Article originally published in ELLE
December 2010
By Susanne Fuglsang
(Photos: Anna Thorbjornsson)
I arrive at Incheon airport a hot and humid summerday in August 2010. My black leggings and beige H&M lace top is a bit wrinkly after the long flight. I put my long thick black hair in a tight bun, as I always do. As I walk through the gates I feel a warm wind sweeps towards my face. My mind feels relaxed but my body is chocked by the incredible heat. I see a familiar face, it´s my friends driver who is waiting to take me to her apartment in Banpo.
The day before I left Sweden, my homecountry since 1967. There I live with my family in a beautiful apartment from 1910 with Jugend architecture in central Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. It´s like a painting looking outside every morning. The beautiful scenery with tourists in casual vacation clothing mixed with buzy officepeople dressed in expensive and citymodern clothing. They walk along ”Strandvägen” (beachroad) by the water looking at the boats and enjoying the beautiful architecture. The area is called ”Östermalm”. Here you find the expensive designer shops, hotels, museum and nightlife. Compared to Seoul it´s a really small city with around one million citizens . The same amount of tourists visits the city every year. I love my hometown and the fact that it´s a small town with a big cities content and feature.
My life partner
My husband Bo and I have been married for 25 years next year. On July 19th 2011 we will celebrate our ”silver wedding day”. It´s been a journey with a lot of efforts and work to keep two strong individuals on the same path. The easy part was to be husband and a wife. The hard part was to maintain the partnership, grow and develop in our career, raise two children, keep fit, take care of the house etc.
But in the end it was love. If we still didn´t feel love for each other, we couldn´t have made it this far.
It all started at one of the hottest nightclubs in Stockholm. Bo was a regular guest and so was I. But we didn´t meet until that night in April 1985. I arrived to the nightclub with my best friend who was a upcoming star ballerina. She was a great dancer and attracted a lot of attention on the dancefloor. She danced with one guy in particular (later it turned out to be Bosses bestfriend). After a while I started to look for her in the crowded club. Soon enough I found her with two guys. One was tall, with darkbrown hair wearing a eyecatching outfit with silvergrey trousers and a pink shortsleeved shirt. The other one was of middleheigt, lightbrown hair and not that memorable outfit. I remember thinking that the tall guy was too handsome for my taste and probably a big time casanova. I was so wrong. The night ended with dates for both us. My date is still going on but her´s ended shortly after.
To be different
Growing up in a Swedish suburb as one of few coloured children was different. I thought of myself as a Swedish person when I was hanging out with my friends. But once in a while I was reminded that I really wasn´t. It was things like being called a ”yellow girl” to not having curly blond hair and blue eyes.
At first I was seen as an exotic element in the neighbourhood. Later in my teenage years I started to be aware of my different features. The feeling of wanting to fit in and look as everyone else grew. I was a searching soul with a huge need to be loved and accepted. I had a few but close friends and kept a low profil most of the times. It was first as a grown up that I started to be more comfortable in my own skin. One big reason that it took so long was probably because I had no one to talk to about my issues. No one could really understand how it could be a problem to be a healthy person living in a nice house with food on the table every day. I learned to keep the thoughts to myself and reading and listening to music became a big comfort. After all everyone around me also had to work hard to find their true identity while growing up so I accepted it as normal. I only had to work a bit harder since I looked different.
One thing that I regret from my past is that I didn´t learn Korean. I wish I could have that treasure of speaking Korean so that I could communicate with people in a correct and native way. But nothing is impossible, so I will do my best to learn.
Language is a barrier for all of us. I am so grateful that many more Koreans nowadays can speak English. That makes it possible for me to continue my passion to educate people and connect them to Korea.
A big part of the adoptee community in the world have gathered in different groups and organisations. In August this year I had the privilege to attended a gathering for adoptees from all over the world arranged by IKAA ( International Korean Adoptee Associations). It was fascinating to meet so many persons with only one thing in common, to be a Korean adoptee. It was a great experience which I wouldn´t have wanted to miss. I felt the strength and the bond between us. I think it´s important to emphasize the many volounteers that work in organisations all over the world to bring together Korean adoptees to strengthen and inspire them. They really make a difference.
I close my eyes as we pass by the Han River in high speed. I think about the fact that twelve hours ago I kissed my husband and daughter Linda goodbye. I feel a bit sad that they aren´t with me. I miss them so much.
Starting a family
Today we are four in the family. We have been blessed with two wonderful daughters, Jenny and Linda Fuglsang. The girls attended daycare from the age of one to the age of seven when they started school. During those years Bo and I shared the task to bring them there and to pick them up. But without a lot of help from my in-laws it would have been impossible for both of us to have fulltime jobs. My dear father-in-law who has passed away and my amazing mother-in-law were always there for us when the girls were sick or we needed to work. They have always been our biggest supporters. I can only hope I will be able to be such a great mother-in-law to my girls when it´s time.
We have always been a hard working family. At least that was what I thought before I knew about the Korean worklife. But today when I know that we have at least five weeks vacation during a year I feel almost ashamed. When I was pregnant I had a year off with almost the same salary paid. And when I wanted to get back to work I immediately had a daycare placement. Today when I look back on all those things that we take for granted in Sweden I feel humbled.
Sweden has been in the forefront for a long time regarding the social and educational system. Everyone has to attend the free public school from the age of six or seven (flexible school start) to the age of fifteen or sixteen (ninth grade). After that you can decide if you want to continue for two or three more years (high school) in a free public school or private school. Most students and their parents choose the free public school and only a few choose the private school where you pay for the education. But the climate is changing in Sweden regarding education. The global level of talented students has made it tougher for Swedish students to get into the most attractive universities. So today you can see a more diverse approach to the choices made for school. The quest for high grades in the best schools is getting more important to get ahead start, but we still don´t have the same drive that Koreans have regarding their education.
A normal workingday in our family starts around 7am. We take a shower, eat breakfast and get ready for work or school around 8 am. Bo who is the owner of two business- and conferencecentres in Stockholm has a day full of marketing, sales and staff issues. I have two offices that I alternate between, one at home and one at a consultancy office nearby my home. Depending on my schedule I eat lunch at home or at a restaurant. In the evening we eat dinner together. When the girls were small we used to have dinner around 6 pm, but now when we have moved from a house in the suburbs to a city apartment we eat around 7 pm. Several times a week we go to the gym so we alternate who makes dinner on those days. People in general are quite good at exercising in Sweden so it´s quite easy to find training facilities for a reasonable price. After dinner we share the typical housework with dishes, laundry and cleaning. The day ends with some TV and last minute work before we go to bed around 10 -11pm.
The big change
Our oldest daughter Jenny is 22 years old and works as a model and actress in Seoul. Her brave life choices has taken our family on a exciting and emotional journey.
For me it started in 1967, when at the age of four I left Korea as an adoptee to Sweden. I came to a Swedish family with a biological son with blond hair and blue eyes. He was seven years old when I arrived as his new ”little sister”. My adoptive parents consisted of my adoptive mother Jane and her husband Sven. They where a middleclass couple with a nice house in the suburbs. They wanted to have a girl but had a problematic pregnancy the first time so they didn´t want to take any risks a second time. Adoption was a great solution for them because then they could both help an orphan and be sure to get a girl. But I guess they had more than they had bargained for, because it was not love at first sight, actually never.
I could share a lot of stories about how it was to grow up in a foreign country and what it meant to me, but I belive that many persons before me have already done that and more importantly that is not what I want to share with you now.
My story is about how I choose to take responsibility for my life choices and how I learn from them to define who I am today. I took the choice to leave the negative environment at home at the age of sixteen for good and continue my lifepath alone.
The taxi driver looked in the driving mirror and said something in Korean to me. I answered back to him as good as I could ”hanguk mal mottejo” and continued in English to explain that I was adopted and didn´t understand Korean. After a short silence he suddenly asked in English – Did you cry every night?
I was stunned and didn´t know what to say. After a while I realised that he felt sorry for me and assumed that my life must have been painful. This was not the first time I had this reaction so I started to feel a growing need to give him a broader view about the adoptees. There are as many stories as there are adoptees. Some of them are happy and some are sad. But no one wants to be considered with pity. But I knew I couldn´t explain it all to everyone I met so I decided to just say - No, I am happy that I was adopted. If not, I would not have been the person I am today.
I want to share the story as an adoptee but more importantly as a fellow Korean to you as a reader. Such a long time has passed since the first adoptee left Korea and we are now coming back as adults to reclaim our history and roots. But the past has mostly portrayed us as adopted persons with happy or sad stories. I would like to start another type of dialogue. A dialogue about the great force we all are as individuals with our multifaceted knowledge and background. We are so much more than adoptees. We may not talk Korean and know the Korean culture and etiquettes but we know about many other things. Together we can help each other to be even stronger as individuals all over the world. But first we need to respect that we will always be different from you on the inside, but it doesn´t show on the outside. So when you meet a fellow Korean who smiles at you with a confused expression and speaks back to you in English please take a moment before you judge us.
Since I left Korea as a four year old child I have had very little connection with my Korean heritage except for some short visits. When Jenny decided to move to Korea I was thrown into a new world. I realised that I didn´t know anything about my ”true colour”. I was like a baby again.
The first months after Jenny moved to Korea I was sad and felt a bit lost. Our family had a different dynamic when we were only three. Linda missed her best friend and big sister very much and had to struggle hard to adjust her daily life without her. My husband handled the loss through work and exercise. We all had to adjust.
The taxi pulled over and stopped infront of the huge apartment complex in Banpo. Just when I stepped out of the taxi my mobilephone was ringing. – Hej, mamma (Swedish for ”hello mother”). A warm feeling spread in my body.
It was my darling daughter Jenny on the phone.
For Jenny it all started when she as a skinny teenager visited our friend Joohee.
It was my second time in Korea and her first. We did the normal sightseeing, shopping and eating and had a great time. People pointed at her legs and said that she was beautiful and should be a model, I guess that stayed in her mind. After she returned home she wrote in her diary that after highschool she wanted to visit Korea again. The years passed by and when she graduated with the maximum grades and yet wasn´t sure about what she wanted to study at University she remembered her goal in the diary. A couple of weeks later Jenny and I landed in Incheon airport, this time it was 2008.
Once again our great friend Joohee Cho helped her to get a kickstart in the modeling world by introducing her to a wellknown fashion designer, and after a short while she met a model agency. After two months she had a model contract and the start of a new life and career in Korea. Thanks to the fact that she was a child to an adopted person she had the advantage to get a F4 Visa. That gave her the right to work and live in Korea. But now the real challenge started. Living in a new country without any friends and family, not talking the language and not knowing about the culture is a huge challenge that most of us never dare to take. But she did, and I will always be proud of her courage to take that step.
During her career in Korea she has been fortunate to have many great assignments.
She has been in the TV show 금발이 너무해 at Comedy TV and in the show 무한정 미소천사 at MBC, supermodelme competition in Singapore, modeling for Kay Kim, Lee Sang-Bong and for advertising ads and commercials and even had a documentary on MBC. But it takes hard work. She trains regularly, eats healthy and studies Korean everyday. On her spare time she enjoys to spend time with her football playing boyfriend and their friends. Once a week she visits a Save the Children unit where she encourages the children to learn English or sometimes she just have fun with them. I could tell you a lot more about her exciting life in Seoul but I will save it to another time. I do know that she loves her life in Korea and is humble towards the fact that she is a part of a society that she didn´t know much about, but who greeted her with open arms.
Tired after the long flight I lay down for a while on the bed. I think about the different smells, the sounds of a language that I don´t understand and the people who looks like me. And I think about how life has given me the gift of two wonderful worlds. The one that I will spend the rest of my life to get to know and the one that I owe my life to.
For me Jenny´s move started a big process in my life. I decided to leave my safe career in the advertising business to a more insecure and challenging life as an entrepreneur. At the age of 46 I started my own company. The procedure was easy and after a simple registration cost about 150.000 Won I was up and running. I wanted to start a business that could combine my heritage with my present life. It was something that I had dreamed about for many years. It would turn out to be a real challenge since I had little knowledge about the Korean business process and etiquette. But that hasn´t stopped me. My lesson from the time up until now is that I need to view my business as an educational project. It´s about sharing knowledge and create interest for the Korean market. After that I will hopefully have the reward to build a growing business for the SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) levels of companies.
I decided that my company Zenex would have a mission to enable business exchange between the Scandinavian and Korean market. I started to arrange executive studytours to Seoul regularly to promote Korea towards the Scandinavian market. One of the trips was for H&M Club before their opening of the first store in Myeongdong. It was a proud moment for me to witness a successful Swedish fashion brand entering the Korean market. I hope to be able to see much more of this in the near future. Korea has so much creativity in the design area that we have little knowledge about. For example the Seoul Fashion Week is a great example of a fashion event that Swedes should know more about to get to know the modern Korea. Koreans know more about Sweden than we know about Korea. Swedish fashion brands like Acne, J Lindeberg and Cheap Monday have been known in Korea for a while, but there is no wellknown Korean fashion brands that we know about in Sweden.
My daily working life involves not only business with Korea. I am also a partner in a digital network company where we are a gathered group of experts in business-development and production for the mobile and internetmarket. This gives me an advantage when I build my company from the other side of the world since digital technology is the biggest reason that it´s even possible. My work is handled mainly with the help of online tools. I produced my company website with IWeb (a Apple program) I have conference calls through Skype (a service that allows me to call for free), I get my news from Korean websites with English translation, I broaden my business network through communities like LinkedIn and Korea Business Central.
I inform potential partners, friends and clients about my everyday insights through Twitter and Facebook (like Cyworld), I follow the latest music, design and movietrends on YouTube, and I check out a lot of great pictures about Korea on Flickr and lately I blog on truecolour.se. I can continue the list but I think you get it by now.
Technology is such an asset to increase the possibilities for crossborder conversation and knowledge. I am happy to be able to use it to my advantage.
The sun starts to set in Myeongdong while I walk down the busy streets with Jenny.
People´s head turns. I think they look because my skin is so dark compared to theirs. I am well aware about that Koreans see white and smooth skin as the most important beauty sign of all. I agree, I think it´s beautiful. But my skin is used to the Swedish beauty standard, which means that a sun tan is considered as beautiful and a sign of wellbeing. We walk further down the street until we reach the H&M store. Suddenly I realise that it´s not me they are looking at, they are admiring Jenny. I feel a warm feeling in my body as we enter the store. Jenny has found a home in the country where I once was born and I have made my dream come true and started a business that makes it possible for me to continue my journey to connect with my native country.
I am proud to say that we have both found our true colour.
With love from,
Susanne Fuglsang
You can follow me on my blog
www.truecolour.se
My company website
www.zenex.se
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