326 Sun Yung Shin
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/326
Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.
You are listening to Adoptees On the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. My guest today is Sun Yung Shin, poet and author of the new book, Heart Eater, A Memoir of Immigration Belonging and How we Find Ourselves in Language. Sun Yung's work examines the complexities of transracial and transnational adoption identity and the limits of what some adoptees can ever truly know about their origins.
We discussed some of the pressures adoptees carry to make sense of their stories and why we need to move beyond the expected search and reunion narrative. Before we get started, I [00:01:00] wanna personally invite you to sign up for my podcast newsletter, which you can find at adopteeson.com/newsletter. We wrap up with some recommended resources for you, and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com.
Let's listen in.
I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Sun Yung Shin. Welcome Sun Yung. It's so good to finally connect with you.
Sun Yung Shin: Thank you, Haley. I'm so excited. I've been such a fan for so long, and I finally get to talk to you. I'm so grateful.
Haley Radke: That is so kind. We have recommended your poetry books on the show multiple times. You have had many friends appear, and now here you are. Would you mind by starting out and just sharing a bit of your story with us?
Sun Yung Shin: Yes, thank you. So I was adopted through the Holt International [00:02:00] Agency, the OG Korean Adoption Agency, and my paperwork says that I was found abandoned in January of 1975, and I seem to be about nine months.
One paperwork says found at a police station in Seoul. Another piece of paper that I got years later says left on the, steps of the Holt agency. And then I was processed through Holt and went into foster care for five months, something like that. My adoptive parents had been, in the pipeline and doing the paperwork.
So I came to Chicago, Illinois in June, 1975, came to Chicago and then grew up with a white adoptive family, Roman Catholic, in a suburb of Chicago. I have an older brother who's [00:03:00] also adopted. He's domestically adopted. He's a white American who was born in a hospital nearby where my parents lived, and he was adopted, I believe, before it was arranged, even before he was born.
Haley Radke: So you, you were both adopted, but you were visibly different.
Sun Yung Shin: Correct.
Haley Radke: Have you talked with him about his experience of being an adoptee who could blend in versus yours?
Sun Yung Shin: Such a great topic. I love this topic of siblings so much. I think it's so interesting and I have tried over the years to engage him in various discussions around adoption and he's so disinterested, but I talk about it in some of my writing that he. We believed at the time that he was the same or he, his paperwork said he was the same ethnic mix as our parents and he actually looks a lot generically like our parents, and he [00:04:00] absolutely blended in. It wasn't like, the brunette child and the all blonde family. So it was really interesting to see how people would respond when they would come over and then they would meet me if I was loitering around like a younger kid, and then, explain I'm adopted. And then he would say, I'm adopted too. But his friends wouldn't believe him. And so we had to go through that and it was really an interesting experience to be that like one person inside the family where absolutely no one is actually genetically related, but one person is passing as genetically related to the parents.
Yeah. And I know that's not all that unusual. Lots of adopted people I know grew up with other adoptees too. So those dynamics to me are so interesting.
Haley Radke: Do you know why the pivot [00:05:00] from domestic to international adoption for your family?
Sun Yung Shin: My parents were, I think, just, I think they were open to anything. They said they were open to anything. They I think someone from Holt came to their church. I need to confirm, which sounds right. And so I think they were attracted to the idea of, helping someone. But to me they've always said their main motivation was, they just wanted another child and it didn't matter where they came from.
So they didn't have an ideology like, we have to save the orphans of the third world, or we definitely, want to try to get another, we wanna try to get a girl this time, or something like that. They said they were open to either. So that's what I know. Yeah.
Haley Radke: And so what was it like growing up in their home? Like what was your perspective of what adoption meant and was it talked about much?
Sun Yung Shin: [00:06:00] I think that it actually was talked about at least a lot more than a lot of other adoptees that are in my generation, because my mom especially was really clear on. Race, nation and ethnicity, which is very unusual.
Because she is a wonderful person. She's very local. She's a very, she didn't go to college. She lived her whole life except until later when she remarried in Brookfield, Illinois. And her parents are immigrants and from an immigrant families from Poland. Anyway, she's not like a race scholar, she just doesn't, didn't have any particular reason to not buy into the, you are just basically white now. So she always would say, you are, your nationality is American, or you're a [00:07:00] United States citizen. After I was naturalized, and you're ethnicity is Korean, or your race is Asian.
She might've said Oriental at the time, but she was just very clear that, I wasn't a white person. I wasn't trying to be a white person, and I was shocked when I moved to Minnesota as a college student. Ended up meeting all these Korean adoptees whose parents told them to check white or Caucasian on forms, or who would say, tell people like, I'm white or I'm basically white, or things like that.
So that's how I grew up. And I grew up with, I think having a white brother who was adopted, definitely decoupled, race and family in a way. So understanding that it wasn't just [00:08:00] transracial adoption, but domestic adoption and kind of put us on that kind of equal footing in some ways.
So it wasn't like a everyday topic, but it was definitely not a shameful topic or hidden. And I also feel like I was, I'm either lucky or I don't remember, but I really don't remember any of my cousins like bullying me or making fun of me or my brother for being adopted. It seemed very like just accepted, and I think that's pretty unusual for transracial adoptees.
Haley Radke: That sounds like a really healthy dynamic. Even just the fact that adoption is not a taboo topic is really unusual. Especially for like our decades and earlier.
Sun Yung Shin: Definitely.
Haley Radke: Yeah. Do you remember? Having an interest in Korea, like thinking about where I [00:09:00] came from or any of those things. I know you're really interested in immigration as a topic, and I wonder when those kind of thoughts started for you.
Sun Yung Shin: I think I was always, there's such a, there's so much compartmentalization, I think just as. Kids, right? Because there's so much that is abstract or just gets put into a drawer 'cause you don't know how to ask questions about it or you sense and perceive that, some topics are there's a period at the end of the sentence and there's really not much more to know about things.
So I was interested, but it was very abstract for a long time. I think that there's a small Korea town in Chicago and we would, my mom, we would go and get kimchi and there was a Holt families group that we would, do some things with once in a while. And so I, I met other adoptees through there.
I did have another Korean adoptee [00:10:00] in my grade school and we were in the same class and we were friends. And I think that probably made a big difference. It made it normalized. And I didn't, I, was very aware of being an immigrant, a naturalized citizen, but that was also very abstract.
Yeah. So my parents signed me up for a homeland tour the summer after eighth grade. And initially I did not wanna go when it was brought up to me, maybe the year before do you wanna go on this Holt, motherland tour and. I didn't wanna go. It seemed I'm trying to be a, I'm trying to be American, or I'm American, or I'm not sure what that has to do with me.
I can tell now that looking back it was some kind of concern around is that going to, how am I gonna integrate that? What is that gonna mean? What am I gonna do with that? It felt something solid that couldn't necessarily be metabolized. If [00:11:00] that makes sense.
Haley Radke: Did you end up going?
Sun Yung Shin: I did. I ended up going and it was amazing. I loved it. It was so interesting and because it was this, what was also unusual is, from what I can tell, is that it was just adoptees and then we had our guides. Our guides were a Korean immigrant couple family who had american born teenage kids. And so there were like six or seven of us who were ages 13 to 21 from the Midwest, and we were all adoptees.
And so we went with this family as our guide, including their two teen kids without any of our parents. And so to me that made a really big difference because as I got older then, and I heard other stories from other adoptees or watched, started watching documentaries as they started being produced of reunion and things like that, where the adoptee [00:12:00] is really taking care of their adoptive parents' feelings and worrying, navigating a lot of kind of loyalty subtleties and making sure their parents don't feel threatened. And then also, if they're in reunion or starting a reunion or, meeting their remeeting, their biological Korean birth family, then navigating that too, while being, yeah. So I feel like that was such an interesting experience and I feel like all adoptees transnational adoptees should get to if they wanted to, or I just wish that was more of an option. For younger people. Going back, I did not want my parents to come with me. I, by that age was also, I had just, I think because of the adoption, it's impossible to know, but I was always pretty independent. Like I was, I went to sleep away camp from a young age.[00:13:00]
I never got homesick. I'm a little bit detached. So even going then, I did not feel like, oh, I need to have my parents with me or, yeah. So it, that was a really good experience and started a new kind of chapter of being in relationship to Korea.
Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that and I, I love this observation of certainly when adoptees have their adoptive families around them for whatever of the moments, there is a piece of caretaking that we feel obligated to do. And I'm saying that as a blanket statement 'cause I don't know anyone who didn't have that in the back of their mind. Oh, they're right there, so I need to also perform for them too.
Sun Yung Shin: Yeah. And I think it shows, it can show how adoptees in general have a burden of performance that is just different than non-adopted [00:14:00] people, or certainly overlapping, but there's these distinct performance pressures. Yeah.
Haley Radke: I think one of those you talk about in your new memoir, Heart Eater, and that is a form for me because I'm gonna ask you the question like, did you search, have you searched for your real parents? Your real parents? Have you searched for your birth parent, whatever language people impose on us. And I'm not asking you that question. What I'm asking is you comment in your book about our stories when there's no search or an interest in search, or there's no reunion or a resolution, any of those kinds of things, and you share.
Which I agree the majority of memoirs or documentaries about Korean adoptees include search and reunion if there is a reunion. So can you just maybe talk about that a little bit as an adoptee who doesn't necessarily have [00:15:00] the reunion story and the pressures that we can feel to have that give, that, give answer that.
Sun Yung Shin: Yeah, it's I love this topic so much because people this dichotomy of the general public thinking like you should be fine, just not knowing. But then everyone wants to know if we know and then if we know they wanna know all about it immediately, even if we've just, met them, that's, it's really the first thing that they wanna know and that I've just been asked that my whole life. Constantly. And so I'm constantly disappointing people and at this point I'm just laughing about it. My friend, JaeRan Kim, Dr. JaeRan Kim, who I know has done a lot of disability research and so I'm not saying that it's like having a visible disability at all, but in terms of being genetically and socially related to the family you're being raised in. If that's considered normative [00:16:00] and non-pathological and non right and it is normative, then to me, it reminds me of when friends who have visible, quote unquote, visible, quote unquote disabilities are just, that's the only thing people see and that's the only thing they wanna know.
They have don't know. They haven't been given permission, they haven't been given any encouragement. It might not even be the topic on the table. And they'll be asking immediately like, how did this happen to you? Or what is that? Can you tell, so this constant navigating this interrogation and divulgences and it's of course racialized. That surveillance is racialized too in this place and many other places. And so I don't mind talking about it at all and I end up talking about being adopted a lot, even when the topic of whatever it is not adoption. That affects everything in my life and I'm [00:17:00] not trying to hide it, and I also wanna advocate.
So to me it's very much, I think if we could harness this phenomenon as proof that actually it's a, a human right to know your origins. If you're gonna be in a society that defines rights in any way. That this is proof that it's something that we should be caretaking better for current and future generations.
'Cause we're always having to also defend why we wanna know. Because pushing on that really threatens the whole ecology, the transnational adoption industrial complex as. Dr. Kim McKee has coined, so I would love to see more of that. I've done like a not most thorough search ever, but [00:18:00] I've been back to Holt agency twice. I've asked for my paperwork. I have done two commercial DNA tests, and I haven't gotten any closer to any, yeah, viable relatives. So I completely understand why memoirs and documentaries focus on, or include or are initiated by the inciting incident of a reunion process. So I'm not knocking that at all.
But the vast majority of Korean adoptees, certainly my age, and just in general at this point, have not found. Original family members. And so we're this, not like we're invisible or silent, but I think I might've written like, oh, people think there's no there. There's nothing to talk about. There's no spectacle for voyeurs to spectate. They're not getting the, what they think is gonna [00:19:00] be the Oprah reunion. They want the sentiment, they want to see that what they think of as melodrama. It's of course like the very most real thing in people's lives who are involved. I'm not saying it's melodramatic, but I'm saying that the hunger for that, especially when it's racialized, because it fits into the whole ideas of empire and white saviorism and all that stuff.
Haley Radke: On the personal side, when you have searched and done, the steps that are available to you at this time, how do you think about like not finding, do you have a hope still? Do you put that to the side? How do you deal with that? If it was a want to find answers?
Sun Yung Shin: Yeah. Oh definitely. I definitely wanna know. I would definitely do, whatever was required, if there was more to [00:20:00] be found. I think the only I didn't go on. I didn't try to get on a TV show, but there, I don't think I would have gotten on the TV show 'cause I don't have enough. I didn't have enough information even.
Haley Radke: Which is it's like that for people who don't know, that's a really common way to search in Korea. It sounds whoa. That's what. TV show, but.
Sun Yung Shin: Find this person or who and I, I'm not knocking that at all, you know at all. Or any of the ways that people search or don't search or don't want to, I definitely would like to, I would love to know, it's a profound curiosity that's beyond cognition, especially since I have two children that I conceived, gestated, delivered and raised, and their dad is an adoptee, a white domestic extended family adoptee. And it's a long story, but he reunited with his Mexican side of his family. His dad [00:21:00] was a Mexican national and he reunited with them through DNA through ancestry.com, in his early fifties, and it's a long story, but he got to meet his birth father, some of his relatives. He got to meet some first cousins and like I think his birth father had a younger child too. He got to go to Mexico to meet him and then he tragically passed last year before our kids could meet him, meet their grandfather. And and that was the only grandfather, biologically related grandfather who they know of or could have met. Because his birth mother, who he was in contact with was in the family. Long story. Her father was gone before my kid's dad was born. And then I haven't found [00:22:00] my biological family, so my kids don't have any access to those people.
Haley Radke: It's totally another layer of impact that most people don't think about is how our children also lose connection to their ancestors.
Sun Yung Shin: Intergenerational loss and disorientation. So it's a continued, I feel like also I've accepted I've really, I fully cognitively accepted that I probably won't, and I feel like also emotionally I've accepted it is still painful and upsetting. I mean it's very politically, it's a political impetus to continue working for family preservation slash reproductive rights slash you know, social welfare slash anti-war. All the reasons that people are [00:23:00] separated and or not supported in their family systems.
So it's feels, of course, it feels like a real collective intergenerational wound. It definitely doesn't. Even though it's personal and feels very, individual in the way that any of us are an individual, it feels like a collective global wound to me, in terms of anyone who's been separated through state machinations or through misogyny, through violence, all of those things that are part of culture and that are part of social relations that we could work on.
In, we could work on more conscientiously if we listened to the people who are impacted most by family separation, which are, people in the family themselves, people who've survived foster care or in foster care. All those things. All those different aspects of [00:24:00] loss and disruption, displacement.
Haley Radke: I think this is related, so you may have a similar answer, but again, the fact that you're paperwork. This one says, oh, doorstep or steps here. This one says, oh no, it was this, place you're not certain of your exact birth date. These things that domestic adoptees don't really connect with, I think is important to talk about, because I don't know what it's like to literally not know your exact birthday. And we've talked about this before on the show and people who are interested in whatever it is. What planets were aligned when, I landed on this earth. Do you have thoughts around those kinds of things?
Sun Yung Shin: Yeah, that's, so I am so interested in this because also like longview birth date only started mattering, with calendaring, with [00:25:00] counting time, keeping time with, I think increased infant survival rates. Like I think about the, I think like anthropologically about how we mark the arrival of a new member into a society or culture or tribe or group, and really interested in how different groups throughout time and place have used rituals around that, right?
It's been so funny with the millennial rise in astrology practices and then having to disappoint people with, I don't know. This is all some astrological guesswork. It is what I want people to understand on a political level. Also of course like there's the psychological, emotional, but on the political level, those kinds of fungible facts about personhood within a state [00:26:00] makes those children so vulnerable.
And I want people to understand how incredibly vulnerable children who are born into an adoption situation or enter the adoption process pipeline are so vulnerable to any one person or a machine, or now ai in that long process, making some either decision, deliberate decision or mistake in one number or one letter, and that can erase a person forever and it can make that person.
Be un findable forever for the people who would like to find that person. So the statelessness, the fact that no one who is blood slash genetically related to this child will ever be able to find them. [00:27:00] Not that those kinds of biological relations guarantee any level of care. Of course, commitment, attachment, or safety.
But to not have those when everyone else has those, and if not values, those values knowing. I really want people who think adoption is great and awesome and 100% a okay to understand these issues of vulnerability and how paperwork and documentation are incredibly easy to falsify at any point.
There's no chain of custody, there's no accountability. I'm sure that, in the United States there's a patchwork of laws from state to state, from county to county, from, patchwork of policies, hospital to hospital. There's private adoption [00:28:00] agencies, there's lawyers involved, there's disruptions, there's rehoming, there's all of this that goes on in the gray market and black market of children and just children are incredibly vulnerable and it's just the huge dark side of adoption that most people don't know about and don't wanna know about.
Haley Radke: That's it. Don't wanna know about too. You, one of your chapter titles, Parts of Me are Made of Paper and I thought, yeah, that is astute to observe you in your new book you have a lot of like documents included, and I love that because sometimes those are the only things that help us feel real. And to your point just now [00:29:00] these documents often are made up and it's like, how can that be the real that we're tied to? Do you have thoughts around that?
Sun Yung Shin: Yeah.
This, when did we, you know what humans didn't need literacy until they started trading and started having commerce needing numbers to keep track of things that were greater than what you could just see or estimate in front of you or so I think a lot in terms of why the function of paperwork, right? The function of literacy, the function of keeping track of people, and how it's changed over time. What it has to do with borders and the state and, belonging and how do we identify people? And then the, I feel like the contradiction or the paradox is [00:30:00] being a writer. And so that's, those are my tools, words, and also words on paper. And yet. Words on paper are also, it's just dangerous. It's just like fire, fire. It can be great and it can be terrible. And so language, I feel is the same way. It's something that, it's a tool that humans have. Not necessarily invented language, 'cause other species have language too.
But we've invented our own special ways of doing language and doing script and recording. So I think about how throughout history, paperwork has been used to oppress people. I feel like it's rarely been used to liberate people. Would people like oppress people fight back with whatever tools are at hand, but states are the ones who have the power to really tell you who you are and where you can go and what you can do. And [00:31:00] the way that they can make that traceable is through paper and then digital paper or digital language, or we're moving into this interesting stage of society where we're in like a twilight of literacy. We're going, images are more important in terms of bypassing our critical thinking, and so all like the bio surveillance and things that are going to more about our flesh and bones body in terms of keeping track of us rather than our signature or having a piece of paper that says this and it matches this.
So it's, I'm very interested in how we are going to try to maintain our humanity or, what is humanity? What is important about. Being human and being in relationship. And I just think adoptees and anyone who has [00:32:00] been rewritten just has more, has some interesting insights that I think our society, needs.
Haley Radke: When did you rename yourself?
Sun Yung Shin: 1995. So right after I graduated from college, I knew that starting in college, I started thinking about going back to my Korean name and one of the, I think the inciting incident I'm talking about, that's what I'm working on with my creative writing students. Inciting incidents is when I started working on the literary magazine in my college my sophomore year, and I ended up writing a poem and it was included in the edition, and so I was thinking about my name, like how do I want to be known if I'm going to publish something? Even though [00:33:00] then I really thought, I didn't have any sense of, oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be a writer or I'm gonna keep pursuing this. But I'd always thought about my name and how obviously it was a Western name and obviously it was constantly surprising to people who would meet me or any adoptee who's clearly like Asian, and then they come in with an Irish name or a Polish name or a German name, like first, middle, and last are, all Western names. And so if there's a mismatch and there's a wait, this isn't the person on the menu that I ordered. Who are you? So it's not something that an adoptee, a transnational adoptee or anyone who's been renamed, I think can really ever forget 'cause you're using your name multiple times a day. Even, I remember in grade school writing my name. You have to write your name on paper. You are learning cursive, like all those things. Learning to write and always [00:34:00] feeling like it was just, it was, I was a little estranged from it yeah that's my name, but who's this person is a fiction, I'm sure I wouldn't have said it that way at the time, but like obviously I've just always known I was adopted.
I've always known that wouldn't have been my name. And then I had another name and it was still existing as a ghost. And that name itself was probably given to me by the agency, or that's what the agency says. I might have been one of these kidnapped people who did have records and they were just destroyed. Never know.
Haley Radke: Yeah that's just it. Who gave you that name? Is it the next one down on the list that they just rotate through?
Sun Yung Shin: Yeah.
Haley Radke: But I appreciate your observation certainly on what it would be like to experience that as a Asian person and then meeting sorry. I know someone just right now who I had the [00:35:00] same experience, like I met them and I was like, wow, this name just doesn't feel like it fits for you.
So it, walking around in the world like that you have included all of these other pieces from your childhood in the book and one of them and you always mark out your name. I think you may might leave an initial, if I'm recalling correctly, but one of the pieces that I was like, oh my God, Sun Yung, was a literal poster child in a textbook for being a immigrant. Do you wanna tell us about that? Because I thought that was amazing.
Sun Yung Shin: So yeah, I, yeah. So that picture of me right after my naturalization ceremony in Chicago was in the local newspaper and [00:36:00] then sometime I think in high school. Then my mom said, oh, you are like, you're one of her friends. Or either a family friend or maybe a cousin now I like, why don't I know this? But that was their textbook in high school and they, I like told their mom and their mom told my mom and then, 'cause it was from a high school that was like in a few suburbs away. And so it wasn't my high school's textbook, but it was being used somewhere else in some massive suburban Illinois, Chicago high school.
But the funny thing is, because I was in the newspaper, local newspaper, a lot. Also when things happen to you as a kid that aren't like super traumatic, you're just like, okay, whatever. Going on about my day. But I don't really know why I conjecture in the book I think it's, I think it was this multicultural. Oh, good. We've, we have an Asian kid in this [00:37:00] picture and a black kid and like six white kids. But I don't really know why I it's a little bit of a mystery.
Haley Radke: I like how you have taken that and now with your life said, this is actually what an immigrant does because there's a, there's I think there's a flag, like a American flag right beside you, right? It's oh yeah, no wonder this be a stock photo.
Sun Yung Shin: Yeah, and I, even though I was five, I don't have any memories of that, oh, I should try to get some, like hypnosis or something, but not that I need memories, but I was a happy kid, I was like a happy, very outgoing kid, apparently even on the plane from Korea, my report from the Baptist missionary's wife who got a free ticket or whatever to escort us six Korean adoptees to the US. She said I didn't sleep the entire time from Seoul, like from Incheon to Alaska [00:38:00] to Chicago, and I just talked the whole time.
Other kids were crying and upset and I feel like it's not necessarily a good si. That's not like a great quality that I was awake the whole time and talking to people, but they're, that's what the report.
Haley Radke: You're independent from the start. Wow. Oh,
interesting. Okay. Is it okay if I read a quote from your book?
Sun Yung Shin: Yeah, of course. Thank you.
Haley Radke: Okay. You write, this is on. Page 62 of my ARC. So forgive if it has somehow shifted when it comes out next month. If you're listing when this releases, "I want people to know that being an adoptee often means being haunted by a sense of being part of a deliberate human lottery. There is an underlying sense of meaninglessness. You are sometimes haunted by the question of [00:39:00] who else you could've been. It requires a certain kind of psychological effort to hold yourself together knowing that you could have been a number of other people in other places. You wonder if you can hold two possible identities in your psyche. If you could hold three or four or 200,000."
That I immediately I highlighted this 'cause I'm reading on a laptop, but I, this is stuck in my brain, this deliberate human lottery phrase. You nailed it. Can you talk about that?
Sun Yung Shin: Yeah. It's so common, right? I think every Korean adoptee that I have, read their work or interview or heard them speak.
And I think especially, maybe especially our cohort of adoptees and I think probably other adoptees think about this too, but just that we know that we were [00:40:00] just next in line, right? Like it was just a random, arbitrary adopters looking for a child, wanting to grow their family. And like my parents would've, I think, taken a child, said they, on their form, like anywhere.
They didn't care if it was boy or girl. They had a white child and then they got me. And then as I got older and got to know other adoptees from other Korean adoptees from other countries after my first, IKAA gathering in Seoul in 2004. But I think meeting all these other adoptees and from who grew up in France, who grew up in Sweden, who grew up in Germany, grew up in the Netherlands. Norway, it's they just happened to be available on that day for those people. And I also don't know what kind of, how much were they charging the Norway people, like how much were they charging? There's, [00:41:00] I'm sure this could be discovered more or less.
Were they giving, were the different agencies giving different types of people or different nationalities of couples, different kinds of children, right? Was it, oh, we're, this child is sickly. We're going to send them. We can't get as much money for this kid from this country, we're gonna send them there.
Or also in my paperwork it says like I had got like whooping cough, or I got had a cold for a few months and so I was supposed to leave earlier, but then my parents had to wait longer and I, when. I remember after learning, in adulthood, like year after year, learning about more of the corruption and abuses in the system, I did have a thought once wait, am I that person?
Then I'm like, re-looking at the [00:42:00] pictures, like in Diane Boucher's first documentary where she discovered she was switched with another girl. But it does, and not that it, that doesn't matter, but it's like. I, it, I could have gone anywhere, as far as I know. And so it just reveals the existential nature of adoption.
The existential nature of life, right? You, as you as a person get born with whatever combination of genes decided to combine that moment with that sperm and that egg, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the fact that these lotteries were managed by human beings and there was money involved, I want people to take some pause.
I also, I grew up, like Illinois has a really big lottery and my dad bought lottery tickets every week. So I think that probably I was always, it was like a constant of what the lottery numbers were. That week, and I'm sure that, I internalized that. I don't come [00:43:00] from a family of gamblers, thank goodness, and I am not interested in gambling. Thank goodness. That would be the end of me, I'm sure if I liked that. But I just really started to realize as all of this information was coming out of South Korea and the system and that, yeah, I could be speaking French, I could be really cool. I often think I could have free healthcare in Norway if I could have, if I had survived all that like weird Scandinavian racism, which sounds really terrible, it's just a different, it's different like obviously incredibly racist here, but learn hearing from other adoptees in other places, they felt much more isolated.
Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. I'm sure folks will not be surprised that I'm gonna recommend your book, Heart Eater, a Memoir of Immigration Belonging and How we Find Ourselves in Language.
And it's your memoir, it's this [00:44:00] series of short essays and critiques. And of course I mentioned before my, one of my favorite things found documents, and you call them in your book Ephemera, which I love that word. And I too love language. And so I'm sure I've said this before, but I think poets often have the best grasp of words, this incisive use you have you're a perfect example of that. And I have Unbearable Splendor and The Wet Hex in my collection as well from you, but I know folks are really gonna enjoy Heart Eater. I loved it. I was so glad to be able to read it early and to get to know you better through your words was really special. So thank you. I'm so glad it's gonna be out in the world soon.
Sun Yung Shin: It's such a weird book, Haley. It's really a weird book. Thank you so much for wading through it. It's not your usual, it's not a narrative memoir started out as I called it field notes, but it's the things that, yeah, it's the things that I wanted to [00:45:00] say after these many years, and so hopefully it will connect with some folks and I hope to be able to talk to a lot of people and hear their stories too. Once the book's out. Yeah.
Haley Radke: It's wonderful. I don't think it's weird. I think it's great. What did you wanna recommend to us today?
Sun Yung Shin: Oh my gosh. I am really excited about novels coming out. Jenny Heijun Wills has a new book, the Canadian writer. I haven't gotten my hands on it yet. Oh, adoption world is just like bubbling with so many exciting new books. There's so many new adoptee poets, oh gosh, I should have made a list. But I do wanna recommend the Starlings Collective of adoptee poets and poetics and there's the Bipoc Adoptee Conference and Organization.
And of [00:46:00] course, I always recommend the anthology that Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung put together When We Become Ours. And it's great for, teen readers. And adult readers and it's all fiction. And so it gives us a break from memoir and documentaries, which are great, but we deserve, speculation in fiction too. And so that, there's just a great variety of stories in there. And so I'm, biased 'cause I got to be included, but I love all the other pieces in there. Matthew Salesses' memoirs also coming out, I think next year. So yeah, there will be, I think there's just an abundance. Not just from Korean adoptees, but from adoptees, from all walks of life, doing all kinds of writing. Not just necessarily focused on adoption, but.
Haley Radke: There's a lot of us doing a lot of great [00:47:00] things. Yes.
Sun Yung Shin: Yes.
Haley Radke: We will likely highlight a lot of those for folks, listeners coming up. Thank you. Where's the best place for listeners to connect with you to find your work and buy Heart Eater?
Sun Yung Shin: Yes, so on my website, sunyungshin.com can get links to all my books on Bookshop and or, any bookstore that you like. Instagram, my Link Tree. I keep up the events and news on Link Tree. I also, oh, my favorite thing is my Substack. It's called Heart Eater and I usually, it's twice a month. It's it's a little irregular, but it's definitely every month every couple of weeks.
And I always include a poem by a writer and then a creative writing prompt based on that poem or short piece or excerpt. And then some news, some [00:48:00] random things like the last edition of Heart Eater I talked about John Carpenter's The Thing. And I love. Zombie movies and robots. And so I talk a lot about pop culture too, as much as I think people might be able to stand.
And then I talk a little bit about my projects, but really it's mostly just other things in other people's writing that I wanna share and go into a little bit more of than I do like on Facebook or Instagram. Yeah, so Heart Eater, it's free. People can do the $5 a month thing, but I'm also just really happy if anyone wants to get into the Substack space, which I really enjoy.
Haley Radke: Amazing. Thank you. And to find out you love zombie movies right at the end of our time. How cruel. I guess we'll have to connect about that another day.
Sun Yung Shin: Part two. Yeah.
Haley Radke: I love horror in general, so that's totally up my alley. Thank you. What a delight to get to talk with you today.
Sun Yung Shin: Thank you, [00:49:00] Haley.
You're doing, the Gods work, the gods of community. You're doing really beautiful work. I really appreciate how you make a space for storytelling and connecting amongst ourselves and beyond. So thank you very much and yeah, just I hope you feel good about the way that you're bringing your talents to the world.
Haley Radke: My honor. Thank you.
Oh my goodness. I really enjoyed my time with Sun Yung, and we didn't even mention I, this is totally my bad. I failed to mention she has authored multiple poetry collections. She has written books for children. She's got picture books. She is an editor. And she was one of the editors on Outsiders Within Writing on Transracial Adoption, which I think is one of the very [00:50:00] first collections ever published by transracial adoptees.
And it's something I've gifted to multiple adoptees. It is a classic. And, she has been in this world for such a long time writing, being an advocate. And activist is the word, activist is the word I was looking for for us. And I really appreciate Sun Yung's work. It was just a delight to have her on the show.
There have been so many tremendous guest this year and we're leading up to my 10 year anniversary. And to have someone come on like Sun Yung, who has contributed so much to the adoptee community, it's just, it's such an honor to get to hear more of her behind the scenes stories, things that don't necessarily come out [00:51:00] in all the poetry collections or those kinds of things.
Anyway. Thank you Sun Yung. Thank you so much to every guest who comes on and shares so deeply of themselves for us, so that we can just feel like we're not alone. I appreciate it so much. Thank you for listening. Let's talk again soon.
