189 Tiana Nobile
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/189
Alicia: [00:00:00] Hey, y'all. I'm Alicia from Winfield, Alabama, and I support Adoptees On because it is a place where I can hear other adoptees' stories in their own voices and I feel less alone. I've gleaned so many helpful resources from this podcast. I'm inviting you to join me in supporting this podcast so we can reach more adoptees around the world and they will also know they aren't alone.
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Haley Radke: You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Episode 189, Tiana Nobile. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Today's guest is brilliant poet Tiana Nobile, whose recent collection of poems, Cleave, is an exceptional [00:01:00] exploration of transnational adoption. Tiana shares her story with us from the deeply personal struggles to her in-depth research on the problematic history of adoption. Tiana also teaches us about contronyms, and you will be in awe of the perfection of the title Cleave when she unpacks that for us. At the end of the show, I'll let you know how you can learn from her in an upcoming workshop on poetry for transracial adoptees. We wrap up with some recommended resources and, as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome To Adoptees On, Tiana Nobile. Welcome, Tiana.
Tiana Nobile: Thank you for having me.
Haley Radke: It is my honor, and I was thrilled that I could be at your Zoom launch party for Cleave. There were so many talented poets reading as well. It was amazing. My favorite thing was how everyone just loved you and cheered [00:02:00] for you, and it was just like a love fest. Is that how that felt for you?
Tiana Nobile: Yeah, I think it was an extremely affirming and emotional night for me. I think especially growing up very isolated and not knowing very many other adoptees, being able to find a community of other adoptee poets has been so special. And I was so grateful to have them join me to launch my book into the world.
Haley Radke: Absolutely. Oh my goodness, what a treasure. All right. So I would love it if you would start. Would you mind sharing a little bit of your story with us?
Tiana Nobile: Sure. I was born in South Korea, and actually I thought for the longest time that I was born in Seoul, and found out later when I was working through my paperwork that I was born in Daejeon, which is a city south of Seoul. I left South Korea when I was six months old [00:03:00] and flew to JFK, to New York, where I was adopted by my family and I grew up on Long Island which is about 45 minutes outside of New York City. I grew up in Massapequa Park, which is a small suburb on Long Island, in a very Catholic, Italian American family. I also have two siblings who are also adopted: an older brother and a younger sister, who are also Korean. My brother was actually, though, born in Queens and adopted pretty soon after his birth. My sister was born in South Korea as well, and immigrated to the US as an infant.
Haley Radke: And so you said a Catholic family with three Korean adoptees. How did that feel for you growing up? What was that [00:04:00] experience like?
Tiana Nobile: So my family, I think, and very much how a lot of white parents were told when they adopted children internationally at the time was just assimilate, right? Treat them like they're your biological children, treat them like they're your own. So even though my siblings and I were all Korean, we never really talked about adoption. Obviously, it was something that we all knew because we looked different from our parents, and we knew. I don't have any memory of ever being told, sat down and told you're adopted. It was just something that was very much a part of our family story, but then it ended there, and we grew up not ever talking about race, not really ever talking about the complexities of abandonment and separation. And my siblings and I, one thing that I was [00:05:00] told by my family was that after they adopted my brother, they wanted us all to be the same. So they continued to adopt Korean children so that we would look the same, but then never actually had the tools to navigate what it meant to be Korean or what it meant to be a Korean American in a white family, in a very white, Catholic community. So my siblings and I, even though we are all Korean, we never really explored our Korean identity as a unit. It took me a really long time, not until my 20s or my mid-20s, that I started to really explore what it meant to be Korean for myself.
Haley Radke: And did you engage in conversation with them now in adulthood when you're doing those explorations?
Tiana Nobile: I think a little bit. They obviously know about my book and how a lot of my [00:06:00] poetry is about adoption and exploring the complicated nature of being a transnational and transracial adoptee. However, I think we all have very different understandings or different places in our understanding around adoption and self-reflection. So I don't think my siblings at all are really considering Koreanness as a major part of their identity, which I think has to do with the fact that in our family we were very much raised in this very white space.
I think, growing up, and this still sometimes happens, there's this weird sense of body dysmorphia that I experience when I look in the mirror and I'm like, Who is that? Or expecting to see a white face because I grew up surrounded by white people and also, as a child was teased or bullied for looking different.[00:07:00] So there was also this like craving to blend in or to fit in and a sense of self-denigration attached to my Asianness. So I think I craved whiteness for a really long time. And so there became this kind of confusion around my physical appearance for me that took me a long time to really accept the fact that, no, you're not white and that's okay. Actually there's something really beautiful about being Korean and what that means that I've been able to really explore and take ownership over in the last 10 years or so. But yeah, my siblings and I, we don't really talk about it, which I think is really interesting. I think we're at different places in our journey.
Haley Radke: What led you in your 20s, then, to explore? What did that actually look like for you? Because I was assuming that maybe it was them who were [00:08:00] inspiring you, but it wasn't that.
Tiana Nobile: I'd been writing for most of my life. When I was very young I loved reading, and I loved losing myself in a story. And then in high school, I started writing poetry, and then it was in college where I really started writing it more seriously. And it was interesting because when I first started writing and having workshops and things, I realize now in retrospect that I was writing very much around my adoption. I was writing a lot about masks and the body and my face melting off. Disembodiment was a huge thing that I kept on kind of skirting around. It wasn't until my senior year in college where I took a class with Cathy Park Hong, who's a Korean American poet and essayist now, that I really started to make the connections with the [00:09:00] themes and topics that I was writing about before and how that was connected to this idea of haunting related to my adoption. So that, I think, opened a door for me to write more specifically about adoption in my poetry. And as I was doing that, I was doing a lot of research, becoming more connected with the adoption community online and also reading a lot about psychology and relationships between children and parents and caregivers and attachment theory. And alongside that, I also was then opening myself more up to Korea as a place. I think before Korea was a place that rejected me. So in my response, I was like, I'm gonna reject it. I don't want to have anything to do with that place. And then as I got older, I started to really think about the nuances of that, right? [00:10:00] Like how it's not that simple. I can acknowledge and feel sorrow and rage about my abandonment and displacement, and I can also connect to a long line of history and culture and resistance in Korea that I didn't know about before. So all of this was happening simultaneously. And I also started a birth family search. So I think writing and research and learning more about Korea and biological family, all this was happening at the same time so it really opened up a lot for me.
Haley Radke: I'm sure. That sounds like a lot. Identity exploration is a whole thing for adoptees, plus the transracial, transnational piece. And you mentioned [00:11:00] exploring this feeling of disembodiment, and I'm wondering if you're comfortable talking about this. This comes out a little bit in Cleave. I'm wondering if you're comfortable talking about hair pulling.
Tiana Nobile: There is a photograph that I found of myself when I was 11 or 12 years old, and in it there's just a massive bald spot in the front part of my head, and when I saw it as an adult, I was confounded that none of the other adults in my family were like, What's going on here? Are you okay? I think I was also a nail biter. I acquired these kinds of compulsions, I think, to help try to manage my anxiety. Now, through therapy, I'm able to articulate exactly what was going on in my little child brain around I don't understand what I'm doing here. [00:12:00] Right? And feeling loved, but also feeling confused about what happened. Where did I come from? Like I mentioned, I felt very loved by my family; however, there wasn't space to talk about complicated feelings. And it was very Catholic, very repressed. I went to Catholic schools my whole life until college, and I just really absorbed the sense of guilt and shame and fear of sin, and that coupled with my adoption that I wasn't processing but was definitely carrying. I think the way that I was able to embody, literally, all of those confusing emotions was by taking it out on my own body, whether it be tearing my nails off or pulling my hair. [00:13:00]
Haley Radke: I'm just feeling for little girl Tiana because we don't know what's happening and I'm so glad you're able to process that now. When you share that in Cleave, I thought that's so brave. It's one of those things like sharing our pain; it gives other people permission to be like, Oh yeah. Okay. It's not just me. There's this, I don't know, validation. I feel like it's so important for us. So you mentioned doing a birth search. I've talked to a lot of adoptees about searching. There's a whole other layer when you're looking in a different country and you're in the States. You're like, How do I get my stuff? I don't even know. How did that start for you? Did you have other people guiding you? What was that like?
Tiana Nobile: So ever since I was a child, I knew that my father had this file in his home office that had my name on it. [00:14:00] In it was just a stack of paperwork that was all about my adoption. And as a young child, I would every so often go in and just pull it out and page through it. It was the closest I could get to an origin story, right? This paperwork. And at the same time, like I mentioned, there was a lot of shame and confusion around that whole transaction. For most of my adolescence, then, I really rejected Korea and didn't want to have anything to do with it. I remember a friend from college once reminded me, or recently reminded me, when she asked me if I ever would go back or was curious about it. I was like, Oh, no. Definitely not. But then as I continued to write more and explore more, I revisited the file with a new lens and started to read it [00:15:00] more closely and more critically. So many things happened through that, I think. Firstly, the file is such a strange archive, right? Because it's all about a human person, a human baby, and the language and the way in which they talk about me, specifically, is just so cold and sterile and clinical. And I was struck by how unfeeling such documents could be when literally talking about a person. And in my book I incorporate some of that language throughout my poems just to try to insert a sense of humanity and feeling and emotion into documents that are so bereft of that.
Haley Radke: I really liked how you [00:16:00] even included redaction marks because that's what, for so many of us, our paperwork looks like. Just a giant black strikethrough, like someone can know this, but not me. Someone can know this information, just not me.
Tiana Nobile: Exactly. I was just trying to call attention to the fact that there's just so much erasure that's happening, not only on a piece of paper but literally in our lives, in our bodies and our brains. That is just something that I feel like a lot of us adoptees are just pulling for and it's just so difficult to reach. So yeah, that being said, as I was looking through the papers, I think it just sparked me to initiate a search, which ended up being such a very long, drawn-out process. I'm reading Palimpsest and it's interesting to read about her process [00:17:00] and how many different people she had to speak to and what emails. It's very similar for me. I reached out to Eastern Social Welfare Society, which was the adoption agency in Korea, and I don't think they ever replied to me. Maybe they did, once, and they directed me to reach out to the domestic agency. I did that and there was a back-and-forth there for a long time. And then I connected with GOAL, which is an adoptee-run nonprofit based in Seoul that does a lot of advocacy and support for adoptees. But we ultimately hit a wall, and they said, There's no m- nothing else that we can do for you. And then I got connected to KAS, who's now been rebranded. So KAS is Korean Adoption Services. It's confusing to me whether or not they're actually part of the Korean government or if they're a subsect or a nonprofit that's affiliated with the government, but they're [00:18:00] a more official organization. And they have since rebranded to the NCRC, which is National Center for the Rights of Children, which I think is really interesting. And we had a back-and-forth that went on for two or three years. So it's just such a convoluted process, particularly internationally, because there's such a lack of communication and they send you down one rabbit hole and then eventually those two rabbit holes meet each other and you're going back up another tunnel and… But I will share one story that I think was a turning point for me: I feel like I had worked this file at every single page over and over, and then at one point I found a paper that I had never seen before. On it was my Korean name and my date of birth and some other details, and then it had parents' names. It had in the two spaces for mother and father's names. It was [00:19:00] whited out, but I could literally hold the paper up to a lamp and read it through the back, and was able to actually find out my biological parents' names for the first time, like they’re literally haunting my paperwork.
Haley Radke: I love that you shared that story because, okay, how do I say this? There are so many adoptees who had a veto placed on their records and so the names were supposed to be redacted, but there's always a place that they're missing. There's so many mistakes made. And like white-out, I was picturing you scratching it off, but you got it up to a lamp. That is so interesting. The other thing I wanted to say is I had written down a question to ask you about how you got your paperwork. I found it interesting you already shared that it was accessible to you. It was in your dad's office and [00:20:00] you could just look at it any time. And some of us stumbled on files when we were being snoopy, but it sounded like it was just open. How did you–I don't know how to word this–how did you take care of all of your files and paperwork and then as you added all your research? Because in Cleave, your poetry collection, you're looking at Harlow's monkey experiments. You have a whole poem which is just incredible about the Babylift crash from Vietnam. And how did you collect all those things? I'm just like visualizing piles and piles. I know what year we're in and we're in the same generation, but for some reason, the way you document things and show them in your collection and in some of the presentations I've seen, it's [00:21:00] very visual and tactile. So I would love for you to talk about that.
Tiana Nobile: I'm a meticulous researcher and it's something that I really love. Especially with the book and especially with adoption we have so many questions. Often a poem for me will start with a question, and then it's in the act of investigating that question that the poem just happens. And my file is a literal file. I do know it's 2021 and everything's digital, but I'm a millennial, I grew up having papers. So I literally had a filing cabinet and a file of Harlow's monkey and all my research that was just printed out and I had notes on it. My own file is literally a stack that I still sometimes will rediscover forms that I forgot about. Yeah, [00:22:00] I could talk a little bit about Harlow's Monkey. When I first started thinking more deeply and critically about adoption and the adoption industrial complex, I found this blog called Harlow's Monkey by fellow Korean American adoptee JaeRan Kim. And what I loved about that blog, I think, was it was one of the first places that I discovered where an adoptee was just being brutally honest about their rage and about their frustration, about their loss. And I just had never heard an adoptee articulate that before, and I felt so appreciative to hear it because, at least, I was brought up with this mentality of gratitude, right? And there wasn't space for us to feel anything other than that. So to hear other adoptees [00:23:00] articulate more complicated feelings around it was a breakthrough for me.
And then, also, the blog is called Harlow's Monkey after this series of experiments that were done in the '50s by the social psychologist Harry Harlow. So after I found that blog I was like, Who's this? Who's this guy? What did he do? And that kind of sent me down another wormhole, but it was so fascinating, his work. He was a social psychologist who studied the relationship between caregivers and infants, and he did this work primarily with rhesus monkeys where he separated them from their biological mothers and presented them with one of two surrogate mothers. This is his most famous experiment. But one made of cloth and one made of wire, and then he studied how that impacted their [00:24:00] psychological development and social ability. And the ones that had cloth mothers were much more well-adapted and social and felt safe, interacting with each other, whereas the ones with wire mothers that weren't getting any nurturing or any sense of comfort were very withdrawn and anxious, socially anxious. Using that as a metaphor for the adoptee experience around separation and maternal relationships, I found it incredibly compelling. Though then I learned so much more about him. His experimentation became increasingly more problematic as he went on to the point of pretty serious abuse of some of these baby monkeys. He would lock some of them in, I think he called it the pit of despair, for months in a black box and then [00:25:00] release them to see how they did. And to no one's surprise they were very troubled and traumatized. And interestingly too, I think, this man, who committed his life’s work to understanding relationships between caregivers and babies, was also an absent and alcoholic father.
So again, I think all of this research helped me develop a more comprehensive understanding around adoption. It's not gratitude or rage. It's not like one thing or the other. It can be all of these things, and it's complicated and it's messy, and it's also connected to larger questions of neo-colonialism and American occupation in war, like you mentioned Operation Babylift, right? And I think doing all that research helped me situate my [00:26:00] story within this larger framework.
Haley Radke: I have this quote from an essay you wrote, “Subverting the Script of the Adoption Industrial Complex.” You say:
"The possibility that the experience could be complicated, that an adoptee could feel both loved by their adoptive family and grief for their abandonment, that gratitude and luck have nothing to do with it, was far from accessible."
And so I really hear you trying to make it accessible for yourself, for other adopted people. When you were talking about those experiments. They are just bananas. And if anyone has studied attachment–that's frigging Psych 101–they're still teaching that stuff. And when the monkeys will literally choose starvation to have the comfort of the fuzzy mother versus nourishment from the wiry, pokey one. Ugh. When you really look at adoptees and some of the behaviors we take up, I'm like, [00:27:00] yeah, okay, relatable. But I don't really like it that you did those experiments to tell me that. Can you tell me how you are able to look at this research? I mean you're a poet, so feelings are a big thing, I think, for you. That's what comes out in your writing anyway. But as you're doing research, are you able to compartmentalize and take in this information? Or were you having some moments when you were doing this and just being like, Oh my gosh, has this impacted me? When you talked about the Babylift in that poem, I admit I didn’t think I knew what this is about so I started researching and I was like, holy moly. Do you want to talk about that? I'll let you explain that, and then also would you mention personal impacts on yourself when you were finding these things out?
Tiana Nobile: Yeah, definitely. So Operation Babylift [00:28:00] happened at the end of the Vietnam War. As the US military was leaving, they also started just picking up babies. There's actually a documentary, I forget what it's called. It might be called Operation Babylift, that I watched when I first learned about this history, where there's white women, white American women, I think they're from Catholic Charities or they're from some missionary, and they're trying to convince Vietnamese mothers to give them their children with promises of they'll have a better life. You can't take care of them, right? And obviously, as a mother I can't imagine, the world around you is crumbling. You're coming out of this brutal war. Who knows what's going to happen in the future? And there's this woman telling you that your kid could have a better life. And she's saying, I need to take them right now. [00:29:00] Also, a lot of these women were promised that they would reunite with their children later in the United States, and that never happened for a single one of them, as far as I know. In the documentary, one of the children, who's now an adult, goes back to Vietnam to meet her biological family. So yeah, they just corralled children and put them on planes and took them away. And the first plane that departed as part of this project, which was called Operation Babylift, crashed soon after takeoff, and yet that didn't stop them. In the poem I wrote that I think 78 children were on that plane and they all perished.
This story, though, is not unique, however, right? In Cuba, at the end of the Cuban Revolution there was Operation Peter Pan, where they [00:30:00] took Cuban children and brought them to the United States with the same kind of promises and ideas. So when Americans in particular are involved in situations of warfare and occupation, there's a pattern where after they destroy a country, they basically are like, Okay, well sorry, and we're gonna take your kids. There is a recent story in the news about the mass grave of children that was found at the residential school in Canada. Children as young as three years old were found there. That's something that happened in Canada and United States and Australia, as in all around the world where indigenous children were forced to attend these residential schools, taken from their families, in some cases given up for adoption, in some cases just forced to live at these boarding schools, and were punished for [00:31:00] speaking their native language, were punished for practicing any native traditions in order to erase their cultural ethnic heritage, and to the point of literal mass murder, right? So this is genocide, right? And I think the idea of what happens in transnational and in transracial adoption, taking children is the way to eliminate a culture, to whitewash them, transport them into white spaces, into Western families, is how you remove a generation. So I think it's enraging. Learning about all of this made me so angry. I think it helped me understand all of the parts of the white [00:32:00] supremacist machine, neocolonial machine that's at work that makes this happen. And I can feel loved by my family, and I can feel supported, and it's happening amid this, within this network, right? That doesn't care about me.
Haley Radke: Thank you for mentioning those things and calling them what it is. Let's say it: genocide. And the other thing I find really perplexing, I am very pro-family preservation, but is that the United States has taken to adopting out its own children internationally as well.
Tiana Nobile: I didn't know that.
Haley Radke: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And it's mostly Black children. We can go down the rabbit trail. It's horrendous, but when you look at for-profit adoption and the prices for adoption [00:33:00] and white healthy infants versus Black children, they often cost less. And it's really...It's disgusting. Sorry, I have trouble talking about it because it's so problematic. It's horrible.
Tiana Nobile: And that practice has its roots in slavery, in the separation of families and the displacement of families. It's horrific. That's horrific.
Haley Radke: It is indeed.
Tiana Nobile: And instead of creating opportunities and support systems and resources for families to be able to stay together, like the women in Operation Baby Lift, like many Korean mothers. I've heard so many stories of Korean mothers who were talked out of keeping their children. So why is that the pathway instead of finding ways to support mothers and families to stay together? And again, the profit piece too, right? Capitalism [00:34:00] is also mucking up this whole situation.
Haley Radke: I think the piece here that, as adoptees, I really feel if you're hearing some of these things for the first time, if Tiana's saying some things or I'm saying some things and you're like, really? You need to know these things. As adopted people, we were a part of the system however our adoptions occurred, and I think it's really important to educate ourselves. Even if we're not the meticulous researchers that Tiana is, it's very important. I really believe that. And even if you're not going to use it to become an activist of some kind, which, you know, I'm all for that you should be even if you don't think you're going to be. Anyway, thank you for sharing those things. They're hard things. They're true. So it's important for us to talk about it even if it makes us uncomfortable, because it does. There are deep wounds there, and I feel for our fellow adoptees who've experienced that pain and the biological [00:35:00] families and the losses they've experienced.
We are wrapping up, winding down, getting to our recommended resources, and I'm going to admit this, I stole this. I did not know this word. I saw an interview with you, and the interviewer talked about how cleave, the word cleave, is a contronym, and I'd never heard of that. That's so cool. It's a brilliant title. Tell us what that word means and how you came to it? Because I'm very impressed.
Tiana Nobile: That interview was with my friend Henry, who's also a New Orleans poet, and I didn't know it was called a contronym either.
Haley Radke: Okay.
Tiana Nobile: He said that.
Haley Radke: Okay.
Tiana Nobile: I was like, Oh, there's a word for it?
Haley Radke: Let us give that guy credit. Let me see here. Henry Goldkamp. Yeah. Good job, Henry.
Tiana Nobile: I know, yeah. There are some other examples, for example, dust. You can dust on or off, right? Or execute [00:36:00] means you can carry something out or you can kill it. So a contronym is a word that has opposite meanings. So “cleave” means both to cut and to cling. And I thought it was just such a perfect word for this book that explores transnational, transracial adoption, particularly my own, in that I'm really grappling with what does it mean to cling to something that is severed, right? To be so almost obsessive about something that has cut you or has separated you. And I think that my adoption and the circumstances surrounding it is something that even if I haven't actively been pursuing my whole life in the front of my brain, it's something I've been carrying for my whole life. The book was an opportunity for [00:37:00] me to really dig into that space.
Haley Radke: Well, I absolutely want to recommend your collection. It's tremendous. I loved it. You share personal struggles. As I mentioned earlier, there is this lens of research that you bring in. I learned things that I didn't know and, trust me, I talk about adoption every day, all day. Apparently, that's my job now. I don't know how that happened. Your thoughts on Korea, your mastery of language, Tiana, my goodness. I can just tell, I mean I know you've got a couple master's degrees. You are just an incredible poet. I've seen the grants and awards that you've received, but it's just really tremendous, and I just highly recommend it.
The other thing I want to mention, I just found and I didn't realize that you had another, a chapbook. It's called Spirit of the Staircase. [00:38:00] Can you explain that phrase to us? Because I thought it's just so beautiful.
Tiana Nobile: “Spirit of the staircase” comes from a French idiom that refers to the moment when somebody says something to you that might be upsetting or insulting or even just shocking, and in the moment you don't know what to say. And as you're walking away, you're overcome by the spirit of the staircase: while you're walking away, you have that perfect comeback or that perfect retort, but it's delayed, right? So that's the idea.
Haley Radke: I'm sorry to say this. My husband and I have been re-watching Seinfeld for all the problems it has. There's a whole episode on this.
Tiana Nobile: Oh, really? ...
Haley Radke: George gets made fun of in a meeting and then later he thinks, oh my gosh, I should have said: The jerk store called and they're running out of you. And so this whole episode is him crafting [00:39:00] ways for him to re-have that moment and literally live it out. But I love this in the spirit of, I don't know how to say this. There's so many conversations about adoption, and you probably didn't even mean it this way, but this is the trail I took it down, that later I'm like, Ugh, I wish I would've told them this or I wish I would've said this. Especially when it comes to changing the traditional adoption narrative, that's saviorism, etc., and I feel like you're obviously working towards doing that whether on purpose or not. It seems like it's on purpose. So anyway, thank you for sharing that idiom. It's just really amazing that you called the chapbook that. I was curious, would you be willing to read something from Cleave for us?
Tiana Nobile: Yeah, I'd love to. I thought I'd read the last poem in the book. So in many ways I think this book was a way for me to tell my [00:40:00] story on my own terms. And as an adoptee, there's so much about my origin that is just a mystery. And this poem was a way for me to create my own mythic origin story, to imagine what it could look like.
Revisionist History
The weather in Seoul in October is bright and balmy. All the hospital beds are full, and women with thick arms and bent knees, feet in the stirrups, scream in an echoing
symphony. A woman with small ankles can't see beyond her bloated stomach. She keeps her eyes shut as forceps dig, doctor's hands twisting between her legs
like a corkscrew pulling out the plug. It's been a busy morning, and between heaving breaths she wonders, how much longer? First the head,
then the shriveled body, bright as a small sun. [00:41:00] For the first time in her life, she sighs and means it. That's how it happens in my fantasy. The movie I watch
on repeat, re-imagined myth of my birth. No. I emerge from seafoam flapping my tailfins in the Pacific froth. I washed ashore encased in mermaid purse, crawled on all fours
and learned the power of breath. No. I was stardust, an accumulation of space matter falling to Earth in tiny pieces. I'm still gathering my limbs. They're scattered all over the planet.
None of that is true. I was born in the airport, propelled through the gaping mouth of sliding glass doors. My father's second cousin ferried me down the stairs,
my mouth bubbling with Korean consonants, eyes still wary of sight. In the video recording of my arrival, the airport light burns everything so yellow it's purple. My grandfather's cheeks [00:42:00]
behind his glasses glow like round speckled eggs. I've watched the video so many times it's etched like a scar. I can feel my mother's yellow tears fall purple on my cheek. My father
tucks his upper lip inside his tongue. Years later I will learn why he does this: searching for words when the mouth is lacking, soft tears cradled in the pockets of his open eyes. What's
the difference between memory told and memory burned? I was born in the womb of a stranger, my face a reflection of somebody else's shadow. If I told you that I missed you,
would you believe me? Would I?
Haley Radke: Thank you. It's stunning. I wrote a review on Goodreads, just a little short one. I wrote: "Poems to savor." And I absolutely think that's so true. In this one, look at how many book darts I have. There's several. I don't like to write in my [00:43:00] books, but I love a book dart. Okay, there you go. Cleave, you have to get it. It's phenomenal. What would you like to recommend to us today, Tiana?
Tiana Nobile: I just read Surviving the White Gaze by Rebecca Carroll, and what a brilliant book. Have you read it yet?
Haley Radke: No, because it may be a book choice selection and for my Book Club later, so I try and read them a little closer, but I have it. It's here. I have skimmed a few things here and there, but I've heard wonderful things.
Tiana Nobile: I also have an adoptee book club of my adoptee poet sisters, and this is the book that we just read. I was just so touched by this book. I think it's so beautifully written. The way that she talks about her explorations of race and coming into herself in her young adulthood, I think is so [00:44:00] interesting and inspiring. I especially love the end. So she has a child, and how she talks to him about Michael Brown's shooting and how she talks to him about her white parent’s dismissal of her Blackness and of their whiteness even, right? And I just found that to be so inspiring. I don't have children, but it really made me think about how am I going to talk to my children about race, about identity, being a person of color in a white family? And I felt like she had a really great model for that.
Haley Radke: Oh, I appreciate you sharing that. My co-host for my Patreon podcast where we talk about books and other such things, she read it and she was just talking about it. We were just recording about it yesterday. And she mentioned that Rebecca Carroll's first [00:45:00] mother is white, and her first father is Black. And so even though Rebecca had this experience of connecting with her first mother, again, that still was with a white woman. And so I'm sure her insights are so helpful, especially for folks like yourself who were raised by white parents and didn't have that full experience of mirrors, etc., when you were growing up. So thank you for sharing that.
It's been such an honor talking to you. I'm so thankful that you shared your story with us and your time with us and wisdom. Where can we find out more, more events to come and more work? And where can we connect with you online?
Tiana Nobile: My website is tiananobile (dot) com, and you can also follow me on Twitter and Instagram at tiananob.
Haley Radke: Perfect. Thank you so much. As I mentioned at the top of the show, Tiana is leading a poetry workshop for [00:46:00] transracial adoptees at Hugo House with Leah Silvieus in November. You can find out how to register for that at tiananobile.com/events. And if you're listening to this in the future and that's already passed, I'm sure Tiana will have other opportunities there for you.
I am so thankful for my Patreon supporters. You heard a little clip of one of my dear supporters at the beginning of the podcast, and that's to encourage you to join us on Patreon. I know it's not an option for everyone and I always have the main feed show free absolutely as a resource for the community. But you know the show costs money to make, so I'm so grateful to supporters who fund the show. That's literally how the show keeps going. So if you want to join us, I have some thank-yous for you. There's a whole other podcast every single week called Adoptees Off Script over on Patreon, and if you want to [00:47:00] join us, it's adopteeson.com/partner.
We are in the middle of reading Trumpet by Jackie Kay for our September Book Club, and we have the live recording for that coming up right away at the beginning of October. And we're reading a couple other adoptee-authored books this year. Those gatherings are so fun. I'm just so thrilled about the community-building that's happening there and would love to have you join us, adopteeson.com/partner.
Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.
