Famous Adopted People Read online

  Famous

  ADOPTED

  People

  a novel

  alice stephens

  AN UNNAMED PRESS BOOK

  Copyright © 2018 Alice Stephens

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].

  Published in North America by the Unnamed Press.

  www.unnamedpress.com

  Unnamed Press, and the colophon, are registered trademarks of Unnamed Media LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stephens, Alice, 1967- author.

  Famous adopted people : a novel / by Alice Stephens.

  Los Angeles : Unnamed Press, 2018.

  LCCN 2018033188 | ISBN 9781944700744 (pbk.)

  LCC PS3619.T476675 F36 2018 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018033188

  Designed & typeset by Jaya Nicely

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  For my mom and dad, Betsy and Ralph Stephens

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Sources of Chapter Epigraphs

  About the Author

  Famous

  ADOPTED

  People

  Chapter 1

  “And when she could hide him no longer she took for him a basket made of bulrushes, and daubed it with bitumen and pitch; and she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds at the river’s brink… And the child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son…”

  –Exodus 2:3, 10

  If it wasn’t for Mindy, I might have been dead a long time ago, and now here she was in the Dunkin’ Donuts in downtown Seoul, chewing on the lip of her Styrofoam cup of coffee, telling me to go home. Booze-bloated brain sloshing in sickening waves inside the hard hollow of my skull, stomach a sulfuric cauldron bubbling with acid and bile, I was just trying to keep myself from barfing all over the sesame tofu ring that I had ordered as a joke.

  “Mindy, I’m sorry,” I said between clenched teeth, the smell of her coffee digging sharply into my nostrils. “I know it’s an important day for you—”

  “Uh-uh,” she cut me off. I knew she was nervous because the dimple underneath her right eye was winking at me, a facial tic that came on only when she was stressed. Best friends since we were eight years old, I knew everything about her, just as she knew everything about me. Which is why I couldn’t believe what she said next. “You have never cared about anyone but yourself. How many years I wasted defending you to my mother, to Trip, to the whole fucking world.”

  “C’mon, Min Hee,” I wheedled, “I was just having some fun.”

  “That’s all you ever have,” she hissed at me, heart-shaped mouth broken into two as she bared her teeth in disgust. “It’s all you care about. You can’t even stay sober for a few days! You can’t say no, even when saying yes puts you and me into danger. We’re not in America, Li-li. We’re in Asia. Drug laws are no joke.”

  “It was just a line of something,” I defended myself, pushing the vile tofu doughnut away.

  “What if you’d been arrested? You know what today means to me. What if we had to run around trying to get you out of jail today? Today of all days?”

  “Well, I wasn’t arrested,” I retorted, wiping away white parentheses of gummy spit from the corners of my mouth with a crumpled napkin. “I’m a little hungover, yeah, but I’m ready to go! I won’t throw up all over the hyeon gwan.”

  “You’re not coming with us, Lisa.” Her voice trembled, and a clumsy, sideways glance confirmed that she was crying. “This is the most important day of my life, and I won’t let you ruin it.”

  The seriousness of the situation seeped through the sickening headache that fogged my brain. I clutched at her arm, sloshing her coffee. “I want to be here for you. I am here for you.”

  “It’s too late,” she sniffed, dabbing at the coffee that had soaked into the sleeve of her cream angora sweater, probably leaving a permanent stain. “My parents are so pissed off at you, I doubt they’ll speak to you again.”

  “C’mon, Mindy, I’ve been practicing my Korean. Mannaseo bangapsuemnida.” I bowed so low that I banged my head on the table.

  “You don’t get it, Lisa, do you? You did not give one goddamn thought to me last night. First you beg me to go out with you, when you knew I just wanted to chill out in the room, watch some stupid hotel cable and get an early night’s sleep. Then you insist on hanging out with some shady-looking jopok-type guy who you’d apparently already arranged to meet at the bar, asking to stay for one more drink and then one more, and next thing I know, you’re doing shots of Johnnie Walker and snorting lines! Even when I walked out on you, you didn’t follow! So then I’m worried about you, tossing and turning in bed until you finally get back to the room, and then you snored so loudly I couldn’t fall asleep! I’m a wreck today!” She took a deep breath, and spread her hands—obstetrician hands now that pulled babies out of their mothers’ bodies—on her thighs, the gumball-sized yellow diamond of her engagement ring winking luridly. “Go back to Japan, Lisa. My dad says he’ll pay the penalty on your ticket. You’re not serious about finding your birth mother, and you’re obviously not interested in helping me. You’ve wasted your life away, every opportunity that has ever been given to you. Your parents gave you such a precious gift, and you just threw it in their faces.”

  Not even Mindy’s mother, Margaret, would have ever put it that way. “Are you fucking serious, Mindy? I can’t believe those words just came out of your mouth.”

  She stared up at the fluorescent lights striping the ceiling, the whites of her eyes shining like pearls. “What have you ever done to make your parents proud, Lisa? You say you want to be a writer, you talk about it all the time, but you have fuck all to show for it.”

  Her words were hot little needles, pricking deep into my heart. The geometric angles of the hard plastic seats and tables began to melt and spread into formless blobs of beige and orange. I hated to have anyone see they could make me cry, even Mindy, so I pretended to be very interested in flicking the sesame seeds off my untouched pastry. “I know you think that I’ve just been partying in Japan, but I’ve not. I’m writing. A lot. I’ve filled up at least half a dozen notebooks since I started living in Fukuoka.”

  Mindy snorted incredulously. “Filled them up with what?”

  “With observations. Scenes, sketches, thoughts,” I responded tentatively.

  “That’s all?” she sneered. She had never been so cruel, so belittling, so mean. She had always been the sunshine yang to my dark and troubled yin, but now her light had been eclipsed by dark malice and she was all furious foe. “I thought you were working on a novel.”

  “The journals are the seeds of the novel, like the preliminary sketches that an artist does before a painting, or the storyboards a director makes for a movie.�
�

  She took a big, deliberative bite of her jelly doughnut, a dark clot of filling squelching out the other end, and goaded me: “So basically all the time you told me you were working on a novel, you’ve been lying.” She wiped the white powder from her lips, but not the contemptuous frown. “Stop always hiding in the shadows, Lisa. If you don’t have what it takes to be a writer, then quit pretending you’re going to be a writer. You’re old enough to know that just saying something doesn’t make it so, and quite frankly your big talk about writing the Great Adoption Novel is getting a little embarrassing at this point.”

  “What the fuck?” Anger welled up, more overpowering even than the nausea of my hangover. “Fine, Mindy, you know what? Fuck you!” I leapt from my seat with an alacrity that sent black stars swimming away from the center of my vision. “I don’t know what you’re looking for, what kind of happiness you think you are going to get from meeting the woman who gave you up. She gave you up, Mindy!”

  Mindy flinched away from me, probably because what I was saying was so hurtful, so uncalled for, so out of character after almost twenty years of unconditional love, but maybe also because of my vomity breath.

  “She sent you across the Pacific Ocean to a foreign country to ensure that you’d never come around again, but you’re too dumb to take the hint. You know, there are real disasters in the world, like that tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Fukushima that happened a few weeks ago—quite near me, Mindy!—and has killed thousands and may kill thousands more, without you having to go out there and make your own. But I guess deep down you’re still a little drama queen who hasn’t had enough heartbreak in your life, so you have to manufacture it yourself.” Her eyes louvered shut, slivered lids dropped to shield her from the ugly reality of me. “Tell your father I don’t need his charity, I can damn well get home on my own. Tell your mother she can unclench her rectal muscles now, ’cause I’m outta here. Have a nice life, cunt!”

  Whirling away from her, I almost knocked the blue contacts out of a woman’s surgically restructured eyes when I thumped into her, chest to chest. Without stopping, I rushed out the doors as Mindy began to abjectly apologize to the woman in Korean.

  Back in the hotel room, I curved over the toilet for a quick puke, my yin-yang pendant, a gift to me from Mindy, dinging at the undercarriage of my jaw. After rinsing out my mouth, I scrabbled at the clasp, but I hadn’t taken the necklace off in more than ten years, and it seemed as if the silver was rusted shut. A perfect metaphor for our relationship, corroded and useless, I thought in disgust as I gathered up whatever clothes of mine I could find scattered around the floor, my suitcase already semi-packed, since I had never unpacked it. Cramming hotel toiletries into a side pocket, I listened, half in dread and half in hope, for Mindy’s key rattling in the door, her familiar call of “Li-li,” the only pet name I had in the world, but it didn’t come. Marching through the lobby, wheeled suitcase bumping at my heels, I expected Howard or Margaret Stamwell to be lurking behind the stately celadon floor vases, or hiding behind an unfurled copy of the Korea Herald, confirming with their own eyes that I was leaving their lives, finally, after almost two decades of a friendship that they had never liked. But they were nowhere in sight, and I rolled my suitcase out the heavy, brass-trimmed glass doors, held open by a man in a heavy, brass-trimmed uniform that emphasized he was just an extension of the door, and stood lost and foolish at the corner of the busy avenue, with nowhere left to go.

  Dragging my wobbly suitcase through the tide of black-suited salarymen and secretaries in sensible heels, I plodded down the long blocks of tidy, well-swept sidewalks assiduously attended to by face-masked workers in neon uniforms, past the sleek, cosmopolitan, anywhere-in-the-world facades of skyscrapers and luxury shops, before slipping through a crevice into a warren of back alleys that stank of garlic and piss, the chipped and uneven paving scattered with cigarette butts, loogies, and convenience-store wrappers. Somehow my feet knew where to go, even when my mind didn’t. The first time I blundered into Spaghetti Kyu Bok’s, it had been complete serendipity. When Mindy and I searched for it the next day, we passed the same jade jewelry shop four times and I was just about to admit defeat when we stumbled upon it. Today, I discovered that if I just didn’t think about it, I could find my way there.

  But when I staggered up to the door, the windows were dark and the neon sign of the bowl with three squiggles rising from the rim was turned off. It was that sign that just two days ago had drawn me out of the cheek-chapping early-spring wind and through the steam-bedewed glass door. Seoul had changed a lot even in the seven years since I’d last visited, seeming shinier, taller, more prosperous. Still, cracking the slick surface of steel-and-glass buildings were tiny fissures, like the one the wind chased me down, where a whole other layer of city existed: the noisy, dirty, crowded, stinky, dilapidated fundament that festered beneath the brand-new glitz. Pinched, mazelike lanes were lined with crumbling, squat concrete buildings narrowly sliced into cramped stores crammed with sun-faded plastic sandals, knockoff Nike socks, sour-smelling cages bursting with cockatoos and budgies, weird bamboo implements, dented aluminum cooking ware, and cheap pleather goods. The bright blare of the neon bowl among the drab and faded storefronts irresistibly drew me toward it, promising a hot meal for my empty belly and shelter from the wind that blew from the frozen tundra of the Siberian steppes, through the stinging sands of the Gobi Desert, over the snow-packed reaches of China, and right down the neck of my useless down sweater, which had seemed so warm and cozy in Fukuoka. A grizzled man with a cheerful smile half occluded by the silken wisps of a Confucian beard ushered me with a bow to the counter. It was late morning, and the little shop was empty but for a gray-haired woman wearing a pink apron emblazoned with a teddy bear hugging a kitten, slumped in a chair in front of a big-screen TV, peeling lumpy bulbs of garlic. Shaking my head at the Korean menu the man gallantly presented me, I asked in English, “What’s good to eat here?”

  Smiling widely to reveal a rickety line of teeth scrimshawed with rot, he announced, “Spaghetti.”

  “Spaghetti! Why not? When in Rome,” I said, laughing and shimmying onto a stool.

  He said something to the woman. She sighed heavily and put her chin in her hand, staring hard at the TV. It was a moment of high drama: a beautiful young girl was sobbing painfully, while a rugged, much older man with an oily Ronald Reagan pompadour sneered at her in the background.

  I pointed to the glass-fronted fridge stacked with beer bottles and carefully pronounced, “Maekju juseyo.” That much Korean I knew. It was early to be drinking, but I was nervous about my meeting with Miss Cho of MotherFinders, who knew I was coming to Korea with Mindy and had emailed me to ask that I meet her that afternoon, before Mindy and her parents arrived from the States. I didn’t tell Mindy about Miss Cho’s request because she had enough on her mind as it was; besides, I was pretty sure the agency hadn’t found my mother, or else I would have received a glossy packet detailing the wide array of expensive services MotherFinders offered for facilitating reunions.

  He spoke again to the woman, this time barking a command. She put her hands on her knees with slow deliberation and heaved herself off the chair with a low grunt. As she ducked beneath the counter, he turned again to me with an apologetic grin. Reaching up to a shelf, he brandished a brown bottle with a gold label. He smiled encouragingly, asking if I wanted it instead of beer. Once again, I wondered, “Why not?” and waved my hand to indicate that he should bring it down. He filled a ceramic flask and brought it to me on a tray with a shallow ceramic cup, which he poured full. I raised the cup to him, pronouncing my favorite Korean phrase, “Geonbae.”

  Disappearing into a cloud of steam, he and the woman stepped around each other in the small wedge of a kitchen. There was a soft, soothing burbling of boiling water, and I wished I could mute the dramatic sobs and emotion-cracked hysteria of the TV. Just as I poured myself a third thimble of the rice liquor, the man placed a vast bowl of noodle soup in
front of me. “Spaghetti,” he said, and nodded proudly.

  “Oh, yeah!” I chuckled to myself, clapping my hands in a bow over the bowl before spooling the noodles into my pursed lips with steel chopsticks. “Delicious!” I assured the man, who hovered like a misty moon behind the heat threading up from the soup.

  “Guksu,” he said, nodding his silvery head toward the bowl. “Guksu.”

  “Guksu,” I obediently repeated, giving him a thumbs-up. “Oishii!”

  Immediately, the bobbing moon froze like a reflection in a still lake. “Nihonjin?”

  “Huh? Oh, no, no.” I shivered my head in denial, squinting earnestly at the man. “Not Japanese. American.”

  He guffawed approvingly into the baby-fine fringe of hair that hung from his chin. “America, America.”

  I brought Mindy to the restaurant the next day, while Margaret and Howard were sleeping off their jet lag. Proficient in Korean, Mindy learned that his name was Kyu Bok, that the dour woman in the cutesy apron was his wife, and that they had four children: one a successful factory manager who had bought this noodle shop for his parents, another a no-good party boy who drove a taxi, and two married daughters. Before coming to Seoul, Kyu Bok and his wife had been farmers down south. He was glad to leave that life, he said, holding out hands that were scarred and crooked, a ring finger abruptly ending at the second knuckle, but he missed his home village. A bullet of a woman with a kinked helmet of badly permed hair, his wife watched us with arms crossed tightly over her teddy-bear-aproned chest, face blank and hard as steel; even Mindy could not breach her fortress of hostility.

  Crumpling down on top of my suitcase, I tucked my body under the narrow ceramic ledge that served as the awning over the restaurant, trying to keep out of the way of the scooters, motorcycles, and occasional car that nosed down the sidewalk-less alley. Arms trussing my legs close against my stomach, I rested my forehead on my knees, trying to will myself to sleep, until the gentle strains of “Sakura” intruded upon the anxiety-ridden narrative of my chaotic thoughts. Finally, Mindy was calling to apologize. Fumbling open my phone, I croaked, “Hello,” the hollow echo of my own voice bouncing back from the satellite slowly orbiting miles above in the void of outer space.