* * *
HERE’S SOMETHING we did to prepare, our mother said recently. She slid a paper across the kitchen table. It had the words mother, father, older sister, hungry, pee, and their transliterations in Thai. One day in the months before our departure, suddenly frantic that she wouldn’t be able to speak to you, she’d driven to a Thai restaurant on the east side of town and asked the woman behind the hostess stand if anyone there spoke Thai. The woman raised an eyebrow, and when she learned the reason, that a soon-to-be mother wanted to speak to her son, she said no. What could she have thought about this white woman who would be raising a Thai boy in her home? What could she have told her that wouldn’t take a lifetime?
When our mother turned up again the next day the woman sighed, sat down in an empty booth in the back, and conceded by scribbling down some phrases while our mother ordered what she hoped was an expensive dish.
Can you imagine it now, our mother driving across town once a week to practice her pronunciation off the back of a paper menu, where new words and phrases were written in pencil? Our mother would try to keep them in her mouth the whole drive home, where she would later repeat them to me and I would recite them at the dinner table, the state capitals now replaced. Mae, paw, pee-sao, hiu, shishi. Later that year they brought you back to the restaurant to introduce you to the woman. Do you remember this? The woman knelt down and spoke softly in Thai and you hid behind our mother’s back.
Just speak English, the orphanage had said when we got there.
* * *
AS OUR DEPARTURE NEARED, our mother cooked her way through the Thai recipe book she’d found at a garage sale. I have no memory of what she learned, only that she tried, and that the staples in our home were none of those things after you came. What we loved: Hershey’s Syrup, Chef Boyardee, Bagel Bites with the little pepperonis. Kraft Mac and Cheese and Froot Loops.
Our father bought me a textbook called SIAM, not meant for children but probably all he could find with plenty of pictures. I don’t know what happened to it. But I can still see the spires of Wat Arun that seemed hardly contained by the page, stock photos of elephants and monsoons. I held them against the backdrop of our tract home, the squat shops of downtown, the summers that made you forget about rain, and wondered how we would make you feel happy. I had no idea what your life looked like so I tucked it within the book’s beautiful things. Red flowers and god-swept clouds. I hung a picture of an elephant in your room and your new sheets were patterned with baseballs.
* * *
THE LAST HAPPY MEMORY I have of those months was the surprise baby shower our aunt threw for our mother. We walked into the house one Saturday afternoon in May to a roomful of smiling faces and a banner that read: WELCOME, DANNY! (24 LBS—OUCH!) There was cake and clothing to be unwrapped and a tangible excitement in the room. About a week later, though, the dread set in: our parents were still missing one signature on the last of the INS paperwork. They needed FBI fingerprint clearance—without it, the U.S. Embassy in Thailand wouldn’t allow them to take you home and our mother, in the final days of her final trimester, started smoking again.
With three weeks to go, our father found the number for the FBI and began asking every person he could find for help. The adoption agency had gone silent, and there were no replies to his daily messages. Our father faxed our files to Congresswoman Woolsey and Senator Feinstein, and their offices replied that they would call Immigration for us.
This is the part of the story you’ve heard many times, but I wonder if you’ve ever been able to see how much fear was built into those final days, a desperation that we might not get to you. Our departure date was June 27, 1994. On June 23, there was still no word on the fingerprint clearance and our father called the senator’s office again. After five years of preparing for this day, he found himself suddenly at the mercy of one administrative staff member at Immigration. Was it actually possible? he kept saying, pacing the house. To come this close and be stopped by one person’s mistake?
On June 24, our mother woke at 6:30 a.m. to find that our father had been up since five calling the FBI. He went to work and our mother brought me to Mass so that she could pray the rosary and beg. When we returned home we distracted ourselves with our packing lists, acting as though the scene was normal, as though there was nothing potentially stopping us from packing at all. I kept moving for our mother, knowing only that to stop any momentum toward you would be the very worst thing. I worked for most of the morning compiling a bag of toys and games for your long plane ride home. We were packing the last of your clothing that afternoon when our father called.
Sometimes, as an adult, when you’re frustrated with one of us or feeling left out, you get this look that seems to say, Are you even happy I was born? It’s another one of those expressions singular to you, hard to pin down on paper, and when I try to describe it, strange images pile in: storm clouds suppressing rain, a buck planted in the middle of the road, weeping Madonnas trapped in stained glass. I see it when I cancel plans, when our parents say no. It’s a look that asks if you are wanted, and to those who understand it, it’s punishing.
In times like this, I wish you would picture our father calling the FBI and telling them he was with Senator Feinstein’s office. He gave them the name of one of her employees to prove it, though I still have no idea how he obtained it. By process of elimination, beginning with the switchboard’s general number, he was eventually referred to a woman who handled fingerprint clearance. He gave her the employee’s name, told her our story—that we were scheduled to leave for Thailand in three days and were still missing the signature required on our final fingerprint clearance to bring our child home. She said he should call Lydia Finn at INS.
At 9:00 a.m. he was outside the INS office in San Francisco. The lines were long already, over two hundred deep. He stood in the same spot for close to three hours before another idea came to him, and he made his way over to the private offices. He began knocking on doors, one by one, telling each person who answered that he was late for his appointment with Lydia Finn—where might she be? Thankfully, miraculously, he finally found her office, though it took a white man skipping the line at Immigration, and I wonder now how, with another family, another’s life, the circumstances might have shaped up differently. When he walked in, she looked up from her desk and said, You! You’re the one who has every senator and congressperson in the state calling me!
She said she’d call her contact at the FBI in D.C., but she made our father leave the room. When she let him back in he couldn’t tell whether the news was good or bad, but she said she could get the clearance in writing via mail. Impossible, our father said, we’re leaving Monday. So they faxed it.
Our father told our mother this on the phone, and then went back to work. She wanted to send balloons and flowers to his office signed from you but when the florist asked the occasion, she began to cry. I took the phone, gave the credit card number, repeated the message for the card. With a nine-year-old’s sense of great purpose I made the additional calls, one by one, to our parents’ friends, delivering the good news.
* * *
WITH OUR FATHER, love was understood in acts of service. He filled our cars with gas, brought home the ice cream we liked. He repainted your room when you decided, after two weekends of labor, that you’d changed your mind on the color, after all.
So when, a few years ago, our father spent an afternoon in the garage and pulled out his letters from Vietnam, I wondered if this, too, was in service of love, since we’d always been curious about this part of his life. He’d mailed the letters to New Jersey fifty years before, addressed to his parents, and his mother had saved every one. They were stuck in a green file folder marked NAM and one day he gave them to me, just like that.
I held the letters and asked if he’d waited until this particular point in my life to show them to me, on the cusp of starting my own family. To which he answered: Actually I just kind of forgot about them.
So
I took the letters home, and our father said no rush, and as soon as I walked in I started reading. Eventually your brother-in-law turned off the bedside light and I took the folder onto the couch and sat there until I’d read every one.
And what does our twenty-two-year-old father sound like? The year was 1967. He arrived in Da Nang on a 120-degree day in July, and the letters continue until Thanksgiving of the same year, when an explosion sent him into the air and then into the hospital. He describes the eighty men put under his care, the heat, the food, the mosquitoes, the children from the villages who came by to sell Popsicles to the platoon. His handwriting is the same, and a joke here and there, but that’s about it. He is a young, handsome stranger on paper, with a calm that can perhaps be attributed to being twenty-two. The omission of the violence backstage only seemed to make it more ominous, and I was embarrassed to realize that in reading I felt the same as I’d felt in life: disappointed because the stories had been stripped of the details. His greatest concern is keeping his men safe, a group of men who are younger than our twenty-two-year-old father. In the back of the folder is a sandwich bag that holds his Purple Heart, and a note from a woman in Potlatch, Idaho, thanking our father for letting her know how her fiancé died, what a relief it had been that he went honorably and without pain. As I read I couldn’t let go of the feeling that I was somehow still missing half of the stack. Though what had I really expected to find? I read and reread them for days afterward, then weeks, as if by extracting, turning over, and polishing each story, it would reveal some deeper message. Have to go, to the rescue—he signs off.
Maybe they also made me wonder about the narratives we inherit, about what does or doesn’t get passed on. Without a child of my own, I didn’t know what would happen to my stories, my letters, my sentimental items and junk. Would you want any of it? I offered our father’s letters to you once if you remember, and you said, Do they talk about the war, and I said, Kind of, and then you never asked about them again.
If you had read them, you might see a trace of the same man who, thirty years later, would call the senator’s office, who would wait in countless lines and fight the ones in which he couldn’t afford to wait. Or perhaps I can only read with the knowledge of the man and the father he would become.
I returned to them again in search of you, in thinking about the speech. I asked our father if Vietnam informed his desire to adopt, but he only frowned, as if to say that those kinds of connections only happened in the movies. He reminded me that adoption had been our mother’s idea.
* * *
ONCE, DURING A BAD SPELL with you, I told both of them I would never adopt. The point then was not whether I meant it, but that I meant its desired effect. The hurt on our mother’s face. I can still see it now, many years and apologies later.
* * *
ON JUNE 27, 1994, we packed the last of our things, returned borrowed books and videos, mailed letters, picked up traveler’s checks, and made copies of all the papers our father had worked so hard to get. Panic started to set in that we wouldn’t get everything done, but we walked out the door on time at 5:00 p.m., as our mother took one last lap around the house, to ensure your first glimpse of home was a clean one. We arrived at SFO, comforted ourselves with bowls of clam chowder, and then completed the first, brief leg of our journey, a one-hour flight to LAX. There, we were told our flight to Hong Kong was delayed by an hour, and the three of us fell asleep in the stiff black seats at the gate. Our mother woke up at some point to our father reading the paper, telling her we must wait some more. She went back to sleep. We left U.S. soil at 2:45 a.m.
* * *
WE ARRIVED IN HONG KONG in the early hours of June 29, 1994, where we had a three-day layover. If our father hadn’t worked in travel, I don’t know how we would have afforded that trip. It was two weeks on the other side of the world, an otherwise mammoth expense without his discounts on flights and hotels, and costs that couldn’t be reduced were put on a credit card to worry about later. We went straight to a Holiday Inn and spent most of Wednesday asleep. Our father wondered aloud on the car ride to the hotel if and how the Babies’ Home had prepared you to meet us, and in our heads a kaleidoscope of scenarios played: tears, refusal to leave with us, remoteness. I’m sure I was afraid then, head pressed to the window. I’m sure I had never felt so far from home.
The next day, to distract ourselves, we went to the Temple Street market. I remember mostly the heat that pasted our clothing to our bodies, turning the curls on the back of our father’s neck wet, a heat so different from the dry summer days I’d never thought to notice at home. I remember the crowds, and how our mother dug her nails into my wrist so that they wouldn’t swallow me up. I’d never seen so many people in my life, and felt dazed by the white noise of language around me. I thought to ask our mother for something cold to drink but since I couldn’t read any of the signs I said nothing. At some point our mother tried to check in with me, to see how I was feeling about the looming change, but I had spoken enough about preparing to meet you over the last five years and now I just wanted to meet you. Our father enjoyed the market immensely.
When we arrived back at the hotel I fell asleep, while our father and mother sipped two cold beers on the bed. Eventually they drifted off, too, but by midnight our mother was awake again. At 2:00 a.m. she got out of bed in a cold sweat, hearing only the sound of her heart. I can’t really imagine just how frightened she must have been, alone in the middle of the night at the Holiday Inn, days away from becoming a mother again, with no one to tell her how it might turn out, this time so different from the first. Just a few weeks before she had heard a story about a couple who had gone to Romania to adopt their daughter and then, upon witnessing the child’s emotional detachment as a result of neglect in the orphanage, decided to go home without her. She’d brushed it aside when she’d heard it at home in her kitchen, but now the story rattled inside her like a shot of caffeine. She went into the bathroom and closed the door. On the toilet she recited Psalm 91. You will not fear the terror of the night, or the arrow that flies by day, or the pestilence that stalks in darkness, or the destruction that wastes at noonday …
* * *
ON JULY 1, our father and mother awoke at the same time, around 4:00 a.m. They were married ten years that day. Across the pillow they whispered to each other until the light traced the curtains, though neither of them remembers what they talked about, or if they do, they’ve chosen to keep it between them.
We walked to the shopping district in the afternoon, exploring a large complex by the Star Ferry. Our mother said that she had never seen so many expensive clothing stores in her life; our big purchase was three Mrs. Fields cookies. We took photos of the harbor and tried to find a nice restaurant for the anniversary dinner. On the way back to the hotel our mother bought two pocket-size hand mirrors with jade handles for thirteen American dollars because she thought they would make a nice gift, though she knew no one at home expected souvenirs from this particular trip.
Our last evening in Hong Kong, we ended up at an Italian restaurant for dinner. I pushed my minestrone to the side mid-meal, laid down my head, and gave our parents some privacy by falling asleep on the table.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING we boarded an early flight to Bangkok. We checked into the InterContinental Hotel, set down our things in adjoining rooms, and then walked to the Siam Center, where the most bustling attraction was the Pizza Hut. To prepare us for our arrival, the adoption agency had sent an abbreviated list of logistical and emotional pointers: Only 220 volts for your hair dryer. You may find yourself overwhelmed by the anticipation of finally meeting your child. Dress up for the embassy, NO JEANS. Don’t be surprised when you are out in public with your Thai child that you will be constantly stared at—it’s okay! By all means, sample the Thai cuisine; it is an unforgettable experience.
* * *
* * *
ON SUNDAY our father went to the hotel pool while our mother and I took a cab
to the city’s Holy Redeemer Church, which displayed a large gold statue of Christ with arms raised to heaven, as if to say, Well, here we are. Our mother was nervous about getting back to the hotel without the internal compass of her husband, but we found a tuk-tuk for fifty baht, a ride that made us both smile girlishly for the first time since leaving home.
Later, we pushed through the crowds of the Tokyu Department Store in search of last-minute gifts for the social workers. But this day, more than any other, was marked by feelings rather than by comings and goings or new sights and sounds. There was sadness along with excitement and fear, because change is always tethered to some kind of departure, some send-off to a life you knew.
At dinner I said that this would be the last meal with just the three of us. We were as ready for you as we’d ever been—at nine, forty-five, and forty-nine—and yet; what a strange course in preparing for a child, we must have all thought then, in communion and in isolation. We raised our glasses and toasted.
WHEN A WOMAN’S BODY FAILS to conceive on its own for one year, the first thing they do is run a genetic screening for 176 conditions, taking enough blood to fill a kiddie pool. They test for things with names like 11-beta-hydroxylase-deficient congenital adrenal hyperplasia, CLN6-related neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis, Herlitz junctional epidermolysis bullosa LAMB3-related, and something called maple syrup urine disease. Blood is also taken for the thyroid, for the follicle-stimulating hormone, for estradiol, for the anti-Mullerian hormone; there are routine checks for varicella, rubella, HTLV, HIV, hepatitis B and C, clearance forms for Zika. There are new Pap smears to put on file, mammograms, and a procedure called a hysterosalpingogram, which x-rays the uterus and fallopian tubes in search of abnormalities.
Immediate Family Page 4