Ali

A daughter reclaims a name and a past

Photos by Murphy Woodhouse

The name that Ali Pruner has now is not the one she began with.  

Ali was born in Busan, Korea. Her mother, unwed and in her early 20s, had little to give her. But she gave her a name, Eunjoo.

By the time Ali was six, her mother could no longer care for her and her two younger siblings. Among Ali’s few memories of Korea is the day her mother brought them to an orphanage. It felt exciting at first, and then Ali realized her mother was gone. It was the last time she saw her. 

When Ali and her brother and sister were adopted a few months later by a family in Oregon, their new parents changed their names. Eunjoo became Alisha – Ali for short – though her adoptive parents chose to keep Eunjoo as her middle name. 

“I always hated it,” Ali says of the vestige, passing her hand over a tattoo so new that it’s not yet healed. It’s on her right forearm, and it’s of a stargazer lily, her favorite flower. Curved along the stem in Korean Hangul letters is her birth name: Park Eun Joo.

“Recently, my feelings have changed,” Ali says.

After she was adopted, everything was new. She met her new parents, who had three biological children, for the first time at the airport in Portland. It was January 1987, and by September when she started first grade in Bend, she’d already learned English. 

In the 80s and 90s, there were almost no other Asian people in her community. Ali remembers feeling overwhelmingly different, and her Korean middle name was one more thing that made her feel that way. 

At 15, she left her adoptive parents’ house to live with family friends who she refers to as her foster parents. She stayed in Oregon until 2008, when she moved to Kuna with her then-husband. 

Ali is a mother herself now, and when she thinks about the young woman who gave up her children almost 40 years ago, she can’t imagine the strength it took. Despite her feelings about her middle name, Ali chose to give her daughter, now a teenager, a Korean middle name, too. She says that’s probably when her feelings about Eunjoo began to soften. 

Ali had long wanted a tattoo of a stargazer lily. The idea to include her Korean name came to her sometime last year. She recalls her adoptive father keeping a piece of paper in his wallet that she’d written her Korean name on soon after the adoption, when she still knew how to make Hangul letters. She figures she must have kept thinking about that name – an adrift little girl trying to square her old self with the new. 

“When I look at it on my arm, the way it’s written, it’s very familiar to me,” she says.

The tattoo was done by local artist Allyssa Strain. At first Ali wasn’t sure where on her body it should go. She considered her chest, just below her collar bone. But when she held up the stencil, it didn’t feel right because she wouldn’t be able to see it except in a mirror. She almost decided to not get the tattoo at all.

Yet on her forearm, with the letters facing her, it seemed to belong.

“It’s right here where I can see it,” she says. “I think it’s so beautiful.”