While we shuffled forward in the check-in line, my attention was captured by a crowd of white people slowly advancing toward us like a thundercloud rolling across the prairie, identifiable as Americans by their NFL team caps, gum-snapping jaws, and cacophonous hooting. As they neared, I saw that some of them were cradling bundles in their arms, while others had baby carriers strapped to their chests. All eyes were turned down to the soft packages that they held, though occasionally they would roll their gibbous eyes at one another and squeal, “Oh, she just yawned!” or “Oh my god, I still can’t believe I’m holding my baby. Oh my god.”
“Come on, Lisa,” Ji Hoon called, beckoning from the counter. The airline representative flicked her eyes away from him just long enough to give me a dismissive look. She kept us a long time, chatting and cooing at Ji Hoon. I turned to find the crowd of Americans again, but they had disappeared.
When we arrived at security, however, we squeezed in behind the group. There was some fuss as to how to get the babies through the scanners. “He’s too little to get x-rayed,” one of the new moms fumed. I stood behind a blond woman who already looked exhausted by motherhood, eyes pouchy and red rimmed, hair pulled back into a greasy ponytail, clumsily applied foundation streaking her face. Her baby was propped against her shoulder, looking blankly at me. “Does Bessie have a burpie?” the woman was babbling softly as she massaged the infant’s back. “Widdle baby Bessie, sweetums.” She began to jog the baby slightly, even though it had not squirmed or fussed. “Your mama loves Bessie, loves baby Bessie so much.”
The woman’s husband leaned close to the baby, taking a deep whiff of the top of its head. “Bessie baby smells so good! What a great smell, eh, Ava? Better than money!”
The baby’s black eyes flickered toward the man but then settled back on me. I gave a wave, and the baby followed my fingers. I waved again, and her pudgy little cheeks convulsed, lips spreading open to reveal smooth gums. “She’s smiling, she’s smiling!” the man panted with a hint of hysteria.
“Oh my god, oh my god,” his wife squealed, comically turning about in a little circle, trying to catch her new daughter’s happy expression by chasing it as fast as she could.
“Her first smile,” the husband explained apologetically to me. Then, unsure if I could understand him, he gave me a little bow.
A strange prickle ran down my body, and I doubled over to slowly unlace my Converses, trying to get ahold of myself. Straightening up, I looked at the accumulating crowd on the other side of security, everyone peering down at their black-haired, slant-eyed babies with concern to make sure they hadn’t been unduly traumatized by their first encounter with airport security. Tears blurred my eyes as I walked through the metal detector. On the other side, I grabbed my handbag and muttered, “Gotta go to the bathroom,” to Ji Hoon.
“Can’t it wait?” he asked as I broke into a trot. When I didn’t answer, he shouted after me, “It’s Gate 4. Hurry up! The plane’s about to leave!”
I ran blindly down the concourse, searching for a nook to hide myself in and pulling out my phone. I huddled behind an advertisement of a glamorous woman holding a bottle of skin whitener against her spectrally incandescent face. She answered almost immediately. “Li-li?”
“Min Hee.”
“Lisa! Oh god, Lisa.”
“Mindy…”
“No, before you say anything, Lisa, you were right. You were so, so right. I never should have come here to meet my mother. She’s not my mother. Oh god, Lisa, she came to our meeting with her other kids.”
“You have siblings?”
“Two older brothers.” She started to sob. “She brought them to the meetings, both times. And all she does is talk about them; she doesn’t have the slightest interest in me. She barely even looks at me.”
“She’s unsure how to act, Mindy. It’s not every day that you meet your own daughter.”
“I don’t care!” It was a strangled scream. “The sons are the ones who do the talking. They are really interested in our financial situation, constantly taking note of our material possessions. When they found out I was a doctor, they almost started drooling, talking about how much money American doctors make. It’s scary. I’m wondering what I got my parents into.”
“Mindy, you didn’t get them into anything. Stop freaking out. Asians talk a lot more openly about money and salaries and things like that. It’s just a cultural difference.”
“My mom and dad don’t have a clue that things aren’t going well. My mom thinks that my birth mother is a nice woman and has nothing but sympathy for her.”
“Well, of course, Mindy,” I started, but then bit my tongue. Mindy didn’t want to hear that her mother was relieved that her chief rival, Mindy’s biological mother, was cold and unlovable. “Margaret is eager to be friends with the woman who gave you to her.”
“Oh, Lisa,” Mindy sobbed. “Where are you? Why did you leave me?”
“Why didn’t you call?” I countered. “Didn’t you get my email?”
“Email? No. There was nothing from you in my inbox.”
“That’s strange. I emailed you yesterday, early afternoon.”
“I’ve been checking, there was nothing from you. Lisa, I am so sorry for the horrible things I said to you. Can you ever forgive me?”
“Only if you forgive me first,” I said, my voice shuddering against a hot wave of tears. “It was my fault, all of it, entirely. As usual. You were completely right, I was acting like an ass, like I always do. But listen, I don’t have much time—”
“Where are you?”
“At the airport. We’re catching a flight and I—”
“Who’s we? Where are you going?”
A shadow fell across me, and I looked up to see Ji Hoon, his beautiful face a little less beautiful as he glared angrily down at me, chest heaving with panic. “What the hell are you doing, Lisa? The plane is boarding!”
“I’ve got to go.”
“Lisa…” Her voice held a warning, telling me to stop.
“I’ll call you as soon as I get there…”
“Get where?” Mindy demanded. “What’s going on, Lisa?”
“We have to go! Now!” Ji Hoon violently tapped a shaking finger on the oversized face of his TAG Heuer.
“OK, bye for now, Mindy. I’ll call you soon! I love you!”
“Lisa, wait!”
Ji Hoon grabbed hold of my arm and pulled me to my feet, voice pitched high in alarm: “If we’ve missed the plane…”
“Come on, Ji Hoon, let’s run,” I whooped, wrenching my arm from his clammy fingers and sprinting off toward our gate.
We just made it, the flight attendant leading us on a perp walk down the aisle to the disapproving stares of the other passengers, the plane pulling out as soon as we had buckled up. Ji Hoon sat with arms tightly folded, staring out the window, refusing to look at me, both of us still breathing hard from our dash through the airport. That sudden burst of activity had unleashed the throbbing queasiness of the hangover that I had been trying to keep at bay ever since Ji Hoon had roused me from my drunken slumber that morning, when he came to pick me up for the airport, and I closed my eyes as the plane lifted creakily into the air. Soon, the monotonous throb of the engines and the peculiar serenity that comes with hurtling through the sky at 500 miles per hour 3,200 feet up in the air lulled me into sleep, until Ji Hoon roused me to ask if I would like a beverage. “I got myself a beer.” Ji Hoon pointed to a can of Hite on his tray table. “Do you want one too?”
Yawning into my hands, still treading the borderlands between sleep and consciousness, I nodded. The flight attendant passed me a can of beer and a plastic cup with a superior sneer. If she didn’t want me to drink beer at nine o’clock in the morning, then she shouldn’t offer it, I thought, sneering back. But I didn’t actually want the beer, I wanted more sleep, so I closed my eyes, trying to recapture the dream that I had inhabited just moments ago. But Ji Hoon, who seemed to have recaptured his high spirits, jostle
d my arm as he gallantly poured beer into my cup. “Cheers, Lisa!”
The familiar, yeasty aroma wafted into my nose, promising me something—whether it was a cure for my hangover or a full barf bag, I couldn’t be sure, but I decided to find out. I felt the beer flood to the back of my throat, through my chest, and into my empty stomach, and since I didn’t gag, I decided I had made the right choice. “Breakfast of champions,” I said, grinning at Ji Hoon, who was back to attending to me with his usual flirtatious solicitousness, declaring I was prettier than the girl on the cover of the airplane magazine he was leafing through. I asked how old she was, and he said sixteen.
“You must have been a very sweet sweet sixteen,” Ji Hoon teased a moment later.
“I was never sweet sixteen, I was toxic sixteen,” I snorted. “I was zitty and sullen and really insufferable. Nothing like I am now.” Which I wished were true but knew wasn’t. “The only thing that remains of me at sixteen is this.” I touched the yin-yang pendant.
He leaned close to inspect the dime-sized medallion of interlocking silver and gold commas, murmuring, “That’s very nice metalwork. Is it Korean?”
“Yes. My friend Mindy brought it back from a heritage tour. A gift for my sixteenth birthday. It’s kind of symbolic of our relationship.”
Ji Hoon exclaimed, “I get it! So, which one are you? Yin or yang?” He gently stroked the pendant, his finger brushing the tender skin at the hollow of my throat.
“I’m the yin, obviously,” I said, my skin tingling from his grazing touch. “Especially that year. I got into a lot of trouble when I was sixteen, doing drugs, skipping school, getting arrested for shoplifting. After that, my mom made me go see a shrink.” Technically, Mrs. Frank wasn’t a shrink, but it was more dramatic to say “shrink” than “licensed clinical professional counselor specializing in Asperger’s syndrome, gay and lesbian, and adopted teens.” Oh, how I hated her, with her too-bright shade of cherry-red lipstick, her impertinent, probing questions, and the stupid lists she made me write: “Five Things I Can Do to Have a Good Day,” “Six Literary Characters I Admire” (because she knew I liked to read), and “My Seven Worst Fears.” And then she would go through my lists and explain to me that the fact that I wasn’t taking them seriously, writing things like “Fear of Math” and “Fear of Cheerleaders,” was evidence that really my greatest fear was of rejection. That’s what it all came back to with Mrs. Frank, the original sin of all adopted people, Fear of Being Rejected.
“What did your shrink tell you?” Ji Hoon inquired, obligingly pouring more beer into my cup.
I obligingly drank what he poured. “She told me that I was acting upon my environment by internalizing the locus of control.”
He tilted his head to show that he didn’t understand.
“I know, right?” I laughed roughly into my glass. “Basically, it means that my life was shaped by forces outside of my control—my birth mother giving me up, my parents adopting me and bringing me to another country—leaving me to feel like I needed to take control of my own life by behaving in a way that people wouldn’t expect. So by being bad, I was changing the narrative that other people had made for me, thereby seizing control of my own story.”
Pinching his lips between his teeth, he nodded as though he followed the tangled idea that I was so inarticulately expressing. And maybe he did understand.
“You must hear this from all the adopted girls you squire around town,” I joked.
He shook his head, remaining serious. “So what did she suggest you do?”
“She suggested I find my birth mother, actually.” I poured the last of my beer into the cup. “She said I wouldn’t become a fully developed person until I did, and by finding her, I’d return the locus of control to me, but in a positive way, instead of a negative way. She said it was a rite of passage that all adopted people should go through.”
“That was very wise of her,” Ji Hoon declared, wagging his head in emphatic approval. “I feel very sorry that MotherFinders failed you. I am sure that your mother is a very beautiful and intelligent person, just like you. You must not give up hope. Maybe one day she will come to you.”
I shrugged, shook the last few drops of beer from my glass onto my waiting tongue.
Ji Hoon drove us straight from the airport to the famous Dragon Head Rock in a tiny Hyundai hatchback that was a tin can compared with his Audi. It was as if we were in another country, a different season, a previous era. Palm trees fringed the roads, the traffic was calm and orderly, and the air warm and sun-kissed. Lush green pastures speckled with yellow and pink blooms rolled by like unfurling bolts of silk on one side of the road, while dramatic volcanic coastline plunged into the opalescent swell of the sea on the other. At Dragon Head Rock, we made a dutiful pilgrimage down to the viewing platform, dodging newlyweds frozen in artificial poses as they had their pictures snapped and an unceasing tide of tour groups marching with smiling determination behind their perky guides, who held the company flag aloft like it was a beacon of justice. We stopped at an ocean-side restaurant for a lunch of seafood so fresh it was still moving, Ji Hoon cautioning me not to eat too much because that evening we would have a spectacular meal of island delicacies. Hypnotized by the metronomic rhythm of glassy waves crashing against the craggy, tidal-pool-pocked shoreline, I dutifully drank the glasses of soju he poured for me. Occasionally, Ji Hoon’s cheerfulness would recede, and he’d fidget anxiously, his unruly eyebrows descending to shade his eyes, so he’d be looking right at me but clearly not seeing me at all, and I could only assume that he was thinking of the sticky situation with his girlfriend.
Promising to blow my mind, he nosed the Hyundai into a long line of idling cars and tour buses at Mysterious Road. “Now you can see, we are at the bottom of the hill, yes?” Ji Hoon asked, looking at me out of the side of his eyes with delight.
“Uh-huh,” I agreed.
“Now, see, I put the car in neutral and release the brake.”
The car started to roll. “Whoa!” I snorted through my nose. “No way! We’re rolling uphill!”
He nodded at me triumphantly. As the car defied gravity, he had to be careful to avoid the thronging tourists who were let loose from their vehicles to pour water and drop pencils on the tarmac. “But of course, Lisa,” he explained seriously as he started the engine again and put the car into drive, “it is just an optical illusion. You must not be so gullible.”
But then the very next place he took me made me wonder how gullible he wanted me to be. Called Jeju Love Land, the first clue that it was not your usual theme park was a sign in the shape of a penis pointing the way to the ticket booth. As we entered, we were greeted by penis and vagina mascots, each wearing mittens and a hat, perhaps to make them seem more cuddly and adorable. Underneath a Möbius strip of ecstasy—three people performing fellatio on each other—a gaggle of grandmothers flashed the victory sign as they mugged for a group photo. A path took us on a meandering walk around a large lake, past erotic statues, engorged phalluses, pornographic fountains, lewd dioramas, mounds of earth that were shaped like breasts, and other strange sexual decorations.
“This seems like the kind of place that Jonny would like,” I said for no particular reason, except that we were looking at a chubby man in a mask being bounced upon by a woman who was held up, apparently, just by the stiffness of his dick.
“Yes, he would,” Ji Hoon agreed smilingly. “Did you like him?” He strolled on toward a fat woman who seemed to be sucking a scrawny, much smaller man into her vagina.
“You mean ‘like’ like this…?” I wondered, as I leaned close to see what was going on.
“No, no, no!” Ji Hoon vehemently disavowed the misunderstanding. “No, I mean ‘like’ as a person, a friend. Like a cousin, say, or a brother.”
“How come the fat men look like they are satisfying their sex partners, but the fat women look like they are sapping the very life blood out of theirs?”
“So, did you like him or not?” Ji Hoon i
nsisted.
“Uh, yeah, I guess so.” I shrugged. “He seemed kind of yakuza.”
“Oh, no, no.” Ji Hoon gazed at me with a worried wrinkle mussing the smooth perfection of his forehead. Naked, he would not be like the statue I was staring at, the man extremely well muscled, with thick thighs, a chunky taut ass, and bulging biceps. He’d be more like the woman who was clinging to his hips, delicately wrought, exquisitely shaped. “No, he is an honorable and upstanding man. A real leader, very smart, very strong, with a big heart. His family is chaebol, you understand what that means?”
“Sure, it’s like zaibatsu.” I nodded, watching as a tour group gathered around a woman arched in ecstasy as she pleasured herself with her fingers, some of the cheekier men grabbing up the side of her breast.
“Why do you always use the Japanese word for everything?” he snapped. “Are you not Korean? Why do you love everybody else’s culture but your own?” He sat down abruptly on a bench next to a half-dressed statue who looked yearningly in his direction.
I gave him what I hoped was a withering what-the-fuck look. “So what is he? Hyundai? Daewoo? Samsung?”
He buried his face in his hands, his fingers digging into the silky plumage of his hair. “No, you wouldn’t recognize it. It’s something that only real Koreans know.”
With an exasperated laugh, I stalked onward. The sexual ecstasy was beginning to bore me, and I had no idea why intertwined upside-down legs sticking up from a lake would be considered erotic. But then I saw a figurine of two mounted turtles perched on a rock at the pond’s edge. Kenji had two pet turtles, named Orihime and Hikoboshi after star-crossed lovers of Japanese folklore who could meet only once a year on July 7. “Aww…” I sighed and took out my phone to snap a picture for Kenji.
“You want a photo?” Ji Hoon asked, suddenly by my side. “Let me take one with you in it.”
Famous Adopted People Page 7