Thursday, April 11, 2013

The Adoptee Statistic


The rate of suicide among Korean Adoptees is something like 5 times above the national average for comparable age demographics. Here is one guess why:


The Adoptee Statistic (4/5/13, revised 4/11/13)

At night, when the stars come out, I like to pretend each one is an ancestor.
I don’t know if that has any relevance in my History, my heritage;
it has lots of significance in My history. 

They look down at me, speak in a language I can’t understand,
that I’m too lazy to understand;
below the stars already, I sink deeper.

I call my mom--as a troubled child always should
and complain about my job because I lack the vocabulary to say what really bothers me.
My real sadness doesn’t translate,
but manifests as anger, as hate
and she tells me to stop bitching. 
And she’s right
but our blood doesn’t speak the same language
and we’re talking in codes that can’t be broken
so I hang up,
wish I had a mother who needed no translation,
yearn for darkness to reveal more ancestors in the sky
so I can learn by immersion. 




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