Journeys Across Race, Place, and Time
Before going to the Kundiman poetry reading at Fordham University last night, Pauline and I had dinner at Nook in Hell's Kitchen. Dinner was very pleasant, sauced by talk about the ekphrastic stories she is writing, and about the book of poems I am publishing next April. She gave me a copy of her essay published in an anthology of women's writing, Homelands: women's journeys across race, place, and time (edited by Patricia Justine Tumang and Jenesha De Rivera, and published by Seal Press). Pauline's essay charted her own journey towards accepting her ethnic identity as a Korean adoptee, and her gender identity as a transgendered woman. The essay--and the life--is remarkable for the geography it traverses. At the age of eight months, Pauline was flown from Seoul to Tokyo, then to Anchorage, and then to Chicago, where she was picked up by her foster parents, and brought back to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That flight set the pattern for a peripatetic life afterwards. Madison f...