Mia Mingus and Stacey Milbern are two queer disabled diasporic Korean women of color in the process moving from the South to the Bay to create home and community with each other.
This tumblr documents their journey. For more info about Mia, visit her blog at it never disappeared: violence and the medical industrial complex
dear stacey,
I have been avoiding writing this letter. I don’t talk about what happened when I was a child in the medical industrial complex. Sure, there are little mentions of it here and there, but I don’t go into it. It is too painful, too scary, too angering.
Talking about it with you has been the first time I have ever really talked about it with another disabled person since it happened. You said you could tell how much I cried by the tear stains on your pillow.
I had surgeries and doctor visits from the moment I arrived from korea up until high school. Usually I was being examined, bracing for an operation, navigating the whiteness of health/science or wishing I was someone (somewhere) else. i can remember being terrified of people cutting into me, putting things in my ears and the slow claustrophobic stillness of CAT scans. I can remember horrible braces and brace makers and physical therapists. I can remember creepy moments where the lines between medical touch and sexual touch blurred on an examining table while a white brace maker made a wet cast molding of my leg from foot to hip. I can remember being stripped down to my underwear in front of crowds of male doctors while they displayed, touched and commented on my tiny disabled korean adoptee girl body. Sometimes they would use the end of a pen to point to parts of my body, I don’t know what was worse, that or their fingers and hands. I can remember sunny white nurses telling me I was “brave” and deep white male doctor voices telling me “it’s almost over” and “good job.” I can remember not knowing where the line between good adoptee and good patient began and ended. I wasn’t just being saved like other adoptees, I was also being fixed. I was supposed to be grateful.
Sometimes I can’t tell what is more painful and scary, the things I can remember, or the things I can’t.
And what was I going to do? Who was I going to tell? How does a five year old know how to say no? how was a nine year old supposed to push back against all of science and medicine by herself? and maybe even most infuriating of all is that I also didn’t trust my body. I also was afraid of my body, even as I knew what was happening didn’t feel right, even as I hated it. this is the way momentary anger quickly turns to collapsing shame that keeps me silent.
I can remember conversations happening around me, above me, without me that were about me. I can remember that it was always about “later.” It was always, we’re doing this now, so that you’ll be ok later. It was never about now. It seemed like it was always supposed to be disappearing, as if it wouldn’t have any impact on me, because I would be better. I would be closer to normal, maybe be even actually normal—if I was lucky.
But it wasn’t true. It never disappeared. It’s with me every day, every moment. it profoundly shapes how I think about what it means to be disabled. It shaped my relationship to my body, to touch, to the way I move, the way I relate to people, how I learned how (not) to feel… everything.
The rage is palpable, why wasn’t what happened to me in the medical industrial complex seen as violence? The irony that my mother worked and helped to found a domestic violence organization, but never connected what was happening to me as a disabled girl in the MIC as part of gender violence. The usual burden that is routinely placed on mothers, but considered optional for fathers, when it comes to looking out for (their) children’s well being.
I think about disabled children all the time. I am 30 and I still don’t talk about what happened to me. How many of our stories will never be heard? How many of us are experiencing abuse in our homes, in group homes, in institutions, in orphanages, in the foster care system, in special ed classes, in the vast, thick, hungry vines of the medical industrial complex right now?
The question throbs in my head over and over again: How would our world have to change for disabled children to be safe from violence?
And there is so much more to write. So much about white middle class privileged parenting, notions of motherhood, adoption, queerness, gender, the ownership of children, the medical industrial complex, healers… So much more.
But most days it just moves with me, a silent under current of a history that doesn’t have a home, doesn’t feel right to put down anywhere, doesn’t seem to fit. Until now. Thank you for more than you know. thank you for risk and silent recognition through dusty stories whispered late at night.
And to think, this is only the beginning. I love you.
to belonging and healing,
mia
