I never wanted to search for my birth parents. It would be impossible to find them anyway, I thought, because there was no record of them. I was an abandoned baby on a police station doorstep in Seoul, Korea—my birthdate on a slip of paper tucked into my clothing. I believed the story my parents told me—the one they were given by the adoption agency—that my family was too poor to raise me, so they gave me up to have a better life. There was no sorrow in the telling of it. No reason to be upset, growing up in an affluent suburb of Long Island with white, college-educated parents and an RCA TV the size of a modern-day washing machine. But as I approached 50, I began to feel differently. Adoption had been “no big deal” before I was old enough to understand what was taken away—before I understood what was lost—before the email that changed everything I thought I knew about my adoption.

From the outside, I was a cheerful, well-adjusted teenage girl but inside, felt an underlying sadness I could never name. It dragged me down when I was a senior in high school, sending me into an undiagnosed depression, gaining weight and missing countless days of school. I was crushed under the heaviness of uncertainty in my twenties, an out of work television news writer without structure and a sense of purpose.

To cope with uncomfortable feelings, I took up the “good girl’s” vice, compulsive overeating—not as dangerous as drugs or alcohol but just as destructive. The never-ending, demoralizing cycle of weight loss and gain took its toll on my health, happiness, and self-esteem. Still, I never wanted to search for my birth parents.

In March of 2021, a writing coach told me about an online adoptee writer’s group called Adoptee Voices. A few weeks earlier, a friend texted me about a free Korean language class that was also online. Even though I never would have sought out either of these opportunities, they seemed to find me. I signed up for both.

I was as uncomfortable as I could have been in these online groups, the adoptee writer’s group in particular. I didn’t think I had anything to say about adoption, but as I wrote about it, something inside of me broke open. I had feelings about my adoption, after all. Spending time with other Korean-born women raised with non-Korean parents for the first time, I learned to think of myself as a KAD (Korean American Adoptee). Suddenly, the parts of me that had previously felt out of place, were the reasons I belonged. I met Jenna, a kindred KAD and veritable walking encyclopedia for Korean birth family searches.

“All you have to do is send an email,” she said. “There might be more to your adoption than you were told.” Jenna explained that I could request a second adoption report from Korean Social Services that might or might not not provide more information about my past. At first, I said to myself, Thanks, but no thanks! I had come to own the sad, vague story of my abandonment and I had no desire to dig deeper.

Over the next year, however, something shifted.

I began to embrace my culture and muster the courage to enter Asian spaces, despite feeling like I didn’t belong. I joined online groups for Korean adoptees. I read books like All You Can Ever Know by KAD Nicole Chung, Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong, and Crying in Hmart by Michelle Zauner. I watched documentaries and participated in Q&As with adoptees who had been reunited with their birth families. I wrote and published an essay about the experience of growing into my Asian skin. I was even invited to read my work aloud at the Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network (KAAN) conference in Denver, Colorado—but Covid had other plans.

A new world of identification and possibility opened up to me. The next time Jenna asked me if I wanted to send away for my Korean adoption report, I said, “Yes.” Two days later, I sent off my email request to Korean Social Services (KSS), and held my breath.

“It will take a few months for them to get back to you,” she told me, “They have a ton of requests and it’s a very small office.” Just as my body started to relax, I saw it in my inbox. The reply had arrived. It took only seven days. Heart pounding and hands shaking, I read the words on the digital page.

“Your adoption was arranged by your birth father. He could not take good care of you and you were placed for adoption.”

I hadn’t been left on a doorstep like I was led to believe! I wasn’t abandoned on cold concrete in the dead of a Seoul winter. I had been handed to another human in warmth and safety and there was a record of my birth parents.

My birth father’s last name was Kim. He was born in 1937. My birth mother’s last name was Lee. She was born in 1951 and only 23 when she gave birth to me in Siheung, South Korea.

A month after receiving the first email, KSS sent a follow-up message. My father, Mr. Kim, whose full name they still refused to give me, had passed away in 1996 at the age of just 69.

My initial feeling was relief. Relief that I reached the end and there were no more paternal breadcrumbs to follow. With him gone, there were no questions to ask, like, Should I try to find him? Would he want to see me? All those questions had been answered with one word, deceased. Korean Social Services was unable to find my birth mother.

My next feeling was a certain thin, one dimensional kind of sadness. Compared to the devastation I felt when my father died—the man who had raised me—was like comparing the thickness of a brick to a sheet of paper. Much less sorrow, but still sorrow, nonetheless.

That was in the spring.

For the next few months, I carried on with life as a wife and mother of two teenage boys. I sat in the car drop-off line at school. I scheduled doctor’s appointments around pick-up times, special events and tennis lessons and parented through bullying and broken wrists, sickness and falling grades.

But then, with winter’s colder temps and shorter days, my flimsy paper sadness burgeoned into a raging Nor’easter of pain and grief. I shut the bedroom door one Saturday morning and sobbed over decades of anger, confusion, loneliness, and loss—loss of my birth parents, loss of my culture, loss of my identity.

I don’t know for sure if all my struggles stemmed from adoption, but I do know this; since giving myself permission to cry over my losses, I am better able to sit in emotions when they come, instead of being compelled to soothe them immediately with food. I had never wanted to search for my birth parents but now that I’ve cracked open that door, I can’t walk away from the new-found pieces of my past.