Famous Adopted People

by Alice Stephens

  “That kick that your girlfriend gave you? Did it feel anything like this?” And I drove the pointed toe of my red satin pump as hard as I could between his legs. He dropped to his knees to hold communion with the tiger, two pairs of glassy eyes staring back at each other. “You see what they did to my nose? If I ever get the chance I’m going to do the same thing to your dick, Ji Hoon.”

  And I swaggered forth toward the dining room with a hip-swinging victory strut, mouth cracked into a most un-Sally-like grin. Face crimson, Ji Hoon waddled in about five minutes later, lowering himself delicately into a chair.

  The dinner started with snails poached in garlic butter, and Cookie kept the courses coming, each one paired with a different wine, so by the time we arrived at the venison steak, we were all sozzled. “I shot this motherfucker myself!” Jonny boasted as he sawed into dense, oozing flesh.

  “Oh? Are there many wild animals in these parts?” I asked, savoring the duskiness of the meat, which Miura-san had prepared au poivre.

  Food reeled about in the little porthole of his mouth like laundry in a dryer. “Did you know that Korea has one of the best game parks in the world? I call it Dead Man’s Zoo, DMZ for short.” He adopted the dramatic tones of a North Korean newscaster, his voice dropping to a deep bass, trembling with passionate conviction: “Over one thousand square kilometers of undisturbed wilderness with the greatest biodiversity in all of Asia, home to 5,097 species of plants and animals, including many endangered species like the Siberian tiger, the black bear, and the red-crowned crane.”

  “The DMZ?” I frowned. “But surely you can’t hunt there. Isn’t it heavily mined?”

  “He sends in a platoon to capture the animals,” Honey announced with great pride, as if he had done something extraordinarily brilliant, like cured cancer or mapped the human genome.

  “No, they’re not from the army,” Jonny snapped at her, spearing another chunk of meat. “I wouldn’t waste our soldiers that way. These are common criminals who are given the choice of either standing trial for their crimes or going on a mission to the Dead Man’s Zoo. Funny thing, not one of them has ever chosen to stand trial.”

  “Funny thing,” Ji Hoon echoed in an amazed I-never-thought-about-that tone, and we all laughed.

  “They are told that if they survive the mission, they can go home. A lot of them make it home alive. They really do!” His cheeks were swollen with meat, a little trickle of juice leaking out the corner of his mouth.

  “But the animals never do!” I joined in the half-wit banter, smiling woodenly, turning my head this way and that like Sally did when there was a break in the song.

  “I like to hunt on horseback, with a pistol,” he said, nodding with great satisfaction.

  “Like a cowboy,” his mother crowed, and he seemed pretty pleased with that comparison, pointing a forefinger at her and pretending to shoot repeatedly with his thumb.

  As we were being served chocolate ganache cake, the icing so glossy I could see my reflection in it, Jonny hefted his snifter of brandy and bellowed, “Here’s to my baby daughter!”

  We all thrust our glasses in the air and then let them waver there uncertainly, Ji Hoon, Yolanda, and me waiting for Honey to be the first one to react.

  “Is Sally pregnant?” Honey shrieked. “Oh, Jonny.” A long, sibilant sigh of relief leaked slowly from her parted lips.

  “No, it’s not the singer,” he said with a teasing smile.

  Honey leaned back as if slapped. “What? Whose is it?”

  His eyes thinned into new moon crescents as a lecherous grin took over his face, evoking a dimple just like Mindy’s that pocked his cheek under his right eye. “Remember that Joy Brigade candidate you didn’t like because of her bad teeth and the mole above her lip? Used to be a gymnast but now’s a dancer? She’s still pretty limber, let me tell you.”

  “Poor Sally, I can only imagine how she must feel. Married so recently,” Honey hissed, pushing her cake away untouched. “Oh, the dirty little slut. I knew she was no good! She had the look of a real backstabber, like she’d do anything for success.”

  I was surprised at her vehement dislike of the mistress. After all, she was a mistress herself.

  “When’s this baby due?” Honey fretted.

  “Three months,” Jonny said, his voice thick with icing.

  “And a girl you say?”

  He nodded, running his tongue like a windshield wiper over his chocolate-smeared teeth.

  “Well, at least there’s that. Sally better hurry up and give you a son.” Honey nodded seriously at the importance of her pronouncement. She seemed to be studying his face carefully—perhaps worrying about that recessive gene.

  “Her name’s Sol Ju, not Sally,” Jonny growled irritably. “Stop calling her that!”

  “Why, Jonny,” she gasped, hand a shapely and lacquer-taloned shield over her heart.

  “And why can’t you be happy that I’m having a daughter? It’s your first grandchild, after all! Unless this one”—he jerked his head in my direction—“had a bastard baby she had to give up for adoption too.”

  Honey cried, “Jonny! How can you be so cruel?” Not that she was standing up for me; she was merely embarrassed that he was bringing up her shameful past. “Of course I’m pleased for you. Only, don’t you think you should be paying more attention to your wife? We need that baby boy!”

  “Oh, don’t worry, Moms. We’ll get there. Take a chill pill.”

  Later that evening, after we had retired to the Versailles room for karaoke, while Honey and Ji Hoon were singing “Reunited,” I whispered to Jonny, “I’m not sure if you remember, but you promised to send a computer programmer to help me with that website she wants me to build.”

  “Of course I remembered,” Jonny declared, lips flecked with soggy bits of tobacco from the gargantuan cigar he was sucking on. “I have just the right guy picked out for you.”

  “Thank you very much.” I kowtowed toward him from my seat, my forehead touching my knees. “I’m honored that you remembered. I know you have much more important things to do.”

  “Not really,” he said. “Just waiting now for the old man to kick it. Then the fireworks really begin.” He grinned around the soggy butt of the cigar. “And hey, great job with Moms. She used to call me five, six times a day, boo-hoo-hooing about how bored she was and how this wasn’t the life she had imagined for herself. These last few months, I’ve hardly heard from her at all.” He clenched his pudgy hand into a fist and gave me a thumbs-up.

  “Glad to be of service,” I said, folding at the waist once again. “She and I have a lot of fun together. It’s been easy.”

  Life in Japan was easy. Everyone was polite and helpful, the streets were clean, the trains on time, the bars always open. My job was easy too, and the students in my elite Fukuoka high school adored me. I was a celebrity with a coterie of admirers, including a first-year student by the name of Kenji, who even joined the English Club, though he was largely absent because of baseball practice, which was a good thing because his presence ruined the vibe, the rather nerdy girls who made up the rest of the club embarrassed to the point of muteness whenever he showed up, so that it was just Kenji and me talking to each other as they giggled into their hands or hid behind their hair.

  The majority of my colleagues in the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme were fresh out of university, and this was their first real job. But to call it a real job was a bit of a stretch. We were props who were given busywork or no work at all, spending the majority of the day in the staff room rather than the classroom. More care was spent arranging a Friday night out than on lesson plans, and because my apartment was a short taxi ride from one of the entertainment centers of Fukuoka, on weekend mornings all eight tatami mats of my tiny apartment were strewn with inert bodies.

  Filling the empty hours of the workday was sometimes a challenge, so I started to bring my journal to school, writing in it until my hand ached, the side bruised with ink. When I finished rel
ating the details of my day, I’d compose sketches of the other teachers, dissect strange Japanese rituals, muse about the dynamics of the student body, ponder the bizarrities of Japanese TV, challenging myself to organize my thoughts into a coherent analysis of any given subject. The Japanese teachers admired me for my diligence and work ethic. They didn’t care what I was working on, just that I looked like I was working hard.

  During my second year, Kenji asked me to tutor him once a week during lunch. It was not unusual for students to request extracurricular assistance, but mostly it was a one-time thing: help with an essay, a speech for a competition, or an application that had to be completed in English. Sometimes his friends would crowd against the window of the classroom and make comments that I could not understand, though the laughter that followed needed no translation. Once in a while, one of them would make kissy noises, and Kenji would spring up and chase them away. Even the teachers knew what he was doing, as my supervisor had smiled knowingly when I asked for permission to use the classroom and commented, “That Kenji is a bold one, isn’t he?” No one, including myself, thought there was any harm in it.

  One cold February day, we had brought photos of our families to show each other while reviewing the passive and active verb forms. His photo showed a jocularly smiling father, as if one moment of family coziness could make up for the late nights he was obliged to spend at the office; a mother with her face obscured under a bucket hat; a chunky older sister in her school sports uniform, glaring aggressively at the camera; and adorable little Kenji, one eye squinted against the sun, the other holding up a Pokémon figure. He carefully studied my photo as I pointed out my mother and Scott, explaining that my parents were divorced. He was disappointed that I had not brought a photo of my father and asked, “Isn’t he Japanese?”

  “Who? My father?” Shivering in the unheated classroom, I rubbed my hands between my thighs for warmth. “No. He’s white. I was adopted from Korea.”

  “What is adopted?” he asked, reaching for his dictionary.

  I spelled it out for him.

  “Adopt, adopt, adopt,” he muttered, flicking through the tissue-thin pages. “Yosh! Adopt!” He read the definition and then gazed at me with such tender pity that I looked away from him with a little laugh. “I didn’t know,” he whispered reverently. “Just like Toby-san.”

  I was irritated by his reaction and ready to get back to the warmth of the kerosene-heated staff room. “Who’s Toby-san?” I asked curtly.

  “He is a famous ski… ski… player? How do you say?” He mimed a slalom with his shoulders, making the noise skis might make over slushy snow.

  “Skier?”

  “Skier. He won in Torino Olympics.” Leaning toward me, he was excited, forgetting to be flirtatious and cute. “Like you, he was Korean baby. He adopted with American family…”

  “Ah!” I clapped my hands, glad to get back to grammar. “This is a perfect example of the use of the passive verb form. Toby-san was adopted by his parents. His parents adopted Toby-san. Do you see? Toby-san had no choice, he was just a baby—”

  “He was three years old,” Kenji interrupted me eagerly. “He… nan darou?” Kenji struggled to come up with the words, fingers plucking at the awkward bristle of his adolescent facial hair. “He was at the shop… and cannot see his mother, cannot meet her again.”

  “He got lost?” I had become fairly adept at translating high school English.

  “Sou, sou,” Kenji agreed. “A family from America was adopted him…”

  “No, no,” I protested. “The family is active. They are the one who take the action. The family adopted Toby-san.” I hugged myself to convey the adopting as active.

  “Toby-san won buronzu in Olympics. Because he is like this”—Kenji pulled the corners of his eyes taut—“he is very famous in Japan and Korea. Quickly, many mothers and fathers in Korea say, ‘Maybe Toby-san is my child.’ Everyone wants to be mother and father of Toby-san.”

  “Really? He has people clamoring to be his parents?” Talk about a famous adopted person. This guy was living the adoptee fantasy! “Did he find his parents?”

  “Yes! His father and his brother. They are looking the same, all of them! Same hair, same earring. It is so surprise.”

  I couldn’t wait to get to the computer to search for the story and then send it to Mindy, who was planning to register with a group called MotherFinders to search for her birth mother. “What about Toby-san’s mother?”

  “It is so sad,” Kenji said mournfully. “Toby-san does not meet her. The mother and father divorce, same as your mother and father. She does not want to see Toby-san never again.”

  “Oh.” Probably better not to tell Mindy about Toby Dawson after all.

  Six days after Jonny’s visit, I entered my office to find a stranger sitting at my desk, a laptop computer propped open in front of him. He sprang up, pecking at the air with a flurry of bows. “Hello, miss. My name is Gun Ho. I am here to help you with your website.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Gun Ho. You can call me Lisa.” I stuck out my hand, and he stared at it for a moment before fluttering into another series of bows. His skin was ghostly white, as if the only light he ever saw came from the glow of a computer screen. His head was too large for his body, his face too large for his features, which were oddly clustered in the center, so he seemed all forehead, cheeks, and chin.

  We sat side by side, and though I would turn my head toward him as we conversed, he never looked at me, addressing the computer instead. “Please describe what kind of website you would like.”

  “Well, first and foremost, its purpose is to entertain, but it is also meant to advise, uplift, promote patriotism, and, of course, praise the Dear Leader.” I gestured at the pin he wore over the left breast pocket of his drab olive jacket. “We want something eye-catching, with bold graphics, lots of photos, fun fonts. A home page that features the buzziest stories, and then different tabs you can click on, one for sports, another for fashion, another for household tips, that sort of thing. Um, can I show some examples of websites whose design we might want to model ours after?”

  He bowed toward the computer, which I took as a yes. Fingers trembling with anticipation, I touched the keyboard, the plastic so smooth and inviting, so familiar. As I typed into the browser, he intoned, “Please be aware that it is forbidden to go to social media and news sites. Every stroke you make on the keyboard is being recorded and may be reviewed in order to verify that you are not trying to communicate with anyone. If that happens, the consequences will be very severe, for both you and me.”

  “Oh, yes, sure.” I gulped.

  After I showed him the desirable features of several different websites, Gun Ho nodded, his neck a thin stalk to his dandelion head. “I understand, miss. May I ask who will be using this website?”

  “The people.”

  “Which people?”

  “The North Korean people.”

  He blinked rapidly, his eyes squinching into small wrinkles. “Which North Korean people?”

  “All of them!” I was beginning to get irritated with him. Perhaps he wasn’t too bright. No doubt he was the lowest of the low, the office runt dispatched to help me while his colleagues sweated away at the real work of programming viruses and breaching highly secure networks.

  His eyes strobed shut several times before he said, “OK.”

  “There’s one other website I want to show you, but I can’t remember its title,” I said, speaking softly so that he wouldn’t hear the nervous tremor in my voice. My fingers hovered over the keyboard as I racked my brain. I couldn’t enter names into the search engine, as that would be an immediate red flag, and even if Gun Ho wasn’t bright enough to catch what I was doing, somebody else was sure to be. What phrase might I use that could lead me to what I was looking for, namely that people were looking for me? The only thing I could think of was “famous adopted people.” Up came the list, all the usual links to listicles of adopted celebrities. But there
on the bottom of the page was a website that was actually called famousadoptedpeople.com. That was new. I clicked on it, summoning a blog, the title a theater marquee at the top of the page, a rotating gallery of images beneath it—a yin-yang symbol, the American and South Korean flags, a mother cradling her baby, a joint, a diary, a typewriter, an American passport—and then, beneath that, text. The latest entry, dated from a few days ago, was titled “Toby Dawson.” As I quickly scanned what was written there, I wondered if I were hallucinating. Those were my words, an excerpt from my journal.

  After the Toby Dawson incident, the Korean government began to do a lot of Seoul searching on the issue of exporting their babies to affluent white countries instead of taking care of them themselves. Toby’s story is problematic in so many ways. Instead of searching for his parents, the authorities quickly introduced him into the adoption pipeline and shipped him off to the US. But I also suspect that the family purposely wanted to lose him, since apparently no one ever went searching for him. The South Koreans want to get rid of their babies; the Americans want to take them. I think about my own mother, giving up her half-breed baby. Was she coerced by the government? She was definitely coerced by society, because in Korea it is deeply shameful for an unwed mother to bear a child, especially one of impure blood…

  “Very nice,” Gun Ho said, nodding slowly. “I like the carousel of images at the top. Very eye-catching.”

  “Yeah, isn’t it cool?” I managed to gurgle. “Can I just…?” I clicked on the “About” tab. There was a photo of a woman in silhouette, her face so deep in shadow that none of her features could be discerned.

  Hello, adopted people and those who love them! I am a transracial Korean-born adoptee and these are random excerpts from my journals, written over the span of my lifetime, and from the overwhelming response I’ve had so far, I see that I am not the only conflicted, angry, and maladjusted adoptee out there! I’ve chosen to remain anonymous for a variety of reasons, but like every adoptee, I’m searching for myself, so if you know anything about my real identity, I’d love to hear from you via the comments page…