In honor of transracial adopted people whose voices are not properly heard. For those who lived silenced and took their lives due to the complexities of race, gratitude, and identity. Your legacy remains. Your deaths were not in vain. — Who is Colin Kaepernick? Colin Kaepernick is a person who beat the odds. It is not his football career that causes me to say this. It is merely him being alive and thriving.

A lifetime that never was now lives in me. I never had a Korean Umma make comfort food for me. She never came to my side to make me Tteokbokki. It didn’t come to me. Not with extra rice cakes. Not with melted cheese. When I was 20 something I had it and later in my early 30s I…

Artwork by Cristina Rago, “Liberated” This is the body that came to America and struggled in a lily white world. This is the body that contains the soul which carries residual trauma of her birth mother. This is the body that feels language in her bones as memory and pain…

White Woman Privileges in Interracial Friendship Whenever I pick up my son at school, his friend’s mom and I make it a point to find one another. We’re not just friends because our kids go to school together. We have been good friends for years, and were even pregnant together…

A letter to my adoptive parents Dear Mom and Dad, I’ve worked with people wanting to become United States citizens for a decent amount of time now. While there is a diversity in everyone’s cases, I’ve also come across a lot of sad adoption stories. …

Thank you for this great opportunity, Korean American Story. Thank you KoreanAmericanStory.org. I woke up this morning to some messages on my phone that my story went up. I’m very thankful for this great organization. Our stories live, and through sharing, we can be healed a little more. It’s been…

An Ode to the Streets. “When I first met you, I thought you belonged to the Streets.” What difference would it make? What does that mean? Where are we now? Who is where? Where are we going? What does respect mean to you? I digress. And in the End, I…

I’ve been struggling to maintain a schedule these days. It’s been busy around here, to say the least. I’ve watched more than I’ve written on Medium lately. I’ve watched more than I’ve read fellow writers and artists on Medium lately. But I have seen the number of readers on this…

Second thoughts about professionalizing (colonizing?) myself Ten years ago I was a young professional athlete making a decent salary and living with excellent credit. Athetes under contract for non mainstream sports or minor leagues don’t make the kind of money that NFL or NBA (called up) athletes make, but if…