Set your tivo, folks. Searching Seoul is set to air on June 17th at 10:30 p.m. If you are from MN or WI and you happen to catch it, I’d be interested in your thoughts.
We caused a little bit of a ruckus last Wednesday, after all our neighbors saw the KSTP-Channel 5 van parked outside our house. Mike and Phil (from the news station) filmed us doing such natural things such as: walking the dog, sitting on the stoop, playing with water balloons and looking at photos.
It’s hilarious to think that so much staging is involved in order to show us as being “natural” on t.v.
I asked whether this would be available to be purchased through the station, but they said no. However, I will get a DVD copy and am free to make copies and “give away” as many as I want. So I will check out the costs of copying and shipping – check back on that one.
I am extremely nervous about seeing my face on tv again. First, because it was a time in my life when I was just one big bundle of raw emotions. And at a time in my life when I wanted to present myself as so put-together, the whole world (it seemed) saw me as this sad, sap of an adoptee. And a clue for those who have never dealt with the media – it’s so hard to control them. You can say all the things you want and one thing that’s iffy and sure as hell that one thing will be what’s aired. And just like the Korean television producers, I’m sure it’s no accident that I’m crying in a majority of my airtime.
It’s such exposure! The other thing that makes me cringe thinking about this, is that I was so new and naive about so many things – I’d never been to Korea before, so in a way I was kind of robbed of that first experience. Having a camera in my face isn’t exactly a stellar way to see your birth country for the first time. I didn’t want to have all my emotions on camera! So, although I feel I’m portrayed as emotional in this documentary, I also feel that I held back a lot, and in a way that’s bad. I needed to be able to process and feel my way through this experience.
In the end, I guess I feel it was still worth it. As an outside viewer, I’d really have appreciated seeing it, especially if I was a newbie to the adoption identity process. I guess it’s just hard to have your life in a fishbowl and open to such scrutiny.
I just hope that this is the end of my 15 minutes. I think I’ve had enough of “reality tv.”
Harlow's Monkey 