Fable Farmstead

I’ve been an adoptee my whole life, obviously. But this year I became something I didn’t think I’d ever be. Someone who knows.

I was adopted from Taiwan in 1987, raised in America, and this past January I traveled back and met my birth mother for the first time. I’m 38. It took that long, and also it happened faster than I expected once I decided to try.

There’s a story here I want to tell properly. It’s about adoption and identity and belonging and becoming. About growing up not looking like anyone who loved you. About what you find when you finally go looking, and what finds you back.

I’ll be sharing it here over the coming months. The fuller essays will live on Substack, link in bio, for anyone who wants to settle in with it.
I’m glad to have people to tell it to.

📷:

There is a particular kind of peace that I only find in certain places. Deep in the woods. At the edge of a field while the sun is setting. Somewhere old enough to have held other lives and stories before my own.

I have always sought those places out. I used to think it was just temperament, my preference for quiet, for the unhurried company of trees and birds and whatever moved through the grass ahead of me (preferably not big creepy bugs, but I am slowly coming to appreciate them more).

I’m starting to think it was something else. Something I didn’t have the context for yet.

(More on that, slowly, as the year unfolds.)