Getting to know my roommates

Hotel Concorde, Kyongju
http://cosmojin.com/photo/info/hotel_photo_204_1.jpg

June 17, 1988: Con't.

After leaving the Korean Folk Village, we headed to Kyongju (or Gyeongju) which is located in the southeastern part of the country. This is one of Korea's popular cities for tourists and was the capital of the Silla (or Shilla) Kingdom for over 1,000 years. That said, there are many historic buildings and temples to tour and this was on the itinerary for the following day. I was excited to visit other areas of Korea and looked forward to more sight seeing.

We arrived at Kyongju and checked into a hotel. In '88, it was the Kyongju Tokyuu Hotel and now it is the Concorde Hotel Kyongju (I think). We were just excited that we were in a new location and it seemed like it would be a good setting for socializing. By this time, we were together for a few days and started to feel more comfortable with each other.

After dinner, most of us went to check out the discotheque also known as the little smoke filled room with a dance floor. Even then, it seemed dated and a bit garish. That didn't stop us from checking out the locals and listening to American pop songs sung in Korean. I faintly remember a couple of Village People songs in Korean. Anway, the novelty wore off and my roommates and I decided that we wanted to leave.

The four of us returned to our two rooms and decided to hang out for a while. Our conversation started off with mundane topics and then, we began to question each other about our pre-adoption circumstances at a deeper level than any previous discussions. Naively, I thought that everyone had the same experience that I did.

Digress for a second. Being adopted as an infant, I didn't really have any major issues or certainly didn't have any memories of living in Korea. I only learned that I was adopted when I noticed that other kids at pre-school looked like their parents. On the way home one day from pre-school, I told my dad that the other kids looked like their mommies or daddies, and I wanted to know why I didn't. He said something to this effect, "Well, sometimes there are mommies and daddies who have babies and they might not be able to provide for their babies. They want them to have a better life than what they can offer, so they give their babies up for adoption." He continued to explain adoption and told me about Korea, etc.. It was an age-appropriate response that made sense to me. I will always remember this conversation.

So, back to June 17. Like I said earlier, I operated under the assumption that everyone was adopted as an infant and no one had any memories of living in Korea before their "new" lives in the U.S. Well, I was wrong.

One of my roommates began to tell her story with the fact that she was 4 when she was adopted. She said that her (bio)parents abandoned her and her younger sister at a train station in Seoul. (I have learned that this was a common scenario.) She remembers walking around while holding her sister's hand and crying out for her parents. She said that her sister had a dirty diaper and she didn't know what to do in addition to the fact that they were both extremely scared. After roaming around for a few hours, someone approached them and took them to a police officer. The police officer took her and her sister to the police station and they waited there for a long time. She said that she even remembers that a policeman gave them ice cream. The next thing that she recalled was that they were sent to a group living home or an orphanage. Luckily, they didn't live there for very long. A family from the Midwest adopted her and her sister.

I realized that we were around the same age when adoption became a part of our lives. I learned that I was adopted when I was around four years old and my roommate was four when she came to the U.S. If I can recall that car ride home when my dad explained adoption to me, then her memory of being abandoned at the train station has to be permanently etched in her memory.