How it feels to be a secret

My Korean mother told me that when I was born and she was holding me, she “wanted to hold me until (she) died.” I think maybe a piece of her did perish when the social worker took me from her arms. 

But the other death came when my Korean father forbid her from acknowledging my birth. She couldn’t tell anyone—including my siblings—about the baby he forced her to relinquish.

Mere minutes-old, I became someone’s biggest source of shame. Erased from my own story, extracted from the family register: a cessation of life. For all intents and purposes, I no longer existed, at least in the ways that an ordinary person imagines being. As belonging.

Even from the grave, my father’s effacement looms. It outlived him- inherited by the next generation. My birth, adoption, and reunion remain unspeakable in certain circles.

And maybe that’s why I fight so hard to be seen. Heard. As proof of life. Staking a claim to subsist. Daring a deceased patriarch to be proud of what he put aside.

It would be easy enough to leave him with all the blame. But his haunting presence is outweighed by my own mistakes. Thinly-veiled attempts to rewrite history and change my ending to a happy one. One where I’m chosen. Kept. Public.

If a tree falls in a forest…

Did I exist without someone willing to bear witness?

Breaking the cycle is my burden. A mission. Not to withdraw from the light of someone else’s world when they don’t deem my presence in it worthy. 

Stop settling for shadows.

Speak my presence unequivocally. 

I was here. I lived. I loved. I mattered.

I am no one’s secret to keep.