beginning.

My head is filled with clichés about knowing where one comes from, knowing and honoring one's roots, along with constant reminders, real and imagined, to remember, both literally and figuratively – the kind of remembrance that is visceral and beyond words, even for a woman who spends the better part of each day engaging in wordplay, sliding unsuspecting words together, gently or otherwise, hoping that the mere existence of words together on a page will create the illusion of solidity. This is, I think, what it means to be a New American. It is about re-connecting, re-creating and re-collecting.

Memories are many things, but I find memories to be, more often than not, betrayals. Or more accurately, the absence of memories with real shape and substance betray me. This absence defies my yearnings and struggles to place myself within the context of my own life. Born in South Korea, adopted when I was nearly five years old with my biological brother who was seven, into a white family in the rural Midwest, giving me another older brother and an older sister, the pattern of my life thus far has been a search for an identity that I can claim as my own. I know that my history is something that I cannot escape, even if I cannot remember.

One of the major disappointments of my childhood was finding out that I could not become the President of the United States, contrary to what my parents had been telling me for several years. This is my first memory of being denied access to something based on a technicality that I did not control, rather than my substance, and perhaps I have yet to fully recover. What I remember most vividly from my childhood is what I know I have been told over and over. I know that I entered kindergarten knowing enough English to say the primary and secondary colors and to tell people I loved them, though I have my doubts about whether or not I meant it. By Christmas break, I was well on my way to English fluency, with my grasp of Korean quickly fading. It wasn't until I was in high school that I realized that my brother and I constituted half of the Asian population in the Three Rivers school system.