10/6/2004 Project Conception

Before we set off across the continent in a vegi oil van, (once with a bamboo framed bed, the other time with two hammocks strung across the van, one on top of another like a bunk bed); before our engagement amongst the sand dunes, the words flying out like Harriers; before the amazing underwater homebirth of Naima Cha-ra, our first born; before yet another unattended underwater homebirth of one Sora Moon Reed Bolles, then Tuli Llewellyn Bolles–there was Dylan, and there was Sasha, and a night of trading stories and songs in a doorway of a once bowling alley on the Headland to the Pacific Ocean, beneath a clear star filled sky. And some time after a star fell, and the spray of a very large wave reached the mountains, the stories gave us a few words, some sounds, melodious and not, like Naima giving us her name from the womb. Of course, it wasn’t until a week after she was born, that we conceded to name her the name she had told me in a dream. And it wasn’t until we had 3 weddings, a dozen leases signed and broken, joint bank accounts, and a 15-passenger van, that we were able to say aloud to one another, in the day time, face to face, “What do you think about making work together?” Silly artists.

Disclaimer: First, I must tell you this: I have not yet made this blog public. It is a place that I put only my most questionable thoughts. Nothing is for certain. We try not to see our lives and our art as separate things. Living like this–from town to town, without a mattress, with what seems like never enough, or frequently way too much; with faith, without faith, but always with each other, our days strung together like popcorn. Our life is our art. Art is not some self-involved indulgent practice, but according to Webster’s, which I quote reluctantly, “the use of skill and imagination in the production of things of beauty.” As my previous employer at the Cockeyed Gull on Peaks Island, Maine once said, in five degree weather while smoking a Pall Mall, “I hate people who call themselves artists. As if we’re not all artists.”

These are the things I struggle with: mothers and artists (ha ha). Dairy and wheat, and my dog who won’t stop licking the table (which is only about a foot off the ground, and which was once the floor in our van, a shelf in my room, a shoe rack in front of our apartment). Depression and elation, and an insane inability to focus on any one thing for more than a minute. Things and the lack of them. Pre-school, tantrums, leaf blowers and cockroaches. None of what you will read is secret, per se. You don’t have to not tell. It’s just that, what you are reading is still private, unpublished, yet to be performed.

It was New Year’s Eve, 2005. We had just begun our Nomadic adventures, or at least what we perceived to be the beginning had begun. We threw everything that was left after the great sifting, and everybody into the van one sunny day in Richmond, California (See Naima the Nomad Part 1). Took off across the country, using cruise control without understanding exactly how it worked, the numbers ticking away at the fuel pump, in our bank account. 3, 2, 1. Now, we were stranded in Jamestown during a Nor’Easter that flooded his parents’ fieldstone basement. Even with two sump pumps running, there was still this rising threat of water electrifying everything, as we sat in the kitchen huddled around their laptop, streaming P’ansori, while a baby slept.

The first time I heard P’ansori, I had no idea what I was witnessing. On a stopover from Ho Chi Minh City, a few nights in Seoul turned into months, as I found myself on daytime talk shows and prime time dramas searching for my birth family with the help of an overseas adopted Korean organization (G.O.A.L.).

It was 1998, ten years after the Seoul Olympics, twenty-three since my adoption, my first departure from Korea. I wandered through an open door to the Sejong cultural center. From the back row of a theatre, I heard singing in a language I could not speak, with this inflection whose shapes only my bones understood. For a moment, I thought I had found her, although it was a man singing, the sound was definitely hers. I wanted it. Why can’t she be mine? And the colors, I’ll have to tell you one day about the colors. Surface and Texture. What lays beneath? I’ve never been the same since.

3, 2, 1, 2005, and the ball finally dropped. Dylan turned a page from my first novel, the one I keep like a deck of cards in a box, slipping pictures, receipts, ticket stubs, and lists between the pages. I held the baby on a storming island in Rhode Island while poor recordings of P’ansori flooded our ears, filling the cracks of our palms as we shuffled and dealt out the stories. Birth mothers, Adoptees. A land called Korea. U.S.A. We knew we held something, we just didn’t know what.

Project Inception

5,000 miles later, a continent crossed, vegetable oil burned, islands hopped, and one settled upon. This is how it all happened. Although if you asked Dylan how it became that we are living in Davis while he’s working on a PhD in performance studies, this P’ansori piece, or whatever it is, his final project, he might say something entirely different. And if you asked me how it began, I might say something different too. But this is what I’m telling you now.

I never got my period after Naima was born. December 23, 2003. That was the last time I’ve menstruated. We knew we wanted another child eventually, kind of like we knew that eventually we would set sail and leave our wonderful little island in Maine, which we sometimes complained was a floating suburb, even with the chickens crossing Main street unassisted. We just didn’t know how it would all happen. I was working full-time as a nanny, Dylan was working part-time, although the previous winter he worked full-time assisting developmentally disabled adults in Portland, catching a 6 a.m. ferry, through the wind, rain and snow, to receive $8/hr, not including the hours in transit. I had worked for a Korean woman (the only other Korean on the island) and her husband in the tiny kitchen of their restaurant, then as a host at a Japanese restaurant, then packing caviar in a sterile white room beneath surveillance cameras.

Dylan knew that if we were to have another child, I would stay home for at least a year, and he’d have to be the one working full-time again. As wonderful and difficult as Maine was our $8/hr jobs were not adding up, even with the thirty-five cent raise. He said, “If I have to go back to work full time again, I’m going to choose what my work will be.” So, he made the P’ansori project into a PhD. UCDavis accepted him into their performance studies program, and still my period never returned. One year and an 8-lb baby later, it still hasn’t come back, but you won’t catch me complaining.

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