The Red Coral Road
“Dying is a wild Night and a new Road.”
— Emily Dickinson in a letter to Peter Cowan, October 1869
“the end of the red road
polished with wet and sun
nearly circular”
— Karla Kelsey, “flood/fold: Aperture Two”
I was born waiting for a red death thread to be wrapped around me, spilling several inches below my feet like the afterbirth of a christening gown.
We are all born laid open bare: bare backs, bare butts, bare nipples, bare hands, though in a sound healing I once had a vision I was the Greek goddess, Athena, running naked through a city, half covered in mud and singing. And, Athena was born from her father’s head after he raped and swallowed her mother whole.
Like Athena, my mother is absent from my birth story, though I believe she was also raped, and that I was raped in the first three months of my life in Korea, and then swallowed by an international industry that profits from the separation and selling of children. For the equivalent of $30,000, I was flown across the world to a new home where like most little girls, my christening gown was made of white lace.
White lace, white powder and white love—the precious adornments that would become a burden for me in my twenties, a young girl who was never really a virgin. When I was two, I realized it felt really good to rub up against the corner of a coffee table or cup my hands and brush against the hardwood floor in masturbation. I would gather all the other children at the nursery around me and show them how they could feel really good too until I was separated from the group and put in front of the television for the rest of the afternoon.
My first poetry mentor told me all children masturbate when they’re young, but my teaching the other children to do it too was a sign I would be a leader one day. My therapist says the research on that is inconclusive, though many psychologists now believe only children who have been sexually abused masturbate at such a young age. Either way, I have grown up to be somewhat of a leader, like Athena. And like Athena, I have a taste for blood and coral.
Red coral is often called “precious coral” (according to Wikipedia). Blood-orange to blood-red, it grows inside dark caves deep in the Mediterranean Sea. It’s funny to me because so much of my life has been defined by the color red and the idea of preciousness. People tend to find me precious, precocious and there is a quality within me they wish to protect. Sometimes, I will cultivate my own preciousness because the child within me still longs for the protection I did not receive at birth. Like red coral, I was born in the darkness.
Once there was a girl born in Busan, South Korea, on October 8th, 1984, to a thirty-six year old homemaker and a thirty-year old pawnbroker who was missing an arm from a shipping collision off the coast of the East Sea. The loss of his arm had devastated the family who already had twin sons they couldn’t feed, so they refused to take the baby girl back.
I have seen this baby girl being born, or rather, the moments immediately afterwards. I have seen them and felt them because I have lived them, though it isn’t necessarily the memory of being born I hold onto.
I hold onto the vision I had of it in a shamanic medicine circle: me as a screaming, wailing baby surrounded by metal trays, doctors, hands, naked and newborn in a halo of fluorescent light. It is this image of my birth I have come to know as the source of my pain. My pain is a woman, and I cannot imagine letting go of her.
I had a felt-sense of being born once in a Lineage workshop where I called in my line of female ancestors, walked with them, danced with them in a circle, and two of them grabbed my hands. It’s funny in that moment when my fingers held onto something ghostly, I felt what it means to be truly here in this world, to come from something, rather than nothing, and to have a motherline that isn’t only created by love but by blood.
My great-grandmother ancestor stood with me, her bay blue medicine gown enveloped me, but I still couldn’t feel my birthmother. She is conspicuously absent from all the roads leading back to how I came into this world, but I have an image of what it would be like to see her for the first time.
It is blood-orange, the color of fruit, Old Weavers satin de laine athena coral spice fabric and sunsets. We would be rooted in this burnt-orange color, and I would know what it’s like to be born from her womb. I would see on her face all the fruits I’ve never eaten, the sunsets I’ve closed my eyes to, and maybe I’d even hear the sounds of the lullabies I never heard sung from her lips fall gently onto my satin nightgown. Her eyes would look down into mine and mine would rise to meet hers, and there would be an immediate knowledge, as if my whole life and hers connected in a spiral of DNA strands coming together, merging into a cohesive person. I would smile, trying not to cry because I rarely cry, or maybe because I am seeing her, I would cry as I have never cried before.
I have an inkling I might cry as I have never cried before because I watched this movie I can’t remember the name of now with Juliette Binoche several years ago, and she and whoever was playing her half-brother were involved in some incestuous emotional flirtation and through their discourse, her character finds out she will have to go back to the Middle East where she abandoned her daughter to be raised by another family, so she does go back, and when their eyes meet for the first time, the music cuts out, and there is only silence. They stare at each other for what feels like an eternity, and as the scene drags on minute by minute, I am mesmerized, just staring at them staring at each other, and then, the silence is broken by wailing. The sounds are unbearable, so I begin to cry too, and I shut the movie off and have never returned to it. Maybe because some part of me knows the truth captured in the meeting of their eyes and the terrible sound of wailing.
I read a book called I Wish for You a Beautiful Life: Letters from the Korean Birth Mothers of Ae Ran Won to Their Children when I was in my twenties, and in Letter 3, one birthmother wrote to her daughter: “I dreamt that after your birth I would buy a pair of red shoes for your feet and a pretty ribbon with lace to put in your hair.” When I read these words, I did cry softly, tears I refused to let fall from my eyelids because I want to keep anything that could possibly belong to her closed within me.
In my twenties, I was only interested in falling. Falling into a deeper kind of despair, a deeper agony, as if simple agony and simple despair were not enough. I believed the falling and the depth would bring me to the resolution I longed for.
“Falling into that color, was she not also falling into herself, as I fall into myself now, my own memories of red, and my own redness?” Susan Griffin asks in her essay “The Red Shoes.”
As I fall into myself now in my thirties, my own memories of the color red blend with a pair of rainbow colored shoes that came to America with me. They are one of only a handful of things I have from Korea: a queen’s honbok, a baby shirt and hoodie with a picture of a bear that says B-A-R-E on it, a jade tea cup and set of four bowls, wooden prayer beads with a window containing a mirror and a Buddha on the inside, and these rainbow shoes.
As a child I wanted to wear the rainbow shoes with their red outline as proudly as I wore my black patent leather shoes, saddle shoes and princess dresses I could twirl in, but they were always too big. My mother told me to be patient and one day they would fit me. I decided to hide them away in my closet, so I wouldn’t be tempted to try them on every day and be disappointed. By the time I remembered them again when I was older, they were too small. I guess they never were the shoes of a princess, and they will remain a mystery in which all the questions of my own history can be held:
What is my story? What is my life concept?
Where am I? Where am I not?
Where am I? Where am I not?
I still wonder about my birthmother sometimes with the same intensity I began to in my early twenties after seeing a John Sayles movie called Casa de los babys. There is a scene where a maid who is relinquishing her child for adoption is cleaning the room of a prospective adoptive mother. Neither of them speak the same language, but they share their dreams of what they want for their daughters with each other and cry. Watching the actress who played the birthmother, I couldn’t help but wonder about my own. What does she look like? What is the shape of her? What are the textures of her lines?
I used to lay in bed at night tracing the lines on the hands of the woman I was in love with and wonder about all the stories held there, all the things I would never know, and the histories we couldn’t bridge. One night, she told me she could feel my birthmother and how much she loves me as she traced the lines of my own body through my clothes. She said the story I had been told my whole life about my birthfather being a pawnbroker who lost his arm in a shipping collision the year before I was born, and the family already having twin sons a year older they couldn’t feed, so they wouldn’t accept me back if I was not adopted was a lie. I actually come from a long line of women healers, and there was some sort of sexual scandal which forced my birthmother to give me up. She said she herself had had an abortion, so she knew firsthand the love it takes to bring a baby into the world, and she kept repeating how I come from a long line of women healers and how loved I am over and over and over again until she fell asleep.
I stayed awake feeling sensations I had never felt before, and for once, it seemed possible my body could come alive. My entire being crackled as if it was one of those tiny hand-held sparklers when they’re first lit up, red-hot and ready to be transformed. Maybe I was really loved, but why couldn’t I feel my birthmother? Why couldn’t I know deep within my bones if it was true?
A few nights later when this woman I was in love with tried to kiss me, I froze, and in that moment, I felt myself slipping back into the familiar, and I wondered why.
Red coral is so precious, it is dying. It’s “slow-growing,” taking its time to form in the deep dark, and by 1987, the growth-time was unable to keep up with all the fishing. The countries along the Mediterranean Sea said they would take care of it, and by the early 2000’s, it was beginning to return because of the local laws implemented to save it. The Living Oceans Foundation remains skeptical, however, because it has ceased to come back to the Pacific.
One night I did a Google search of “Korean girls” and the word “beauty” and came across the blog title, Korean Girls Are Beautiful Like Clouds, though I have never been able to find it again. I wonder if my birth mother is beautiful, like a cloud.
I think, I never want to meet my birthmother.
I think, What could I possibly say?
I hate you—I love you—I leave you—I grieve you—I do not grieve for you—I don’t know you. I don’t know you—I don’t—know—who—who are you? I don’t care anymore. Did I ever? Care. . .
You were right—and—you were kind. You were not kind—and—you were wrong. You were—you—were—You think about me—you must think about me—but—I did not think about you till I was told I was s’pose to—suppose too—supposed to. I do what I’m told. I do not tell—anything about myself—and I never thought about you as a child—as a child. . .
As a child—you give up—you gave up—you gave me up. Thank you, but I hate you. I hate you, and I thank you. I thank you, and I feel you, or I don’t feel you—never felt you, but I fill you, or I did fill you. I filled you, and I killed you, and I will keep killing you until you find me. Don’t find me—don’t ever find me. I will not find you, and I don’t care. I don’t care, and it’s not fair, or it is fair, but who cares? Who care—who cares—who cared. . .
. . . . .
But what I really want to know is: why am I so damn precious?
During one of our early sessions, my therapist told me she had an intuition my birth mother had been raped and that was the reason I had been given up for adoption, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I could breathe. The blood-red wisdom of my body, deep within its core, beneath the harvesting waters, sighed in relief. It was the confirmation I had been looking for, the precious proof I could trust the woman I had loved about where I come from, even if I couldn’t trust her with anything else, especially my body.
“Delicate skeletons” or polyps form the underlying structure of red corals. Some delicate sea creature is there growing into the coral’s roots. As a gemstone, it is associated with bone, marrow, blood, intestines and sexual organs.
My pain is this woman who still lives in my hips, the precious wound she left there, and an emptiness so vast it becomes a desert. The desert is black with gnarled, tangled roots growing underneath dead trees. It is barren, aside from those roots. The sky, sand, trees and horse I am riding are all black. As I ride through the night on the horse, I travel deeper and deeper inside my womb until I come to an orchard full of trees. They are still black, but on the branches, dark red apples grow.
One sun-filled afternoon in California, I went upstairs in the house I had moved into only a few months before and felt a sharp womb pain that made me scream for the first time in my life. I was alone, so I called an ambulance and had all kinds of tests done in the emergency room on everything except my womb, only to be told there was no medical explanation for the pain. The doctor told me they release women all the time with no explanation for their symptoms. He told me I should follow up with my internist, but since I had just moved, there was no one to follow up with. With no explanation, something new began to form within my own roots.
.
.
.
.
I began to form there.
Amidst the tangled trees, I shape-shifted into a shaman, into a raven, into a bird-woman, into myself. I walked up to a different horse, now calico, as a young girl wearing a red hooded cloak. The actual shaman invited us to turn around so our backs faced where we had currently been standing and dance with a younger version of ourself.
I turned and danced with my baby self during the first few months of my life in Korea. I saw my chubby baby self with short, spiked black hair wearing that B-A-R-E shirt in foster care while waiting to be able to fly to my family in America. Two years before, I had been doing some kundalini breath work, and I had the felt-sense of being sexually abused in those first few months of my life—something my therapist and the woman I had loved had suspected long before. I took in a sharp inhale of breath, felt its edges grow in the pit of my womb, the sword of wisdom held within, and the slow birthing of it.
Later in the dance, as the shaman read the UN Report that had been released that day as the closing, I had a vision of myself in my forties, staring over the Pacific Ocean as airplanes flew overhead. I saw my baby self in the distance, and I told her I’m sorry she had that happen to her. I said I feel for her pain, but I will not carry it into the next cycle of my life, and I told her how much I love her.
I then felt the presence of my birthmother, though I still couldn’t see her face. I told her I forgive her for surrendering me at birth, and I’m sorry if I came into this world through acts of violence that were not her choice. I told her I forgive her for what also happened to me in Korea because I was able to be raised by people who could love me, take care of me, and give me everything I wanted. I told her I have a really precious and beautiful life.
Then, my baby image faded, and my future self as a grown-up woman faded until it was just me and the ocean, and then me laying on the dance floor. I rolled over and got up to my feet. The dance was over and when I walked outside, a red butterfly lingered above my head as I breathed in the sun-filled California air for a minute before it flew away.
BIBLIOGRAPHY & RESOURCES:
Barret, Allison. “Red Coral: What’s the Future?” Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation: Providing science-based solutions to protect and restore ocean health, livingoceansfoundation.org/red-coral-whats-future/. Accessed 24 May 2020.
“Benefits of Wearing Red Coral Gemstone.” GemLab Laboraties, gemlab.co.in/benefits-of-wearing-red-coral-gemstone/. Accessed 24 May 2020.
Bergman, Vladi. “The Red Coral Stone.” Karma and Luck, karmaandluck.com/blogs/crystals/the-red-coral-stone. Accessed 19 November 2020.
Butcher, Stacey. “Lineage: A Women’s Open Floor Workshop.” Open Floor Movement International, 18-19 May 2019, Western Sky Studio in the Sawtooth Building, Berkeley, CA. Workshop.
Dickinson, Emily. Dickinson/Cowan Correspondence: October 1869 (Letter 332), archive.emilydickinson.org/correspondence/cowan/l332.html.
Dorow, Sara, editor. I Wish for You a Beautiful Life: Letters from the Korean Birth Mothers of Ae Ran Won to their Children, Yeong & Yeong Book Company, 1999.
Gitai, Amos, director. Disengagement. Studio Canal, 2007.
Griffin, Susan. “Red Shoes.” The Next American Essay, edited by John D’Agata, Graywolf Press, 2003.
Kelsey, Karla. “flood/fold: Aperture Two.” Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary, Ahsahta Press, 2006.
Khan, Susannah Darling. Online Webinar, Movement Medicine, 7 May 2019, Sol Studios: Yoga, Dance & Wellness, Fairfax, CA. Movement Medicine Class.
“Precious Coral.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 26 September 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precious_coral.
Sayles, John, director. Casa De Los Babys. IFC Films, 2003.
Symes, Sand. “Modern Medicine Circle.” Sand’s Healing Practice, 1 June 2019, Sunrise Center, Corte Madera, CA. Shamanic Medicine Circle.
“The Red Coral Road” is part of a larger body of work called The Red Collection, which I’ve created a space for in honor of the beautiful journals that have published them so far. This essay was first published by K’in: A Literary Journal Celebrating the Range and Diversity of Voices Under Our One Sun in the November 2021 issue. Since this journal unfortunately no longer exists, I have re-posted it here.
