Lucky Girl

by Mei-Ling Hopgood

  I started hyperventilating.

  We reached the street corner where Ba’s white car sat angled in the intersection. A group of teenagers hovered under the sallow light of the streetlamp. No Hopgoods in sight. Irene, Min-Wei, and I ran across the street to the car. Ba had been turning left and the young man hit his car, denting the fender. He had already dropped my family off. No one was hurt, but Ba continued screaming and freaking out, blaming the other driver. The boy did not have a license and Ba did not have a registered car. Irene and I peered into his darkened vehicle, then I stood there silently with my younger sisters at my side, breathing heavily.

  I was so relieved. My head was spinning. My heart felt twitchy and my stomach sick. Then my sisters and our mother walked numbly back to the house.

  Ma shook her head. “I don’t remember the last time I moved like that,” she said. Min-Wei and I laughed weakly.

  Irene and her mother took their places again on the couch and tried to take up where they’d left off in their reading. Min-Wei and I sat next to each other on the couch in petrified silence. I stared at the television, at the silver sparkles on the dress of a reporter who babbled about a Chinese New Year show in Taipei. I would need hours to settle down.

  MANY OF MY SISTERS had to leave the next day, to spend the rest of the holiday with the families of their husbands. As Jin-Xia said goodbye, she broke into tears.

  “I’ll miss you,” she sobbed, and we all started crying.

  Still, I was ready to go. As well as things had gone, I wanted to get my American family far away from my Chinese family, as quickly possible. I imagined that this was the feeling that my adopted parents had years ago, when they decided not to adopt Min-Wei because they were afraid to get involved with my birth family again. I felt as if I were crossing these incongruent currents of my life, pinching together two live wires that were never meant to touch, and if I held them together much longer, they might explode. Was I tempting fate? All I knew was that while I might continue to question and toy with my own serendipity, I was ready to get my mom and dad and brothers out of Taiwan.

  We bade Ma and Ba goodbye and flew to Taipei. Meeting my birth family had reminded us that somewhere beyond the curtain of time existed another life, another family, and another destiny. Now my parents wanted to give the boys a chance to visit their homeland. We boarded the plane for Korea.

  11

  THE BIOLOGY OF ADOPTION

  Seoul, 1998

  The last glimmers of daylight were fading into the Han River as we landed in the city of Seoul. Giant illuminated crosses on the many churches throughout the heavily Christian city pierced the blue black sky, high above the animated billboards and skyscrapers. Wide, high-speed roadways seemed suspended in midair. Mammoth digital screens, as big as or bigger than those in Times Square, lit up the downtown. During the day, you could clearly spot the giant vats of kimchee fermenting atop apartment buildings. Underground, the Koreans built an elaborate maze of walkways filled with shops, food courts, and passageways, making the insane traffic and biting cold more bearable. The city seemed exotic but much more organized and orderly than Taipei. It was indeed as its government advertised, “a clean, attractive, and global city.”

  My brothers craned their necks to see out of the airplane window as the country they had left as children unfolded before us. I watched them closely. We had never really talked much about how we felt as adoptees. It would have been awkward, like discussing our own conception. Hoon-Yung had shown little to no interest in most things Korean throughout high school and during college at the University of Michigan. Jung-Hoe had begun only recently to get to know other Korean Americans at Michigan Tech University. I hoped my brothers’ experience would be positive, even if the chance that either would find out much, if anything, about his birth family was very slim. Hoon-Yung and Jung-Hoe understood this, but I couldn’t help feeling nervous for them.

  We arrived at the Seoul Plaza Hotel in Cheng Gu around the corner from city hall downtown. The hotel was an amazing fortress of glass and lights, a five-star affair with several restaurants and a three-level gym. We admired the marble floors and countertops in our bathroom. (What a different experience already, I marveled.) Jung-Hoe called his friends, exchange students he had met at college, and they took my brothers out on the town to have a few beers and Korean snacks of squid and seaweed. Mom, Dad, and I were beat to pieces from all the travel, so we stayed in.

  With a great sigh of relief, I crashed on the hotel cot, a welcome luxury after sleeping for three weeks on hard beds or the floor. As I was drifting off, it occurred to me that this was the first night I had been without one of my birth family in tow during the last few months. I fell asleep immediately.

  WE GOT UP EARLY on our first full day in Korea to travel by train to Incheon, the port city on the west coast of Korea where Hoon had been found. Jung-Hoe’s friends, Jae Young and Mi Young, acted as our interpreters and guides.

  During the hour-long train ride, people stared at our mixed group curiously, and we, in turn, inspected them. I was impressed with how tall the Koreans seemed; we spotted a few guys who topped six feet. One older woman seemed especially interested in our family and watched us for a long time before finally asking Jae Young who we were. Jae Young explained our story. The woman nodded and took my mother’s hand.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for doing such a gracious thing to help our people.”

  Many of the first babies to be adopted from Korea in the 1950s and 1960s were offspring of Korean women and foreign servicemen, children who were largely rejected by the conservative and patrilineal society. American adoption agencies built strong relationships within the country and were able to place abandoned children such as my brothers in American families during socially and economically turbulent times. Westerners were adopting from Korea long before foreign adoption became popular or widely accepted; according to the U.S State Department, more American families have adopted from Korea over the last four decades than from any other foreign country.

  In recent years, however, there has been considerable debate over whether Koreans should let their own be raised by outsiders. After the media aired reports that Korea was the largest exporter of babies in the world, some lawmakers, in an effort to save face, introduced legislation that would ban international adoption. The government also began various scholarship and mentoring programs and camps, to reacquaint and connect adoptees with their native land. We were visiting during a time of large-scale soul-searching in that country, my own little drama multiplied by the thousands. It seemed that the whole of Korea and its lost sons and daughters were trying to figure out where they fit in each other’s lives.

  WE ARRIVED IN INCHEON at around eleven o’clock in the morning.

  The sprawling city sits on the Yellow Sea and is famous among war history buffs as the port where General Douglas MacArthur launched a key amphibious assault in 1950. Incheon is often thought of as an extension of Seoul because many people who live there commute to the capital for work. As soon as we arrived at the train station we asked a police officer to direct us to the Star of the Sea Orphanage. He politely obliged, and we caught a cab to the site.

  The entrance was at the end of a long, icy alley. Deep red brick buildings hovered on the left, blocking the sun. To our right were the gates of the orphanage. The words STAR OF THE SEA were inscribed on white concrete at our feet and on the sign overhead.

  It had been twenty-one years since Hoon-Yung had lived in this place; he had been almost two when he’d left. He studied the signs, walls, and the door cautiously and without comment. The cold whipped his cheeks rosy and tousled his thin hair. We all waited to see how he would react.

  We pushed our way through the frigid air to the main building of the orphanage. It was brick, too, with steps that were made of large rocks held together by cement. I paused to take pictures, first the whole family together, then just Hoon. It was an odd portrait. We smiled touristy smiles, as though we we
re posing in front of any other monument or landmark, and then entered the building.

  It was eerily quiet, and our footsteps echoed through the lobby. The only man we could find was the orphanage accountant. Through Mi Young, we explained why we were there. He told us that none of the other officials were there, but he graciously agreed to show us around. We walked slowly through the small complex of buildings, letting Hoon lead. The man gave us the basic facts, no more and no less. He explained that in 1983 many of the older buildings had been razed and replaced with newer facilities. A preschool was added in 1994. However, the building where Hoon stayed still remained. It was an ordinary brick building, nondescript and square. We couldn’t see inside because the windows sat high, though beyond the snowy panes, we did glimpse bits and pieces of the toys that sat on the ledge inside: an elephant’s ear, a red box, a doll’s blonde hair. The man said he couldn’t let us enter because he did not have permission, and most of the children were sleeping. There are fewer adoptions these days, domestic or international, he said. Mostly they were taking in children from broken homes. The tour lasted barely fifteen minutes.

  The man could not tell us anything about Hoon-Yung’s case. He didn’t have access to the files and didn’t know when the others would be back. He apologized for not having more information and told Hoon that he was happy to see things had worked out so well for him, that he had a good life and a good family. He shook our hands and led us out.

  We returned to Seoul and visited the agency that handled the Korean end of both brothers’ adoptions. Administrators at the city’s social welfare agency could verify that they had limited records for the boys, but they would have to be formally requested, dug up, and sent to us later. We decided that the trip to Jung-Hoe’s native Kwang Ju, 160 miles south of Seoul, would be too ambitious for our brief stay. Instead, Jung-Hoe spent the rest of the afternoon visiting schools to check out language programs. He was on track to graduate from the university in three years, and my parents were encouraging him to consider studying abroad. He wanted to come back to Korea.

  We had all hoped that Hoon-Yung and Jung-Hoe might find out a little more, especially after experiencing Taiwan and my crazy, welcoming, and repenting birth family, but there were no big discoveries or breakthroughs to be made in Korea. As with many international adoption cases, the circumstances of my brothers’ abandonment had always been fairly unknown, and it looked as if things might stay that way. We spent the next couple days sightseeing, eating, and meeting Jung-Hoe’s friends and their families.

  At first, I felt sorry for my brothers, but then I remembered how I had been happy in my little cocoon of ignorance. None of us had ever doubted the destiny that we had been given. For my brothers, it was enough to see, smell, and experience Korea. They had fun hanging out with Korean pals, eating kimchee, kim bop, and bulgogi. They gulped down shots of soju, a Korean rice liquor, and played Korean billiards. They got a tourist’s-eye view of their homeland, and that was enough.

  Hoon said that visiting the orphanage was a precious, positive experience, his first concrete link to his past, but he added, “It was not overwhelmingly emotional for me, but I had certain expectations that were basically met and not exceeded.”

  For Jung-Hoe, visiting Korea was monumental, improving his sense of identity, confidence, and independence. He told me that when he heard that I had contacted my family he was envious, and yearned for his “biological home,” although he did have some reservations upon learning the complicated story of my family.

  Jung-Hoe indeed would return to Korea to study a year later. He would go to his orphanage in Kwang Ju to see if he could dig up any more information. He would only find the papers that talked about his reserved and sweet personality and would discover that he had been found wandering the streets after a civil uprising, holding the hand of an older child. A relative? A brother? A friend? We may never know, yet these unanswered questions did not make him or Hoon any less happy or successful in their lives.

  I sometimes resented people’s assumption that adoptees must automatically, deep down, feel part empty or abandoned, that we must suffer some hole in us that will never be filled because our birth parents could not or did not raise us. I know people think this. I know because psychologists and adoption experts write essays and books about it. I know because of the questions people ask (“Did you always know you were adopted?” “How did you feel about that?”) as if being adopted might mean you are somehow incomplete.

  I also understand that adopted parents worry a lot about this. I’ve talked to parents who pine and mourn for their child’s birth mother and father and fret over whether their baby will despair at not being able to know or find their birth family. I know parents who fear telling their child that he or she is adopted, which is ridiculous, in my view. The longer you conceal this so-called secret, the more likely it will become toxic.

  Ultimately, I think people tend to forget that on a basic level our relationships with our adopted parents are normal parent–child relationships. The only difference is how we became parent and child. We can get along great and we can hate each other. We love and fight. We can long for another fate or adore our families and never want anything else. It’s not biology that defines the relationship. In fact, one might argue that adopted families start out in a better spot, as Jung-Hoe pointed out, because of all the background checks and vetting that the parents have to go through. At least they have to prove they have the means and the heartfelt desire to raise the child.

  Perhaps I have an overly unsentimental, simplistic view on the subject. I’ve always known I was adopted. I also know that my adopted parents loved us more than anything. I think that’s why my brothers and I have been able to keep our pasts in perspective. I know for other adoptees, it’s a more complicated question, and they do feel a tremendous loss. After I wrote a newspaper article about my first reunion with my birth family, agencies and support groups eagerly invited me to speak on panels with other grown adoptees. I was taken aback listening to one woman talk about how betrayed she felt by her birth mother. I had never felt that way. One friend of Jung-Hoe’s told me, bitterly, about meeting his Korean birth mother. She had agreed to see him in a Seoul train station. She was obviously nervous that people would see them and tried to give him money so he would not contact her again. He threw the money back in her face and angrily left.

  “I hate that bitch,” he told me. “I don’t care.”

  I also know plenty of adoptees who don’t even think of their birth parents, and have little or no interest in ever finding them or even visiting the place they were born. They have been offered the information and have refused. There are countless factors that influence the way we view our families, our adoptions, and ourselves—and they are the same factors that impact how other children see themselves. No one adoptee’s view is more right or wrong than another’s.

  If I really thought about it, I didn’t automatically feel a strong connection with my birth parents. I had thrown out almost carelessly the words I love you, but did I really mean them? I felt something, although I certainly did not care for them like I did my parents in the States. I did feel a special bond with my sisters that was growing stronger, but I was not some passive player.

  I wanted to love them—and I wanted them to love me.

  I was actively choosing to open my heart, revising my personal history and reconstructing my family. I never would have imagined that I would want to take a sledgehammer to the wall between then and now and upset the applecart of my identity. My sisters had revealed the first gnarled flaws in our family tree. (There were so many sisters with differing opinions and personalities that no secret could stay hidden for long.) I was just beginning to get to know the real people behind the happy façade. Each revelation, each visit, each conversation opened a whole new set of questions. Who really were these people? What was it really that I missed and that I now belonged to? Who am I?

  I wanted to know the real family, not just
the version that they wanted me to see. I was more interested in the complex and the difficult. I just wanted the truth. I had a journalist’s curiosity, the Hopgood spirit, the anxious blood of a Wang.

  “They don’t want you to know about Ba,” Min-Wei warned me.

  To me, that kind of proclamation was practically a dare.

  12

  HANDMADE DUMPLINGS

  I love dumplings.

  I have loved them ever since my parents used to take us to Chinese and other Asian restaurants in Detroit, Toronto, Ann Arbor, and Chicago. I adore their compact efficiency, how perfect they look on the plate, the burst of hot flavor in my mouth. I eat them steamed, boiled, fried, in soups, or crispy and hot off the grill. I like them quarter-moon-shaped, or plump and doughy, or twisted up like oversized Hershey’s kisses. I’ll eat them filled with cabbage and carrots and pork or shrimp and mushrooms or spinach and onions. I have savored sizzling guotie in a home restaurant in Kinmen made by a grizzled woman who hovered over a greasy, crackling grill while her children pulled at the folds of her skirt. I have inhaled an inhuman number of shumai, hargou, and other types of dim sum in smudgy dining rooms in Hong Kong. My husband and I physically crave xiaolongbao, a perfect specimen of dumpling from eastern China that is filled with soup, as well as the meat or seafood filling, and explodes with flavor when you bite into one. Eating them in Taipei’s famous Din Tai Fueng restaurant changed my life, and whenever we are in New York we are sure to order them at Joe’s Shanghai. To me, dumplings are almost an obsession.

  What a joy it was to have access to a family who knew how to make, buy, and eat the best dumplings. That first morning I woke in Taipei, Min-Wei was eating dripping pork dumplings from a clear plastic bag, and offered me one, winning my heart forever. Fourth sister Jin-Hong later handmade shuijiao, boiled dumplings, for the entire family when we visited Taitung.

  “Please teach me,” I begged, and she pleasantly agreed.