Where are you really from?
(In progress)

It was only the first of a series of highlights of his life. It was May of 1977. Jim Guyker, now 78, was home in Buffalo, NY, before his wife, Ruth, 76. The mail had just arrived and they were eagerly anticipating a letter containing the photographs of their first daughter who they were adopting from South Korea, a process they began in the summer of 1976. Unbeknownst to them, in just two months, they would be parents for the first time.

“Usually if it's addressed to both of us, I wait until Ruth gets home, said Jim. “But I didn't wait so I opened it up and there it was - three pictures of Amy; one with her caretaker and two others. I was ecstatic, just so thrilled. I couldn't believe it, so I put the pictures in my pocket and I walked around and I couldn't wait for Ruth to get home. It wasn't that long I don’t think. But I waited for the right moment and I said, ``Oh look.”

“Well, I fell on the floor,” said Ruth. “I didn’t fall, I just dropped to the floor because of the reality of this child.”

Jim and Ruth were at the end of the second decade of their lives, and after two years of attempting to have biological children, without success, they were feeling a sense of urgency and frustration.

“At that time being in our late twenties, early thirties, you start to feel like, oh my gosh, if we don’t have a child, we won’t be able to,” said Ruth. “Every month I’d be like, what is this? Come on now.”

Once the Guykers decided to adopt, they found solace in knowing that with their patience for nearly the same amount of time they would have had to wait had Ruth become pregnant, they would be parents.

“It was just a relief for us to think that we were going to adopt and have a child,” said Ruth. “We just felt that that’s what we were meant to do. We were meant to adopt.”

July 29, 1977, was a humid evening in the low 70s. The skies were mostly cloudy and an airplane carrying twelve babies from South Korea, accompanied by paid caretakers was bound for John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, NY where the infants’ expectant adoptive parents were waiting.

“I remember waiting and the caregivers were bringing the babies and we were kind of watching and waiting and seeing if we could recognize you (Amy) and we did,” said Ruth. “We did recognize you from your picture.”

Jim’s first daughter had arrived, and so had the second highlight of his life as he took Amy in his arms. He was a father. However, Amy’s temperament towards Jim was initially aloof and she seemed only to be interested in Ruth.

“We both wanted to hold her but she looked at me and she just stared, probably because she was used to women so she only went to Ruth,” said Jim. “She wouldn't have anything to do with me. I tried to pat her, touch her, even in the hotel room she just sort of looked at me askance, didn't want anything to do with me.”

As they went to bed, Jim was hurt, still unable to hold his new daughter. A few hours later he was awoken by the sounds of the cries of Amy, who needed to be changed. Not wanting to wake Ruth, Jim rose to perform his first duty as a new father. The third highlight of his life was waiting for him, and so was his daughter.

“So I decided, well I don't want to wake Ruth up, so I said, I'm going to just try it. So I got up, got the diapers, and there was a little light that I turned on,” said Jim. “I picked her up, she looked at me. I picked her up, I didn't make any gestures or anything and I put her down and I was cleaning her and she was watching me and watching me, and I started cleaning her off and cleaning her off and I looked at her and there was a big smile on her face. I took her diaper up and I picked her up and she held me. That's the third.”

Buffalo, NY, the state’s second-largest city with a population of a little over 250,000, is one of America’s top twenty most segregated cities, so it is perhaps unsurprising that Amy, whose family lives comfortably in a quintessentially American suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of the city was one of only two non-white students that she can recall from elementary to high school.

“Everybody in school was white,” said Amy, who thinks of herself as an American discovering her Korean heritage. I remember being one of the only people of color and there was one other boy in my class that was black. So it was me and Mike Wolfe from elementary school to high school. I never really saw anybody else besides my parents' friends that were people of color.”

Amy’s Koreanness was invisible to her until it wasn’t. She did not have to confront the fact that she looked different from the majority of her peers until she entered public school and she began to attract the taunts of the students around her. Even to this day, Amy feels as if she has not truly reconciled her appearance.

“I think that has been a considerable factor in how I view myself,” said Amy. “Not only physically and facially but just in general as it pertains to if I am white or Korean, just identity in general.”

The significance of role models in the lives of children cannot be understated, and for Amy, the scarcity of Asian women in the media and pop culture growing up made it difficult to find a baseline for the standard of beauty for people who looked like her.

“A lot of people's reference for Asian people in pop culture or media was Connie Chung,” said Amy. So I was often referred to as Connie Chung. You're trying to compete or live up to a beauty standard that is never going to exist for you and that you are never going to achieve. When you are at that age and you're trying to find yourself and trying to understand who you are as a person, it's hard to know even subconsciously that you're different and that you are made to feel ugly by the people interacting with you but then also to see that there is nobody who is representative of how you look in media or in beauty or any of those things so you don't know who to look to. I only had Connie Chung.”

Around this time in her life, Amy dreamed of exchanging her Asian ethnicity for any other undesirable physical characteristic as long as it was not being Asian. With her simplistic view of the world shared by most children, Amy was certain that any such struggle would be a welcome respite from the pain of being an Asian girl in her white community.

“I remember praying to God that I could either be a redhead or overweight or anything else that had sort of a negative association with it as far as a physical characteristic, as long as it wasn't Asian,” Amy said. “You don't know when you're thirteen years old that those people have similar struggles and everybody has different things they have to deal with but it seemed to me at least at that time, that that looked easier, from what I saw in school. I'm sure it was not. But it was something that seemed like the grass was greener. I absolutely didn't want to be Asian because I did identify as white so it didn't make sense that my face and my soul didn’t match.”

As she reached early adulthood, Amy recalls viewing her adult peers around her, not as the poised vessels of equilibrium, infallible and unflappable, as she did with the neophytic eyes of a fledgling human being, but as people who were, like her, struggling with their own battles. This empowered her to allow herself to be a more vulnerable person and to deflect the pressure to fulfill or adhere to the expectations of others.

“I was like, what am I trying to live up to?” said Amy. “Maybe I can just do me with all my beautiful faults and it doesn't matter anymore and I'm going to stop trying to be what everybody else wants me to be or needs me to be or thinks I should be and that was definitely a distinct point for me in becoming more confident. It definitely gave me more confidence to just be who I am.”

On December 18, 2008, Amy’s daughter, Mena was born making her Amy’s first immediate blood relative. Having lived through girlhood, surmounting the challenges of navigating her racial and ethnic identity, the way in which Amy is raising Mena has been informed by reflecting on how her parents raised her as an adopted Korean child. Her response to that experience has been to be open and direct with Mena, which has helped make her a more empathetic person.

“I wish somebody were able to have had a conversation with me whether it be my parents or some other adult in a way that helped me understand not only how the world was going to interact with me but how my Korean culture and heritage could have been celebrated as opposed to being something that was so foreign and either feared or misunderstood,” said Amy. “I think that would have gone a really long way with me but maybe I wouldn't be as open or direct with my daughter so maybe that was what was supposed to happen. I think I really just want to be open with her and try to explain things to her in a way that will help her understand them so she can feel better about them and have coping skills. Because I've also been open with her about some of my experiences, she's a much kinder person to other people and that also makes me happy.”

While Amy found it fascinating to recognize a piece of herself in Mena’s facial expressions and some of her physical features, she does not necessarily link that directly to her being an adopted Korean woman. For Amy, what is more remarkable, is the distinction between the negative way her ethnicity shaped her self-image and confidence at Mena’s age, and how being half Korean has become a positive part of her daughter’s identity and not one that she wants to divorce herself from.

“What I do think is interesting in me being Asian,” said Amy, “Is that where I wasn't necessarily interested in embracing Korean culture or wasn't exposed to it and felt like it was a negative thing based on the people surrounding me and how they interacted with me and how, you know, just the sort of stereotypical views of that for me growing up, she’s actually interested in Korean culture, and she's proud to be half Asian and half Korean. So that to me is really great. And, you know, it makes me hopeful for the world.”