As I read this article, about a Korean adoptee who is a dancer on tour with Celine Dion returning to Korea for the first time, the part about how she first tasted kimchi — and how it seemed to trigger her questions and curiosity about her identity and Korean heritage — hit home for me.

It was much the same for me, too.

Not the world-tours-with-music-divas part.

I mean, the kimchi.

My tongue didn’t make first contact with Korean cuisine until adulthood. I was about 21 or 22 when I tasted kimchi and bulgogi for the first time as I dined at a combination Korean-Japanese restaurant one block from my apartment, with a hapa-Japanese friend. (Double-whammy: It was my first encounter with sushi as well.)

And I didn’t love it. Not the first time. I remember trying to act nonchalant about the whole thing. Sure, sure, I’d eat the kimchi. No problem. (Ouch, my sinuses!)

I really didn’t love it. Yet there was something provocative and visceral about it that I couldn’t put my finger on, like a scent or a strain of music that your memory can’t quite place, or maybe the muscle memory of a lost extremity.

I wonder, if I had declined that invitation to meet my friend, who lived just across the street from me, and never walked over to that restaurant, would I still be where I am today? Would I still have unlocked that part of me that was drawn, as if by magnetic force, back to Korea, to search, to be reunited? Would I have made the strong circles of fellow adoptee friends who now support me and nourish my life on a daily basis? Would I still be a closeted Asian, laboring to be accepted and embraced as no more, no less than all-American, and-I’ll-thank-you-very-much-to-not-ask-stupid-questions?

I don’t know. I’d like to think that something else would have elicited the ensuing slow tidal shift of exploration (of self, of past) that crept up on me, like the gradual melting of ice caps, rather than rushing in like a tsunami. But I really don’t know.

Today I eat Korean food at least once a week. Half the top shelf of our fridge is occupied by a motley assortment of kimchi jars of varying vintage and variety.

Strange now — or not strange at all — that most of my close friends are like me, ethnically Korean, transplanted by adoption.

Strange back then, that for the first time out on my own as a young adult, I ended up living one block from one of the two Korean restaurants and adjacent Korean groceries in the entire city. (Perhaps stranger, still, that the other Korean restaurant & grocer was an extra 1/2-block away …) And I had walked past them every day, twice — once to campus, once back. So many times I had peered in through the window, too intimidated and too resolute to allow myself to feel curious. I had walked on by, ignoring the tiny voice inside me that said, “Go in.”

“Just go in and have a look around.”

But I didn’t.

It makes me a little angry at my past-self. What was I waiting for — a personal invitation?

Or just a little more time?

* * * *

I’d love to hear from fellow transcultural, transnational adoptees: Can you identify a “trigger” experience or experiences that prompted curiosity about your identity/heritage?

Your response: