#421: Searching For Home
Three great articles on finding the places and people that feel familiar
Happy Thanksgiving, loyal readers, and welcome, new subscribers. I’m happy you’re here and grateful that you’ve allowed me a weekly spot in your inbox.
This week’s articles focus on the theme of searching for home. In typical Article Club fashion, I’ve selected a few outstanding articles that explore a range of perspectives from a variety of publications. (For instance: Have you heard of The Delacorte Review or Rest of World?) I hope at least one piece resonates with you.
You’ll meet a queer Black woman who travels the globe to find a place she feels she belongs. You’ll meet a straight white man who has given up on dating and prefers spending time with his partner, a straight Asian man. And you’ll meet two Korean American adoptees who always thought they were alone until they found each other on Facebook. Please enjoy!
⭐️ Coming up at Article Club
HHH #21, Nov. 30. HHH is a great way to hang out with fellow kind and thoughtful readers in person. We’ll be at Room 389 in Oakland beginning at 5:30 pm. You can get your free ticket here.
This month’s discussion, Dec. 3. This month, we’ll be diving into “The Fog,” by Larissa MacFarquhar. It might be one of my favorite articles of the year. There are a few slots left. You can sign up for free here.
1️⃣ A Black Woman’s Search For Her Place in White, White Vermont
As a queer Black woman, Sheena Daree Romero has never felt at home. After growing up in suburban Ohio, where white classmates tolerated her and white neighbors ignored her, Ms. Romero wanted to escape, very far away. She chose Germany, where she spent a year as an exchange student. It was better than the United States, but certainly no dream. Several moves in her twenties brought her around the world — Japan, Spain, Australia, Norway, Finland, England, Portugal, Chicago, Albuquerque, New York, Tajikistan, and ultimately Vermont — on a quest to belong and feel safe. This personal essay tells the story of Ms. Romero’s time in Vermont, where she vows to spend 1,000 days. Her first snowstorm is disconcerting. She writes:
I glared out of the window, amazed, but mostly frustrated, that a place that was already so white in so many ways, could become even whiter. But if I could survive the tundra, I thought, I could survive anything.
Yearning to tough it out, wanting desperately to call a place home, Ms. Romero makes it halfway to her goal. Then she gets hit crossing the street, in a crosswalk, by a truck whose driver who doesn’t see her.
By Sheena Daree Romero • The Delacorte Review • 30 min
This week’s theme got me re-reading Matthew Desmond’s first book, Evicted. I highly recommend it. Prof. Desmond joined Article Club earlier this year to talk about his latest book, Poverty by America. Here’s the interview.
2️⃣ Family Membership
This week I met up with a friend I’ve known since preschool. On my drive home, I got to thinking about how rare and special this is. After all, he’s not my sibling, but he might as well be. Then I read this endearing piece about Christopher and Tan, whose friendship is so tight that fellow shoppers at Costco assume they’re married. Christopher used to worry how they came across. Now he lets people assume what they want. He writes:
Tan is not the partner I ever pictured myself spending so much of my life with (and he would say the same). But we do not choose the people who end up mattering the most to us. In this life, if we’re very lucky we get two families: There is the family we’re born into. And then there is the family we find.
As Kathryn Schulz reminded us last year in this interview, let’s not take for granted the loved ones we’ve found in our lives. After all, “it is finding that is astonishing,” she writes.
By Christopher Solomon • Esquire • 9 mins
3️⃣ Korean adoptees felt isolated and alone for decades. Then Facebook brought them together.
Since 1953, more than 200,000 Korean children have been adopted abroad. More than two-thirds were sent to the United States. The idea was that the children were orphans (mostly not true), the American parents were saviors, and assimilation was the goal. The reality, of course, is very different. Torn from family and home, many Korean American adoptees have felt lost and out of place. This article follows two women, both 36 years old, who experienced trauma for decades before finding each other on the Korean American Adoptees group on Facebook. Discovering that they were not alone was affirming. There was “instant acceptance, a validation of their lived experiences.” But the complicated feelings persisted, especially when they decided to return to Korea to search for their birth mothers and visit the adoption agencies that gave them away.
By Ann Babe • Rest of World • 23 mins
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