Charles P. Pollak, “Q&A Baby Dreams,” an interview by C. Claiborne Ray, New York Times website, published November 22, 2005, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE0D81F3EF931A15752ClA9639C8B63

We cannot find our original family is unknown to us. No access to stories about our fetal life, or to the body of the mother who was the creator, protector, and nurturer of that our life. We were with her Her until we were about ___________________. We were breast-fed and bonded.

Did you know that fetuses have a developed sense of smell? And, as soon as three days after birth, newborns are able to recognize their own mother’s amniotic fluid. The indelibility of the scent of maternal milk follows soon after—at two weeks old, a baby can distinguish her mother’s breast milk from that of another. Though we humans often give less attention to our sense of smell than we do to other senses (sight, sound, touch), for babies—and perhaps all of us at all stages of our lives—it is primary. For at least the first two months of life, a baby prefers the unmistakable scent of her own mother to any other odor.

We were born in or around May of 19___. Unknown are our birth date or our name. Slipperiness of a shared time. One is an object, easily laundered and transferred. Relocated and reassigned. Physically safe, perhaps, and fed and sheltered, but without one’s first materials and self and home: one’s mother, one’s ur-body.

A few months after our birth, on August 15, 1974, Park Chung-hee, the military dictator of South Korea, who had declared himself “president for life,” was the target of an assassination attempt by Mun Se-gwang. This violent incident resulted in the death-by-gunfire of Park’s wife, Yuk Young-soo, and a high school student who was part of a choir performing at the ceremony.

Our country, a people with a continuous history of over five thousand years, has been left divided since the end of the Korean War, that peninsula-wide trauma that resulted in tens of thousands of children being made available for adoption to the West, first to the U.S. The profound disruption of the end of Japan’s colonial occupation, the brutal civil war, and the aftermath orchestrated by the U.S. resulted in unprecedented political and social change.

Perhaps our father and mother were people from the north, refugees to the south, ultimately trapped below the thirty-eighth parallel. Perhaps they were married but we were the fourth child, one too many. Perhaps our mother was raped by a taxi driver. Perhaps our parents were involved in an extramarital affair and could not be together. Perhaps our father died, or moved away.