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Identity as Contradiction: Tori Gosse interviews Hayden Park

“The First Law of Adoptee Physics” threads musical theory, physics, and adoptee identity into a single emotional narrative. How did you arrive at music, specifically the G-clef, as the governing metaphor for origin and selfhood? Was that connection intuitive from the start or did it emerge through revision?

I wish I had a more interesting answer, but the truth is, music is just how my brain has always worked. I started playing piano at five and violin at six, so by the time I was old enough to think about thinking, music was already the language I was doing it in. When I write, I hear rhythm before I see sentences. So when I sat down to write about being adopted, all this musical vocabulary was already there, and it started attaching itself to the ideas I was trying to work through.

The G-clef specifically came from me thinking about beginnings. I was stuck on this problem of where a life actually starts. Is it birth? Is it the moment you’re named? Is it when you arrive in your family? And I remembered learning about clefs as a kid, how the G-clef doesn’t make any sound at all. It’s just a marker that says, “this note is G, figure out everything else from there.” And something clicked because that’s exactly what my Korean name felt like. Hyoeun was this designation placed on me by a woman I’ll never know, and even though she left the next day, that name became the reference point for everything. It’s the G from which all my other notes get measured, even now.

The other things, the F-hole and the bridge and the scroll, came later. I was revising and I realized that if the clef worked as a metaphor, maybe the whole violin could. And it did, in ways that honestly surprised me. The F-hole is a wound cut into the instrument, but it’s the wound that lets the sound out. That’s my adoption file, this tiny opening through which the only story I have about my origins escapes. The bridge bears all this tension between the strings and the body, and that’s the space between my two identities, Korean and American, holding everything taut. The scroll is just decorative, it doesn’t do anything acoustically, and that really reminds me of my birth name, beautiful but not functional in my daily life.

One of the striking tensions in your piece is the “quantum” duality of truth, where you write, “my parents are my parents. My parents are not my parents.” What did you find most challenging about writing an experience that is defined by contradiction? And how did you approach conveying that paradox on the page without trying to resolve it?

The challenge is that everyone wants you to resolve things in your life, make the decision right now. Just the same, there’s this huge cultural pressure around adoption narratives to pick a side. Either you’re the grateful adoptee who got rescued and everything is beautiful, or you’re the wounded adoptee searching for your “real” identity. And I get why those narratives exist, they’re clean and easy to understand. But neither one is actually true to my experience. What’s true is that I am completely loved by my parents, and I am also haunted by a stranger. I am grateful for my life, and I am also grieving something I can’t even name. These aren’t phases I move through. They exist at the same time, always.

So the quantum physics thing came from genuine frustration. I needed a framework that allowed for superposition, where two contradictory things can both be true until observation forces a collapse.

The sentence “Thank you. And also, how could you?” was the hardest thing I’ve ever written. It felt like betrayal in every direction. Like I was being ungrateful to my parents by acknowledging the loss, and ungrateful to my birth mother by acknowledging the gain and somehow betraying myself by admitting I don’t have it figured out. But I also knew it was the truest sentence in the essay. If I’d softened it or tried to make it resolve into something neater, the whole piece would have been a lie.

Music actually helped me be okay with that. In music, dissonance isn’t a mistake you have to fix. It’s tension that creates meaning. Some of the most gorgeous moments in Sibelius Violin Concerto are the more dissonant double stops. I wanted the essay to end like that. Not with a nice tidy chord, but with the dissonance still ringing.

The piece uses highly lyrical language but also relies on factual material—adoption documents, timelines, names. How did you balance the poetic voice with the weight of real history and lived experience? Did you ever have to pull back or push further in either direction?

The facts had to stay ugly. That’s a strange way to put it, but the language in adoption documents has this bureaucratic coldness that’s almost violent. “Mother: Office worker, single, good health. Father: Unknown.” That’s it. That’s half my genetic history reduced to one word: Unknown. I wasn’t going to pretty that up or bury it in metaphor because the starkness is part of the truth. The system that processed me into existence didn’t care about poetry. It cared about checkboxes.

But facts by themselves don’t make you feel anything. Reading “Father: Unknown” on a page is different from understanding what it’s like to be seventeen and holding that page and realizing this is all you’ll ever have. So the lyrical parts of the essay are me trying to bridge that gap, to make readers feel the weight of facts that might otherwise just slide past them. The poetry isn’t ornament. It’s an attempt to make the information land the way it lands in my actual life.

I definitely went too far in early drafts. I’d get really elaborate with metaphors, and my mentors at Iowa would point out that I was using the lyricism to hide. Like, if I made the sentence beautiful enough, maybe I wouldn’t have to say the hard thing directly. Revision was a lot of cutting back, stripping away the pretty language that was actually just avoidance. The goal was to earn every moment of poetry by grounding it in something concrete and real. You can’t just float around being lyrical. You have to be tethered.

You are the youngest ever winner of this contest. How has being a young writer shaped the way you approach nonfiction? Do you feel it gives you a certain clarity, freedom, or even pressure when writing about identity?

The thing about being young is that I’m not looking back at this from a safe distance. I’m in it. My birth mother was probably around nineteen when she had me. I’m seventeen. That gap is small enough that I can actually feel the proximity of her situation in a way that might be different if I were writing this at forty or fifty. When I write about her, I have to imagine forward a few years from where I currently stand, and it’s scary how close that is.

There’s also freedom in not having it figured out yet. This essay is how I understand my story right now. It’s not a conclusion. I fully expect to feel differently about all of this as I get older, and I think that’s fine. The essay doesn’t pretend to be the final word. It’s a snapshot of understanding at a particular moment, and there’s something honest about that. I’m not claiming wisdom I don’t have.

The pressure mostly comes from people assuming young writers can’t handle serious material. But I’ve been navigating this contradiction my whole life. The depth isn’t about age. It’s about how long you’ve been paying attention to something.

WYour writing feels deeply musical—there are crescendos, motifs, and variations. Are there writers, musicians, or other art forms that influence the rhythm of your sentences or the way you build an emotional progression on the page?

It’s genuinely how I think, not a technique I apply afterward. When I’m writing, I hear it. I notice where the rhythm wants to speed up or slow down, where a phrase from earlier could come back in a different context, where a pause needs to happen. I draft out loud a lot, actually. If a sentence doesn’t sound right when I say it, I know something’s wrong even if I can’t identify what yet.

Ocean Vuong has been huge for me. The way his sentences accumulate and repeat and transform feels like music more than prose. That long sentence in my essay about the Wednesday breakfast, the one that keeps going and going and building, that’s me trying to do what he does. He showed me that a sentence can become almost incantatory if you let it breathe and gather momentum. Claudia Rankine too, for different reasons. I love how she shifts between modes, lyric and documentary and image, within a single piece. That formal flexibility feels musical, like changing keys.

For actual music, Chopin is the biggest presence in my writing. I quote him in the essay because he’s the composer I’ve spent the most time with, and I think his nocturnes specifically shaped how I understand restraint. Chopin knew how to use silence. He knew that a pause or a held note can do more work than adding more notes ever could. I try to do that with white space and sentence breaks. Lately I've been thinking about Radiohead a lot too, how they build these massive structures out of anxiety and beauty. And Phil Ochs, for the way folk music can carry grief so directly without flinching from it. Those are really different influences, but they all feed into how I think about building feeling across a page.

What are you working on now, either in writing or in life? Are there themes from “The First Law of Adoptee Physics” that you feel you’re still exploring, or are you moving into new creative territory?

College applications are eating my brain right now, or at least up until just a few days ago. But even that has become a weird kind of writing project, trying to explain why the fact that I do so many different things isn’t scattered but actually connected. I play piano and violin, I write fiction and nonfiction and poetry and plays, I code, I make visual art. People see that list and assume I’m just dabbling in everything, but it all comes from the same place. I don’t want medium to limit what I can express. If a story would work better as an interactive website than a static page, I should be able to build it that way. If an idea needs music and text together, I should be able to make them talk to each other.

I’ve been working on digital literature, which is basically interactive fiction that lives online. The way you navigate becomes part of the story. I like the idea of the reader having to make choices, of the text responding to them. It makes reading feel more like music in some ways, where the interpretation matters. I’m also writing songs, trying to find something between folk and experimental. And there’s a stage play that keeps growing in the back of my mind, based on that dream sequence at the end of the essay with the train station and the woman across the tracks. I want to see what that scene could become with actual silence and space, the way theater allows.

The adoption themes aren’t going away. Identity as contradiction, the body wanting to belong, what you owe the people who made you, I think I’ll be working through those questions for the rest of my life. But I’m also trying to find the joy in it, not just the grief. There’s something fierce about being a beloved forgery. The love that built me wasn’t guaranteed by genetics. It was chosen, every day, on purpose. The wound that makes the music possible isn’t only a wound. It’s also the opening that lets the sound escape.

 

 

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