#421: Searching For Home
Three great articles on finding the places and people that feel familiar
Happy Thanksgiving, loyal readers, and welcome, new subscribers. I’m happy you’re here and grateful that you’ve allowed me a weekly spot in your inbox.
This week’s articles focus on the theme of searching for home. In typical Article Club fashion, I’ve selected a few outstanding articles that explore a range of perspectives from a variety of publications. (For instance: Have you heard of The Delacorte Review or Rest of World?) I hope at least one piece resonates with you.
You’ll meet a queer Black woman who travels the globe to find a place she feels she belongs. You’ll meet a straight white man who has given up on dating and prefers spending time with his partner, a straight Asian man. And you’ll meet two Korean American adoptees who always thought they were alone until they found each other on Facebook. Please enjoy!
⭐️ Coming up at Article Club
HHH #21, Nov. 30. HHH is a great way to hang out with fellow kind and thoughtful readers in person. We’ll be at Room 389 in Oakland beginning at 5:30 pm. You can get your free ticket here.
This month’s discussion, Dec. 3. This month, we’ll be diving into “The Fog,” by Larissa MacFarquhar. It might be one of my favorite articles of the year. There are a few slots left. You can sign up for free here.
1️⃣ A Black Woman’s Search For Her Place in White, White Vermont
As a queer Black woman, Sheena Daree Romero has never felt at home. After growing up in suburban Ohio, where white classmates tolerated her and white neighbors ignored her, Ms. Romero wanted to escape, very far away. She chose Germany, where she spent a year as an exchange student. It was better than the United States, but certainly no dream. Several moves in her twenties brought her around the world — Japan, Spain, Australia, Norway, Finland, England, Portugal, Chicago, Albuquerque, New York, Tajikistan, and ultimately Vermont — on a quest to belong and feel safe. This personal essay tells the story of Ms. Romero’s time in Vermont, where she vows to spend 1,000 days. Her first snowstorm is disconcerting. She writes:
I glared out of the window, amazed, but mostly frustrated, that a place that was already so white in so many ways, could become even whiter. But if I could survive the tundra, I thought, I could survive anything.
Yearning to tough it out, wanting desperately to call a place home, Ms. Romero makes it halfway to her goal. Then she gets hit crossing the street, in a crosswalk, by a truck whose driver who doesn’t see her.
By Sheena Daree Romero • The Delacorte Review • 30 min
2️⃣ Family Membership
This week I met up with a friend I’ve known since preschool. On my drive home, I got to thinking about how rare and special this is. After all, he’s not my sibling, but he might as well be. Then I read this endearing piece about Christopher and Tan, whose friendship is so tight that fellow shoppers at Costco assume they’re married. Christopher used to worry how they came across. Now he lets people assume what they want. He writes:
Tan is not the partner I ever pictured myself spending so much of my life with (and he would say the same). But we do not choose the people who end up mattering the most to us. In this life, if we’re very lucky we get two families: There is the family we’re born into. And then there is the family we find.
As Kathryn Schulz reminded us last year in this interview, let’s not take for granted the loved ones we’ve found in our lives. After all, “it is finding that is astonishing,” she writes.
By Christopher Solomon • Esquire • 9 mins
3️⃣ Korean adoptees felt isolated and alone for decades. Then Facebook brought them together.
Since 1953, more than 200,000 Korean children have been adopted abroad. More than two-thirds were sent to the United States. The idea was that the children were orphans (mostly not true), the American parents were saviors, and assimilation was the goal. The reality, of course, is very different. Torn from family and home, many Korean American adoptees have felt lost and out of place. This article follows two women, both 36 years old, who experienced trauma for decades before finding each other on the Korean American Adoptees group on Facebook. Discovering that they were not alone was affirming. There was “instant acceptance, a validation of their lived experiences.” But the complicated feelings persisted, especially when they decided to return to Korea to search for their birth mothers and visit the adoption agencies that gave them away.
By Ann Babe • Rest of World • 23 mins
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Body memory. At 10 months, our older girl could speak fluently in English and Spanish. At 16 months, she spoke as well as any adult, so at the park around the corner from home, she addressed a white father who was pushing his blonde, blue-eyed toddler on a swing, "How old is your daughter?" No answer. "How old is your daughter?" she asked again, just a little louder. No answer. The third time, I told her, "That man is not going to answer you, let's go home." It felt like slinking away. This was something I had, in my woeful naiveté, never expected from our biracial marriage. (I'm so white I glow in the dark; nothing in my life experience could approach this. Throughout her childhood and teens, fighting for her only ever backfired to caused her even more hurt.) It marked the beginning of a lifetime of invisible slings and arrows for this gifted child, now an adult subject to acute migraines and soul-crushing high anxiety, the best and brightest in her work-from-home job, who still hides herself away. Body memory.
No keyboard showed to answer your musing as to whether you should post a Thursday article today--(?) Why change, indeed, is my thinking. (It's a selfish answer; I woke up looking for today's presentation even before I got out of bed!)
I have indulged to read Ms. Romero's article, at least, before starting in on prepping our turkey day dinner. Today I am above all THANKFUL to have my little family living together and safe at home, even though we are immediately uncomfortable once we enter our wider, extremely white community, proudly the first home of skinheads. (There are actually many people of color living here, as quietly as they can. But there are fewer than 1.2% Black people in this third largest city in California.) One of my girls yearns to leave for anywhere in Europe, although a well-traveled African man once told us, "Racism is everywhere," as Ms. Romero confirms. Our younger daughter presents a tougher-than-you attitude that's served her well so far, although she's the most thoughtful, caring person I know. It's a shame they have to don that kind of pretense just to buy groceries, or gas. Neither, of course, can find local employment matching their several degrees/skill sets.
When we married in 1990, I had thought the country was on a better track; a few years later, skinheads driving by were screaming the n-word at him as he raked leaves in our front yard. That same year, two Black men were murdered on the city's main street. Years later, I was stopped for having the wrong tag on the BMW as we were heading home from a restaurant dinner one late afternoon, my husband in the passenger seat, the girls in the back--but the police only wanted my husband to, "GET OUT OF THE CAR!" They escalated to the threat of violence so fast, my head spun! I got out, instead, and immediately they calmed down. Their thought process was so loud, I swear I could hear it: ok, white lady, dressed well, ok ok. They made me, disabled woman with a cane, limp to the rear and bend down to examine the offending tag; apparently that satisfied as sufficient mortification for the event. (The ticket was later dismissed without any action on our part because the tag was indeed ours: I'd only mistakenly put it on the wrong vehicle, which is not an offense. They could have known that by asking the dispatcher to check, especially as I had, in fact, told them that's probably what I did.) At that point, however, we were being ticketed come hell or high water, as it was near the end of the month and they have, after all, their quota to fill.
When one daughter volunteered for GreenPeace, seeking donations in a public thoroughfare, a man came on to her with, "You're one of them hot black chicks, aren't you? (She's biracial, café au lait, so maybe he wasn't sure--?) He only quit when another volunteer asserted that she was HIS, at which point the guy apologized--not to her but to HIM, "Oh, bro, so sorry, I didn't know. Another time in public, a man pulled off her sunglasses without saying a word. She always orders groceries for delivery now, after so many white women have wordlessly pawed though her hair.
Many years ago, it was only dumb young white guys with shaved heads; now it's everybody, even people of color who are not identifiably Black themselves. And they don't shout anymore; they rarely speak. But their eyes follow, everywhere, a thing felt even when not looking back.