My immigration story
“I lost you for 30 minutes. I thought I was going to lose my mind.”
I was born in Seoul, at the end of 1973. My father, having just completed medical school, thought that the United States of America was a better place to raise a family than Korea. His older sister was already Stateside (also a medical doctor), and Korea was still many years from becoming the economic powerhouse that it is today. He went ahead alone, leaving my mother and me, his one year old son, to join him once he was settled in our new home. Eventually, it was time for us to join him in New York City.
“You were 18 months old.”
There were no direct flights between Seoul and New York City in 1975, so my 28 year old mother, an elementary school science teacher before motherhood and her toddler deplaned to fill out the necessary forms and have the passport held up next to our faces.
“You were a chubby baby.”
Filling out forms means you need your hands so she set me down in my bare feet. “잠깐만,” (just a minute) she said, and she quickly wrote our names, checked the right boxes, and put down our address in the U.S.
“And then you were gone.”
She looked behind her, she crouched down and searched among the legs of everyone in line, she strained her neck to look around that area of the airport terminal. Nothing. Panic set in.
“I didn’t speak any english.”
Her next thought was that we were supposed to get back on the plane and fly onward to LaGuardia. This was all part of a process that she had meticulously planned out, getting from Seoul to New York, and she hadn’t counted on a missing little boy. Where did he go? Where would she find him? How would she find him? What if we miss our flight? But where is he?
“There was this Korean woman who was married to a G.I.”
A sympathetic bilingual woman helped her search for me, asking everyone they could if they had seen a little boy. It made no sense though. How far could a toddler get in such a short amount of time? Could it be that someone took him? Where could…
“This person made a hand gesture like they were measuring the height of a tiny person.”
They nodded and followed the person down the terminal hall, around the corner and into an airport restaurant, and there he was. There I was. Eating, off of the plates left behind by other diners. My mother realized what had happened. I got sick on the plane (I’ve suffered from motion sickness my whole life) and must have been starving. In tears, she scooped me up in her arms. I wasn’t interested though. I wasn’t finished eating.
“I lost you for 30 minutes. I thought I was going to lose my mind.”
This story has been in my family my whole life, along with other stories of my parents’ life in Korea, in New York, during hot summers, and snowy winters. I always thought it was a cute story and it lay in my memory as the origin story of my gluttony. Earlier today, I was talking to someone on the phone about the terrible news of children being separated from their parents at the U.S. border by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and I stated proudly that I am, myself, an immigrant. In fact, I was a small child when we immigrated.
“Actually, and it’s a funny story, I was separated from my mother for thirty minutes when we were on our layover in Seattle…”
Those words hit me square in the middle of my chest. My mother has always told that story with a laugh, but the state of mind she recalls was overwhelming terror, panic, and despondence. And that was thirty minutes. Only thirty minutes. And I thought about all of those parents, hundreds of parents, thousands of parents, separated from their children. For days, weeks, months.
It is evil.
