Early draft excerpt

Early draft! Felt like sharing a peek into the process. I’m steadily working on my book and here’s a lil thing that appears early on, about a one day event the Korean community put on for adoptees to teach us how to, uh, be Korean and stuff. In this story, I’m 21 years old.

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At 1 pm there is brush painting in the preschool classroom. A Korean woman with raven hair and her raven haired tween are distributing paper. Sit, says the mom raven, waving us in, the paper fluttering like wings as they arc from her arms and land softly on the table. The preschool table is low, shaped like a peanut. The chairs are playground blue and tiny. We sit at the small peanut, giant toddlers. Our knees knock against the edge. You can see through the wing paper. You could see through me, too, if you held me up between your fingers, which is how it feels when the raven woman asks us to introduce ourselves.

I say my name, my american name, but it feels fake, so I say my Korean name too, which makes the feeling bigger. The other adoptees follow suit. The raven tween is picking at some glue on the table. Her mom asks her to pass out the brushes. The brushes are as long as an ulna, their fingertips gathered into a soft spear. I hold the brush, a foreign thing, so elegant I bite my lip. The feeling of wanting to come from a place that makes something like this.

So, says the raven woman, you just, and she soars over the table, dips her brush in the ink and waves it across the paper. Like magicians do, like orchestra conductors do, like my father does, in the air, when we go on walks and he describes where we are. Like that, says the raven, and she sets the perfect paintbrush spear aside and lifts the wing paper so we can see how beautiful this world can be

*

We’re going to write our names. What are our names again? She will write them down in hangul, in Korean, here on a piece of scratch paper beside us. The scratch paper is another piece of the wing, but torn in half. She asks the tween to help, so we can get started.

What's your name, asks the tween, then she writes

정

나

미

with a marker on the scratch paper and moves to the next adoptee.

*

My name, an elaborate stick figure. When I was seven, my aunt sent me a book about drawing cartoons. The last square on a page was the cartoon as we know it, but each square before it contained less and less of the cartoon until it was just lines, shapes. My name is a picture, the first squares of me, and I try to draw it, one stick at a time.

*

No no no, says the raven, shaking her crown and smiling, and she gives me a new piece of wing paper. She covers my hand with her hand and tilts it so that my brush stands up instead of slouches. Still cradling, she writes the first character for me:

정

I stare at the 정. A bird, a moon. My family name, a word to call home. A shape so dignified I can’t believe it’s a part of me.

Now try the rest, she smiles proudly. The raven is usually a dentist but today she is a teacher. She hasn’t painted in years but obviously she still has talent, she ought to consider painting more often, really, and she feels sorry for adoptees, no child should grow up without their culture, without their mother, and she is a good christian, and a good Korean, and look at how good this is going.

My back hurts from leaning over the toddler table. I sit up for a moment, readjust my enormous legs. The brush, too, I point upward, will it to grow up. I study the tween’s marker example and I write again.

*

The least of me. The stick figure of me. My lines are blobs, thick and inky. Bulbous where it should be straight, straight where it should be curved. Jagged almost, like my name got nervous the more it emerged. My name looks like a little kid painted them, which is what the raven tween is saying as she giggles behind her claw. She shows her friend, another Korean tween who was forced to be here with her parents and who thought the other classroom (drumming) was boring. The raven says something in Korean to them both but not before she also chuckles at my painting, which she calls cute.

The other adoptees say nothing; they are concentrating on their own paintings. We are adults who want to do adult things, like sit on a preschool chair on a saturday and write our own name on a piece of paper and be loved. We are together and we are alone, cartoon children of ourselves, one to a page. I join the laughter and cast my name aside.

I place another wing on the table and I dip my brush into the ink.

Again and again I try to draw the bird I came from