Mindy Tsonas Choi
Mindy is a maker, mah nyuh 마녀, and cultural organizer who facilitates circles of creativity for collective belonging and care.
She believes in using art and alchemy as mediums for interconnection, somatic healing and radical, liberatory change. As a transracial, transnational adopted person from the South Korean diaspora, this deeply informs her embodied perspective on how we belong with ourselves and one another.
Mindy’s work is focused towards:
Expressive and embodied creativity for nervous system resilience
Relational somatics through the 5 Bodies from an animist lens
Belonging as inherent interdependence, not individual safety
Practicing interstitial ecology unmapped from divisive systems
Holding wholeness as a praxis for bridging and repair
Practicing radical aliveness and regeneration (beauty, wonder, imagination, pleasure, play…)
Korean adoptee, AANHPI and DEI advocacy
Queer and kink community organizing
A Story of Reclaiming Belonging
As a transracial, intercountry adopted person, it has been critical for me to understand the harmful dominant systems that created separation and otherness to reclaim my truth and belonging. In a culture that always reinforces how I do not belong, my life experiences and intersecting identities have urged me to get to the root of how belonging functions and operates.
Through years of searching, learning and healing, I’ve come to see how capitalist narratives co-opt and commodify belonging into something separate, individual and external - 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 an equivalent for in most western perspectives), which means something akin to a broadly unified and anchoring collective kinship, care, good-will and shared struggle connecting all Koreans.
Finding my way back to belonging with myself and other beings, I realize is not a single destination as much as it is a reorientation, a radical act, a lifelong practice, and a wild mystical calling.
Cultural Bio
Along with nearly 200,000 other children, I became part of the latter first-wave of international adoptions out of post-war Korea to the US in 1972 at the age of 10 months old. I grew up in a loving, upper middle class, white family and community just north of Boston. Though I had access to many “opportunities for a better life”, unnamed and unaware, I deeply struggled with the inherent trauma of my adoption, forced assimilation, and resulting racism and othering for most of my life.
In my early 30's, just after the arrival of my first child and my first trip back to Korea, creativity became the catalyst and portal through which I would finally begin to explore who I was on my own terms. Sharing my art and writing became a practice of being brave with my voice, finding my own medicine, building community, reconnecting with spirit, and embodying my truth beyond external trauma and oppression.
Creativity saved me, where systems, institutions and traditional western therapy, failed.
Through multiple facets and identities, over many seasons and decades with the help of countless artists, healers, facilitators, activists and mentors, my personal healing and reclamation has been iterative, incremental and ongoing.
During the summer of 2020, with the full support of my family, I actively began my birth family search. It took me half a lifetime and a global and racial pandemic to make such a potentially life-changing decision.
For now, I am still searching and healing towards wholeness and belonging everyday. I’m actively living the questions (Rilke) and learning to love across wide oceans, both actual and metaphorical.
Location
I live on unceeded land of the Algonquian-speaking people of the southern region of the Wabanaki Confederacy, and what is colonially known as Massachusetts. As a community-made and collectively supported artist, I grow more humble every day in this human experience as I aim to create and thrive within collapsing systems of racial capitalism and hetero-patriarchal empire.
