Russian Folk Tahs, trans. H. C. Stevens (London: Hamlyn, 1967).

To beg > borrow > burn.

A coup d’état of this, abandonment, miniature

Immigration as it comes on and on like black Night on its black horse. These pages our glade and our harness.

5. Iksop Lee and S. Robert Ramsey, The Korean Language (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000), 224.

6. Hildi Kang, Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2005).

8. Russian Folk Tahs, trans. H. C. Stevens (London: Hamlyn, 1967).

Orphan: The Plural Form

Orphan: The Plural Form

The women laughed and wept; the crowd stamped their feet enthusiastically, for at that moment Quasimodo was really beautiful. He was handsome—this orphan, this foundling, this outcast.

—Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Orphan. Conjuring, for some, images of dirty, ill-clothed children from the nineteenth century. Dickens. It is an old-fashioned word. Technically most Korean adoptees are not orphans—in most cases we did not become “available for adoption” due to parental death.

In Microsoft Word, “adoptees” is underlined in little red Vs that look like the stitching that ran across some of our dresses when we were younger. Red, forbidden, dangerous, bloody.

Word does not recognize the plural form of adoptee.

If you control-click on adoptees, the first word in the drop-down list is Help. Then comes adoptee, adopters, adopted, adopter. For some reason, Add is grayed out in our list and we cannot add adoptees to our dictionary. We can, however, Ignore All. Or AutoCorrect or click on Spelling . . . both of which bring us to the aforementioned list. When we typed refugees, amputees, tutees. . . they all remained unlined.

A poor mother who was from a poor country.

“Third World.”

We were told that the poverty was so severe when we were born that the government made it legal to abandon one’s child to an institution such as a hospital, police station, or social agency.

The story of our country’s struggles and our mothers’ misfortunes began and ended there for some of us: dusty rings around the planet-word orphan.

Orphan is a gorgeous word. Sublime. The first syllable or reminds me of gold ore, or simply the word or, which means the possibility of alternatives, the certainty that another choice is to follow the little word or. English has so many of these tiny words that mean so much—and, the, an, if, so . . .

The word orphan probably comes from the Latin orbus, which means bereaved. We love how when you want to indicate the word itself you italicize it. The word gets dressed up, leans into the wind, gets seemingly darker, moves forward, speeds itself to mean The Word and not the word.

When you type in the word adoptee into the Online Etymology Dictionary search, you get this: “No matching terms found.” But of course it’s from adoption, L. adoptare, “to choose for oneself.” Adoptee then implies that one has been chosen for someone else’s self.