The Universality In The Specific
On longing for racial belonging. Plus, 'White Boy Winter' and can whiteness be exoticized?
“Writing is like a whale call, you send out the vibrations and someone on the other side of the world hears you,” said Matthew Salesses at a recent Asian American Writer’s Workshop panel celebrating the release of When We Become Ours: A YA Adoptee Anthology.
In 2020, I received Salesses’ whale call. A couple friends of mine sent me Salesses’ writing on grief, and it revealed so much to me about my own grief and racial identity that I reached out to him to express my gratitude. Somewhere in the intimate absorption of Salesses’ artfully constructed sentences, I found a sense of belonging, a “feeling seen” I’d only ever felt reading Cathy Park Hong and Alexander Chee.
Salesses was born in South Korea and adopted at age two by white American parents, who then raised him in Connecticut. I was raised by my white birth mother but I’ve always found the narratives of Korean American adoptee…