Famous Adopted People

by Alice Stephens

  Flattening herself paper-thin, she gave a little shake of her head and slid by me. I smelled blood in the water.

  “Wo jiao Pao Li Jia,” I exclaimed, using my Chinese name. “Ni jiao shenme mingzi?”

  It was a stupid question to ask—I already knew her name, or her first name at least—but it was all I could think of in the heat of the moment; my Chinese was very rusty. As she slipped out the door, I pleaded, “Wo yao shi ni de pengyou.” As an answer, the door closed with that awful, vacuum-seal whoosh.

  Heart hammering, I was proud of myself for finally figuring something out on my own. Ting was not North Korean. Ting was Chinese. Somewhere within me, a rag of hope fluttered like a plastic bag caught upon a bush. That afternoon, I paced my room like the caged animal that I was: ten steps long and fourteen wide.

  Shortly after the breakup, eager to escape an environment that was suddenly claustrophobic and stultifying as I huddled in my cramped dorm room hoping to avoid Nigel, whose wounded eyes would accuse me whenever we crossed paths, I applied for a yearlong study program in Xi’an, crafting a writing project with my adviser in order to fulfill credits toward my English major. The project was simple: keep a detailed daily journal, which I would have done anyway, and write a final paper using my journal as source material.

  I loved and hated China, not simultaneously, but often in lightning-quick succession. Love, hate, love, hate—all in the space of a short stroll down a city block. At first, there was a lot of love, or at least wonderment. It thrilled me to see flat-faced, single-lidded, dark-haired people everywhere I looked, and I felt instinctively at home in a sea of similar faces, one among a billion people, all who looked like me. But the reality of living with a billion people quickly broke the spell. There was simply no such thing as being alone. People were everywhere, in every nook and cranny, every bush and bench, crowding around the stalls at the market, squeezing onto the bus, elbowing to the front of the line, threatening to run you over on the streets, exhaling pungent garlic breath, and spitting everywhere—in restaurants, on the bus, in class—the streets of China were paved with sputum. As soon as they heard me talk in a loose, sloppy accent, the Chinese would become very friendly and claim me for one of their own, as an overseas Chinese, even after I explained that I was actually born in Korea. Korean, Chinese, we’re all the same, they’d happily assure me. Being American accorded me an immediate respect, as well as constant requests: changing yuan for dollars, language exchanges, TOEFL study sessions, help with applications to American universities, lectures to cultural clubs, even sponsoring visas. Relationships in China were all about scratching backs, and the Chinese were not shy about asking for favors. Soon, I had so many zhongguo pengyou that I had no spare time for myself. Life was a slog of classes, language exchanges, lectures, and excursions. But that was the life of a Chinese student, who lived as if in a beehive, always part of a group, always working toward something. Even drinking was hard work, a communal event where people gathered with the explicit intent of getting shit-faced and doing crazy stuff, like dancing around with a bottle between their legs like it was a penis, or doing a striptease to a traditional folk tune, or simply weeping uncontrollably into a glass of baijiu. If you were a man (and as a foreigner I was an honorary male), there was no shame in drinking to excess, and whatever you did at the drinking party stayed at the drinking party, with nary a mention of your transgressions the next day. It was as if you were two entirely separate people, sober you and drunk you, and sober you was never blamed for what drunk you did. You might say I went native with my drinking habits.

  As the winter wore on, I became disenchanted with life in China, weary of battling the unceasing tide of humanity; irritated with the constant blaring of the school loudspeakers, which announced the new day at seven A.M. and imparted important reminders on how to comport yourself as a good citizen throughout the day; tired of shivering in the unheated classrooms; and appalled at the relentless obliteration of the old for the new, downtown Xi’an a forest of cranes and scaffolding, the air cloudy with concrete dust and factory smoke. Each day there were fewer bicycles on the street and more cars, fewer sidewalk restaurants serving the local specialty of flatbread soaked in mutton broth and more KFCs, fewer Mao suits and more business suits. All my pengyou wanted to talk about was how to get an American visa and money: how to make it, how much of it my family had, how much I would make after college, how much they could expect to make if they were able to go to the US on a work visa. I knew it was ridiculous for me to be nostalgic about a China that I had never experienced, and it was unfair to expect the Chinese to stay in their Mao suits and their shabby Communist poverty—that they had just as much right to enjoy private transportation, cable TV, and status consumerism as I did. I was also aware that it was horribly colonialist of me to want the Middle Kingdom to stay frozen in time, a relic of tile hip-and-gable roofs, stone arch bridges, and tiered pagodas rising from the mist. Nevertheless, the relentless paving over of the past depressed me, and by the spring I couldn’t wait for the school year to end, when I would meet Mindy in Korea for a two-week visit, my first return to the country of our birth.

  I had never been so happy to see Yolanda as when she strutted into my room late the next afternoon, vacuum-packed into yet another fashionable business suit, not a strawberry-blond hair of her French twist out of place, eyes gleaming like glass in the ravaged contours of her face.

  She, however, was not happy to see me. “Change into these clothes. Quickly,” she commanded, throwing a zipped-up garment bag on my bed. “And this is the last time I’m doing your face, you hear? From here on after, you will do your own bloody makeup!”

  Unzipping the bag, I suggested, “Maybe you can supervise me while I try to do it myself? Does that…?” My voice died in my throat when I saw that inside the garment bag were my own clothes: the leopard-print underwear and bra that I had bought at the Canal City mall in Fukuoka, black skinny jeans, a pink long-sleeved T-shirt emblazoned with Hello Kitty in a kimono, and a pair of high-top Chuck Taylors in neon green and orange. “Uh, does that sound all right?”

  She grunted in angry agreement, gesturing for me to hurry up and get on with it.

  “Why these clothes, Yolanda?” I tried to keep my voice even, my first thought being that they were going to dress me in my own clothes and murder me, throwing my body into the ocean to wash up on some distant shore.

  She didn’t know what was in the bag and poked a finger through the folds of cloth. “What the hell are these?” she wondered.

  “They’re mine. They were in my suitcase when I got kid— when I was in Jeju-do.”

  “Are those really your clothes?” she sneered. “You never grew up, did you? Christ!” Then she snapped her fingers at me as I had seen Honey snap her fingers at her. “Come on, girlie, get on with it!”

  “Aren’t you going to at least turn around?” I asked as I unbuttoned my pajama top.

  “Ag, I’ve seen it all.” Her head waved from side to side, reeling from all the things she had seen. “Dead babies, machete wounds, starved corpses, rabies… Nothing can shock me.”

  “How old are you, Yolanda?” I inquired brightly, hoping that she would take it as a friendly stab at conversation rather than a challenge.

  “We don’t have time for your stupid questions. We’ve got a schedule to keep. You don’t mess around with the schedule.”

  “All right, if you won’t tell me how old you are, I’ll guess. You’re thirty-five.”

  Maybe because I was standing in front of her stark naked, she replied, “Thirty-eight.”

  “Really? That’s only about ten years older than I am.” I sniffed my shirt before putting it on. It smelled like chilly concrete with an under-whiff of gasoline.

  She laughed harshly, a guttural clearing of her throat. “I was never as young as you, domkop.”

  “I was thinking Australia,” I said, zipping up my jeans, which cradled my hips familiarly with the warm embrace of an old friend. “But I
knew it wasn’t right. You just called me domkop. You’re South African.”

  Shrugging, she sauntered into the bathroom. “Hurry up. Madam is expecting us soon.”

  Before I joined her, I checked the pockets of my pants and shook out my shoes. Empty. I looked at my reflection in the mirror and smiled at the old me there. The me before Honey.

  The marquee lights blazed around the mirror, gleaming off the various jars, pots, and compacts she was arranging on the shelf. “I’ve been through the Jo’burg Airport six times. My father lives in Gabs and he has loads of South African friends.” I started to sing: “Ag, man, Deddy won’t you take us to the bioscope?”

  Despite herself, a giggle escaped her. “Those aren’t the right words.” Handing me a foam wedge soaked in BECCA Aqua Luminous Perfecting Foundation #2, she began to sing: “Popcorn, chewing gum, peanuts and bubble gum…” Her voice was pretty good, strong with a little bit of wobble.

  Carefully slathering on the foundation, I cried, “You got a set of pipes on you, Yolanda! Madam should let you sing more often at karaoke.”

  Taking that as a criticism of Madam, she set her lips primly together. “You need more under the eyes.”

  Obediently, I swabbed the hollows under my eyes. “Why did you leave South Africa?”

  “Oh, the crime was awful,” she said, her accent all of a sudden getting as thick as blood, the c and r sounds cracking out like a leather whip. “After the blacks took over, we weren’t safe in our own neighborhoods.”

  I presented my face for her inspection and she leaned close, so I could see the strange cottage cheese clotting just underneath her skin. Nodding her approval, she handed me a glossy clamshell compact of face powder.

  As I dusted my skin with the silky powder, I inquired, “So how was it you got to North Korea?”

  “Oh, no, Lisa, I won’t be telling you that story,” she murmured almost tenderly. “That’s not your business.”

  Sucking in my cheeks as she had showed me, I brushed on a shimmery plum rouge before tilting my face toward her for her inspection. “Look, Yolanda, I’m sorry if you’re upset by my arrival here. As you know, I was a little upset by it too. I apologize if anything I did offended you in my first days, but I was just trying to make sense of things. I realize now that I’m here to stay, and I think we should both make the best of it. Do you think we can be friends?”

  She stared at me without saying a word, which I took as a no. Carefully, I extruded my lips to stain them a matte blackberry, her face leering over my shoulder in the mirror. Trying to dredge up some sort of pity for her, I imagined what it must be like to see such a frightful kabuki mask looking back every time you glimpsed your own reflection. As I carefully drew a thick black line under my lower lid, I tried another tack, “I know that you and Honey have an extremely close relationship, and I respect that. I don’t want to come between the two of you. She told me that she hopes we’ll become friends.” A lie, but one that I thought I had little chance of being caught in.

  She said nothing, handing me a set of false eyelashes pinched between her long red fingernails, then folding her arms tightly across her chest to watch me put them on. As I ripped off the adhesive back and wedged the quilled strip onto my upper lid, I felt like I had only succeeded in making her hate me more.

  As we made our way to the trophy room, hot air eddied through the hallway with a high-pitched scream. The occasional tunnel wind was one of the mysteries of the compound, a weather pattern without any discernible source, always bringing with it a keening that sounded eerily human.

  A young man with a retro haircut was recumbent on the cowhide sofa, bowling-ball head propped on Honey’s thigh, frowning down at something that he held in his lap. He did not look up as Honey exclaimed, “Here she is!”

  “One sec,” he grunted, “almost done annihilating you.”

  Honey giggled, jiggling his head with her thigh so that his capacious cheeks quaked. She was dressed in a pair of tight white jeans and a short-sleeved white cashmere sweater, an unusual departure from her customary formal evening wear. With the young man in a T-shirt and track bottoms and I in my own clothes, it was casual Friday at Villa Umma.

  “Mom, stop it! Seriously!” he growled, thumbs punching at the black box cradled in his plump hands. With an upward jerk, he finished the game off. “Whoa! Yeah! In your face!”

  With mock sorrow, she sighed. “Do you have to win every time?”

  Chuckling, he raised his stockinged feet in the air to seesaw upright, tousled hair spiked into two unruly horns before Honey smoothed them down. “I always start out telling myself Imma let my moms win, but something happens while I’m playing…”

  “You don’t know how to lose,” she crowed triumphantly.

  “Oh, hello, Lisa,” he said, as if just noticing me.

  Honey purred, “Lisa. Darling. Finally, you get to meet your brother—”

  “Half brother,” he corrected her.

  “Half brother, Jonny.”

  Without standing up, he held out a hand for me to shake. His hand was soft, but the grip was painful, and he pulled me so violently toward him I almost dropped to my knees, our noses coming within inches of each other before he gave me back my hand. He seemed very familiar to me, and I was thinking that was the power of our shared genetics, that this complete stranger would look like someone I already knew, when he smiled teasingly at me and I noticed the Mindy-like winking dimple under his eye. But of course. I should have realized it when Honey had first told me about Jonny, but with all that had happened to me recently, I had almost forgotten about the evening Ji Hoon and I had spent at Honey Do. “I think we’ve met already, haven’t we?”

  “Whaaat?” Honey screeched, looking from him to me and back again. “Is that right, Jonny?”

  His small mouth expanded into a full-teeth smile, eyes slivering into mirthful crescents. “That’s right, Moms. I made one of my stealth trips to Seoul to see for myself if Harrison had the right girl this time.”

  “You did that? For me? Oh, Jonny!” Honey swooned, rubbing her cheek fervently against the padded hump of his shoulder.

  “Nothing’s too good for Moms,” Jonny assured her, tipping me a conspiratorial wink. “How have you been getting along here at Villa Umma, Lisa? Settling in all right?”

  Both sets of eyes burned at me, his onyx and cold, hers a depthless blue and unfathomable. I said, “Yes. Learning the ropes. I’m afraid I’ve been a bit slow at first, but Honey is a patient and astute teacher.”

  His hand slapped onto her knee and began to stroke it, pinkie delicately curled. “You have nothing to fear with Moms on your side. Just do as she says, and you’ll be all right. Sit down, sit down. No need to stand on ceremony. You’re part of the family now.”

  I didn’t dare sit on the couch with the two of them, so I settled into a club chair.

  “Yolanda!” he shouted unnecessarily, as she was standing right there. “What about some drinks, eh, old gal?”

  Yolanda bustled to the bar, returning with shallow crystal glasses clinking on a tray. Expertly wrapping a napkin over a champagne bottle, she popped the cork and poured three glasses full. Jonny raised his glass in the air, declaring, “To Moms!”

  “Here, here.” Honey tilted her glass first at him, then at me.

  “To Honey,” I chirped. After we drained our glasses, I asked, “How’s Ji Hoon doing?”

  “Who is this Ji Hoon guy she’s always talking about?” Honey asked, waggling her empty champagne glass at Yolanda.

  Chin dimpling with a frown, Jonny shook his head in bewilderment.

  “You know, the guy who brought me to Honey Do to meet you?” I also waggled my glass at Yolanda.

  “Oh.” The boy laughed. “Is that what he told you his name was? She’s talking about Harrison,” he told Honey.

  Honey sputtered, “Ji Hoon? Where did he get that name?”

  “From Ju Ji Hoon, most likely,” Jonny guffawed. “Or maybe Kim Ji Hoon. Or could be Lee Ji Hoon.
They’re all popular actors who make the girls go crazy.”

  “What was wrong with the name Harrison? I thought it suited him very well.” Honey seemed pissed off.

  “No, it’s just that I asked him what his Korean name was,” I explained. “Since Harrison was obviously not his real name.”

  Small mouth pushing out into a pout, Jonny whined at Honey: “Where are my snacks? You know I have to constantly feed this.” With his thumb, he flicked the surge of flesh that hung below his chin.

  Clapping hands, Honey called, “Snacks! Snacks!” Then she said to me confidentially, “Jonny is naturally svelte and must work very hard to keep his shape.”

  “In leadership shape,” he concurred. “In the image of my grandfather.”

  “Luckily,” Honey simpered, “he has his father’s appetites.”

  “In all things!” Jonny roared, poking at his mother’s belly. “Ah!” He rubbed his hands in delight at the array of delicacies that Yolanda placed before him. “That Cookie! How’s he doing, hey? Satisfied with his perks?”

  “For the time being at least,” Honey said, rolling her eyes. “Lisa is helping Cookie expand his repertoire,” she explained, teasing a strip of dried squid free and lowering it into Jonny’s waiting mouth. “He’s getting gourmet.”

  “You should try the stuffed mushrooms,” I suggested, grabbing one myself. “Mmm. He’s a quick study, that Miura-san.”

  “Who?” Honey asked sharply. Then shaking her head so forcefully that the tassels of her freshwater pearl earrings whipped her cheeks, she said, “What is it with you and names? Why can’t you just use the names that are given to people?”

  “That name was given to him,” I protested. “It’s his real name.”

  “Well, here his name is Cookie,” Honey insisted, biting into a mini-quiche.

  Jonny began to laugh at me, his mouth opened wide to show the chewed-over squid coating his tongue. “His real name isn’t even Miura-san. Same thing with Ji Hoon. You are so gullible.”