Mine is the only essay by a transgendered woman and one of only two by a Korean adoptee. Most of the contributions are from immigrant women from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Caribbean, writing about longing and loss: the sense of longing that they feel for the homelands in which they or their parents were born but no longer live in. Last October, the contributors living in New York City put together a panel discussion at a conference that took place at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). My half dozen co-contributors spoke of their relationship with the countries of their birth, ancestry, or upbringing, which included Haiti (Phoenix Soleil), Ethiopia (Maaza Mengiste), Nicaragua (Claudia Virginia Narváez-Meza), Cambodia (Sokunthary Svay), and Iran and Greece (Aphrodite Desiree Navab). I was so moved by their reading of each of their essays that by the time came for me to read mine, I felt more like an observer than a participant in the event. But I went ahead and read my essay about the complex and somewhat ambivalent relationship that I have with the land of my birth and the long and difficult process of coming to terms with my identity as a Korean adoptee -- and a transgendered Korean adoptee at that.

You can order the book through Powell's Books in Portland, which may well be the best bookstore in the United States.

When I shared my essay with a colleague of mine, she told me that she had been moved to tears while reading it. "I laughed, I cried," she said. My guess is that you will also be moved as you read the contributions to this anthology. While only a few of the essays are by lesbian or bisexual women (and mine is the only one by an openly transgendered woman), these are stories that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt in between two worlds.