Issue 33: "Seoul" by Meredith Seung Mee Buse

Immigrant Hustle: A Monthly Mini Memoir

When I first read Meredith’s mini memoir submission, two responses came up for me. YOU ARE A PART OF US! And I LOVE YOU! Aside from her powerful voice and impeccable writing, Meredith’s incisive and emotional retelling of her search for family as a Korean adoptee made me want to invite her over to my home for dwenjang jigae and remind her that she is we, she is us - the Korean diaspora and Komerican Pie. I admire both truth telling and unapologetic lamentation — particularly when these things come with a desire for healing and connection. We welcome your story and embrace you, Meredith!

“Seoul” by Meredith Seung Mee Buse

Meredith Seung Mee Buse is an author, educator and Korean American Komerican transracial adoptee whose writing has appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer and on Diversebookfinder.org. She is a 2023 scholarship grantee from The Highlights Foundation for children’s literature and a teaching artist at WriteGirl. As a veteran educator, Meredith has studied race, identity and representation with scholars across the country and been featured in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Magazine. In addition to reading, writing and connecting with the adoptee and Komerican communities, she loves yoga, cuddling with her cats and hanging out with her family. Follow her on IG @meredithseungmeebuse or check out her site at meredithseungmeebuse.com.

I am a number before I am a person.  

I am a number before I have a name.

I am not born Meredith Buse or even Choi Seung Mee. I begin life as 85C – 1165, the case number assigned by my Korean adoption agency: 85 for the year, 1985, that my mother relinquishes me; C for the agency; and 1165 as the 1165th arrival to that agency that year. 

And it is only April. 

According to The New York Times, South Korea sends 8,837 children abroad in 1985, the peak of its international adoptions. This number equals more than 1% of the country’s live births. 

After starting life as 85C-1165, it takes me 37 years to feel safe enough to start asking questions, uncorking a slow, painful drip of information. 

For decades, my adoptive parents keep a faded blue file folder filled with information about my origins but never show it to me. In it, I find my birth mother’s full name and age when I was born. 

The math is inescapable. 

Take her 40 years plus my 37, divide by the average lifespan of a Korean woman (83), and I fear my questions have come too late. Guilt and loyalty—to my own adoptive family as well as the narrative of heroic adopters and grateful adoptees—prevent me from asking questions for too long. 

Mortality sits on my shoulder every step of the search process. What if probing into my past reveals I am not actually meant to exist? I push forward only when the fear of never knowing becomes stronger than the fear of knowing. Ultimately, my husband fills out the search paperwork for me while I lay on the couch and cry. I just sign my name. 

When I finally return home to Seoul, my body releases, for perhaps the first time ever, the tension of being in the racial minority. I revel in the anonymity of walking down the street and blending in, looking like everyone else, sharing facial features with strangers. I am thrilled when my limited Korean vocabulary, annyeonghaseyo and kamsahamnida, makes shopkeepers respond to me in kind. 

The adoption-agency president issues excuses—but no apology—for my existential dislocation. She laments how hard South Korea struggled after the war and describes the challenge of competing in an international economy while lacking natural resources. 

So under the direction of its military leadership, she explains, South Korea turned to something it knew would be an economic boon: Exports.

Despite the country's dominance in material production and the language barrier between us, using that word in front of a group of foreign adoptees seems a bit insensitive. 

I sit on the couch in that cramped office, legs sticking to leather in the late-May heat, watching an adoption-agency advertisement and staring at a scent diffuser incongruously labeled in English, Bittersweet. I take deep breaths and press my feet to the floor to keep myself embodied.

After this, we dutifully bow and exchange gifts: salt-water taffy and Philly-famous Tastykakes from me, agency tote bag and a book written by white adoptive parents from them. 

I leave their gifts in the hotel room in Seoul. 

Screw your gifts. I want my information.

I want whatever pieces you possess to the puzzle of my life. I want my file, 1-inch thick with documents, bound by metal fasteners, which you will not let me look at, touch or photograph—except pages about my adoptive family, whom I already know. 

The only answer you give me during my so-called “File Review” is that a social worker, not a family member, named me. Or at least, you say, there is no information in the files to indicate otherwise. 

And despite the Korean Special Adoption Act, which entitles me to all my documents—even if certain birth-family information must be redacted for privacy—and despite my official filing with Korea’s National Center for the Rights of the Child, I leave with only a two-sentence summary of what my paperwork says. 

Then you feed us sandwiches and ask us to find our way out of the building.

Oh, and one other thing: You tell me my birth mother also had a son. Not a young child or a toddler, as I had imagined, but a (half?) brother 17 years my senior. 

This information bursts open the tap to more wrenching questions. Does he know about me? Does he think I died? As I search for him, does he know to search for me? 

Officers at a Seoul police station block me from taking a DNA test for the missing-persons registry. Though the information in my adoption file bears no guarantee of truth, it contains too much information for the government to consider me “missing.” 

Annoyed with me, the officers complain that it is as if I have come to take my driver’s test without bringing my ID. 

Instead, I take every commercial DNA test possible. My heart jumps with every ping and email notification saying, “You have new DNA relatives.” 

Mostly, it’s another fourth or fifth cousin (we share a set of great-great-great grandparents and 0.05% of our DNA) and notably, a lot of them are also adoptees. Non-adopted Koreans living in Korea don’t need DNA tests; they have easy access to extensive family-relations registers reaching back generations. 

But I do connect with one DNA relative, a second cousin once removed, and just like that, the number of people besides my children to whom I am biologically related increases infinitely—from 0 to 1. 

Spending time with this cousin and their family—my family—is like rain on my parched soul. But our time together is too short, as adoption has scattered us an ocean away from our homeland and a different ocean away from each other.

As Korean adoptees come of age and come into our own, we gather, share our talent and perspective, write memoirs and graphic novels, and advocate for other adoptees. The impact of adoption echoes through the generations, as descendents of Korean adoptees face their own identity struggles with a deep longing for meaning, connection and kinship that is more than fictive.

We harbor an innate—and innately human—desire to know who we are, where we came from and how we ended up here. We use the tools at our disposal. We speak out—sometimes at significant personal risk—return home, ask questions and persist through hardships. 

We are still searching, even if all we may find is each other.  

H Mart Happiness: What’s your favorite product and why?

“I love making (and eating!) japchae. HMart is the only place I can find these japchae noodles, so I always buy a giant bag! 45 servings – woohoo!” - Meredith B.

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