Marie Lee was not adopted, but she can relate.
Lee wrote Somebody’s Daughter (published and released by Beacon Press in April), a novel about 19-year-old Sarah Thorson’s quest to find her Korean birth mother. At first brush, the book is a fictionalized account about adoption, with Sarah’s story interwoven with that of her birth mother Kyung-sook.
“People keep asking me, ‘Is the book for or against adoption?’ I don’t think you can put it in those terms,” says Lee, in an e-mail interview.
Dig deeper and the novel has more universal themes. “It’s just a book about identity and forgiveness,” she says.
Thus, the book is in some ways autobiographical.
“I think writing is like method acting. You take a lot of your own emotional landscape and use what you know to figure out what the character might be like. I felt that Sarah’s disconnection with her culture was resonant to me … because my parents were so anxious about us fitting in, we didn’t really acknowledge Korean culture at all.”
Lee, like her protagonist Sarah, grew up in an all-white town in Minnesota. And both girls grew up knowing very little of their Korean heritage.
Lee’s parents were adamant that their children assimilate. Her parents didn’t want their four children to eat kimchi “because they thought we would smell funny.” They also refused to teach them Korean.
“When I was maybe 6, I found some old Korean books and asked my mom to teach me Korean,” she recalls. “She said no, that English was my language.
“They [thought] that our English would become accented if they taught us Korean, as they didn’t know anyone else with bilingual kids,” Lee explains.
Lee and her brothers and sister only heard Korean spoken if their parents wanted to discuss something in private.
“About the only thing I knew was byeongwon — hospital — for when my dad, a doctor, was going to work,” Lee says. “Once I asked them, ‘What does ga da ol-kke (“I’ll be back”) mean?’ and they acted like it was some big secret.”
In retrospect, Lee understands why her parents did what they did.
“During 1953 to 1965, it was actually illegal for my parents to be in the country, and the INS was always trying to deport them. So that made them try all the harder to stay in America. Now of course they’re citizens and everything, but at the time, they didn’t know the laws were going to change. So they had probably resigned themselves that they would never ever go back to Korea, as obviously the U.S. wouldn’t let them back in, and therefore, if they were never going back, learning Korean wouldn’t be relevant to any of us.”
Lee’s parents were surprised at “the amount of racism going on in school and in town” after reading her first book, Finding My Voice, a largely autobiographical young adult novel about a Korean girl who grew up, again, in an all-white town in northern Minnesota.
