A New American Start: Korean Orphan Comes ‘Home’, Gets Fresh

By Chaelee Dalton

Note: This piece takes excerpts and makes erasures from "A New American Comes Home," a Life Magazine article from the November 30, 1953 Issue, and “Korean Orphan, 9, Gets Fresh Start,” a New York Times piece from January 21, 1958.


______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________ Lee Kyung Soo was ________________________________
_______ pushed aside ____________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
_____________________ made _______ with _________________________________ out ____
_______________________________________ family. _________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
________________ to go _________________________________________________________
____________________________________ to _______________________________________
__________________ America ___________________ to ___________________

______________________________________________________ leave ___________________
______ only ___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________ 4 ½ years old _______________
_________________________________________


I Google his English name first.

Google sends me to his “father,” or his father’s father, who is also his “father.” How language works like this: in its failure to capture the complexity of the truth, it illuminates it. Google tells me to connect with other Lees on Facebook. Google gives me a list of obituaries, a short Google Books preview.

Google shows me pictures of him as a young boy, four or five years old. As a boy, he has a sweet smile and a seriousness about him. He wears a military uniform, a cowboy hat, is fitted for a miniature suit-vest. He holds fake pistols, an ice cream cone, a lit cigarette butt, his “father’s” arm, feet dangling by his “father’s” knees, floating.

Google has no pictures of him after the age of seven. Not that I can find, at least, with my careful research practice built through a proliferation of Tinder dates. I find an array of his relatives– his simultaneous “father” and “father’s” father, his simultaneous “uncles” and “brothers,” what was once written as his “ready-made family of 32 grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins.” I study them for clues, hints at where Lee could be.

After landing on a list of Lee Paladinos on publicdatausa.com, I check whether each one is the Lee I am looking for by comparing them against Lee’s age: today Lee Kyung Soo is 72, maybe 73 years old. A young old man. An 아저씨. While I cannot imagine him at this age, cannot link the childhood photos, dispersed across LIFE, STARS AND STRIPES and LA TIMES, to a person, I can instead imagine my grandfather.

I check my interview recording with my grandfather and, after listening to it a few times and clumsily translating the date he gives me, I confirm that he is 74. A young old man. An 아저씨. I imagine Lee doing the small things my grandfather does: climbing up mountains with a backpack full of beer and 김밥. Belting along to trot music and oldies in the car or the 노래방. Feeling lonely, intensely lonely.

In the same interview, my grandfather tells me that besides his granddaughter, I am also his daughter coming back to him– my aunt, who I never knew, who died the year I found my Korean family. “Granddaughter, granddaughter,” he calls out to me using the few English words he knows. Sometimes, he forgets, and reaches out, clutches my fingers, calls me “daughter,” a small incorrectness that to him feels right. “Fate was what brought you back to me,” he tells me, even though I had never met him before and therefore could have never left him behind.

I know Lee could never have lived the life of my grandfather. But he could have.


_____________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________ disarming ________________________
______________________________________________________________________ Lee was ready. He had learned ____________________________________________________________
_______________________________ only the right words ______________________________
_________________ cowboy ___________________________America ____________________
____________________ want_____________________________________________________ pistols._________________________________________ at_____________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________
___________________

____________________ the __________________ taste of ________________________ his new country._______________________________________________________________________
Lee turned _________ and gravely replied, “Yes, sir.” ____________________ made ready _______
to __________________________________________________________________ come into a
ready-made family ________________________________


I first began searching for Lee two years ago. I wanted to trace the beginning of transnational adoption, to find this institution, so often rendered domestic, outside of or beyond the realm of the home and the country. Locating adoption in womanhood, in motherhood felt like too easy a narrative.

Locating masculinity in the military felt like too easy a narrative. Locating mascots, the Korean boys informally and, later, formally “adopted” by U.S. military troops felt like too easy a narrative. Locating mascots, like Lee Kyung Soo, like Lee Paladino, feels impossible. Or maybe the issue is that it feels too easy, too easy to find Lee Kyung Soos, Lee Paladinos. His identity split, his identity multiplied, each multiplying out further: too many versions of who Lee could be.

I, too, am a version of a Lee. This is what Lee and I share– a Korean name transliterated and physically translated from first name to first name, which in its literal correctness is incorrect. This correct language un-languages us, says: this is no longer a family name, a name passed down generationally to you. No, this is the name we have given to you. This is how we have made you ready-made.

And still, in the making, the model fails, has possibly been designed to fail. What, or perhaps more saliently, who makes a Korean boy turn to an American woman and reply “Yes, sir?” What, or who, makes this boy the butt of a joke?

Korean is a language where pronouns are often dropped, sidelined, where instead, markers are made not from an individual identity, but from relation. In this case, the answer is made incorrect by the English language. The answer is not a what or a who but a mode of relation: a “sir.” 


_____________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________ America ___________ was _
___ making ____________

______________________________________________________________ Lee ____________
______________________________________________________________________________
_____ into ________ a _________ faith _____________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
_______ and _________________________ Friction ___________________________________
__________________________ a ____________ half- _________________ place ____________
_ a ________ foster home. ________________

I Google his Korean name second.

Google sends me to: a former South Korean football player, a minor K-drama actor, Hyundai’s CEO. Google recommends I narrow my search by adding exo, radiology, weightlifting fairy, Vincent Paladino. Google gives me ten pages of results without a single mention of the Lee I am trying to locate.

Korean is a language where names are short and standardized, where a name’s specific history can only be found in the Chinese characters, 한자, not the Korean characters, 한글. In other words, there are many Lees whose lineages can only be distinguished by the Chinese characters to which each is attributed. Neither Lee nor I know the Chinese characters for each of our “Lees.” In our cases, we are made multiple by this incomplete knowledge, fitting into many and therefore no histories. We are not a “who” or a “what” as much as an “else.”

Every few months, I return to Google Lee, and Google shows me the same articles, the same non-linear narrative, the same non-narrative line, in which family, father, and self are lost, translated, made incorrect, made a joke. In which both Korean and English hold too many meanings for anything certain to be found.

And still, I check for Lee. I check the same articles for clues: names of those 32 family members, cities where he might have possibly lived. I wonder whether Lee, in his second adoption, may have assumed a new name. I wonder whether I am chasing the wrong person altogether.

I check the same articles, one titled “A New American Comes ‘Home,’” and the other “Korean Orphan Gets New Start.” Both articles chronicle Lee’s adoption, both articles chronicle one family lost and another ready-made. Both articles could have the other’s title, incorrect in their simultaneous correctness.

What, or who, makes Lee “A New American,” as opposed to a “Korean Orphan?” What, or who, makes Lee multiple, not just in his dual American and Korean identities and names, but within and beyond America and Korea?

The answer is not in a what or a who but in a mode of relation: a way of being made, a way of being made incorrect.


_____________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________
_w___ here ___________________________is_______________________

Lee _____________ and is _____________ he ________________________________________
__________________________happy _______________________________________________

T H E R E A N D B A C K

By Brandi Kruse

When Dad finally got out of bed after the divorce, he moved in with Arch. My sister and I stayed there everyotherweekend. His house looked fancy but felt hollow—the living room as empty as the fridge. It was a bachelor pad, but I didn’t know that phrase yet. The house felt most unfamiliar on the first floor in the dark—in winter months and on late summer nights, it seemed to grow more lonely and unused.

My sister and I would wait 30 years before texting that time at Arch’s house was so strange. And yet, we were in a pool.

Compared to most of our travels across our hometown, the car ride to Northville took forever. Being the first one to holler shotgun on the way to the car became our secret way of claiming the backseat—so we could go to sleep instead of talking to Dad. We weren’t mean or out of love, we were growingbodiesandtired. Especially me.

It was the summer before third grade, and I was already on Weight Watchers with Mom. She was tired of watching me cry in dressing rooms. And I was teased so much at school that I regularly hid in the bathroom. I hid because I hated how my shorts rode up between my thighs when I walked, and because in gym I couldn’t climb the rope without knots, and Mr. Ziegler said it was because I was too fat.

One morning at Arch’s house, I woke up to go jogging through the neighborhood, before Sis and Dad got up, but I realized I didn't even know how to pull my hair up into a ponytail. I decided to do my best with my banana clip. I might have made it through a block before I gave up. It was so much easier in my head. Just like how, until I was hungry, I could easily imagine adhering to all manner of dietary restrictions, like filling up on a quarter cup of cottage cheese or plain canned tuna fish. At Dad’s, I wasn’t able to measure things out the way I was supposed to, so I would eat meals as slowly as I could, and then skip dessert while Dad and Sis ate ice cream. Dad would tell me how strong I was for refusing sweets on the same days he made me feel like I shouldn’t trust my body. He said, You can’t be hungry. I’m not hungry. And then, You don’t want to look like me, do you?

I never really felt like a kid unless I was in the pool.

At Arch’s house, we swam like we were young because we were, and it was not a hassle to be wet, to smell like chlorine, to let our wet hair dripandtangleanddry as it would.

Arch was never around until we were swimming. He would surface in his khakis, button up, and sweaterinanyweather. He loved to pull me from the pool by my ponytail. Somehow it didn't hurt, which no one believed, but no one ever stopped him, either. He had a southern accent and laughed louder than the joke. He thought his pool trick was hilarious.

Me and my sister’s pool trick involved disappearing underwater for worrisome amounts of time, trying to make it to the far end of the pool without coming up for air. We would hold our breath as long as we could, and at one point we could go thereandback in one gasp.

I remember occasional dolphin dives with Dad, powered by a twolegtail kick that pulled my arms tight around his neck, my body gliding underwater just above his—coarse cheeks and soft floaty body hairs. I would open my eyes just in time to see us goingupforair—the clouds in summer blue sky becoming clearer as we broke the surface—then close them before we plunged back under again.

I remember waking up one Sunday morning and crawling into bed with Dad to ask him why he cheated on Mom. He cried, and I don’t remember what he said, or if he ever answered. I’m fairly certain that question is what kept him in bed, at his parents house in the bedroom he grew up in, so long after the divorce.

The only memory I have of a family dinner at Arch’s—all of us around the table, tv off—was when Dad surprised us with octopus, but one sight of tentacles turned our stomachs. Maybe they reminded us too much of our swimming arms and legs. We preferred the more familiar special treat of veal parmesan from a restaurant downtown. Many years later, learning how calves become veal, I never ate it again. Dad had a taste for things that were expensive. I definitely inherited this from him—this craving for things that are not just costly but ludicrously overpriced. Years later, he would fill his own refrigerator with gourmet food that would rot before he ever had the energy or company to use it.

One morning I woke before everyone, hungry. I went downstairs quietly and searched for something to eat. I thought I would find bread to make toast, peanut butter to spoon, cheese to slice, Captain Crunch, Triscuits, bologna, or leftover anything to tide me over until everyone woke up. There was nothing but condiments, so I unwrapped a cloudybrownblock from the freezer. This was the closest thing to food I could find. I grabbed a butter knife from the drawer and started to chisel away at the icey lump, mostly unsuccessfully. I ate the weird shaved ice chunks I managed to free from the whole. Dad's later laughter was way worse than the metallic bite of brine shrimp meant for Arch’s basement fish.