Lucky Girl

by Mei-Ling Hopgood

Society had come a long way. In Chinese cities and among the younger generations, families wanted girls as much as boys, but such a deeply engrained belief does not change and disappear even over a century. It lurks like a latent virus in laws, memories, and traditions. It surges forth when we least want to remember. Though we try, we might never escape its reach. In the end, my sister would get a divorce and give up custody of her children, although they stayed with her on the weekends.

  Ba interrupted our bonding. He came upstairs barefooted and wearing a white tank top. He stood next to me, leaning against the wall. I could tell he desperately wanted to ask me questions and bond with me.

  He asked: How were my parents? How was my job? How were Irene and her family? They were friendly questions, the inquisition of an interested father. But I answered shortly. I didn’t understand and didn’t feel like trying. I wanted a second of peace, away from his judgment or remorse. I wanted to be with my sister. We sat in silence for several minutes.

  Finally, Ba gave up and returned downstairs. Jin-Hong and I smiled at each other, almost triumphantly, and continued talking late into the night.

  The next morning when we woke up, Ma scolded us.

  “Bad girls,” she said to Jin-Hong. “You were smoking. I saw the cigarette butts.”

  Jin-Hong smiled mischievously and ignored her. To my chagrin she didn’t tell her that it was she who had been smoking and not me. I got the feeling that she liked the idea that Ma might think that I was a bit rebellious, too. I didn’t want Ma to think I smoked but said nothing. At that moment, I preferred to be a good sister rather than a good daughter.

  EACH TIME I VISITED, and each time my sisters visited me, I collected a little bit of vocabulary, history, habit, and tradition and tucked it away in my brain. I bought Chinese scrolls to decorate my house. I learned simple songs and dirty sayings. I can say “fart,” “drink beer,” and “make love” in Mandarin. I could sing funny little nursery rhymes. In Beijing I bargained in tiny shops for two traditional chipao dresses, embroidered silk with high mandarin collars and slits up the sides. I would wear those dresses on special occasions, including my wedding rehearsal dinner.

  I copied some of my sisters’ styles. I saw, for example, that none of my sisters wore bangs even though I’d always had them because I hated my forehead (I thought it was too high). Soon after I met the girls, however, I grew out my bangs and have not cut them since. I wore open-toed sandals and higher heels, like they did. I was proud of “looking Asian,” something I couldn’t have said merely five years before.

  I was developing a new culture of my own, which neither set of parents had handed down to me. Certainly, I may have inherited a love for vegetables from my birth mother or a penchant for the dramatic from either one of my fathers, but the new habits and tastes I had begun to co-opt were not biologically mine nor did they grow organically from my childhood. In fact, I was becoming the Asian American that people had always assumed I was, with a culture that came with the face.

  13

  DADDY’S GIRL

  Washington, D.C., 2000

  Many of the bars and restaurants in the southeast quadrant of Pennsylvania Avenue around the corner from the House of Representatives’ offices were pubby joints with names like Hawk ’n’ Dove and Politiki. They served decent burgers and stiff drinks at inflated prices to congressional staff, lobbyists, and journalists after a long day on the Hill. Walls were covered with presidential paraphernalia, and floors got syrupy sticky around the close of happy hour. The bars on the House side were generally not the hot spots where high rollers with endless expense accounts schmoozed powerful legislators, but plenty of key legislative haggling went on in the booths and around the cigarette-scarred tables.

  My husband and I liked this neighborhood, though mostly for its convenience. When we first moved to the area for Monte’s new job with the Washington Post, we lived in Maryland and this was the first strip of decent night spots on the way into the district. It also was a ten-minute walk from the office where I’d eventually work and little more than a mile away from the house we’d eventually buy. But we chose to meet my parents for dinner there precisely because we thought that it had the D.C. feel that my dad liked so much. The buzz of politics was always in the air: the latest bill, the hottest up-and-comer, the most spectacular crash-and-burn.

  My dad was a political junkie to the core, a loyal foot soldier for the Democratic cause. Every campaign season he filled our front yard with fluorescent signs advertising the appropriate candidates. He would walk through the door with his arms full of propaganda, and my mom would ask, “So what are we supporting today?” We kids were recruited to pass out campaign literature in the neighborhood as soon as we were tall enough to open mailboxes, buoyed by the promise of hot chocolate and doughnuts. Almost yearly we marched or rode on the floats Dad designed for the Labor Day parade in Detroit, waving our UNION, YES! signs.

  My parents had come to D.C. for a national meeting of teachers union officials just before the presidential election of 2000, barely a month after Monte and I moved to the nation’s capital. The four of us met at Bullfeathers, a well-known Hill bar named for President Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite cuss word. My dad came straight from a business meeting and political rally and wore a large GORE 2000 campaign button on his chest. His face was flush with excitement.

  The waitress noted Dad’s pin and asked him who he worked for.

  “Not many Democrats come in here these days,” she said. Bullfeathers was one of the more Republican-leaning joints at that time.

  Dad grinned, as if accepting a challenge.

  “I work for the Michigan Federation of Teachers, and I’m here to support Vice President Gore,” he said. “And who are you voting for?”

  I cringed. This was not a conversation that I wanted to get into, especially before I could order my burger. My father was always doing this, chatting people up, telling them more than they needed to know and how they should be thinking and voting. Most people got a kick out of him, and I admired his bold ability to engage anyone in a conversation about anything. But as I got older, my father’s lack of inhibition—particularly when it came to politics—mortified me. I would recoil whenever he’d launch into one of his diatribes about collective bargaining or union solidarity. I’ve always shared most of my dad’s liberal beliefs, but politics bored me—if not repulsed me. I would debate my father, just to challenge what I thought was blind devotion to causes and leaders that did not always have the best interest of the people in mind. Today I appreciate his resolution, even his gall, and his bulldozing eyes-on-the-prize drive, which he used to get me into this country and teach me to be a strong woman. Yet at times like this—when a poor waitress was forced to admit that she was, in fact, for the other team and then had to put up with my dad’s ribbing—made me want to crawl under the table.

  A COUPLE MONTHS LATER, I managed to land a job with the Dayton Daily News, a scrappy midsized newspaper in Ohio owned by Cox Newspapers. It seemed ironic to me that I would end up in the nation’s capital, immersed in my father’s domain of politics and government.

  I suddenly was a Washington correspondent. The title sounded so much more glamorous than the job was. To do it right, I had to give myself a crash course in parliamentary procedure and memorize the names and faces of all the Ohio representatives and senators, and the names and faces of the staffs that ran their lives. I had to dissect the Air Force Materiel Command’s principal and supplementary budgets and endure long hearings on sexy topics such as the human capital crisis. I read into prefabricated statements and combed through campaign finance reports. I haggled with press secretaries over fine points such as whether the senators supported or just didn’t oppose the president’s most recent proposal.

  Actually, it was a great job, and I did it well enough, but I never felt like I quite fit in among the ultracompetitive Washington press corps, the bureaucrats and staffers who cared more about who you worked for (and how you could help the
m) than who you were. I always had to restrain myself from openly jeering at the know-it-all reporters who dropped names and threw out government jargon at press conferences. The ass-kissing drove me nuts, though I did meet many genuinely good people on all sides who wanted to make a difference, and I certainly didn’t mind the fantastic source lunches in restaurants such as TenPenh or Charlie Palmer.

  I did have some incredible experiences: walking across the White House grounds, wandering the labyrinth of the Pentagon or the halls of Congress, talking face-to-face with some of the political figures of the day: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Donald Rumsfeld, Ted Kennedy, and President G. W. Bush. We were living in Washington on September 11, 2001, when terrorists attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. I stood, eyes watering, in the still-smoldering military headquarters listening to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld vow that the United States would not bow before any threat. Those were mind-blowing days, when the country was full of anxiety, and our jobs as journalists seemed especially important. I learned more than I could have ever dreamed about the way our government and our country works.

  But on slow days, I still ended up foraging through the garbage of government looking for stories. During some downtime on March 12, 2002, I let one of my more persuasive press secretaries convince me that I had to go to a meeting of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. The senators were going to talk about the “the proposed First Responder Initiative” in President Bush’s 2003 budget or, in real-people English, why Bush wasn’t giving enough money to firemen, police, emergency workers, and the agencies that would have to respond to another terrorist attack or national disaster.

  How the heck did I get talked into this? I thought an hour into the testimony. I sat somewhere in the middle of the hearing room in the Senate Dirksen Building. Sure, the topic was important, but it was as boring as heck. I was struggling to stay awake while the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency talked about how he desperately needed hiring flexibility to attract and keep good employees.

  My mobile rang, a no-no during a live hearing. I fumbled around in my purse and quickly glanced at the number, which rang in “private.” I shut off the phone, figuring whatever it was, it could wait. The hearing ended after another hour. I trudged back to the office, my arms full of witness testimony. I felt dismayed that I had wasted those two hours and tried to outline a short story in my head that might salvage the afternoon.

  When I got back to the office, the secretary gave me a funny look.

  “Susan [the office manager] wants to see you,” she said. This was not big news, but the gravity of her voice made me pause.

  Am I in trouble? I thought. My mind raced with any number of things I could have done. Mistakes on expenses? Personal e-mail? I walked past my colleagues’ cubicles and to her office, trying to figure out what I had done.

  Susan was talking in a low voice on the phone. I peeked in, and she motioned me over.

  “Hi,” I said. “You wanted to see me?”

  “Your mom is on the phone,” she said, and handed me the receiver.

  My mom? I thought. She and my father had been in Hawaii for two and a half months on vacation. They were on the Big Island for a weeklong bike ride that included a jaunt up an extinct volcano. It was strange for her to be calling. Instantly, I thought Granny must be sick or dead.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi honey, I have some bad news,” my mom’s voice said. She spoke in an ultra-controlled, low voice that I have always called her principal’s voice: steady, unwavering, effective in cooling a hysterical eight-year-old student or a forty-year-old parent. She was using it with me now.

  “Dad had a massive heart attack,” she said, then paused. “And he didn’t make it.”

  I shrieked. I dropped everything I had in my arms, my umbrella, my notebooks, all the papers I had gathered at the Senate hearing. I collapsed into breathless sobs.

  “No! No! No!”

  Impossible. Dad was in the best shape of his life since he had retired the year before. He had lost weight, lowered his cholesterol, and was going to the gym. He had started to pull the collar of hair around his bald head into a ponytail and had seemed younger than ever when I’d seen him a few months before. Dad had talked about traveling with Mom, buying a condo soon, in someplace like Florida or even D.C. He had just promised me that he would put together my wedding album, because he loved that artsy stuff. He was going to be a great grandparent, once his kids finally had children of their own. Sure, he had made me go over their will recently, but I had blown it off, because, well, I never believed that he would die, at least not so young. He was one month shy of age sixty-three and six months shy of celebrating his thirtieth wedding anniversary.

  “What happened?” I gasped. I was numb except for the shudders that raged through my body. My mom explained, her voice still cool, that they had cycled up and into Volcano National Park the day before. Dad had been afraid he wouldn’t make it, but then he dominated the ride—Mom said he was “dancing” on his bike. He was ecstatic when he reached the peak. The group ate dinner together and then they went to sleep. My mom woke in the middle of the night to loud snorelike noises coming from my father. She was surprised because after he had lost weight, he had stopped his thunderous snoring. Then she felt him wet the bed and she jumped up.

  She screamed for help, and the couple that was staying in the cabin with them came running. Their friend tried to force his breath into my dad’s mouth, hoping to revive him, and the medics did too. But he was dead.

  Mom went with him to the hospital. After the doctors’ futile efforts to revive him, she was able to observe the cadaver. It was just that: a corpse, an ashen, bloated body on a hospital cart. It was not Rollie Hopgood, the husband who commanded a room, who rallied his students or his softball players or his union, who stopped at nothing to adopt his three Asian children. Mom told me later that the only time in which the body seemed like him—the man she married on a whim and who always had seemed so much bigger than the life that contained him—was just before they took him to be cremated. She caught a glimpse of his hand peeping out from beneath the hospital sheet. It was healthy and tanned from the Hawaii sun. It wore his wedding ring, the one he had designed with circles and lines. Mom held that hand for a second, slipped off the ring, and left.

  I was trembling and crying as she told me bits and pieces of this story. I asked questions but don’t remember what. I tried to calm down. My head filled with a despondent fog.

  Dad once told us: “When I die, I want to go to sleep and never wake up.”

  And that’s just what he did. He always did what he promised.

  WHEN HE WAS still a high school art teacher, Dad used to take Hoon-Yung and me on the myriad extracurricular activities he oversaw. He converted an old school bus into an artmobile during the summers and drove from school to school, entertaining kids. Inside, there were benches and tables where students would work on art projects. I remember sitting in the bus, dizzy from the smell of glue and paint, pasting seashells onto colored construction paper. Dad coached softball and basketball, played and umpired slow-pitch softball leagues all summer. We were faithful fans, eating snow cones and watching from the bleachers.

  My favorite outings were the dances.

  I would get gussied up in my prettiest little dresses, such as my frilly yellow Fonzie-wedding frock, and my mom would do my hair, often in ponytails with ribbons. She would curl each tail into a little spiral and help me buckle my white sandals. Then my dad, all groomed, would take me to Taylor Center High School. I loved to prance around to the funky music and hang around all those teenagers who fussed over me. The female students took me by the hand and carried me around the gymnasium, which was decorated with posters and streamers and swirling in multicolored lights. I felt like a big girl.

  I waited eagerly for the DJ to play the slow songs, often some ditty like “Looks Like We Made It” by Barry Manilow. Then my dad would take a break from his chaperonin
g duties and come find me. He would gather me up into his arms and prop me against his chest. I would wrap my arms around his neck. Then, he would sway back and forth to the music. He didn’t like to dance, I would later find out, but he did this for me because I loved it.

  During my wedding reception in 2000, I felt like that little girl again. More than two decades later, my dad tolerated a full four minutes and thirty-three seconds of Céline Dion’s “Because You Loved Me” (though not without grumbling a few times, “Is it over yet?”). As usual, Dad did this to make me happy.

  After his death, the world my dad had so consciously and carefully constructed seemed to be disintegrating. The void he and my mom had filled, the one that might have engulfed me after I was sent away from my birth family, seemed to open into a black hole. There had never been a time in my life that I felt abandoned or unwanted or unloved. Now I felt as if I was desperately alone.

  When I could compose myself, I tried to be the strong daughter that he would have expected me to be. I quizzed Mom on the logistics: How was she going to get home? How was she going to get their stuff home? Did she want me to join her? She needed to get from an isolated part of the Big Island to the airport on the other side, with their bikes and belongings. She would have to stop in Honolulu to pick up the things they had left in their condo and then get to Detroit. Mom hated to fly and hardly ever flew alone. Dad was usually right by her side, holding her hand when the airplane hit full speed, screeching, before jerking upward into the sky.

  Hoon-Yung had offered to go to Hawaii to meet her, too, but she said that wouldn’t be necessary; we’d probably be more trouble than help. She wanted to get home as soon as possible and it would take us at least twenty-four hours to get to where she was.

  My mom was just as concerned about me.

  “Can someone drive you home? Can Monte come and get you?” she asked.

  “I can get there,” I told her. “I can take a cab. Or I’ll wait a little while and then drive.” My voice had stopped trembling but sounded hollow, a vague echo of itself.