KOREAN FOLKLORE CORNER - NOV. 2024

Korean Folklore Corner

By Joshua Kim

This month we celebrate you, the Korean adoptees. You who have been through so much, so much to find your homes amidst challenges that others couldn’t imagine. Your stories this month were inspirational, emotional, truthful and brave. I feel blessed to hear and read them.

In this vein of “home”, I picked a poem to share this month instead of a folktale. It comes from Tiana Nobile. Tiana is an award-winning poet and writer. She lives in New Orleans and is also a Korean adoptee. Her works explore the hardship and confusion of her ancestry and family, but I picked the following work because of the hope she also writes of.

In WHY I STAY she writes of New Orleans, her home. But it struck me what home can mean. It can be a place, it can be your family, it can be your friends, it can be the KCCNYC, it can be that corner of your couch you curl up in to feel safe. 

No matter what, we all have our own bayou, our own river in our lives. And Korean adoptees: the KCCNYC will always be a place where you can stay.

The Wind Show Is Over Now, 2024, Acrylic gouache, paint marker and colored pencil on paper on panel, 24 x 18" by Siobhan Mcbride, KCCNYC Adoptee Student

TIANA NOBILE Why I Stay

In spite of the summers with heat so thick you could cut it with a knife.

I stay even though sometimes it feels like everything is out to get you.

Even though I let the night swallow me whole. Even though I got grass stuck in my spokes.

Because I’ve never had a good enough answer for where I’ve been, where I’m going.

Because belonging is subjective, and I will find my way out of the mud.

I stay for the bayou. I stay for the river.

I stay because Mardi Gras.

Because glitter in your bed, in your beard, for weeks.

Because bicycling through the neighborhood following a trail of red feathers.

Because strutting in the streets with a six-pack and a flask and all the time in the world.

I stay because I finally had the courage to escape the trimly cut lawns of my childhood.

I stay for the smell of jasmine on Gayoso Street at midnight.

I stay in the face of our crumbling coast.

In the face of disposability.

I stay despite the potholes and the boil water advisories and the streets that fill like a fishbowl after a light rain.

Despite the web of cat’s claw ever-creeping up the side of the house.

I stay because the joy on my niece’s face as she fills her cupped palm with pebbles in my backyard.

Because the joy on my husband’s face when the line on his fishing pole goes taut.

I stay because joy. Because we already hung the tire swing. Because when you build a home, you stay.