Suddenly, we were a family: Dad, Mom, and child.
It happened so fast, after such a long wait. My mom said that only for one split second in that airport, I was a dark, foreign bundle, someone else’s child. But once in their arms, I was theirs.
5
HAPPY DAYS
One of the first confessions that I can remember making to my parents was pronounced with fear and shame when I was almost three.
We lived in a white ranch home that we called the White House on Beech Daly Road in Taylor. We had a two-acre backyard with lots of grass, an aboveground pool, a sandbox, and a swing set that my dad painted yellow. It was a sunny afternoon, and I was playing by myself in our living room while my mother cleaned in the kitchen. I could hear the sound of running water in the kitchen sink.
When I woke up that morning, I had asked mom to help me put on my favorite dress, a pale yellow floor-length number trimmed in front with bows and fringe. My mother had pulled my black hair into ponytails, accented with bows of thick, bright yellow yarn. I sat on the blue and black speckled loop carpet, playing my scenario over and over, talking it out with all the important parties. Mom heard my kid babble but couldn’t make out what I was saying. Little did she know that I was planning and acting out an elaborate wedding ceremony with music and flowers and my own handsome groom.
Mom went on with her chores. Then I heard the motor of my dad’s car as he pulled into the driveway. I jumped up and wedged my body between the living-room window and the couch, a space I often turned to for hiding or toddler inner reflection. I hoped that my father would not find out what I had done during the day while he was gone.
I stood there, rustling the curtain and talking to myself.
Mom peeked behind the couch.
“Mei-Ling, what are you doing?” she asked.
“I can’t tell you.” I answered.
“Come on, honey, what’s going on?”
I shook my head side to side.
“Mei-Ling …”
I was trapped. I had no choice but to give it up. I looked up with guilty eyes and responded in a loud whisper:
“I don’t want Daddy to know I married Fonzie.”
I SLIPPED INTO my American life easily, as if I was always meant to be there. I grew up on Gerber baby food and apples and bananas from Farmer Jack. My parents read me Dr. Seuss before bed and let me watch Sesame Street. I had an enviable collection of bathing suits and started swimming classes shortly after I arrived in the States. My room and my baby furniture were painted red, white, and blue, and my father hung large red wooden letters on the wall: MEI-LING. I was the center of my parents’ world and had most of what I wanted even before I knew it. I was especially close to my father. It was, my mom said, love at first sight. Contrary to what Maureen predicted, my dad’s plentiful facial hair never bothered me. I loved to sit on his chest, put my feet in his bushy beard, and laugh and laugh and laugh.
My mom and dad say I was a happy child, adaptable and good-humored most of the time, though stubborn and a little spoiled. I hated to sleep and once threw myself out of my crib—landing with a loud thud—seven times in one night. I learned to say my ABCs at two years of age. I ate and drank everything and was impossibly whiny and cranky when I was hungry. When we went to the beach and I felt thirsty, I would walk up to people’s beach blankets and drink from their cups. I stayed with my babysitter, Zadia, during the day while my parents worked, but during the weekends my parents took me on bike rides or to Detroit Metroparks or to see my grandparents or to Greenfield Village in Dearborn, where I liked to feed popcorn to the carp. My parents and grandmothers made sure I was dressed to the nines, with a wardrobe that included plaid pants, frilly dresses, and a sweater-poncho with a bunny-eared hood.
We were a typical midwestern family with a very atypical look. In the 1970s Asian adoptions were still rare, although some families had begun adopting babies from Vietnam and South Korea. In Metro Detroit, where everyone was basically black or white, people gawked. Mom and Dad would wrap me up in my coat and hat and take me to the park or the grocery store, and people would stare, sometimes stopping to ask us questions. They often thought I was from Vietnam, because they had heard that war babies were coming to the United States. Once, a woman told my amused father that we looked alike, but Mom does not remember ever hearing an intentionally offensive remark. A local newspaper published a small story on us with the headline “China Doll.” We were a novelty. Of course, back then I didn’t know to know we were different. I probably loved the attention.
People often ask me when I found out I was adopted. For a long time, I was puzzled by that question because it was a no brainer. How could I not know? My parents are Caucasian and I am Asian. It wasn’t like they could hide our genetic differences. I cannot remember a time when I was “told” or in which I “heard.” So I asked my mom if we ever had such a discussion.
“No,” she told me. They always called me their “beautiful adopted baby.”
“But adoption was just a word,” she said. “We used it so you would know it, but it meant nothing to us. Everyone makes such a deal of it. I think it’s crazy. Adopted is adopted. ‘So what?’ was always our feeling.”
Never once in my life did I have a problem with that. I never felt separation pains that I can recall. I felt isolated racially at times, but the fact that I was not my parents’ biological child was never an issue. Being adopted was just an obvious fact.
Besides, to my child mind, adoption seemed a plenty logical way for people to reproduce, way more reasonable than the idea that women grew babies in their bellies that popped out after forty weeks. It made all the sense in the world to me that we would pick up my new brother at the airport—I mean, that’s where I came from, right?
MY PARENTS KNEW they wanted another child before they ever had me in their arms, but they didn’t want to suffer through another touch-and-go private adoption experience. They turned to a local group called Americans for International Aid and Adoption, then a seedling organization run out of the Troy, Michigan, home of Nancy Fox, who had adopted a girl from Vietnam. The process was much less formal then; Nancy’s contacts in other countries told her how many orphans they had, and she worked with the state of Michigan to place them.
I vaguely remember my parents explaining to me that my brother was coming from South Korea. I was three then, but my parents already talked to me as if I was a shrimp-sized adult. They made it clear I was to love him and help take care of him.
Ooooooh. A brother! (read: another toy). I’m sure my parents showed me that first picture they received of him, the one that still brings tears to our eyes. It is a small passport-sized photo in black and white. He is a sad child, with vacant eyes and fuzzy hair.
My parents decided early on that they would keep Hoon-Yung’s Korean name, which orphanage officials had given him, just as they kept my given name. According to his papers, the name Hoon-Yung meant “brave, strong boy.” My parents thought our Asian names were special, a small homage to our past, and used to get irritated when friends called me Mei for short. Too bad if Americans had to fumble around to pronounce them at times. Is it Mary? Marilyn? Mee-Lang?
I admit that I myself had a wee bit of trouble with my new brother’s name at first. One day in gymnastics class, where I had been focusing on balance with an eye on more complicated moves such as somersaults, a friend of my mother’s asked me, “What’s the name of your new brother?”
I puffed out my chest with pride and declared, “Hong Kong Phooey!”
We met my new brother on July 10, 1976, in Detroit Metro Airport, only a few miles from our house. Mom dressed me up in a white sundress with white sandals for the occasion. We waited with my aunt in the immigration hall of the airport for a couple hours before the doors swung open and a woman came out holding a skeleton of a child in her arms. Hoon-Yung was the last passenger off his flight. He could not hold up his head. He could not sit up. The agency had told my parents that he was about nine
teen months old, but he was smaller than I had been when I arrived at half his age.
This can’t be my son, my mom thought to herself. She was expecting a robust toddler, who was walking or at least ready to walk.
This can’t be my son.
But it was. The plastic bracelet wrapped around his bony arm read CHUNG, HOON-YUNG. He was ghostly white, dressed in a light blue and white checkered jumper. His belly was enormously swollen. He did not smile, and we weren’t sure if he knew how. Even if he had known, he would not have had the energy to do it. At the airport, he barely made a peep as my mom gathered his emaciated body close.
Hoon-Yung had been abandoned in the streets of Incheon, Korea, soon after he was born. He was placed in the Star of the Sea Orphanage, where he was well on the way to dying of starvation. Officials guessed his age because he had no medical records or even a note of who his family might be.
From my dad’s arms, I watched anxiously. What is wrong with this kid? I was ready to grab, hug, kiss, and play—the last thing he wanted. After begging incessantly, I was allowed to hold him. My mother put that tiny child in my lap and I tried to prevent him from sliding out of my arms and down my legs. (As you can imagine, he was a little harder to manage than a doll, since he moved on his own and all.) Hoon-Yung showed little interest in me and instead played with two plastic airline cups.
We brought him home. For weeks, my brother acted as if he was still fighting for his life in Korea. When you spilled a handful of Cheerios in front of him, he would panic and madly grab at all the tiny circles, hoarding them close to his body. If he dropped anything on his bib, he would eat it immediately. Mom and Dad learned not to put out serving bowls with food because he would eat all the food in one panicked gulp. He hovered over food for months, until he finally realized there was enough. The memory of his terrified hunger still made Granny, my dad’s mom, cry two decades later. My dad caught one of many illnesses that my brother suffered, and it took our father months to recover from a stomach infection that doctors never could identify.
Slowly but surely, Hoon-Yung got healthy and came out of his shell, thanks to the love and care of my parents, their friends, and our babysitter Zadia. They fed, hugged, and kissed him. They dressed him, read to him, and gave him toys. He smiled for the first time about five weeks after he arrived, when Zadia was playing on the floor with him. Then and there, the orphan began to disappear for good.
My mom credits to some extent his pushy sister for making him do stuff even if he didn’t want to. I made him play with my Playskool Sesame Street people. I combed his hair. I sat him on the closed toilet, tied a towel around his neck, and brushed his teeth. I tried to teach him to boogie and sing. We played in the red baby pool outside, and I would try to teach him my version of going “underwater” (leaning back and dipping my hair in the water). It was just what he needed, Mom theorized, someone who was oblivious to his limits. I was just being bossy me.
We were inseparable back then, Hoon and me. We spent hours making cities of mud and sand and digging tunnels and swamps to drown our Matchbox cars in the sandbox. We swam practically every day almost every summer of my young childhood, cannonballing, playing Marco Polo, and turning golden brown under the Michigan sun. We nibbled watermelon at our picnic table and spit the seeds into the green grass. Hoon tolerated his big sister, although if I bugged him too much, he would throw me a nasty look—the same one he occasionally gives me to this day if I annoy him. Or he’d hit me in the head with a plastic boat, which today, fortunately, he does not do.
I WAS NINE years old when we adopted my second brother. We had moved from the White House three doors down to a home my dad had designed. It was much larger, with lots of large glass windows, a wood exterior, and a slanted roof. It sat back on a wooded two-acre plot of land. My parents’ bedroom took up the entire second floor and included a walk-in closet, a terrace, giant picture windows, and a bathroom with a Jacuzzi and sauna that I liked to show my friends. My room was at the end of the house on the first floor. A bathroom separated my brothers’ room from mine. The entire house was built to blend with its natural surroundings. We had squirrels, lots of birds, rabbits, and sometimes foxes. We also had the occasional Peeping Tom because back then our house was considered especially nice in a working-class town. People thought we were rich, but the home was merely the product of years of careful saving by my folks.
In fifth grade I was a perfect prepubescent mess. I had long black hair that I often tied into braids. I wore chunky glasses with purple-tinted plastic frames, and my favorite outfit, I regrettably recall, was a plaid maroon shirt with ruffles and burgundy culottes. I was especially young for my grade—I had skipped third grade and my birthday was in the summer, so I was at least a year or two younger than my classmates. I was beginning to notice how absolutely uncomfortable and awkward I was. The seed of self-loathing had begun to bud in my head. I wondered if a boy could ever like a Chinese girl. I never spoke about these worries to anyone, especially not to my parents, who had tried so hard to teach us to be proud of who we were and where we came from. I didn’t think they would understand.
These doubts did not apply to my brother, however. So when my parents asked me if I wanted another sibling from Korea, I answered a resounding yes, though I vetoed the idea of a sister because I didn’t want to share my bedroom.
Moon Jung-Hoe was the third addition to the Hopgood family. He was five when he walked off the airplane on September 9, 1982, grinning like mad as he held the hand of my dad, who had gone to Chicago to meet his international flight. He was thin and had a head of straw-stiff hair. A spray of brown freckles covered his flat nose, which spouted perfectly round beads of sweat when he got hot. Jung-Hoe was dressed in striped pants with red suspenders.
He was shockingly smiley, especially for a child who had been abandoned and found wandering the streets in Kwang Ju in the aftermath of a bloody civil uprising in the city in 1980. Jung-Hoe had been holding hands with an older child—we didn’t know if it was a friend or sibling—and put in an orphanage. The adoption agency observed that he was a good-natured child, though reserved. But for the first several days there, he stared out the front window and cried, as if waiting for someone who would never come. He later lived in at least one foster home.
Now he was arriving in a strange place, where no one spoke his language and few people looked like him, but he was grinning from ear to ear. He smiled so hard and so big that his eyes seemed to disappear in his face.
“Can he see?” my grandma asked.
Hoon and I began right away to love and torture the child, telling him to say this and say that in English. On the way home from the airport, he fell asleep while repeating a barrage of words. “Car?” “Cah.” “House?” “House.” “Mei-Ling?” “Ma-Lang.” The only English words he knew were helicopter and Coca Cola.
Jung-Hoe had a history and memories of his native land that I never had, but he couldn’t express them to us. Or rather, he could, but we could not understand. He would sit cross-legged on the couch after his bath and just before bedtime, wearing his pajamas covered with little cars, and sing Korean songs. We would sit in front of him and listen, a rapt audience. He used to laugh like mad at my mother when she would try to pronounce Korean words from her English-Korean handbook, although he refused to speak Korean with any native speakers. He corrected our pronunciation of his name. We said Jung-HOE. He insisted his name was Moon (his last name) Jung-HA. (Later when he studied and became fluent in Korean, he proclaimed that he had been wrong—or we had misunderstood him—and we were to go back to calling him Jung-HOE.) He liked to wake very early and stand outside the bedroom of his poor adolescent sister and yell, “Ma-Lang! Wake up!” He was a pack rat, saving wrappers, magazines, and other junk, a habit he likely developed in the orphanage that continues today.
Once, in a park, Jung-Hoe was chasing seagulls. Mom and Dad let him go on with this normally futile child’s game and continued to play Frisbee. Suddenly, a commotion of sc
reaming squawks filled the air.
The child had managed to catch a bird, using popcorn as bait. It screamed and flapped its wings and tried to peck out my brother’s eyes. A posse of gulls circled overhead, threatening a rescue attack. My mother hates birds, a phobia she acquired as a child when bats got into her house. She and my dad yelled, “Drop it! Drop it! Put it down!”
My brother didn’t understand. He stood serenely holding out the screaming bird toward his new parents. Finally, after jumping up and down, motioning and insisting, they convinced him to release the bird, which flew away in a white huff. Jung-Hoe didn’t see what all the fuss was about. He was just rounding up dinner.
Awake, Jung-Hoe expressed incredible joy and an astounding ability to learn and adapt. He ate everything he was given, and still does. He loved his preschool and promptly won the affections of the cutest blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl in his class.
But when he slept, his past emerged from its dark resting place and tortured him. At first he was unable to sleep on a bed—he was used to lying on the hard floor—so he often rolled or climbed down and curled up on the carpeted floor. He also would moan and scream in his sleep, and the chilling cries would resonate through the heat registers of our house. His night terrors regularly woke me out of a dead sleep. (On the other hand, Hoon learned to sleep through the outbursts, unmoved, in the bed next to him.) My parents or I would come into the room and embrace him. When we woke him, he sat up and smiled with tears in his eyes, never remembering what he had dreamed—or at least that’s what he told us. It was like clockwork, at home or on family vacations. I have a clear image of my father’s rising from his hotel bed in Florida and crouching on the floor next to a sobbing Jung-Hoe, caressing his head and murmuring reassurances. Jung-Hoe suffered from these fits for several months after his adoption, until one day the terrors just stopped. I always had the feeling that that evening in his dreams, he finally was able to close that tumultuous chapter in his life.
Lucky Girl Page 7
