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Do you want to know how I came up with the title for this essay? I’ll tell you how, and I wanted to show it with an example from the movie Philomena. Despite how different this story is from mine, I was pretty surprised to find out that we also shared something in common.

Philomena (2013), starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan (two great actors of our time), tells the story of Philomena, a Catholic woman who got pregnant out of wedlock in Ireland in the 1950’s and was forced to give up her son and live in a convent for years after. About halfway through the story, Philomena goes back to the Convent despite her bad memories. The nurses there tell her the files of her son got destroyed in a big fire years ago.

In 1991, I traveled over 35,000 km from Lyngdal, a small village in Norway, to the big city of Taegu, South-Korea, and White Lily Orphanage, the Catholic Orphanage I stayed in as infant. Coming back to South-Korea, I didn’t have that poetic moment of self-realization and fulfillment I’d imagined. It was more of a culture shock. The crowds, the language, the smell, the people, the food. Was this really where I came from?

In Taegu, I discovered that the Catholic Orphanage was shut down. The nurses, just like in Philomena, were still there though. They were watching sports on TV and mentioned the Norwegian athlete Johan Olav Koss. But what about my file? They didn’t speak English very well, so I called the adoption agency in Seoul and had one of the case workers translate. What she told me on the phone was this: All of my files from the orphanage got destroyed in a fire a few years back.

Wait? Aren’t these two stories similar? Or is just a coincidence?

Years later, after doing research for a novel I was writing, and sharing my experiences with other adoptees, I find out that the “lost in the fire” story is like an adoption myth. For various reasons this myth has been told to so many adoptees like myself, but the most obvious reason is undoubtedly that we will stop looking for our birth family.

At the time, the explanation of that big fire destroying every bit of evidence or information that was ever left of me and my birth family seemed pretty reasonable to me. After all, I didn’t come to South-Korea with too many expectations, did I?

So here I was, back in Seoul at the adoption agency together with the case worker looking through my file once more. During my journey back to South-Korea, I didn’t find my biological family; despite that, the people we met, including the nurses, were friendly and helpful. But I did discovered myself as Korean. This was the place where I came from. Here I would blend in with everyone else without looking different in any way. Could one of these strangers be my mother or my father? Had they also gone looking for me? Were they thinking of me and how my life turned out?

After returning to Norway, when I talked about my experiences in Korea I would emphasize the confusion I had most of the time. I told everyone it was due to the language problem. But was there something else too? Something that sort of got lost in translation, something I didn’t even know how to describe back then? I started to explore these questions and started to write about them.

Philomena spent 50 years looking for her son. After hiring a journalist and travelling to America with him, she did find her son, discovering he was a successful congressman who worked for President Reagan but also that he had died from AIDS 18 years earlier. She also finds out that when he was sick he’d made the journey back to Ireland to visit the same convent where he was born, looking for his birth mother. What do you think the nurses told him?

For as long as I remember I’ve been a writer. I wrote diaries, essays, short stories, and worked on a novel too. I contemplated writing a different story than a story about being adopted. But then I had an epiphany: Just like I discovered being Korean in Korea I realized as an adoptee and a writer I needed to be true to myself, and that there was only one story I could write. Finally, the novel When Tigers Smoked was published in Norway. It tells the story about a young Korean adopted woman who goes back to search for her birth family. But I wanted a different ending to the story than the fire. I didn’t want that for the character. Just like in the stories she reads about Korea (the title refers to the myth of the first woman and man of Korea), she imagines a different ending to her story, one that leaves most of her questions unanswered but opens up another journey.

For me personally, I have encountered more than one journey. In fact, after being adopted to Norway and growing up there I moved to the United States. How did that affect me being adopted? And what does it really mean to become American? That will be my next story: Where I Am Now.

[Photo credit to Camilla Pedersen]

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