Meanwhile, my other younger sister, Min-Wei, was preparing to study English in the United States, an idea Irene was entertaining as well. I eagerly helped my younger sisters dig up information on study-abroad programs and invited them to stay with me. Min-Wei decided to go to California first, and then visit St. Louis for a couple months. Then, we would return to Taiwan together, where we would all be reunited—Irene and her mother, my American parents and brothers, and our biological family—in a big, loud Chinese New Year celebration in the Year of the Tiger.
I was going for it, all of it. It was as if I had all but forgotten how tiring my first Taiwan trip had been, and any warning signs and doubts that had crept momentarily into my head. I was charging forward, caught up in the newness and excitement. Sisterhood swept me away. I was so focused on getting to know my sisters and finding out the next juicy bite of information that I didn’t think much about how my inquiries could impact my family or my own sense of self. Blindly, I threw my arms wide open to them, asking for more, more, more.
9
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
I picture my younger sister Min-Wei as a little girl, crouched down, almost holding her breath out of pure excitement.
It is Taitung, circa 1980. She listens for her brother’s heavy footfalls and stifles a giggle by pressing her hands over her mouth. The cornstalks hover high over her head, and dried husks crackle beneath her feet.
Min-Wei has memorized the fields of Taitung but not by laboring in them alongside her mother, father, and sisters. She and her older brother spend much more time playing in the rows of vegetables than working in them. Everyone else is too busy to pay much attention to what the youngest Wang children are doing. They run wild in the hot summer sun, playing games, chasing chickens, faces brown and flushed. I imagine her dark brown eyes sparkling with mischief as she crouches low, ready to jump out. She is a ball of fun and humor—and always will be—but she is also tough as nails, this seventh daughter. She will beat up any kid who picks on her big brother, who is two years older than she is, but slow and awkward, an easy target for teasing classmates. Her fists clench into pale balls instantly whenever she hears her brother’s plaintive and frequent protests—Stop it!—from afar. She always comes running to his aid.
This forcefulness, this simmering rage will explode during her adolescence, when her parents’ relationship gets so bad she cannot bear it. Min-Wei will rebel with the force of a giant against her father’s old-fashioned ways. Unlike her older, more disciplined sisters, she will not study her Chinese characters. She will sulk instead of smile. She will hang around the wrong kids. She will run away more than once. Her grandmother, her parents, and even her older sisters will slap her. She will long for a different fate, and sometimes she will even think about the sister she knows she has in America. She will wonder what would have happened if only she, too, had escaped.
But for now, her spirit is unchecked, and she is shrieking with joy as she races down row after row of corn.
MIN-WEI HUNG BACK on the leather sofa and watched while our older sisters fussed over me during my first visit to Taiwan. Having grown up the youngest in a family of such forceful personalities, she knew there was no point in forcing her way into the mix. She chose instead to play cards with our brothers-in-law, glancing over, smiling, waiting for the right time to get to know me. I instantly liked her.
At that time, most of our older sisters had rather short, conservative haircuts, and Min-Wei wore hers long, with red highlights. She was more slender than the rest of us, though she liked to show off what she did have by wearing short skirts and high heels. She had full lips and olive-colored skin, like me; my other sisters were milky pale. She and I had the same peculiar habit of rubbing our itchy faces from to chin to forehead, vigorously and over and over, with our open palms. Her eyes were more slanted than mine, sexy and almost sleepy looking; yet when she posed for pictures, she opened her eyes wide so they’d appear bigger (something I’ve also been known to do) and sometimes looked surprised or amazed in pictures.
Min-Wei was younger than me by only eleven months and two weeks, but my family still treated her like a kid, the rebellious one who didn’t go to college, who floated from job to job and who dated a foreigner. Yet I sensed she was a kindred spirit, much more inclined to be independent, open-minded, and enjoy the kind of fun (getting dolled up, going out, dancing, and so on) that I enjoyed. I knew we would get along well, even though during my first visit to Taiwan, we didn’t talk much because of her limited English and my next-to-nothing Chinese. We mostly related to each other nonverbally: speeding around on her moped, strutting down the street hand in hand, feeding each other. When she told me she was coming to study English in the United States, I was excited, welcoming the chance to get to know her away from the prying eyes of our family.
MONTE AND I PICKED Min-Wei up from the Lambert airport in St. Louis in November. Clad in Levi’s overalls and very high-soled tennis shoes, she strutted down the boarding ramp and threw her arms wide when she saw us. She had just finished a month of study in the Los Angeles area and she looked like a girl from Southern Cali.
“Helllllloooooooooo!” Min-Wei called out, a huge grin spreading across her face.
“Ni chi baole ma?” I asked, like a good Chinese sister. Have you eaten?
“No, but you are my food!” she said.
ST. LOUIS SEEMED ESPECIALLY cold during winter 1997, perhaps because I was seeing it through my sister’s eyes. It snowed several times, to Min-Wei’s delight; she had never seen snow before. We bundled up in hats and gloves and threw snowballs at each other in front of a Taco Bell in St. Louis and tried to piece together a snowman. Min-Wei often ended up wearing mittens and a scarf in my house, even though I kept the heat at around seventy degrees Fahrenheit.
Min-Wei enthusiastically adapted as I tried to expose her to as much of midwestern life as I could in a few months time. We ate out often, and I took her to parks, museums, movies, and clubs. We went to see Chuck Berry play in the basement of a local club called Blueberry Hill (after which she insisted that Monte and I teach her the words to the song “My Ding-a-Ling”). We threw a party, and she and I frantically cooked for hours beforehand; she made a giant batch of fried rice, and I made taquitos. We took her to Chicago one frigid weekend, one of the coldest I’ve spent in my entire life, when the chill off Lake Michigan cut right through our coats and into our bones. We stuck it out for her, though, shopping along Michigan Avenue, watching the dolphin show at Shedd Aquarium, and eating deep-dish pizza. My favorite times were late at night or on long drives, when we would just talk about our lives.
Min-Wei told me that Ba and Ma tried to give her away more than once when she was a baby. One time, Ba found a Taiwanese couple who wanted a child, and the couple came to visit her when she was weeks old. But those potential parents saw something troublesome in her aura. People born in the Year of the Tiger are said to be powerful and sensitive, but also hot-tempered and strong-willed, and those were not desirable traits for a daughter. The couple decided not to take her. Irene’s parents also declined to adopt her. So Min-Wei stayed.
Ma had been glad to keep her. She was spared the pain of losing another child, for now. She could nurse her and care for her and do all the things she could not do for me. Yet Min-Wei said she felt lost in the jumble of our family. Everyone was always too busy to pay much attention to what she was doing, how she was developing, if she was studying, if she was happy. Ma and Ba didn’t even bother to name her themselves. They allowed our fourth sister, Jin-Xia, who was only six, to choose.
Mei-Fen, Jin-Xia declared, liking the sound. Mei, as in Mei-Ling, means plum blossom; Fen sounds like the word for noodle. One phonetic translation of Mei-Fen literally means “no points.”
Later, when Min-Wei was a troublesome teenager, Ba took her to an astrologer to get her a new name, which he hoped would tame her. That was how she came to be Min-Wei, which means “sharp.” Ba sent her to live with our uncle in Singapo
re, hoping to straighten her out, but after three months she returned to Taiwan and began studying cosmetology. That’s when she began to turn her life around, she said.
The Min-Wei who visited me in St. Louis seemed carefree and happy. She threw herself into her English studies. Each day while I was at work, she attended a free language school in nearby University City or she stayed home and pored over her lessons. We practiced singing “You Are My Sunshine” dozens of times while riding in the car. She quickly picked up my habit of cursing at traffic. She especially liked idioms; she loved to repeat the St. Louis Blues hockey slogan she’d read on billboards, “YOU WANNA GO?” She used sayings such as “pay through the nose” and “under the weather” in conversation. One day, when I returned home from work, she popped out of her seat and proclaimed, “I feel like a million bucks!”
Min-Wei also was a dancer. She mixed it up all the time, in any place. We could be in a bar, at a hockey game, or in the supermarket. If she detected any bass, she would pump her shoulders, nod her head, and shake her hips. I found this amusing, because I, too, loved to dance, though I was a little bit more selective about where I did it. I took ballet, tap, and jazz lessons from ages three to sixteen. I loved learning the routines, dressing up in the costumes, red, pink, and green tutus and later funky leotards and fake tuxedos. (How excruciating my June recitals must have been for my parents and brothers, who sat through twenty or so acts of kids who just did pliés or spun slowly in a circle.) I fantasized about performing on Broadway, or becoming a Laker girl or a MTV video star, but my lack of long legs—and talent—were obvious impediments. Instead, I had to be content with shaking my stuff on the occasional girls’ night out at the club. Min-Wei listened with interest as I told her about my dance lessons. She said dance, sports teams, and social clubs had been luxuries our family could not even imagine. They also didn’t regularly visit the library—as my brothers and I had each week—nor did they take any extravagant family vacations.
I observed with great interest how my friends and fellow mid-westerners reacted to my sister. For so many years, I had fretted over how people perceived me. Now I felt as if I was granted a special looking glass, through which I had an omniscient view on how others might see me. I was pleased to see that guys loved her. She was the belle of the ball at my newspaper’s Christmas party. She wore my purple velvet dress—the same one that I’d worn at the cocktail party I’d thrown, the day I received that first bit of news about my birth family—and knee-high, black suede boots. A friend commented that she was absolutely stunning. I agreed, with pride, as if I had something to do with it. Min-Wei, like me, enjoyed the attention. A childhood friend who met her told me she was blown away by the similarity of our facial expressions, in particular how she lit up when people noticed her.
MIN-WEI AND I were driving my green Saturn, and I was about to pull onto a highway on one of our outings. I looked in my rearview mirror and started to turn left, onto the ramp. We were talking about odds and ends, what we would do that weekend.
Then Min-Wei said suddenly: “You know Ba had a lady.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, glancing sideways at her.
Min-Wei watched my face, carefully, and plowed ahead with her story.
When she and Jin-Zhi were the only two left living in Taitung with our parents, Ba declared that he was bringing a woman home to live with them. This woman was obviously his lover and already had a son; apparently Ba thought she would be more likely to bear more boys. Ma was upset and angry, but she didn’t stop her husband, nor did she leave. She still felt to blame for not being able to give Ba a boy. Meanwhile, he told his daughters that they were to call this woman auntie.
All my sisters were embarrassed and hurt, and they worried for their mother. It was as if their father had taken a kind of concubine into the house, and all of them knew it was wrong. But Ba didn’t care what they thought. The fighting and crying were constant. Jin-Zhi couldn’t stand it and left the house to live with a teacher.
My sister paused. I stared at the windshield, unsure how to react.
“How do you feel about this?” I asked.
“I hate it. I run away,” she explained. Our parents went to the local Buddhist temple and prayed for her return. When Min-Wei decided to come home, Ba, Ma, and Grandmother beat her and confined her to Ma’s room for two days. They forced her to crawl around the temple sixteen times to repay the gods for bringing her home. Min-Wei ran away again.
“I thought about find you,” she told me. “I know I have sister live in America. I thought about find you and live with you.”
I nodded. I was sister no. 6, between Min-Wei and Jin-Zhi. I could have been a teenager living in that home, too. I saw in Min-Wei the shades of the person I could have been. I realized that I had been given a unique gift, one that I thought was only given to make-believe characters in novels or movies, like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. I had been given the real-life privilege of seeing how my life could have been had I stayed in Taiwan, and that realization filled me with a confusing mix of remorse and relief.
“Our sisters not want you to know about this,” she continued. “But I think you should know.”
“I want to know the truth,” I told her.
“I think this, too,” she agreed.
“And what happened with this woman?”
“She leave sometime.”
“Did she ever have a son?”
Min-Wei smirked.
“No.”
MY FAMILY IN TAYLOR planned a big special Christmas get-together for Min-Wei, something we rarely did anymore. My parents took their artificial tree out of the attic and dusted off the ornaments and decorations. They invited our extended family over: Granny, aunts, uncles, cousins and their families. Before driving home to Detroit, I took Min-Wei to the mall to buy little gifts. We drank hot chocolate and listened to Christmas carols while wrapping the presents. In recent years, we’d opted to skip the holiday formalities, forgoing the present exchange and taking a nice trip or going out to eat instead, but we all wanted to give Min-Wei an American holiday welcome.
My sister immediately charmed everyone. She called my parents mother and father and teased my brothers. My dad took us all to a Red Wings hockey game—I was a huge fan—and he got a kick out of watching her boogie down to the between-play music. Min-Wei took photos of our snow-covered home and woods and the crackling fireplace.
When Min-Wei wasn’t around, my parents asked if it bothered me to “share them” with her, but I felt no discomfort with my sister’s easy integration into my family. I told my parents that it took some of the pressure off of me to take her places or show her new things. I could just sit and write in my journal while she chatted with my mom, for example. Over time, I might get envious, but the truth was that in a way, I felt guilty for the easy life I had had and was happy that Min-Wei could share it for a little while.
At one point, when Min-Wei was not in the room, my dad told me, “You know, Sister Maureen asked us if we wanted to adopt Min-Wei.”
This caught me off guard. “Really?” I asked.
My parents explained that several months after my adoption, Maureen contacted them asking if they wanted my little sister, who had recently been born. At that time, my mom and dad had been just settling in with me. My parents had enjoyed our first summer together: bike rides, picnics, my first beach visits, and dips in the pool. We were settling in, a happy family unit. Mom and Dad considered Maureen’s inquiry briefly but were reluctant to reestablish contact with my birth family. My mom said they did not want to risk that anything might happen that would complicate my adoption.
“What could have happened?” I asked Mom. She didn’t answer, but I got the feeling that they did not want to give Ba and Ma the opportunity to change their minds about giving me up. My mom and dad thought it was better to stay far, far away and out of reach. So they said no to taking Min-Wei. But now that they knew her and loved her, they wondered if they should have said
yes.
I told Min-Wei this, and she listened quietly.
“Interesting,” was all she said. I wondered how that revelation made her feel, because she, too, was seeing what her life might have been like had she been adopted. Ba had tried over and over to give her away, but she ended up staying in Taiwan. Did seeing my life make her feel sad, angry, or even glad? She didn’t say, but she didn’t seem upset either. We all knew these decisions had been made long ago.
Still, I was eager to help Min-Wei, now that we did know each other. I hoped to offer her some of the education and opportunities that she never had. I saw how smart she was and thought it was not too late to uncork her untapped potential. I asked my parents if they might consider sponsoring a longer stay, if she decided to study more, and if they might help to pay for more English lessons. (I was not yet ready financially to assume that responsibility on my own.) Mom and Dad said yes without hesitation.
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