Famous Adopted People Read online

  “Miss Lisa?” His voice was small, strained, as if he were crouching in a cupboard, whispering.

  “Oh, Kenji.” I squeezed my eyes shut. My back was killing me and my thighs were numb. “How are you?”

  “Bad,” he said. Silence.

  “Why? What’s happened?” I asked.

  His voice came back. “Kocho-sensei talked… What?”

  The shitty reception had us talking over each other. “No, nothing,” I said, just as he began again, “Kocho-sensei talked with…”

  “Go ahead, Kenji,” I said impatiently.

  “Kocho-sensei talked with my mother and father. The police will come tomorrow.”

  “The what? The police?!” I gasped just as Kyu Bok arrived, his wife trailing after him. Surprised to see me there, he grappled with his ring of keys, his wife plopping down plastic bags heavy with vegetables with a fretful sigh. “What for?”

  “To ask about the sex.”

  “Shit! You told them…?” My heart, weak and fluttery from the rivers of alcohol that had been pumping through it, flopped with the feebleness of a guppy that had jumped out of its fishbowl.

  “Some things,” he said glumly. “I am sorry, Miss Lisa, but I said something to Mori-sensei. I cannot tell too much lie to him. He is my—”

  “What’d you say?” I cut him off viciously. I knew what Mori-sensei was to him. His baseball coach: priest, father figure, and teacher rolled into one irresistible force.

  “I say—I said the night a person saw me go to your apartment was only the one time.”

  “You told him we had sex that night?”

  “Yes. Tomorrow I must tell the police.”

  I didn’t know about the age of consent in Japan (why hadn’t I found out?), but I had heard of foreign teachers being arrested and deported for engaging in sexual relations with their students. I knew I couldn’t go back. “Look, Kenji, you have to do something for me.”

  “Do something…?” he echoed, an echo to my echo.

  “Yes. You have to go to my apartment and get my stuff together and mail it to me.”

  “What? I do not understand.”

  “My stuff, in my apartment!” I raised my voice, as if it were just a matter of his hearing clearly. “You must send it to me. Through the mail. Not all of it, of course, just… just…” Just what? My mind raced. Three years of books culled from Kinokuniyas around Japan. The blue-and-white bathrobe nicked from an onsen in Futsukaichi. The sandalwood bowls from Thailand, lacquer water puppet from Vietnam, hand-tailored batik dress from Malaysia. The dog-eared copy of A Confederacy of Dunces. The Hello Kitty bathroom slippers. The Imari ware sake flask and cups. The purikura albums. I squeezed my eyes shut against the thump of my own heart, the clamor of my chaotic mind. There was, after all, only one thing that was crucial. “My journals, Kenji, it’s very important that you send them to me. There’s a whole pile of pink Campus notebooks, three years’ worth of them.” I was babbling. “You’ll find them in a stack in the futon closet. Send them all.”

  Kyu Bok’s wife corralled a cloud of dust out the door with a bamboo-twig broom, deliberately sweeping it my way.

  “Miss Lisa, you will not come back to here?” Did he sound relieved or disappointed? I squeezed the phone against my throbbing ear as a moped sputtered by.

  “Kenji, I… I would love to return, but don’t you see? It’s no use. It’s just easier if I don’t go back. There is nothing important for me in Fukuoka anymore, except for you and my journals, I mean my notebooks.” No use confusing him. “I’d just rather not go through the Japanese justice system.” I sighed, sludgy blood squelching through my temples. “Surely you can understand that?”

  He couldn’t, because he probably couldn’t even understand what I was saying. And he was only seventeen years old and had likely never been in trouble once in his whole life, except for not studying hard enough or for showing insufficient spirit as a member of the baseball team.

  “But, Miss Lisa, I want you to come back.”

  “It’ll be OK for you, Kenji. You did nothing wrong. It was all my fault. Just tell the police that I made you do it. Tell them I threatened your grade or something like that. Please understand, though, I just can’t go back. Do you understand?”

  “Do you understand?” mocked the satellite backwash of my voice.

  Silence. A passing granny tapped me disapprovingly with the rubber tip of a slender bamboo cane.

  “Kenji?”

  “OK, Miss Lisa,” he finally said.

  “Please don’t forget about the notebooks, Kenji. You can take anything of mine you want from the apartment. All my books, my CDs. But not the CD player, that’s the school’s. As soon as I hang up, I’m going to text you my address in America. Let me know when you have mailed the notebooks. Thank you, Kenji. I’ll wait for you in America. When you graduate university, you can come and we can live together.” Why was I saying that? I was such a coward. Why couldn’t I just say a proper good-bye?

  “Miss Lisa.” His voice suddenly came through loud and clear. “I love you.”

  “Oh, Kenji,” I half sobbed, feeling like a lower life-form than the cockroach that had just trundled out of a drainpipe near my feet. “I miss you terribly too. We’ll find a way. I promise. Kyousukete.”

  “Bye, Miss Lisa. I lo—”

  I quickly hung up. This was all Mindy’s fault. If she hadn’t made me come to Seoul, Kenji and I would have stuck with our plan to sneak off to Nagasaki together for a few nights, and he wouldn’t have been seen by some unknown informant coming out of my apartment.

  As I unkinked my numb limbs, Kyu Bok’s wife again came to the door to empty a bucket of dirty water. The water splashed against the pavement, spattering my legs, gurgling with a sickly burp down the drainpipe from which the cockroach had come. She blocked my way as I tried to hobble into the restaurant, first pointing to the wet floor and then at the sign on the door that listed the restaurant’s hours, the ink faded into inscrutable hieroglyphics. Hoping to gain Kyu Bok’s attention, I pleaded loudly with her. “Please let me in. Juseyo!”

  Her face tightened into a walnut of wrinkles as she scowled contemptuously, firmly sliding the door shut in my face. Customer service, I noticed, was not a major concern to the small-business owner in Korea. Or at least not for this customer. My junior year of college, I had studied in China, where everyone was eager to accept me as their own, just at face value. They insisted that I was an overseas Chinese, and even when I told them I was born in Korea, they still treated me like a returning hero. But here, in the country of my birth, all I got were closed hearts, unwelcoming grunts, and slammed doors.

  To kill time, I wandered toward the main street, where I could buy a beverage with which to wash down some Advil. As I was scanning the shelves of weird soft drinks for something that would actually taste like a soft drink should and not like old toenails or the burned bottom of a coffeepot, I realized that it was about now that Mindy was meeting her birth mother.

  It was for this meeting that I had come to Korea. Just a few weeks ago, she had called me in a state of euphoria. I too was in a more banal state of euphoria, wailing away at karaoke long after my bedtime on a school night. “They’ve found her, Lisa,” she quavered.

  “Found who?” I asked, drunkenly pulling on the door of the karaoke box rather than pushing it, as Aussie Tim belted out “Like a Virgin” in my ear.

  “Her. My mother.”

  Out in the hallway, I pretended to be confused even though I knew exactly what she was talking about. “Margaret was missing?”

  “Come on, Lisa, I’m not joking!”

  “They found your old lady, huh? That’s great! I’m so happy for you!” I lied.

  “I know, I can hardly believe it,” she said in a rush, her astonishment, and maybe the stretch of planet that curved between us, making her take what I said at face value. “I keep pinching myself to make sure I’m not dreaming. When is the school year over for you?”

  “For me
? Why?”

  “I want you to come to Seoul. MotherFinders is setting up a meeting with her. I want you to be there too.”

  “What do Margaret and Howard think about my being there?” I realized I hadn’t brought my beer out into the hallway with me and opened the door to the karaoke box, Samantha shrieking, “And now, the end is near…” I frantically pointed at my glass to indicate that someone should pass it to me. Beer slopped onto my shirt as I cradled the glass in the crook of an arm while closing the door again. “What? Sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

  “Mom agreed that it would be nice if you were there too. She and Dad completely get that you’re the only person in the world who understands what I’m going through. They even want to pay for your plane ticket.”

  Yeah, right. I could just see them begging Mindy to buy me a plane ticket to Seoul. “What about Trip?”

  “What about Trip?” she asked defensively.

  “Will he go as well?”

  “No. He can’t. His law firm won’t give him the vacation time.”

  That sounded suspicious to me, since his daddy owned the firm. “Really?”

  “He needs to save up vacation for our honeymoon. But he’s totally on board with this. Much more than you are.”

  “Which is why maybe he should go…” The school year would be over in three weeks, with a short break before the start of the new school year, during which time Kenji and I had planned an excursion to Nagasaki. It was to be the first time we spent the night together. He’d already told his parents an elaborate lie about a graduation trip with classmates.

  “Look, Lisa, if you don’t want to be there for me…”

  “I had plans to do some traveling, Mindy,” I whined. “With a guy.” Of course, I hadn’t told anyone, not even Mindy—especially not Mindy—about Kenji.

  “Lisa Sarah Pearl, I am begging you. I don’t think I can do this without you. Please, please, please, if you never do anything else for me in my life, do this.”

  “What about all the wedding crap? Don’t you need to be there?” Mindy and Trip were getting married in June.

  Her laugh was wild, the cackle of a woman on the edge. “Everything has been arranged for months now! Besides, his mother will be able to take care of last-minute details. She’s practically running the show anyway.”

  A girl staggered out of one of the rooms, her hand held up to her mouth. It’d be a miracle if she made it to the bathroom in time.

  “What’s she like? Your mother?”

  “MotherFinders didn’t send much information. Her name is Paik Su Bin, and she lives in Suwon, a suburb of Seoul. That’s all I know so far—that’s all I know about her.” Her voice cracked, broke up, came back together again.

  “Min Hee, are you crying?”

  “Yes, I’m fucking crying!” she gasped. “I’m freaking out here. I’m going to meet my mother!”

  The door to the karaoke box slammed open. “Yo, Lisa! Is ‘Oops!… I Did It Again’ yours? It’s on!”

  “All right, Mindy, of course I’ll be there. School ends in three weeks. Have your dad send me the ticket. There are direct flights from Fukuoka.”

  We are a peculiar tribe, adoptees, with something that rankles at the very core of our beings, a little burr buried somewhere deep in the tender seat of our souls. For some, it is only a pinprick; for others, it is a raw outrage that can never be soothed. But for all of us, deep down we know the truth, that we are an abomination of nature, for what could be more unnatural, more against the laws of nature, than the adopted child? Human identity is forged upon genetic history, and from the very first we find our place in society through family, the one true thing in an ever-shifting world; nations may come and go, leaders fall and rise, but family is forever. Adoption challenges those fundamental notions of belonging, subverting the sacred primacy of the bloodline, testing the boundaries of love, probing the depths of the very definition of what it means to be a mother, a father, and a child. The adopted child is a lie, her family a fiction. She learns this early, from the rude inquiries of other people, the loose talk of “real” mothers and fathers, the misty-eyed sentimentality of well-meaning strangers rhapsodizing about rescue and second chances. While her parents tell her adoption is an act of love, the world tells her something else. You know that moment in every sitcom when one of the characters is told that he is adopted? The goggled eyes, the boinggg of the sound track, the mirthful guffaws from the audience as the unthinkable horror of the accusation sinks in. It’s all a ploy, of course. The character is never adopted—the writers would never be so cruel. Every adopted person sits through that scene with a smile frozen on her face, mind suspended until that painful and tired old gag passes and she can once again be one with the audience, chuckling at the foibles of their beloved and deeply flawed favorite characters. The pervasiveness of that tired old joke in sitcoms, comics, and other popular entertainment reveals the profound anxiety with which the general public views adoption. Many adopted children can pass by blending in with their families, but the transracial adoptee is immediately identifiable by a different skin tone, eye shape, texture of hair, as if branded with an A for Adopted, there for all to see. It is, sometimes, all they see.

  I don’t recall the exact moment when, as eight-year-olds at Korean Kamp, Mindy and I met, but I do remember feeling really lucky that this porcelain-skinned princess with swept-back Cindy Crawford hair and brightly hued Benetton outfits had chosen me out of all the other girls in the cabin as her most favored friend, saving a place for me next to her during every mealtime, picking me as her partner for paired activities, inviting me to sit on her bunk bed, where we giggled and whispered until the counselors told us it was time to go to sleep.

  When my mom and Mindy’s parents came to fetch us on the last day of camp, it turned out they recognized each other from adoptee orientations, and that not only had Mindy and I come through the same adoption agency, but we had also arrived in America on the same plane. As further evidence that she and I were destined to be best friends, we lived just a short Metrobus ride down Wisconsin Avenue from each other, the Stamwells in Georgetown and my mom and me in Bethesda.

  Mindy couldn’t have come at a better time for me, because the night before I met her, while tucking me into bed under a limp, coffee-stained floral bedspread at a Vermont roadside motel near Korean Kamp, my parents had told me that Daddy was moving away to live in Africa. I didn’t fully understand what they were implying, thinking that Dad’s leaving had more to do with his work than with his relationship with my mom. Fomenting my confusion, they assured me that we were still a family, only in a different way. It wasn’t until I returned from camp that the full implications of my parents’ divorce hit me. No more of Dad’s Sunday morning chocolate chip pancakes; no more Monk, Mingus, or Morgan blasting from the stereo; no more staying up late to catch the end of the Orioles game. But by that time, I had Mindy, and I seized upon her to fill the void left by my father. My parents splitting into two halved me as well, and I saw in Mindy a mirror image that made me whole again. She was all light and sweetness, I dark and sour; she pure Korean, I two continents stuck together, blurred into one word: Amerasian. She was a classic beauty, with a high forehead, a sweetly rounded chin, and features that perfectly matched; I was befreckled, was large pored, and had a Frankenstein’s monster nose that looked like it had been sewn onto my face from someone else’s dead, discarded corpse. She was the star of her school’s lacrosse team, class president, merit scholar, lead actor in local theater productions, and student member of the board of the Korean Cultural Society; I racked up suspensions at school, was arrested for shoplifting, filched liquor from my parents, and dabbled ambitiously in pharmaceutical and recreational drugs. She liked boys; I liked rebellion. She was fanatical about Korean culture, taking Korean language lessons, teaching herself how to cook Korean food, getting a black belt in tae kwon do, learning indigenous arts and crafts. I was interested in every culture but the Korean one and, thanks to my father,
traveled to the dusty, downtrodden far reaches of the earth, where few Americans dared to venture.

  But we fit together well, the two of us. I was pointed where she was soft; she was curvy where I was thin. We nestled into each other and made a perfect yin-yang circle.

  When we were about twelve—that precarious time when the child starts to become aware of her place in the world and how she is not at the center of the universe but some insignificant spot way out in the cosmos, and the adoptee of ethnic origins realizes that the world does not accept what she takes for granted and that explanations have to be given over and over (yes, they are indeed my parents; yes, my last name really is Pearl; yes, I am from here and speak English at home; well, OK, you may guess where I was born)—Mindy and I decided we’d become famous. If we were famous, everyone would know our story, and we wouldn’t be obliged to trot it out every time we met someone new. “But,” Mindy said to me, her lips closed self-consciously over her newly installed braces, “can adopted people be famous? I’ve never heard of one famous adopted person.”

  We were lying on our stomachs in her family room, the hairy jute carpet scratching our bare thighs, weaving friendship bracelets, Mindy’s fingers plucking the strings together with graceful dexterity, my bracelet (which would be her bracelet) a lumpy string of rough knots. I let the slippery threads fall from my fingers as I contemplated that shocking statement. “C’mon, there has to be someone! Think!”

  We wrinkled our brows and racked our brains, but in the time it took Mindy to finish her (my) bracelet, we still couldn’t come up with one person. Then, as she was tying it to my wrist, the tips of her hair brushing my arm as she bent seriously to her task, she raised her head so suddenly she almost smashed into my nose, which I was just being made to realize by the bullies at school was a preposterous nose for probably anyone, but especially a slant-eyed girl. She announced, “I know! Moses!”