There are over 200,000 Korean orphans who have been adopted by American families. Like adoptees everywhere, many of these individuals as they grow to adulthood are interested in, and sometimes obsessed with, finding their birth parents, and many travel back to Korea, determined to do just this.

About five or so years ago, a talented friend of Hannah’s who was in a playwriting collective with her, and who was born in Korea and sent to a family in America at an early age, wrote a fascinating play called My Name Is….., which told the story of Korean orphans returning to Seoul to learn about their birth families

As I recall Deb Sivigny’s play, it concerned three young Korean-Americans, each of whom had a very different American experience. One was adopted by a middle class family, one by a very wealthy family, and one was never adopted, but had been shuttled from one unsatisfactory foster family  to another. What happened when the three got to Korea? Sorry, my memory is not that good.

(What I do remember is the creative format of this play. It was interactive, with a limited audience, and took place in a house where the audience moved from room to room. I remember a party where I was a “guest” and a flight to Korea where I was a “passenger.”)

Saturday night, we watched another play, a one woman play by Sun Mee Choset, called How to Be a Korean Woman. It was staged last year at Theater J and brought back this month for a reprise. The run goes through September 22, and if you are going to see it (and I recommend you do), you may want to stop reading now. Spoiler ahead.

Chomet was born in Korea and adopted at about six months by a family in Minnesota. She had been told that she had been abandoned on a doorstep in Seoul. That is all she knew.

The play takes you with her to Korea, and you learn how she did locate and eventually meet her birth mother. It is all very interesting and emotional. She learns her mother was 19 and single, and when Chomet met her in 2009, was married with two sons. Her mother’s husband knew nothing about this earlier child, and she knew he would never accept it. So contact had to be secret. (Her father was out of the picture and had been pretty much since the birth.)

But Sun Mee did meet her 80 year old grandmother and two of her aunts, one of whom spoke English. They were ecstatic about the reunion, because they had had no idea as to what had happened to her (or if she was even alive), and they thought about her as much as she thought about finding her birth mother.

But, upon meeting Sun Mee, they became very concerned about her upbringing in the United States, and they were determined to make her into a Korean woman (hence the title). She needed high heels, fashionable clothes, makeup, nail polish, skin treatment, and more. More meaning finding a husband.

The story took some fascinating twists. I won’t write all of them down, spoiler or not. Let it just be said that she was not abandoned on a doorstop at six months, but she was stolen from her birth mother, and that many were at fault in a terrible deception.

Yes, mother and daughter were brought together and they saw a lot of shared identity. But they were products of different cultures. And that wasn’t going to change.

Her mother, her aunts, and grandmother were truly Korean women. She could never be.

In fact, Sun Mee Chomet was an outsider in Korea, and to some extent she felt she was an outsider in the United States, as well. That’s just the way it was, and that’s the way it will stay.

Her adoptive mother is Jewish, and her American grandfather is a Holocaust survivor, originally from Vienna. Something he told her seems to me right on point, and I had never thought of things this way. He told her that her relation to Korea was similar to his relation to Vienna.  You long to go back to a place you clearly love and wish to be identified with, but you can never forgive the people there for what happened to you.

This is perhaps a feeling more widespread than we may think. A longing for a home from the past, but a longing mixed with the memory of tragic events that shape your present. It’s a cliche that “you can’t go home again”. But it’s a cliche for a reason.

And….

WHOA!!   Today’s New York Times print edition lead editorial: “An Adoptee’s Lifelong Seaech for Home”. Read it.