There’s a particular kind of randomness to life that sometimes feels less like chance and more like design. Jillian Kurovski experienced this twice over, both times because of spiders.
The 27-year-old Ph.D. student was doing spider research in Guam when an email arrived with the subject line that would reshape her life: her birth mother wanted to meet her. Kurovski had initiated a birth search through her adoption agency in 2018, almost casually, while planning a research trip. Her lab manager offered her a choice of travel routes through Hawaii or South Korea. She picked South Korea, her birth country, which she hadn’t seen since being adopted at eight months old.
That three-day layover in 2018 proved transformative enough that she spent the next several years figuring out how to go back. She applied for the Fulbright Presidential STEM scholarship, ostensibly to continue her research on spider reproduction. In July 2025, she arrived in Seoul for a year-long program. This time, her birth family picked her up from the airport.
The Weight of Belonging to Two Worlds
Growing up in Iowa, Kurovski knew she was Korean, but she didn’t have language for what that meant. She was raised in a loving, predominantly white family with Irish and Czech heritage. Her adoption was never hidden, yet something else was: the actual experience of being the only Korean face in rooms built for people who looked like her white parents.
A junior high assignment crystallized the feeling. She needed to bring an artifact from her family’s heritage. Should she bring something Czech or Irish? But she had no connection to those cultures. Should she bring something Korean? She didn’t know anything about Korea. She ended up printing a picture of an Irish friendship ring. “Even while I was presenting it, it just felt like a total lie,” she recalls.
That kind of disconnection from your own heritage while holding others’ doesn’t leave you. It sits in your chest and waits.
Language as a Bridge (and a Gap)
Living in Seoul has given Kurovski something more valuable than a comfortable identity narrative: it’s given her complexity as a lived experience rather than a abstract concept. She texts her birth family about everyday things now, sends back YouTube videos her dad discovers. Her siblings know enough English to have conversations. But with her mom, there’s that gap.
“I wish I could hear her tell a full story,” Kurovski says. “I want to know about her life, and I want her to know mine.”
This is the real work of reunion, isn’t it? Not the dramatic airport moment, but the grinding, unglamorous business of learning someone across a language barrier. It’s tender and it’s frustrating, and it doesn’t get resolved neatly.
The Unexpected Parallels Between Spiders and Identity
Kurovski studies animals that most people fear without really understanding them. Spiders are misunderstood predators, existing in the margins between threat and prey. She draws a line to her own experience and to adoptees more broadly: “People talk about both without really knowing anything about them.”
There’s something honest in that observation. Adoptees occupy a similar liminal space—not quite one thing or the other, but somewhere in the middle. Multicultural people know this too. You’re never fully believed as a member of either world. You’re always asked to prove your membership, your authenticity, your right to claim space.
Through her research on reproduction and mating behavior, Kurovski has also developed deeper respect for both of her mothers. Being a parent in any circumstance is difficult. Being a birth mother who made an adoption plan? Being an adoptive mother who raised a child across cultures? Both require a kind of strength that deserves acknowledgment.
Finding Peace in Both/And
Kurovski used to struggle when people told her she wasn’t Korean or she wasn’t American. Living in Korea, experiencing the culture firsthand, and having her birth family pass it down for the first time has shifted something fundamental.
“I realized I love being Korean, and I also love being American,” she says. There are things about both that she genuinely appreciates. Her adoptive family remains incredibly close, her biggest supporters. Her adoptive mother was apparently more excited about the reunion than Kurovski herself. The love there is uncomplicated.
The point isn’t that one family replaced another or that meeting her birth family somehow “fixed” Kurovski’s identity. The point is that she stopped trying to choose. She stopped treating her heritage and her upbringing as mutually exclusive categories and started treating them as the layered, sometimes contradictory truth of who she is.
That’s not a resolution so much as it is acceptance. And maybe that’s what happens when you stop asking yourself to fit neatly into one box: you finally have room to breathe.
