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I never didn't know I was adopted. I may have been a little kid, but I knew what was up. My parents kept my Asian hair long, with bangs, you know, like an authentic China Doll to play with. I still can't extirpate the need for that hairstyle today. It's like, the right way to be Asian.

My parents love me a lot and I love them. Everyone's always said to me, "You're parents must have so much love", in reference to the adoption. They adopted two of us, we're from South Korea. What an excess of love. It gets a little suffocating.

I am, in fact, very grateful. But you can never be grateful enough.

This is my sob story. I was found abandoned somewhere on the streets of Seoul. There was a festering cigarette burn on my face and already my brain was shaping up to be an odd place indeed. Three months later, I was on a plane towards JFK, an unescorted baby, how often do you see that?

We have pictures of the flight attendants handing me to my parents and everyone looks so overjoyed because I was such a bundle of joy. I imagine the look in their eyes when they had to bring me to the pediatrician over and over, him trying to fix my cigarette burn and everybody full of pity. There was something wrong with my eye, too, I came complete with conjunctivitis and that birthed more pity. It taught me to be pitiful, I guess.

Can I make a list of people I owe my life too? Welcome Home Adoption Agency, Mom, Dad, Grandma and Grandpa. My dad's first wife, for dying of cancer--while she was sick, my dad got a vasectomy. America. Family values. Altruism. This was 1976. Two years later she had passed on, my dad had met my mother and they were having baby fever. Biological clocks ticking and all, my parents were pretty old. Adopting South Korean babies must have been a cinch. I arrived in America on Halloween of 1978.

My parents met three other adoptive families through the Welcome Home Adoption Agency, friends they would reconnect with when, in 1997, all three of us Korean American Adoptees ended up in mental hospitals. A borderline personality, a bipolar, and me, the schizoaffective. Coincidence? I really don't know. I really don't know.

On Halloween of 1980, the 2 year anniversary of my arrival from Korea, my mom bought me a kid-sized cheongsam and dressed me up as "an Oriental girl". Um. I was already an "Oriental" girl. I still am, I personally prefer the politically correct moniker "Asian American" but you know what they're really thinking. I grew up in an Irish Catholic town--to this day, I'm still not sure if I'm an alien.

My sister (also adopted from Korea, mind you) used to have tantrums and yell "I wish I was American! I wish I was American!" I'd get angry with her, angry with myself, angry at systemic oppressions I wouldn't understand until I left my hometown. "Shut up!" I'd yell. "You're not!" I'd screech. I wasn't audacious enough to say, like she was in her little kid way, that yes, life was easier for white people. I was burdened--I didn't want to be ungrateful.

I never said, "I wish I was white," but I just turned 24 and I'm obsessed with expensive eye creams. I'll buy a fifty dollar bottle of eye cream over a week's groceries any day...it took me a long time to settle into these slant eyes, and I'm not willing to let them go so easily now. I still want to be the right kind of Asian. Sometimes it hurts so much, sometimes I get hold of myself, remind myself of radical multicultural theory and put the jar in the cupboard. For awhile.

I'm writing this because, for all my life, I've really. really. believed I was an alien. It's not just "stranger-in-a-strange-land", although that's most of it. It's my uncertain origins, the way I always got cast as the witch in playground games because I was the dark one. It's the way I was, yeah, so ungrateful for feeling out of place, the way I could never make myself thank them enough for what? Saving my life by bringing me into a system where the odds would always be stacked against me? By bringing me to a land where all my acheivements would be brushed aside as the products of affirmative action? By bringing me into a land that equates "The Orient" with dark, wet, mystical sex--I do, in my alien way, make the perfect Other. I knew I was evil, and I saw my evil reflected in everybody's eyes. The dark child among the light. I read my difference as alien. I mean, really? What other context could I put it in, when I didn't understand imperialist race dynamics and didn't see anyone else around that looked like me?

To hide my alien-ness, I made myself the perfect Asian American. I say please and thank you, I was a math nerd and I've never changed my hairstyle. I played classical piano. I assimilated every stereotype there was, just out of gratitude for my salvation. You saved me, white America. I can at least make myself easier for you to deal with.

I just turned 24. My hair flows like silk down my back, glossy blue black, with the same China girl bangs I've worn since toddlerhood. I'm trying to teach myself I'm not from outer space, but I don't know. I don't see much proof, not when I try to fit myself into mainstream white culture, not when I try to wangle into radical leftist white culture. I live in Olympia, WA, and there are a lot of Korean people here, confined by a racist societal structure to their stereotypical convenience stores and fast food teriyaki joints. They ask me, "Do you speak it?" and when I say no, they laugh and laugh. The Korean people around here think that's the funniest thing ever.

I guess it is pretty funny. But I have a twisted sense of humor.

I worked at a sushi bar once, and spent my entire shift running from table to table making sure the white patrons didn't shove the whole serving of wasabi in their mouths, not knowing what it was; or else, I'd tell them, "Take it easy on the sake. It's going to kick in a little harder than you expect". They were always disappointed that I didn't have an accent, couldn't teach them phrases--all I knew were the Japanese words that described the food, katsu don, nigiri, stuff like that. I single handedly ruined their whole dining experience. I wasn't authentic enough--again, how rude of me to be so ungrateful.

Now? Now I'm completely nuts and my therapist says my main issue is guilt. Now, my mental illnesses have given me weeks on end in which I really believed I was from outer space, and is it a surprise that my misfiring neurons filtered faulty brain chemistry through the concept of alien?

Try to tell me I'm human. Really. Try.

Batty can be contacted at bizarreassociate@aol.com.