You tell this story differently. You say that I was the one who sat there quietly. That you were the one to call him out on his mistake.
What difference does it make?
Because I was the strong one, you said, while you just sat there in the corner feeling sorry for yourself.
Sorry for myself? Why?
Because you don’t like thinking about death.
Oh really, I said. I was laughing now.
I don’t know, you said. Your voice became quieter and I couldn’t tell where your mind had gone.
I don’t know, you said again, I just try not to ever think about it. And then I was quiet, too. I didn’t know if you felt like you knew something I didn’t. It was true that the thought of him gone had invited a terrible loneliness to the table, even as we all sat around it. Maybe my childlessness had also bound me to our parents; my only concept of family was a nostalgic one.
Some days I don’t know what frightens me more, the idea of life without children, or without parents, or being the only parent you have left.
* * *
ON JANUARY 25, 1994, at 7:30 a.m., after five years of waiting, the adoption agency called our house. This is the call, the woman said to our mother on the phone, we have your match. I leaned into the receiver and together we listened to your name: Boon-Nam Prasongsanti, born May 28, 1991. Later, when I saw your name on paper, I realized how beautiful it was, the first part like a drumbeat, the second like a few melancholic notes on a stringed instrument. But I didn’t hear this at first when she pronounced nam like ham, santi like panties. Boon nam praw song santi.
Our mother put a hand to her mouth and then looked at me. I remember her initial look of happiness and relief, and how quickly those feelings were transmitted. Then she dropped to the floor, apologizing to the phone while she sat on her knees. The tears frightened me because I didn’t understand them; I didn’t understand all the longing and sadness that was shackled to the joy of that moment. After she hung up we walked around the house together, each space suddenly renovated with the news. This was the room where you would sleep, no longer an office; this was the room where you would eat, no longer just a table for three; this was the room where you would play with me, no longer a child without the company of a sibling.
Our father was away that week on business so our mother dialed his hotel in New York, but he was out. She decided to leave a message with the receptionist, whose voice was cool until our mother said, Tell him he’s a father again!
Oh! the receptionist cried, suddenly all sweetness. We could hear motherhood warming her voice. What is it?
It’s a baby boy, our mother said.
* * *
OFTEN PEOPLE HAVE ASKED how we prepared for your coming. For four and a half years our parents didn’t know the sex of the child; for a portion of that time they thought they would be adopting an infant. Eventually they found that, the younger the child, the longer the line, and that biological parents were legally allowed to reclaim them up until their first birthday. So our mother told the agency that we would be thrilled with whomever we were matched with, and put away visions of carrying you through the door. Instead we imagined whoever you were to us then, walking through it yourself.
* * *
HOW DOES ANYONE PREPARE for a child, I wonder now, regardless of the route you take. I knew one family from church who had been through the process—I babysat their two kids, adopted from Mexico. But even that situation seemed different from ours, as both children looked like their adoptive parents. Our father says they read lots of books, that our mother marked up each paper from the agency with scrupulous underlines, even when she was unsure exactly who she was underlining for. The image of you was blurry for so long, after all; we didn’t receive your name, age, or picture until a few months before we met you.
I have a memory of asking our parents at dinner if you might be bullied for looking different—but I’m not sure this is right, whether this came up before or after the bullying had already begun.
Did we assume that any hurt you felt would only come from outside the home and not from the trauma of living within it?
* * *
THE FIRST DOCUMENTED transracial adoption in the United States was in 1948, between a Black child and a white family in Minnesota. Up until that point, and even still afterward, Black families were denied adoption services, making it difficult both for Black children to find placements and to find placement within Black homes. Transracial adoptions grew in the postwar boom with rising interest from white families, but some states continued to ban them through the fifties and sixties, even after laws barring interracial marriage were ruled unconstitutional. In the seventies, the National Association of Black Social Workers changed the course of the conversation when it issued a statement on transracial adoption, which took a “vehement stand against the placement of Black children in white homes for any reason.” It argued that white homes weren’t equipped to raise a Black child in a racist society, that these adoptions were done for the benefit of the white family rather than the welfare of the child, and that Black families would adopt in higher numbers if the adoption process didn’t effectively eliminate their applications. The statement echoed throughout the community and Black–white placements began to decline.
There were fewer public discussions around transnational adoption at this time, how a child from an Asian country, for example, might psychologically adjust to a white home, white still being the primary demographic for American adoptive parents due to money, access, and racial bias. This was evidently an easier narrative for the culture to swallow; a kind of institutional saviorism was less apparent when foreign children came into the mix, not as quick to remind America of its original sin. But there was little mainstream language for any of it yet.
There was a connection between the two things, though. It was true that our parents couldn’t afford to adopt domestically, but controversy might have stopped them if they’d traveled farther down that path. At its peak in 1970, only an estimated 2,500 adoptions between Black and white families were finalized each year, and the more controversial the subject became, the more international adoptions began to soar. They accelerated throughout the seventies, eighties, and nineties, when Americans would adopt more than a quarter of a million foreign children, most coming from Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.
I say all of this to you now because, in the privacy of our own home, the three of us didn’t talk about it before you got there, because our parents, in spite of the tall piles of research, perhaps didn’t notice the space a blind spot can occupy. I picture us there at the dinner table and am surprised to see how easily we slotted into adoptive tropes, either in the unspoken hope that we could make your life better, or that we ourselves would be changed, altered, transformed in some way, converted from a white status quo.
And yet. Here also sat the same family, so excited to meet you. Here they sat, turning over your papers like love letters from afar, longing and praying for the wait to end. Any concerns our parents confided in each other might have been brushed aside with two questions: Here in this progressive California town? With all the love in the world to give?
* * *
MY HUSBAND AND I had a game for a while, Bad Empathy, and the contestants comprised both friends and strangers. To qualify they needed to say things like:
Is it him or you?
Just relax!
You have plenty of time.
It could always be worse, like cancer.
Ding, ding, we’d say to each other in the beginning, when we still had a fresh sense of humor. This week’s winner. Step over here to the side to receive one giant foot to stick in your …
One evening at the library I picked up Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I’d forgotten about the younger couple, Nick and Honey, who have married because of Honey’s hysterical pregnancy, a condition more palatably known in the medical world as pseudocyesis, in which nonpregnant women believe they are pregnant. Wha
t’s most mystifying about the condition is that their bodies convince them: their breasts and abdomens get larger; they experience nausea, vomiting, food cravings, and missed periods; in some cases they come back with positive pregnancy tests due to hormonal shifts that can only be half explained. Hippocrates documented this as far back as 300 BCE; Mary Tudor and Freud’s patient Anna O. were said to have experienced it. I was reading theories around its connection to desire until I saw a text from my husband, asking if I was ever planning on coming home for dinner.
On the train, I went back to the play. I’d remembered how George and Martha’s sadness violently propelled the drama forward, its true horror kept secret until the final act. And I’d remembered the reveal: a child invented to bind their private pain closer, for better or for worse, an apparition part angel, part demon, that after twenty-one years would finally vanish that night. And so I didn’t think I’d feel chilled by the play’s conclusion until I came to one of Martha’s final lines just before the lights dim, as George invites her upstairs to bed.
Just … us? she says, and it feels like the loneliest question in the world.
* * *
DAYS AFTER THE PHONE CALL, your picture arrived in the mail; you know the one, the famous first picture. Our mother debated whether to wait to open it until our father got home from New York, but our aunt was over and said, What—are you crazy? Open that envelope. So our mother secretly peeked in at you, before running upstairs to show me, and I said you were the cutest baby I’d ever seen. In that first photo, you’re two years old and standing on a stretch of concrete with a brown awning overhead. To the left is balding grass, and the sky is bleached from the bad angle. You’re standing to the side, head cocked toward us, like an inmate who’s misheard the instructions for his mug shot. You frown. You’re barefoot, with white shorts that display prancing red-nosed reindeer, and they’re pulled up over the bulge of your belly. Your shirt is yellow and green and says CASPER THE FRIENDLY GHOST! with a smiling, sickly-looking ghoul on the front. From this side angle, one thin arm is visible. Despite the frown, you are such a handsome toddler that the look of unhappiness almost suits you. Your eyes are large and brown; your cheeks puff out, only to narrow into a dignified little chin. Your small lips curve downward. You offer us a look at one small ear and a buzzed head.
That day, I removed one of the photos from a frame in the living room, slipped yours inside, and asked if I could keep the picture in my room, where it sat for many years until the day I moved out, and took it with me.
It still sits in the same frame on my desk, just far away enough from the window to protect it from the sun, one of a handful of photos from those first three years of your life.
* * *
SOON AFTER YOUR PICTURE CAME, the adoption agency recommended we make you a Life Book. So our mother bought a thick blue journal and taped a copy of that first photo inside, a copy of your birth certificate, our packing lists for Thailand, and other to-dos before meeting you. Later she would staple in pages from the journal she kept during our trip to meet you, cards from your first Californian birthday, your baptism, an outstanding participation award from school. It rested on a shelf in your room where you would always be able to find it growing up and remained there after you moved out.
Looking in your box of paperwork recently, I found the outline for the Life Book provided by the adoption agency. A LIFE BOOK can help you deal with the mundane issues that uniquely built families will encounter, it explained. It included a template to get started, in case any new parents got stuck:
Not so long ago, on [date] a little [boy/girl] was born in a faraway country: [Korea/India/Thailand]. [His/her] name was _______ and this baby was you. The woman who gave birth to you knew that she could not take care of you because [she was not married/she was very poor/she was very sick] and knew that she couldn’t give a child all the things [he/she] needed.
We don’t know what the woman who gave birth to you in [Korea/India/Thailand] looked like, but because you are so [handsome/cute], we imagine that she must have been very beautiful. What do you think she looked like?
Before you came to us, you were taken care of by a [foster family/ayah/orphanage] in [Korea/India/Thailand]. You lived there for the first [months/years] of your life. Then on [date] we got the call that it was time to meet you. Imagine our excitement! [Insert story of first meeting, joy at finally holding child. Include pictures.]
You didn’t sleep well for the first couple of [days/weeks/months] because you were probably kind of scared. We looked and smelled very different from your [Korean/Indian/Thai] [foster family/ayah/orphanage]. But gradually you relaxed and accepted us and knew that we were your forever Mommy and Daddy [plus siblings, if applicable]. Soon you felt very much at home with your new family. [Pictures.]
Now you may look somewhat like the woman who gave birth to you in [Korea/India/Thailand], we don’t know for sure, but we do know that you [walk just like Mommy, tell jokes like Daddy, etc.]. Because we love you so much, we think about the woman who gave birth to you and your birth father and hope that they know deep in their hearts that you are safe and happy and deeply loved. No matter which way parents and children become a family, they all love each other, and they will be a part of the same family forever.
I was struck by this strange little guide; I was struck by our mother’s decision to keep it. It reminded me of those Hallmark cards with text that filled both sides of the pages. I know I wasn’t always easy growing up, but you’ve always been there, Mom … I often wondered about the people who purchased them, if they signed their names at the bottom with relief, off the hook for anything other than an endorsement. I looked back at the Life Book instructions again. Was this the narrative we also had followed?
* * *
IN FEBRUARY, our parents mailed the papers that said they would accept you and purchased a white teddy bear with long, soft fur to include in our package to be forwarded on to you. At the last minute our mother had the idea of including a key chain around its neck with our photos so that you might recognize us when we came. Our mother started to slide in a group shot of the three of us, but then felt strongly that you should be included, too, when you looked at it. So she and I pulled out the albums and searched for three single photos of each of us, then slid them in alongside one of the few small, single photos we had of you. We all kind of stood on top of each other inside the frame but I agreed it was better; I tried to imagine you studying us.
For a long time our parents had discussed giving you an American name that closely resembled the Thai, but they couldn’t find one that worked. They decided on Daniel, the biblical interpreter of dreams, because it was a name from our mother’s side of the family. Our father said he would call you Dan, but I knew even then that would never stick. You would be Danny. Danny Prasongsanti Larsen.
In April, a date was set to meet you: July 4, 1994. It was coincidental that you would join your new American family on the most American day of the year, and our parents’ friends marveled at the timing, bound up in the symbolism of some American dream. Our parents nodded politely, just grateful a date was confirmed, grateful for any information, really, that continued to come in, little by little, to help assemble some picture in their minds of the boy who would be living with us. These papers would usually offer one more photo of you, followed by a set of facts: height, weight, immunization records. Sometimes they’d include a short summary at the end that did nothing to help us imagine you: In general, he is a healthy child, his development is suitable. He is quiet but not afraid of the strangers. He can walk and run stably and can climb up the stairs.
* * *
BEFORE YOU, our father used to quiz me on the state capitals at dinner. I’d ask him to do it. What a ridiculous little portrait of an American family, our meat and starch, our plastic place mats, the child rattling off Juneau, Bismarck, Little Rock, Lansing. On Saturday afternoons our father liked to watch TV and on Sundays we would take bike rides. Back then I could never
spot a joke coming on our father’s face, not once. Suddenly his delivery would break through some firm inner membrane in which seriousness had been holding him captive. And then his body would release—the head thrown back, the teeth revealed—and the real punch line would be his own amusement.
* * *
HE CAUGHT ME once with a boy. Something you probably never wanted to know. I was seventeen and taking the pill every morning, terrified about what would happen if I swallowed it five minutes late. That afternoon he came home early from work, and when he walked through the door all the curtains were open, exposing my room to an ugly, bleached sunlight. I sat up in bed and the boy hid his face under the covers.
He didn’t yell, as you would have guessed. He looked at me and I looked at him and he said nothing before turning around, the door clicking shut. He said nothing later that night at dinner, or the next day, or the next. I didn’t go out for weeks after that, as if to put a punishment on display.
How did you know how to make him laugh? I wish you had taught me that gift, how to soften trouble. Like when you knocked out the light on his car and went straight to McDonald’s before coming home, delivering a Happy Meal with the news.
Why on earth, he said, as you handed it to him.
I just thought it would make you feel better, you said, and before he could tell you how ridiculous that was, his head was already thrown back in his chair.
Immediate Family Page 3