Lucky Girl

by Mei-Ling Hopgood

  ON SUBURBAN DETROIT’S social ladder, Taylor occupied a rung somewhere near the bottom, and the people from neighboring suburbs loved to step on us, and hard. Teens from other towns quipped that we lived in “Taylortucky,” referring to the large number of southerners who immigrated there, and claimed we lived in trailer parks, bought our clothes from Kmart, and parked our cars in our front yards. I did know a couple people who did those things, but mostly those were unkind and untrue stereotypes. Still, the Taylor I grew up in was a blue-collar city of auto assembly-line operators and foremen, office managers and teachers, of sports bars without windows, strip malls, and disconnected subdivisions. It was the perfect hometown for my dad, who fancied himself the champion of the worker and the underdog. He dedicated his life as a teacher and public official in the city to changing Taylor’s reputation, pushing to improve public schools, bulldoze crime-ridden public-housing projects, and build parks and golf courses.

  One thing was true: the city was mostly white. In the 1970s, when I arrived, Taylor’s population was 90 percent white and about 9 percent black. Only about one percent was Asian; I figured my brothers and I made up a notable part of that one percent.

  My parents did what they could to try to make up for that isolation. They tried to give us some kind of Asian experience by hanging Asian art on the walls and hiring Asian babysitters. They bought me an Asian Raggedy Ann doll, as well as a black Raggedy Andy doll, which were my favorite toys for years. We ate Chinese food regularly and drove to Ann Arbor to get Korean bulgogi. They sent my brothers to Korean school, which the boys despised except for the meals and the Tae Kwon Doe classes; they just didn’t understand the lessons because neither spoke Korean. My parents offered to send me to Chinese school, but I refused. Back then, we just wanted to be seen as American.

  ON JUNE 19, 1982, two drunk autoworkers named Robert Ebens and Michael Nitz beat Vincent Chin, a twenty-seven-year old Chinese American, to death. Chin had been in a Detroit strip club celebrating his last days as a bachelor when the three men got into an argument. Ebens and Nitz reportedly called Chin a “Jap,” and Ebens said, “It’s because of you, motherfuckers, that we’re out of work!” All three got thrown out of the bar, and then Ebens and Nitz hunted Chin down and smashed his head with a baseball bat.

  “It isn’t fair,” Chin gasped before he lost consciousness, according to court testimony. Four days later he died, five days before he should have married. Both men were acquitted because the prosecutor failed to show up. National mass protests inspired the Justice Department to retry the men and a jury found Ebens guilty of violating Chin’s civil rights, but Ebens won on appeal and was set free.

  The Chin case and the anti-Japanese sentiments that surged throughout the country and especially in Michigan in the early 1980s scared us. Automakers and workers blamed Japan’s booming car industry for their woes, and politicians and pundits were glad to adopt a thinly veiled language of blame, anger, and hate. It was one thing to talk about unfair trade and competition—my father was prolific at that discourse—but it was much easier to target the yellow threat. The fact that they were talking about the Japanese made little difference to the uneducated and unexposed. To them, we “yellow, slant-eyed gooks” were all alike.

  To be fair, my brothers and I never felt as if our physical safety was at risk. Most of the teasing we faced during our childhood was the silly, ignorant stuff of kids: the hiss of “ching-chang-chung,” the kids who pulled back the ends of their eyelids, the chanting of “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these!” Sometimes drunks in cars screamed, “Go back to your country!” Other times, it was what people didn’t say: the nasty stares and suspicious looks. My parents tried to counter any racism. They did their best to explain ignorance and hate, dismissing the offenders as idiots. Had Dad witnessed any harassing, my anti-gun, Brady bill–loving father might have hunted down the offenders and shot them. But it’s hard to avoid being stained by the ignorance of the people around you—ask any Asian American or other minority. On the mean streets of adolescence, you are on your own in the fight against your demons.

  I wanted to be anything but Asian. I used to curse being different in my journals and in my dreams at night. I overcompensated. I went out of my way to prove how American I was, making sure people heard me speak my perfect English. I was Little Miss Everything in high school, class president for three years, captain of the pom-pom team, and a member of almost every club that existed. I excelled at a lot of things: school, socializing, public speaking, organizing. I had a healthy family life and lots of friends.

  Yet I was a tormented hypocrite. Outwardly I tried to ignore or make light of the stereotypes and slurs. The one time our terrible advanced placement English class actually read a Shakespearean play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I was accidentally cast as the “Chink in the Wall.” I was horrified inside but giggled to deflect the anxiety I felt. I allowed myself to acquire the nickname “Chinky”—I think it began as a joke in pom-pom. I even painted it on my Buick Regal as part of my graduation graffiti. I would defend my brothers, but I would never have dated an Asian guy. During high school, I resisted even hanging around Asians. I did have one half-Korean friend who was on the pom-pom squad with me, but that was enough. To this day, I still feel bad for not being nicer or getting to know the only other Asian American in my high school classes, a terribly nice and smart guy, but I was so worried that I would be automatically paired with him in the minds of my friends that I kept my distance.

  I watched the movie A Christmas Story, which I now find delightful, and felt hot and flushed during the part when thanks to the Bunkus’s dogs, the family is forced to go to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. I cringed when the Chinese staff could not sing “Fa-la-la-la-la” and could only say “Fa-ra-ra-ra-ra.”

  That’s me. That’s what they think of me, I thought. They think because I look like this, I talk like that.

  I worried when friends wanted to fix me up on dates.

  “Do they know I’m Asian?” I asked anxiously, thinking that no one would possibly think I was attractive.

  I got sick of people asking, “Where are you from?” and after hearing my answer, “Taylor, Michigan,” their asking, “No, where are you really from?” I’d tell people I wanted to be a journalist and they almost always asked, “Like Connie Chung?” I grew bitter about Connie during my young years. I am not unlike many of my Asian American friends in this struggle, but I did not know that yet. Aside from Pat Morita on Happy Days and The Karate Kid, there weren’t many Asian American stars, no Lucy Lius, no Amy Tans or Michelle Kwans. There were no rainbow casts like you’d see later on popular television series such as ER, Lost, or Grey’s Anatomy. I felt isolated, and that would not change until my final years of college. I didn’t discuss those feelings with my brothers or my parents until years later; I didn’t want them to think they had done anything wrong. It was my problem, and mine alone.

  6

  THE RETURN

  For two decades, Ma kept a picture of me on her bedroom table. I was wearing a blue shirt and a white diaper. Sprouts of dark hair stuck out from my red knit cap. I had just arrived in the United States and was sitting on the hotel bed in San Francisco.

  “Who’s that?” my siblings asked occasionally, pointing at the picture.

  “That is your sister,” Ma and Ba answered humbly. They said little more for they knew almost nothing.

  Years passed and many things had changed for my Chinese family. After giving me up, my parents had two more girls, one they kept and another they gave to a couple in Switzerland. Ba got into real estate and began earning more money. Little by little, they were able to claw their way out of poverty and into the middle class. The other daughters grew up, graduated from high school. Ba pushed them to study and helped to pay for their college. Meanwhile, the letters from Sister Maureen, who left Taiwan for Africa not long after I was adopted, tapered off.

  My birth parents said that from time to time they inquired a
t St. Mary’s Hospital, to see if any word had come from me or our Swiss sister; they didn’t know how to contact me. Once, after Ma was severly injured in a moped accident, she asked for me while lying in her hospital bed, delirious. Another time, when our grandmother was on her deathbed the year before we made contact, Ba asked the nurses and priests to see if they knew anything more about my whereabouts.

  “No, dui buqi,” they said. We’re sorry.

  (I wonder now how they could not find me. We had moved only once during my childhood, only three houses away.)

  Then, one early January day in 1997, a priest from St. Mary’s called the Wang house.

  “We have a letter,” he told Ba. “You should come by.”

  Ba hurried into downtown Taitung. A nurse told him that Sister Maureen had made an inquiry to the hospital on my behalf. Ba asked the nurse to write a letter in English—he knew none—and rattled off updates on each family member, some of which were vaguely wrong in his haste or incorrectly translated. He gave ages, where they lived, where they worked. He insisted that I try to return for Chinese New Year, just one month away, and included a self-addressed envelope so I could easily respond.

  “Tell her she has a whole family in Taiwan waiting anxious to meet her.”

  Their reasons for giving me up always seemed to be worthy. Surely, I must have a happy life and better opportunities. Surely, they made the right decision.

  But to finally know. To get the chance to say the things that were never said.

  “Tell her I will pay,” Ba told the nun. “Tell her I will pay for her trip to Taiwan.”

  He rushed home to spread the news and called each of my sisters.

  “We found her.”

  Soon, they hoped, their American daughter would come home.

  IT WAS SURREAL, having my birth family in my life again. (“Again,” I say, as if I actually acknowledge that they had been in my life before.) Until those first letters, those first phone calls, I barely recognized that I could have had a life outside my family in the United States. Suddenly, I had seven sisters, six of whom were writing me an e-mail or a letter almost daily during that February and March of 1997. They all had studied some English, fortunately, because I knew no Chinese. We traded stories of our lives and our jobs, our boyfriends and families. We discussed our tastes in men, food, and music and even compared height and weight, blood type, and bra size.

  Jin-Zhi, who was twenty-five—two years older than me—wrote most often because she seemed to know the most English. She was working in public relations for a recycling company and lived with my parents in Taitung. She told me that she had wanted to be a journalist, but Ba had forbidden her to work as a reporter, for her safety. She was hoping to pass the difficult exam to become a teacher.

  She and the others peppered me with questions: Did I like Chinese food? Could I describe my “environment”? Did Americans wear Chinese clothing? Could I use chopsticks? Did I have my ears pierced? I asked lots, too: What did my sisters do at work? Where did they live? How was our family doing financially? Was our family close to one another?

  I asked about our medical history; during doctor appointments I always completed forms asking for my family history with one word: unknown. Now, I finally could find out. Jin-Zhi told me our mother had suffered from cervical cancer, probably from having too many babies. She was recovering. A grandmother had died of lung cancer because she smoked too much, and an uncle had died of liver cancer because he drank too much.

  Then, feeling emboldened, I asked a question that had nagged me since I was a teenager: did my mother or any of my sisters have a big chest?

  I knew it might seem ridiculous or superficial, but the origin of my body type had been one of vexing questions of my youth. My first training bra, of the Strawberry Shortcake variety, started to fill out when I was eleven years old. By the time I was in high school, I was five feet two inches with a full C cup. My breasts were by no means huge, especially compared with my busty friends, but they were much larger than I had ever seen on any Asian person. My legs also seemed thicker than those of many Asians; Asian actresses always seemed so petite and willowy to me, as if the wind might topple them over. I was by no means fat, but I was sturdy. I always wanted to know if this was a genetic trait or if my figure came from the pizza and french fries I loved to eat. Any of my other friends could just look at their mom, dad, or sisters and say, “Yeah, well I know where that comes from.” Not me. It was as if I had been beamed in from outer space. I could not have been more physically different from my mom, who was thin and white, with blonde hair and blue eyes.

  So I asked the question, and as I had hoped, my sisters took it in stride—in fact they all got a big kick out of it. Jin-Zhi told me that some of our sisters were chesty and that we got it from our mother. My fourth-oldest sister, Jin-Hong, wrote: “HAHA! That’s so funny. Sisters always talked about my chest but they will talk about you. Right? It’s a joke. Don’t be mind. It’s an honor to us.”

  My sisters also passed along requests from my parents. For example, Ba wanted me to bring him “fish oil” for his digestive problems if I came back to Taiwan. One of the most fervent and amusing entreaties that Jin-Zhi relayed to me, almost immediately after contacting me, was that I was to buy clothing for our brother, the one that my birth parents had adopted shortly before giving me up.

  “He is very fat,” Jin-Zhi wrote. She explained that finding clothing for him in Taiwan was very difficult and Ba wanted me to bring him something to wear.

  My family’s requests and comments were blunt, forward, and confusing, but they amused me. I did not bump heads yet with the strong, stubborn personalities that characterize my family, nor did my sisters talk of the sordid family backstory that had haunted them. We were basking in the glory of discovery. I never had sisters. Their urgency became contagious. I felt as if I was being passionately recruited for an exclusive, mysterious sorority, and I was eager to be inducted officially into the club.

  I decided to go back at the end of March 1997.

  WHAT DO YOU PACK in your bag when you are going to meet your birth family in the country you left as a baby, in the home that was never really your home? What outfits and shoes do you wear? What gifts do you take? Which words do you learn in Mandarin to help you navigate the years and worlds that have grown up between you? I had taken some last-minute language classes. I could say basic things such as “hello,” “goodbye,” “thank you,” “I love you,” “I’m full,” and “one pineapple cake, please.” It was the best I could do for now.

  Two days before I left for Taiwan, I unfolded, folded, and piled clothes on my bed. I was packing some of my favorites: a red and white picnic-table patterned shirt with short ruffled sleeves, sarongs, a brown button-down polyester shirt, a long khaki skirt, jean shorts: nothing special, but all flattering. The weather would be warm and humid during the day, my sisters said, and a little cold at night. I figured that a little cold to sisters who had spent their entire lives on a tropical island meant something quite different than it would to a girl from Michigan.

  Almost half the space in my luggage was filled with presents. Chinese American friends had advised me that it was good form to bring presents for not only your family but for anyone you might meet, even something small, like candy or a pen. It had been a nightmare trying to find cheap trinkets that were genuinely made in America. I went to Target, Hudson’s, and other stores. I dejectedly checked every tag looking for something that might be representative of the United States. It seemed like every stuffed animal, every toy, every piece of clothing was made in Taiwan, China, or another Asian country. I did manage to find a cute jumper with a red, white, and blue flag for my fourth sister’s new baby girl. In the end, most of my gifts were nothing special. For my birth mother, I chose citrus soaps and lotions from the Body Shop, and for my sisters, smaller packets of bath gels and beads, body puffs, and back washers. (To my chagrin, I would see a Body Shop along a busy street in Taiwan.) I had found my brothe
r large clothes—sweatpants and khakis and three shirts. I bought St. Louis Post-Dispatch T-shirts at my newspaper’s souvenir shop for my brothers-in-law and a black Post-Dispatch tie for my birth father—cheesy, but local. For random relatives, I bought Hershey’s kisses, wrapped them in cellophane and tied the packets with red and white ribbons.

  My American parents gave me a coffee-table book on Michigan to present to my Chinese parents. We had shopped together when I had returned home to Detroit a few weeks before leaving for Taiwan.

  Throughout these weeks, Mom and Dad always seemed more excited than I was about the reunion. I tried to include them in the experience as often as I could by calling them when I heard from my birth parents and reading them letters from my sisters.

  Mom told me she flinched just once when she considered my birth parents.

  “Mom,” I said showing her a picture, “This is my mother.”

  How could there be another mother? she thought.

  But after that, she took it in stride.

  “How do you feel about this?” I asked her.

  “I’m very excited for you,” she deadpanned. “But when you get back you have to make sure to tell me how much younger I look and how much prettier I am than your mother.”

  My grandmother told me before I left, “Remember, I will always be your granny.”

  Still, I was careful not to say anything I thought might hurt my parents. For a long time, I tried to avoid calling my Chinese parents “my” parents. I referred to them as “the” parents, “the” father, and “the” mother. Sometimes I slipped.

  At first, my dad thought that he and my mom should go with me to Taiwan, but I knew right away that I wouldn’t be comfortable with that. I’d be too worried about what the Hopgoods were thinking and feeling to concentrate on getting to know the Wangs. I remember rehearsing the conversation with my dad in my head before calling him from St. Louis. Dad, I think I should travel to Taiwan on my own. I know you know you will always be my true parents, but …