Countries are just stories you tell yourself. – Bono1
Just like places have borders – nations, states, and cities – such is true for people. And like places and spaces, people don’t have fixed identities. The boundaries and borders labeling us are created. We assert them, or they are imposed upon us. The ongoing tension is whether we are allowed to freely move across or shift these borders or if we are restricted from crossing by others.
Boundary crossing is part of life and reality. The belief people and life in general should be static, held within strict confines of created borders, is just a belief. Who benefits when laws and social rules constrain people to these borders?
As a transracial transnational adoptee, I have lived my whole life crossing borders. Most of these crossings have been imposed upon me. I’ve spanned countries, families, languages, and cultures, largely because of the push and pull of global politics even if the reason on paper was “family building.” One can’t build a family through adoption without also having a family dismantled.
Right now, I am living in a country whose government is rigidly enforcing borders and boundaries on individual identities as well as geographic identities. We are told who we can be and what we can’t be. Across the world and in our own backyard we are witnessing people being ejected from countries and nations, and being murdered for staying. We are told we must adhere to specific rigid definitions of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, language, and spirituality (among just some of the many dimensions of humanity) or suffer from the threat of imprisonment or death.
Again, I ask: who benefits from forcing us into these rigid boundaries?
I often think about how I was escorted from South Korea to Minnesota when I was adopted. My adoptive parents did not fly to Korea to get me. They have never set foot in South Korea. They did not cross that border.
The first time they crossed the threshold of a Korean restaurant was for my oldest child’s high school graduation celebration dinner, 40 years after I was brought to the U.S.
They disparage immigrants, forgetting that they created an immigrant by adopting me. They believe my immigration was “legal” because they wanted it to be, and they were backed up by two governments. The “legality” of immigration is another identity that is imposed or asserted based on who has the power to create that definition.
Boundary and border crossers, whether by force or by choice, face harsh consequences.
Identities are more than labels. To riff off of Bono, they, like countries, are stories we tell ourselves.
Who is allowed to tell the story?
Harlow's Monkey 