A Debt of Gratitude

An essay for Tamara Abu Dayer

A photo of two boba drinks

We are publishing the following essay during National Adoption Awareness Month (NAAM) and in the lead-up to National Adoption Day on November 23, 2024. Historically, both have been celebrations of adoption centering adoptive parents and those in the adoption industry, overlooking first families and adoptees. To read more critical perspectives on adoption written by adoptees themselves, visit the BIPOC Adoptees website.

 

It was the bubble tea shop that got me—the photos of a bright café with floor-to-ceiling windows covered in fairy lights, neon signs, and a wall mural with playful images of pizza and ice cream, rocket ships and planets.

Before October 7, the only images I had seen of the Gaza Strip were of the aftermath of bombs and massacres—the matte hues of rubble, debris, and bloodshed. So when I first came across Tamara Abu Dayer’s Instagram, I spent a lot of time immersed in the vibrant images of her life before the genocide: days at the beach, birthday parties, sunset drives along the sea, the boba shop. Two of my teenage children work at a boba shop in Portland, but it's nowhere near as nice as this one in Gaza.

Tamara’s GoFundMe campaign was posted in her profile. I read her story and donated. It crossed my mind to fundraise for her. Here was this twenty-five-year-old woman, trying to help her family survive in Gaza; and there I was, a middle-class American in my warm bed, with my full belly, in my cozy home. I had seen friends steward GoFundMe campaigns for families in Gaza. When Tamara messaged me to thank me, she was gracious and warm—a very real person connected to the images I had been looking at.

Over the next week, I could not shake the thought of fundraising for her. But I was scared. What did I know about fundraising? I was afraid to fail, to let her down. And to be honest, what I feared the most was: What if I grew to like her? What if we became friends? How would I endure the grief of watching her suffer? What if I grew to love her, and then I lost her?

 

 

As a Korean adoptee, I am programmed to expect loss. In South Korea, when I was four months old, I lost my entire family: my mother, from whom I had been breastfeeding, my father, and my grandparents. Maybe aunts and uncles and cousins. Maybe siblings. One day, I woke up, and they were all gone. Everyone. Everything.

My adoptive mom used to brag about what a smart baby I was. “You could speak at six months old,” she would boast with glee. “When you arrived, you could already say 'Eomma'!” Eomma is Korean for mom. “It’s no wonder you love books and writing,” she’d say. It wasn’t until I became a mother myself that I understood this was not a point of pride but evidence of tragedy. How had I never realized that I had been calling out for my Korean mother?

I am nearing my fiftieth year of life. It took me decades to learn about my own history as a Korean adoptee, that my life emerged from the ruins of Japanese imperialist and colonialist brutality. I hadn’t learned this history in school, nor did I have a Korean family to pass down stories of hardship and resilience, of what my ancestors endured in order for me to be here, of my own immigration story. 

I hadn’t known that Japan had colonized Korea for over a generation, nor had I known this was part of a larger US imperial project to attain power in Asia. The Taft-Katsura Agreement allowed Japan to annex Korea in exchange for their compliance with the United States’ occupation of the Philippines. From 1910 until the end of WWII, Japan tried to eliminate my people through violence and cultural genocide. They dismantled the Korean army, instituted a colonial government, forbade the Korean language, made Koreans take on Japanese names and learn Japanese history while destroying historical documents and artifacts, erasing archival memory and evidence of our existence. They conscripted Koreans to manual and slave labor. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese settlers moved to Korea and took over Korean homes, farms, businesses, institutions, and land. In the process, they destroyed the natural landscape and planted non-native species, trying to transform the land into a Japanese likeness.

 

 

Tamara and I have messaged every day since mid-May. Every morning, the very first thing I do is reach for my phone and check for a message from her. Every morning, when she tells me, “Good morning, my beautiful love,” I soften with relief because I know she is alive. Every night, I conclude my day similarly. “Good night, my Habibi,” I write. My beloved in Arabic. “I love you endlessly.”

It is not easy for Tamara to be online. The Internet is unstable. There are frequent outages. Now, it cuts off at 10:00 p.m. like a curfew. Some days, it takes three to four hours for her to post a short video. Some days, videos won’t load at all, and she is forced to give up. But Tamara is steadfast and good-humored. “I want to throw my phone,” she tells me, with laughing and crying emojis. Sometimes, if she stands on a chair and holds her phone in the air, it seems to help. Other times, WiFi works better if she places her hand on the wall of the small asbestos shack where she shelters with fifteen other people. She laughs at herself. “I’m the router,” she says, with more laughing emojis.

Tamara has become one of my best friends. When I scroll through my messages, they’re filled with as many laughing emojis as crying emojis. We often make each other laugh out loud. We like to message about the future. It’s a respite to live in imagination for a while. I tell her when she is free, I will buy her the fastest Internet available, and she’ll be able to post all the videos and stream all the movies she wants. “And tissues,” she once joked, with an emoji blowing its nose. The environmental contamination, combined with famine and stress, had made her very sick with sinus issues.

 

 

On December 1, 2023, Israel bombed Tamara’s family home in Jabalia, a city in North Gaza that was one of the first to be bombed. Then her sister’s home was bombed, and then her other sister’s home. They fled with their children, leaving everything behind them in ash and rubble. While her father and youngest brothers were forced to stay in North Gaza, Tamara, her mother, sisters, and the children were displaced to central Gaza. Although they are only ten miles apart as the crow flies, the family has been separated for over a year. The roads are either blocked or destroyed and much too dangerous to travel.

A recent photo going around the Internet shows a haunting scene from Jabalia: Very thin men of all ages, rounded up in a large group, stripped down to their underwear, and huddled in the dirt. On the photo, Tamara draws an arrow to an elderly man in the front row. He’s one of her neighbors.

Tamara has told me things I’ve only imagined from dystopian sci-fi films. High-tech quadcopters patrolling her camp, their spidery metal legs dangling, zipping between tents like giant insects. They pause, hover, surveil, and often shoot. The unrelenting roar of planes circling overhead, night and day, with no end. Shrapnel in the yard from the previous night’s bombing. The sounds of screaming from neighbors being engulfed in flames. The merciless phone calls, ordering them to evacuate. But where can they go? Into the sea?

I live in Portland. The distance of the Gaza Strip is about twenty-five miles long, roughly the distance between St. Johns and Corbett. Like many other Palestinians, Tamara has never been allowed to leave the concrete walls, razor wire, and metal bars that enclose the Gaza Strip.

 

 

It is easy for me to empathize with Palestinians. When I see images of Gaza, they mirror images I’ve seen of the Japanese occupation and the massacres of the Korean War: bodies wrapped in shrouds, mass graves, cities flattened to rubble. I’ve studied photos of thousands of displaced Koreans, fleeing on foot, carrying everything they can to a place of safety they’re not sure they’ll find.

I don’t know much about my Korean mother, but I know she was born in 1956 into post–Korean War poverty, a time when many Koreans lived in crowded tent cities made of leftover military tents and huts made from flattened tin cans. It was difficult to impossible for some Koreans to travel between cities. By car, it could take three hours to get from Seoul to Incheon, just twenty-five miles, because of immense potholes in the war-torn roads. Based on simple math, I know that my halmoni, my mother’s mother, must have been born in the middle of the Japanese occupation. Sometimes, I wonder what she saw. Sometimes, I wonder if she is still alive. Sometimes I imagine that she held me when I was born, or that she still thinks about me.

One purpose of imagination is to empathize with others, to bridge the gap between our own experiences and theirs, to step into someone else’s world—their emotions, joys, and struggles. It is an art to create a mental picture of another life, to push past the limits of our myopic realities and dissolve the boundaries of culture and distance to conjure compassion.

Sometimes I imagine a reversal of Korean adoption, where a White American child is adopted into Korean society. I see a blond-haired, blue-eyed, light-skinned daughter in the composition of a family photo. She looks blankly at the camera, her Korean mother’s hand on her shoulder, her face an aberration among the Korean bodies. She eats alone at lunchtime while the kids at another table laugh and use their pointer fingers to push the sides of their eyes into circles. At home, her parents make macaroni and cheese for dinner once a month, so she can connect to her culture. They are so proud of this effort. In public, strangers stare at her. They ask her where she’s from and use her as an opportunity to reminisce about the one time they went to New York, or California, or Canada. Or Germany or France or England. Others tell her how much they want to travel to America.

And yet everyone tells her, We don’t see race. You are the same. As a teenager, she dyes her hair black and straightens it. She does everything she can to prove she is Korean, to prove she belongs. When she wonders who her biological parents are or questions the legitimacy of the adoption system, she immediately shoves her feelings down, down, down and replaces them with gratitude for being saved from a life of American poverty. It’s the story she’s always been told. You would’ve been homeless on the dirty streets of America. You wouldn’t be so well-educated. Be grateful, always grateful.

The failure to empathize is a failure of imagination. Sometimes, this is how I empathize with myself.

 

 

When I started fundraising for Tamara, we were building funds to get her family to Egypt. But since then, the borders have closed and everything has gotten exponentially worse: more bombing, more bloodshed, more child-deaths, more family lines entirely eliminated. Now, we fundraise for her basic survival. Rent has doubled. Water is less available, and the cost of it has increased, even though it is not clean. To charge phones, they must travel to an expensive charging station. Israel has slowed humanitarian aid to a drip. The last I heard, diapers cost eighty dollars. A carton of eggs, if available, is around forty dollars. In some areas, there is only canned food. In North Gaza, there is nothing.

Every day, Tamara uses her limited phone battery and WiFi to express endless gratitude to her Instagram community. Over and over, she writes unique, individualized thank you notes in the comments of posts, reposts, and stories and in her direct messages—in English, her second language. Witnessing this feels painful. I understand the confusion of being authentically grateful for something while simultaneously knowing there are consequences for seeming ungrateful.

 

 

When I was two months old, my eomma relinquished me to a multinational adoption corporation that promised a better life than the one she could give me. They placed me in a foster home until I was six months old, when I was exported to Michigan to be raised by a White family who loved me very much but were woefully unprepared to raise a Korean child. I grew up as one of the only children of color in a place where my White best friend would point at my face, laugh, and ask: “Why is it so big? Moon face! It’s like the moon!” Sometimes, she’d call me n-word knees, referring to my darker skin. The boy who sat in front of me in algebra would harass me all semester, turning around to whisper, “We killed gooks like you in the war.” It took me weeks to get the courage to ask my parents what gook meant. I had no one with whom I could share my feelings, and yet I was conditioned to be thankful. It could be worse, I trained myself to think. At least I was alive, had a family, wasn’t aborted, wasn’t living on the streets of Korea. You’re lucky to be in America, they said. Thank you, I said.

Years later, my ex-husband nicknamed me Crazy Lady as a term of endearment. He sang it to me around the house as an act of affection. He often told me how lucky I was to have him because no one else would want me. For over a decade, I tiptoed on eggshells around him because I didn’t want to deal with the blowback of challenging him. I excused offense after offense until I couldn’t take it anymore and exploded in self-protective rage. “See,” he said calmly. “See how crazy you are.” And I apologized because I believed he was right. I thought I was lucky to have him. Thank you, I said endlessly.

The trope of the ungrateful adoptee is as insidious as it is powerful. Now, I’m in a place in my life where I’ve done a lot of healing. I belong to a community of adopted people who have woken up to our history and understand our experiences as inherently political. When we speak out, we are invariably attacked with accusations of ingratitude. We hear these things so frequently that they’re cliché. You ungrateful brat, they say. I hope your parents kept the receipt, they say. After everything they did for you, they say. You should’ve been aborted. You should’ve never been born. No wonder your parents didn’t want you. Die.

 

 

Society abhors an ingrate. According to scholars Navarro and Tudge, ingratitude is viewed as a “heinous moral vice.” They cite a study of over 800 descriptive traits, in which ungrateful was rated as one of the most negative. There is a reason thank you is one of the first things we teach our children.

“Don’t be sad, Habibi,” Tamara often tells me. “I am fine.” Fine means she has all of her limbs. Fine means all of her immediate family members are alive. Fine means she eats once a day. Fine means she has her faith. Fine means she is grateful for what she has.

Sarah Shaoul, creator and host of the podcast Grief, Gratitude, and Greatness, says “people who grieve are often put in a position where they must reassure those around them that they are and/or will be fine. They often have to console others when they should be embracing their own grief. In this way, many feel forced into suspending their own grief and their own sense of self by exhibiting gratitude to those who expect it of them.”

Our last online auction fundraiser was an immense success. It was nearly two weeks of excitement. First, there was the build-up: previews of all the items, all the various communications, and literally hundreds of people sharing and reposting and leaving messages of encouragement. Then there was the auction itself. Every day, the auction brought in thousands of dollars in addition to endless supportive messages. Every day, Tamara thanked people, over and over, in every way she could. I did too. We meant it from the bottom of our hearts. And also, when the auction was over, Tamara and I felt deflated and sad. “I am grateful to everyone,” she told me. “But it is exhausting to depend on people for survival and thank them all the time. It is really a mixture of joy and sadness.”

As an adoptee, I understand. It can be profoundly difficult to feel deeply and sincerely grateful for a kindness born from violent and devastating circumstances. The gratitude is real, but it’s tangled with the pain that made it necessary. And for those of us with less power, the weight of gratitude is a reminder of our vulnerability and of imbalances of power. In a world shaped by systems of charity and pity, to express gratitude can feel like laying bare our vulnerability while quietly affirming another’s power over us.

“I've worn you out,” Tamara told me after the auction, worried and sad. “I'm really sorry, and I love you. You are a shining star in our lives. And we shouldn't all depend on you as if we became an obligation on you. You did everything you could and put in an invaluable effort. I feel like crying because I'm causing you stress. I know you will say that we are not a burden, but my heart is filled with sadness for our situation. I do not want to be a person who depends on others. I want to study and work, and that is also true for my family. But this occupation has made us live this difficult life.”

 

 

Buddhist mindfulness teacher Oren Jay Sofer writes, “Gratitude and grief may seem to be in tension with one another, but gratitude and loss are inseparable. Awareness of what is present calls forth what is absent.” And I think the reverse is also true: Awareness of what is absent calls forth what is present.

By now, it’s been a half a year of donation drives, online events, and auctions. There is an international team of donors who contribute every single month to provide steady support to Tamara and her family. Many of us have become dear friends. We call ourselves Team Tamara, and we message each other regularly: How are you? What do you need? Are you resting? I am scared. Have you heard from Tamara? I love Tamara. I love you.

And I am thankful.

When I am scared, I rely on my imagination and think of Team Tamara, all the individuals who have formed a community of love around her. I imagine Tamara dipping her toes in the sea with Audrey and learning Buddhist psychology from Ekta. She will learn about art and design from Lisa and will read Palestinian poetry to Melissa. She and Anna will hold each other tightly in the warmest embrace, and Jenn will teach her new ways to dance. She and Paige will chase butterflies and bask in the feeling of freedom. There are so many of us, too many to name.

And Tamara and me? I imagine us in a boba shop, and we are laughing so hard that everyone looks at us, which makes us laugh even harder. I imagine her guiding me through her city, showing me where she works, her favorite market, the best restaurants and her favorite foods.

I imagine generations. She will meet my children. I will tell her the story about the moment I finally met my eomma and my halmoni. We will sit with her children and tell them stories about the ways we learned to survive and how we taught each other about love.

 

Written with permission and in partnership with Tamara Abu Dayer. You can follow Tamara on Instagram @tamara_abu_dayer.

Source: Jessica L. Navarro, Jonathan R.H. Tudge; "What Is Gratitude? Ingratitude Provides the Answer," Human Development 64, no. 2 (2020): 83–96, https://doi.org/10.1159/000511185

Tags

Global and Local, Violence, Grief, Kinship, Imagination, Gratitude, Empathy, Adoption

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