Jun 16 2008
the myth of ten-thousand things
The Project
The Myth of Ten-Thousand Things is a new work of performance based in collaboration, storytelling and appreciation for cultural difference. Developing aspects of p’ansori, a Korean oral narrative form rooted in ancient Shamanist rituals, we will relate the contemporary history of the unaccountable number of internationally adopted Korean orphans and Korean birth parents. The work will address issues of identity and displacement which are common to many of us, but find particular poignancy in the family divisions wrought by international adoption, modernization and political/geographical division on the Korean peninsula. We will present the work-in-progress at lectures and workshops leading toward a fully staged production to be presented in both Korea and the United States in 2011. Taking performance as our structure, we will create a new language for cultural exchange and form the basis for relationships which will extend far beyond the work itself.
The Project
Since the mid-1950′s, nearly 200,000 children have left Korea for adoption. That’s about 600 plane loads of babies and children, row after row of small faces, a list of names in the sky.
There is no wall long enough, no structure ever intact, to memorialize the severance, not just with motherland but with mother, bifurcating the bodies and imaginations of Korean Adoptees dispersed into “first’ worlds.
The signature of forced migration is carved into my hands. Upon my palms, at its root, my lifeline is split and reproduced: a double lifeline. I am a writer. I perform Korean adoption, the mechanisms and structures that have enabled it to exist, still exist, with its privilege and plunder, on a paper stage. I am an American. I do not vote.
I first left Korea in 1975. Then, I returned in 1987 with my adopted parents to bring home another adopted girl. I returned again by myself in 1998, and yet again ten years later. Each time, I was acutely aware that I was not a tourist. I was a spy, peeking from behind my adopted mother’s leg, watching the people taunt me with their “Korean-ness,” the ease with which they moved across their own country. Remaining in silence, because I was a reminder of a nation’s regret. There was no word for me in Korean. When I opened my mouth to try and explain, I was met with outrage, horror, shame, the backs of women fleeing from me, the motherland lost once again.
Ten years later, it’s a little better. A generation of us has come of age and returned to live in Korea. We have been recognized by the government, apologized to and for, and our endless search for reunification is featured regularly in day time talk shows, prime time news, and newspaper ads. Some people even know now what we’re called: “‘Ipyang-a,’ oh right. I think I heard of that before,” they might say calmly watching a bird pass overhead.
200,000 children. Over 600 plane loads filled with children kidnapped to be sent overseas. An what if just one of those planes was hijacked? Made to turn around and land, lower its staircase to allow the already crawling babies, and walking kids to descend upon the airport. Ride escalators then conveyor belts, stow away in the luggage of the family of its choice. Seoul international airport has been hijacked by orphans. Instead of enforced culture camps, Sunday schools, and a parade of chanters ching-chong-ching-ing behind us on the playgrounds, like a group of racist Hare Krishnas across America; in this moment, in this picture, maybe even just 600 of us, are given the choice to stand upon the tarmac and tell it all ourselves: the births, the deaths, why she left us, who we are, what we seek–over and over and over–every version. Until the stories, like grave stones, stacked create a wall-notched, deteoriating, flat pieces as black and smooth as water.
Like transnational Korean adoptees across the globe, “The Myth of Ten Thousand Things” creates a place for itself amongst divisions and definitions. It is torn down, re-built, transported, laughing to survive the telling and discovery of itself. On the inhale, there is birth, on the exhale there is nothing, like writing on the wood in the rain.
During the monsoons of 2008, I return again with my husband and daughters. We stand before brick tenements, winding dirt alleyways, at the intersection where I was reported to have been found on that night of January 18th, 1975 at 10pm. On that winter night when a man supposedly found me on his doorstep at that intersection, and then walked me, a crying three day old infant to the police station.
My oldest daughter stands there holding my hand. She points at a pile of trash beside the tenements and asks, “Mommy, is that where you were left?”
We snap a photo of a time and place that no longer exists. I tape it to my wall along with the rest, sit my three daughters upon it, and tell them, “See here. This is the place where I was found. It begins with a story called, ‘The Myth of Ten Thousand Things.’”