Mindy Tsonas Choi
Mindy is a maker, manyeo and cultural organizer who facilitates circles of confluence, creativity, collective belonging and care.
She believes in using art and alchemy as mediums for generative interconnection and radical change. Her lineage as a transracial, transnational adopted person from the South Korean diaspora, deeply informs her work and organizing.
Mindy’s work is focused towards:
Expressive art and embodied practices for collective healing Relational somatics as a tool for attachment repair
Belonging as inherent interdependence, not individual safety
Korean adoptee and AAPI advocacy
Queer, kink community organizing
Movement cycles of iteration, integration and defragmentation, for collective wholeness
Liminality, mystery, elemental alchemy and energy, from an East Asian animist perspective
Beauty, pleasure, wild imagination as regeneration
A Story of Reclaiming Belonging
As a transracial, intercountry adopted person, it has been essential for me to understand the harmful dominant systems that created my separation and otherness, in order to find my truth. Coming out of the adoptee fog has been both a heart-opening and painful journey of rediscovery. In a culture that says I do not belong, my life experiences and intersecting identities have sent me seeking a deeper understanding of how we all seek to belong.
Through years of searching, learning and healing, I’ve come to see how capitalist narratives co-opt and commodify belonging into something separate and external that we as individuals must strive for - which can be lost or gained, bought and sold.
It has also been through my ongoing process of reclaiming my lost Korean heritage, that I have learned about the cultural idea of Jeong (a word we do not have a direct equivalent for in English), which means something akin to a broadly unified and highly regarded collective kinship, care and good will shared amongst all Koreans - an ideology that highlights and challenges the way belonging operates within different cultures, and invites us to consider other possibilities of how we might better belong.
Finding my way back to belonging, with myself, others and the earth, I realize is not a single destination as much as it is a reclamation and reorientation, a lifelong practice, and a wild mystical calling.
Cultural Bio
Along with nearly 200,000 other children to date, Mindy became part of the first wave of international adoptions out of post-war Korea to the US in 1972, at the age of 10 months old. She grew up in a loving, upper middle class, all white family and community just north of Boston. Though she had access to many “opportunities for a better life”, unnamed and unaware, she deeply struggled with the inherent trauma of her adoption, forced assimilation, and resulting racism, for most of her life.
In Mindy’s early 30's, just after the arrival of her first son and her first trip back to Korea, creativity became the catalyst and portal through which she would finally begin to explore who she was on her own terms. Sharing her art and writing became a practice of being brave with her voice, finding her spirit and medicine, building community, and embodying her truth beyond trauma and oppression.
Creativity saved Mindy, where systems and institutions failed.
Her personal healing happened in increments, through multiple facets and identities, over many seasons and decades with the help of countless artists, healers, therapists, facilitators, activists and mentors. Healing and reclamation is always iterative, nuanced and ongoing.
During the summer of 2020, with the full support of her family, she officially began her birth family search. It took Mindy half a lifetime and a global and racial pandemic to finally feel ready to make such a potentially life-changing decision. Later that same year, she changed her name professionally to reflect her Korean identity by reclaiming the surname she was assigned prior to my adoption. She will always hold hope to know her true family name and biological lineage.
For now, Mindy am still searching and reorienting towards wholeness and belonging everyday. She’s actively living the questions and learning to love across wide oceans, both actual and metaphorical.
Location
Mindy lives and creates on unceeded Wabanaki territory, on the northern seacoast of what is currently known as Massachusetts. As a community-made and collectively supported artist, she grows more humble every day in this human experience as she aims to create and thrive within collapsing systems of racism, ableism, capitalism, and patriarchy.
Learn more about Mindy’s work at witchcraftivism.com
Cultural bio informed by the work of Desiree Adaway
