La Sarmiento has said, “You need to be someone before you can be no one.”
In Retour à Séoul (Return to Seoul), Frédérique "Freddie" Benoît, a Korean adoptee raised in France, demonstrates a very specific somatic challenge: how adoptees can ricochet between intense engagement and complete withdrawal, between rage and tenderness.
Emotional regulation is the foundation on which one practices viriya, the fifth of the ten Buddhist Perfections. For that reason, with the caveat this essay does not speak for all adoptees, this movie illustrates and externalizes aberrant energy. I felt like someone represented a part of me I had never been able to articulate before.
And seeing that this experience was shared, I could see my own patterns around effort more clearly.
Allons-y // 가자 // Let's go!
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Energy, Effort, and Han
Viriya—energy and effort—is the fifth perfection. It refers to the skillful application of one's energy: not too tight, not too loose.
In the old texts, there’s the analogy of the lute, an old stringed instrument. A Goldilocks amount of tension creates the ideal resonance, and the grail of balanced energy and effort toward the dissolution of suffering.
When wondering how to expend energy or effort, ask: What might dissipate unskillful states (impulsivity, anger)? the prevention of them arising in the first place? What efforts might lead to the cultivation and maintenance of skillful states?
While tuning one's own lute strings is an ongoing adjustment, adoptees often begin life without a sense of what "in tune" even feels like.
This can manifest as difficulty regulating focus and energy, oscillating between hypervigilance (strings too tight) and withdrawal/dissociation (strings too loose).
I’ll go one further.
Freddie’s relationship with energy reflects han (한). Han feels like a complex blend of emotions: bitterness, wistfulness, shame, melancholy, and vengefulness resulting from generations of colonialism, and war that left Korea divided.
This can emerge pathologically as hwabyeong (화병, “fire” + “illness”), recognized in the fourth DSM as a somatic disorder specific to Korean bodies, and is more common in Korean middle-aged females.(They are boiling from within with rage. I kid you not.) 1
From a Buddhist perspective, han can be understood as a conditioned state, arising and passing due to causes and conditions. Recognizing this impermanence allows us to begin releasing our attachment to such emotions.
And we can name what is: transracial adoptees often struggle less with getting rid of attachments, and more with imagining anything permanent.
Effort in Familial Relationships
Writing down your emotions can be an act of reclamation.
The pandemic spurred a lot of reunions with birth families. This is when I met my own. I was naïve, curious, and excited. To shy away from focus, my biological mother surrounded herself with her five other children. I finally convinced my biological sisters to let me speak to her alone.
There we were, nearly eight decades of accumulated grief and thousands of miles between our screens. Using the little Korean I knew, I told her “You are beautiful” and “I love you.” She repeated, “I’m sorry” and “It’s my fault,” throughout our conversation.
Virtually present, we had an “X” in the top right corner, and no way to communicate what we really wanted to say: “Do you love me? Do you see me?” and “I hate what I did.”
Technologies facilitate Freddie’s closest relationships in the abstract way power, governance, and capital usually does, but also more overtly. Throughout the film, screens and devices both connect with and separate her from family.
Freddie’s adoptive mother appears against nature. Literally. Freddie sits on a bench, surrounded by greenery, and reaches out to her adoptive mom via Skype. The adoptive mom opens with infantilizing manipulation: disappointment that Freddie withheld her plans to go to Korea without her.
Freddie corrects her adoptive mother, saying this was never the plan. She was re-routed from original destination, Japan, to Seoul because of a typhoon. The facts did not appease her adoptive mother.
Throughout the film, Freddie takes on the emotions of her biological and adoptive family, none of whom have capacity to care for her own. She finds her biological father, a sad man full of guilt and trepidation in how to approach Freddie. His frequent, tearful, and often drunken apologies exemplified the unbalanced energy of han and a broken man’s grief over lost time.
Later, her biological dad sends her emails asking how she is, where she is. Her screen indicates she’s previously marked his email as “spam” and has not responded. On her birthday, a day that can be difficult for adoptees, he sends a picture with his other two (Korean) daughters.
She guffaws, hard, long, and unconvincingly at the photo in her spam folder, as if trying on what it would feel like to have received this as a daughter. What if those girls were her siblings? They are her siblings.
She collapses on the floor, worn out by the effort to have a father.
In the final vignette, Freddie is primarily alone. In the bathroom, Freddie reaches out to her biological mother, through an email she was given. She writes, “I think I am happy” and hits send.
Many adoptees, myself included, have experienced difficulty identifying and naming emotions—a common outcome of early separation. Further, Freddie’s adoptive mother’s dismissal of factual chronology indicates the emotional gaslighting many transracial adoptees report in their homes.
Her emotion-labeling, however tentative, is a milestone. Naming can belong to a continued effort to externalize what’s arising (emotions), and ultimately let go of them. Here, through sharing.
Her message bounces back. The email her birth mother gave her was invalid.
Effort in Social Relationships
While not the only path, formal meditation provides a baseline for regulating energy; a formal meditation practice can help attune to one’s embodied needs.
The analogy of the lute is one of present-moment resonance. It helps to slow down to hear it.
The film uses music and sound to illustrate Freddie's relationship with viriya. At a dinner with a one-night stand, Freddie pauses to listen. “Can you hear it?” She draws attention to the silent “music” around them. In another moment marked by quiet and stillness, Freddie meditates.
But on the whole, the film's score—alternating between minimalistic, dissonant, and unpredictable patterns—functions as an auditory representation of Freddie's unbalanced energy. Sometimes screeching, sometimes off-kilter like something is just a little off, sometimes off entirely.
One vignette features a scene where Freddie, her male artist friend, and an adoptee friend kiss each other to soothing music. A female vocalist cocoons the three of them in a tender, intimate moment.
And, with the announcement that a birth mother has been found, the music quickly changes. The vocalist is suddenly screeching. Soon, Freddie is attacking a much larger man. Her adoptee friend looks on. Her male artist friend gives her another pill.
Musical connection and transformation appears from the film's very beginning. When we first meet Freddie in a Korean hostel, her intensity is apparent as she stares fixedly at the woman behind the counter. Freddie asks what she’s listening to, and Tena shares her music, her culture, and ultimately her dinner table.
Tena's self-sufficient steadfastness and unfailing generosity contrasts with most men in the movie, inclined to impose their wants rather than seeing her needs. Naturally, Tena would become a love interest. But when Freddie tries to kiss her, Tena recoils, saying, “You are a sad person.”
In a later vignette, Maxim, who seems kind but not fully attuned to adoptee sensitivities, tells her who she looks like and tells others what her dreams are. He hears her father’s piano composition, dedicated to her. To him, she says, “I could wipe you from my life with a snap of my fingers.” And with that, Maxim and Freddie’s sobriety streak exits the movie.
In the final scene, Freddie sits alone at a piano and plays a simple tune.
Can you hear yours?
Energy to Move
Be kind to your body.
In the first vignette, Freddie dances by herself in the middle of the dance floor to lyrics that progress from “I never needed anybody” to “you can’t make it alone.” Her movement is unfiltered, simultaneously loose and staccato in form.
Adoptees are, by definition, born in transit. From the jump, Return to Seoul names the strangeness of an adoptee returning to a place they do not remember. Freddie's constant physical movement throughout the film—from France to Japan Korea, in busses, taxis, and planes, through crowded streets—represents a struggle to live at the pace of life.
Most tellingly, she is almost always someone else's passenger—surrendering control of her direction and pace to others, reflecting how adoptees have major life decisions made for us from birth. When she does attempt to drive herself, it ends in a crash, leaving her visibly injured.
Agency may feel unfamiliar to those whose earliest experience was having decisions made for us. For many adoptees, giving ourselves permission to exercise choice and direct our own lives requires intentional practice.
It may take time.
For adoptees specifically, practicing viriya means developing a relationship with our energy that might double down on the call to abandon ourselves.
Drop the story, the self, and step into this moment.
If you liked this, consider checking out:
Takeaway Practice
A place and permission reflection.
If you’re able, I recommend doing this practice standing.
Close your eyes for a few breaths. Then, open opening them, slowly take a 360-degree turn. Allow yourself to take in where you are. Notice what you enjoy or find beautiful. If you find yourself judging, note that, too, and then continue looking for things like colors and textures.
If you’re seated or lying down, you can do the same practice just moving your torso or head.
Attune to the environment. What is the most distant sound you can hear? What is the closest sound? How warm or cool is the room?
Ask yourself: What does my body need right now? To stretch? To yawn? To breathe more deeply? To lie down?
Can you let yourself have that?
Take a moment to reflect on this experience.
Creative Coalition: April 6th, 3-7 PST
Join the Creative Coalition for a unique collaborative storytelling experience to practice mindful listening, speech, and community building.
Give yourself permission to drive a new narrative. Using Avery Alder's Ribbon Drive, we'll embark on a virtual road trip, building relationships, and navigating emotional landscapes together, such as in Little Miss Sunshine and Thelma and Louise.
Newbies to gameplay are welcome, it would probably help to have a little formal meditation under your belt for this one.
Asking Rate: $80
Discount code = Hive50 = 50% off
No one is turned away for lack of funds. If the registration fee is cost-prohibitive, please ask for the link via email or DM.
Bio
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) is a queer, transracial adoptee and co-editor of Notes from the Inflection Point, a newsletter dedicated to processing and expressing climate-related emotions. They are neither a mental health provider, nor an authorized teacher in any Buddhist lineage. They hold a PhD in Performance Studies and are currently LOVING Hadrian’s Wall. And hip hop dancing.
Min, Sung Kil, et al. “Symptoms to Use for Diagnostic Criteria of Hwa-Byung, an Anger Syndrome.” Psychiatry Investigation, vol. 6, no. 1, Mar. 2009, pp. 7–12. psychiatryinvestigation.org, https://doi.org/10.4306/pi.2009.6.1.7.