Famous Adopted People

by Alice Stephens

  “The list is dumb,” I grumbled, squinting into the traffic for our bus. “What’s the point of it if you’re not going to become a famous actress?”

  “Don’t say that about the list,” she gasped, rummaging in her handbag for her sunglasses. “You’re going to be the famous one, remember? It’s all up to you now.”

  “Melissa Gilbert, Scott Hamilton, Dave who-the-fuck-even-knows-who-he-is Thomas. They suck. Adopted people suck,” I moaned. “I’m never going to be anything. I just wrote a really shitty paper, and it’s painfully obvious that I don’t have an original or worthwhile thought in my head. I can’t write, my observations are boring and petty, I’m shit at expressing myself.”

  “Li-li!” Mindy admonished me. “That’s not true. I’ve saved all your letters, and I read them over and over. They’re raw and sometimes rambling, yeah, but you definitely have a talent for writing. You just need to practice more. I thought that was what your journal was for, sort of like daily exercises to strengthen your writing muscles. That’s why I always give you one for your birthday, so you can practice your lines for your big debut.”

  I had never thought about why I kept a journal; it was just a daily compulsion, like eating and sleeping. I did it because I had to, because the day was incomplete if I didn’t. As usual, Mindy was right. As usual, I was going about things all wrong. Writing was as much discipline as anything else, and instead of using my journal as a random repository of the words that rolled around in my head, I should have been using it to hone my narrative skills, a sketch pad on which I made the preliminary studies for a larger work. Instead of feeling invigorated by this insight, though, I only felt aggrieved with myself. Five minutes with Mindy, and she was straightening out my life for me. Why couldn’t I straighten out my life on my own? Gazing into the brown penumbra of exhaust that overhung the road, I said, “I don’t like Korea. It depresses me. I’ve felt like shit ever since I got here.”

  A well-dressed man joined us, smoking a cigarette and fiddling with his phone. He paused to ogle Mindy.

  “No, no, no, Korea is the bomb,” she chirped, stroking a lumpy braid. “You’ve just been missing me. You have MAD, which is like SAD: Mindy Affective Disorder. Now I’m here and you’ll feel all better soon.”

  “Have you ever looked in the mirror and been surprised by what you saw?” I demanded through clenched teeth. “I mean shocked at your own face, like who is that?”

  “Yeah,” she said, grazing my cheek with her fingers. The man stared even harder. “It’s called cognitive dissonance. If you’d been paying attention at Korean Kamp, or stuck it out with that adoption therapist, you’d know about it.”

  “I thought coming to Asia would tell me something about myself, uplift me, the way you were when you came back from your first trip to Korea. Instead, it’s just made me sad. Like nowhere is home. Like I don’t fit in anywhere. Like I’m a stranger in a strange land no matter where I am.”

  “You’re just homesick. You’ve been away from your family and friends for too long, and it’s time for you to go home.”

  “No, I’m just sick of myself,” I spat, stepping back to avoid the cloud of smoke that drifted downwind from the businessman. “I’ve always hated that everyone made assumptions about me that were wrong. But you know what? I’m just beginning to realize that I’m wrong about the assumptions I’ve made about me as well.”

  “Lisa,” she said, laughing. “You know who you are! You’re my best friend.”

  “Sadly, that used to be enough for me, but it isn’t anymore.” Most unexpectedly, I began to cry.

  “Oh, Li-li.” Mindy nudged her luggage out of the way and enveloped me in her arms. I could smell the stale air of the plane in her hair. “It’s OK. I’m here. You’re right where you belong, with me. We’re going to have fun in Korea. Look! Here comes the hotel bus!”

  The knock at my door came earlier than expected, but I was ready after a sleepless night chasing feverish ideas of how I could escape without needing to rely on Wendell after all, slipping away into the crowd, just another Korean on the streets of Pyongyang.

  The man who had come to fetch me was a Frankenstein’s monster-type with a square head, thick neck, and huge, murderous hands. He led me for what seemed like miles through the twisting corridors, then onto an elevator that took us to a steel door that required a complicated series of codes. The door opened up like a ship’s hatch, fuddling my concept of spatial relations so that I felt like I was stepping into another dimension as I emerged like a rabbit from its hole into the pastel wash of early-morning light. A gleaming silver vehicle awaited, and though I was no expert on cars, I immediately recognized the boxy, long-nosed silhouette and the winged silver hood ornament of a Rolls-Royce. The windows were mirrored, and when Frankenstein’s monster opened the door for me, I saw that Jonny was already inside.

  “Morning, Lisa!” he greeted me with hearty bonhomie. “Ready for Jonny and Lisa’s big adventure?”

  “Wow,” I exclaimed. “What happened to you? You look totally different!”

  His hair was sculpted into a stiff meringue atop his head, bordered by a freshly shaved swath of skin that stretched from temple to temple in one of the weirdest hairstyles I’d ever seen. His eyebrows were plucked to short parabolas, and his double chin spilled over the lapels of a boxy black jacket buttoned to the very top, a red flag-shaped pin decorated with the smiling faces of his grandfather and father pinned over his heart.

  As I settled into the backseat, pants squealing loudly against the leather seats, he said, “Hold up! Hold up! What’re you wearing?”

  Looking down at my ensemble of leather rock-star pants and sheer silk shirt heavily embroidered with gold thread, I sheepishly explained, “I had to work with what Honey allows me to wear, and these were the only pants that were in the closet, besides pj bottoms and a pair of sweatpants.”

  “Better you wear the sweatpants!”

  “I’m sorry. Should I go back and change?”

  He glanced impatiently at the chunky Rolex on his wrist. “No, we don’t have time. We’ll just have to make a stop at the Paradise. I mean, you look good”—he raked his eyes over me in a way that was not quite brotherly—“but the noble masses are not ready for such, um, provocative fashion.”

  He knocked his knuckles on the smoked glass that divided the backseat from the front, and the car thrummed forward.

  “Here.” He motioned to the burl-paneled console that divided our seats, travel mugs snug in the cupholders, two wax-paper packets laid out on a shallow lacquer tray. “Cookie made us some takeout, bacon and egg sandwiches. Be careful with the coffee. The beginning of the ride is a bit bumpy.”

  The driver maneuvered carefully over the heavily eroded road, swerving to avoid the ruts when he could, easing the car through them when he had no other choice.

  “I’d love to pave this road,” Jonny explained apologetically, “but that would be like a huge arrow pointing spy satellites to the compound, so it has to seem like any other country road. Otherwise, it would be a quick ninety-minute drive to Pyongyang.”

  I dipped my face to take a bite of Cookie’s egg sandwich so that he wouldn’t see the eagerness in my eyes. Pyongyang. The big city. My chance to escape.

  But as if he could read my thoughts, he advised, “You have no idea the number of eyes that will be on you at all times. One word from me, and you’ll be torn apart, limb from limb.” He gave me a gleeful openmouthed smile that featured all his teeth except for the very back molars.

  “What?” I smiled back. “I wouldn’t dream of it. I’m just ready for that day of fun you promised me.”

  Picking up what looked like a walkie-talkie with a baton for an antenna, he said, “Excuse me, I have a few phone calls to make.”

  I was glad for the chance to stare out the window, wishing I could inscribe the landscape onto my brain to replay on endless loop when I was locked up in my room. The car was nosing down the crenellated, flower-starred flank of a mountain, othe
r peaks rising about us into eternity in the sun-hazed distance. There was no evidence of human activity, no other cars, no pedestrians, no houses. It was as if we were the only life for light-years around.

  When Jonny finally stopped barking into his phone, we were suddenly enveloped in an eerie cocoon of silence. We couldn’t even hear the sound of the wheels on the dirt road. But Jonny didn’t like too much time to go by without hearing the sound of his own voice. He asked, “Did you destroy the note I sent you?”

  “Of course,” I averred. “Just like you asked me to. Why did I need to do that?”

  “I didn’t want her spoiling our fun day together. If she’d found out about our plans, she’d’ve tried to stop you from coming.”

  “Why would she do that?” I had slipped out of my Swarovski-encrusted black velvet Louboutin mules to brush the soles of my feet over the Rolls’s plush sheepskin carpeting.

  He shrugged. “Jealousy. She wants me all to herself. Lucky for you, she got word that Pops is arriving today, so she’ll probably be too busy to check up on you. But if she finds out…” Catching his lower lip under his hypsodontic front teeth, he rolled his eyes. “She wants to believe that she’s in total control of you. You’re her little project.”

  “What do you mean, ‘her little project’?”

  “Look, Lisa, I’m going to be straight with you. I brought you here to keep Honey distracted during this very, very dangerous time. My father is going to die soon. Like a dumbass, he waited too long to appoint me his successor, and now I’m in a life-and-death battle against the bad guys to take control once the old man finally kicks it. Your job is to keep Moms occupied, keep her out of my hair, and manage her when she starts to lose her shit about my dad. That’s why I rescued you from your sad little existence and brought you here for this life of fabulousness. If you fail, well, then, I’m sorry but I’ll probably have to kill you.”

  “You’d kill your own sister?” I gulped, the words sticking glutinously in my throat.

  His cannonball head bobbled about for a few seconds as if it were a tough call, before he raised his sculpted eyebrows, nodding decisively. “You’re just a half sister, and not the important half.”

  “I’ll handle Honey for you, I promise,” I gabbled, a cold sweat breaking out down my back and all thoughts of escaping into the streets of Pyongyang vanishing like street-corner drug dealers when the cops roll by. “I’ll do whatever I can to keep Honey happy, to keep her busy. She wants me to build a North Korean website. Even though I don’t know anything about that. But I’ll pretend I do.”

  “Relax, Lisa.” He patted my knee, his hand lingering there as he appreciated the buttery quality of the leather. “She really likes you. As long as you play the dutiful daughter, it’ll all be good.”

  “But,” I said, confused, “you just said she’d be unhappy if she finds out I left the villa without her permission.”

  “If she finds out.” He grinned. “You better hope she doesn’t.” Humming a little tune to himself, he turned away to look out the window.

  I too turned to my window, glad to hide the shocked realization—no doubt evident on my ashen face—that he was setting me up to fail. We had descended the mountains to the plains, and suddenly here was the evidence of humanity that I’d been searching for: a man walking behind a yoked ox—the early-morning sun picking out the ribs of the lumbering beast—and guiding a primitive wooden plow as it tore up the field. My first real North Korean. I craned out the window to get a better look.

  “Yeah, I’m going to have a lot of cleaning up to do,” Jonny announced to the air.

  The car slithered by two farmers working a flooded rice paddy, pants rolled up, mud slicking their calves and arms. When they beheld our shining chariot, they quickly dropped to their knees, foreheads touching the glinting water.

  Did he want me to respond to what he’d just said? I’d better, just to be safe. “How much cleaning up?” I quavered.

  He gave me a coquettish, sidelong glance. “I haven’t decided yet. But there are going to be some real surprises. None of those fuckers are safe.”

  A lone child watched raptly as we flew by. I did a double-take, sure that he had been wearing nothing but a plastic bag, the handles serving as straps over wizened shoulders, skeletal legs that knobbed out at the knees sticking out from the bottom.

  Jonny reassured me: “Don’t worry about the website. We have the best computer geeks in the world. I’ll send one of them to the villa to help you set up a prototype, not that it’s ever going to become a reality, but at least it’ll keep Moms happy. Ah”—he clapped softly—“finally. The paved road.”

  The Rolls-Royce shuddered onto a wide stripe of glossy tarmac and then accelerated until the land was but a smear of green fields interrupted by occasional huddles of blocky concrete buildings. There were no other cars on the road but more people, on bikes and walking, some of them riding wooden carts, others harnessed to them. All who were quick enough to react dropped to their knees and bowed as we streaked by.

  “So much love,” Jonny murmured, nibbling on his fingernails, and I couldn’t tell if he was being facetious.

  Pyongyang announced itself with tall cookie-cutter apartment buildings that loomed abruptly upon the landscape. Soon, we were speeding down a vast, empty avenue, past a sudden sprouting of curvy modern towers, catching glimpses of a shining Wizard of Oz rocket-ship-shaped building in the interstices of the crossroads. Despite the thickening congestion of the streets, the car didn’t slow down, and everyone—drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians—knew to get the hell out of its way.

  A svelte young woman in a snug navy-blue uniform cinched tightly at the waist, a plastic-brimmed hat with an enormous white crown perched atop her head, pursed her lovely lips around a whistle while repeatedly thrusting a red-and-white-striped stick in the air, waving our only road companions—two packed buses and a single car—to a dead stop as we blew by them. Two off-duty traffic cops clutched at each other with white-gloved hands as we passed, their faces stretched in distraught rapture. People on the sidewalks, too, would stop to wave and scream as we rolled by, some wiping tears from their cheeks.

  We came to a stop in front of a squat building paneled in reflective glass. Picking up his phone, Jonny announced, “You go in. I’ll wait here.”

  I swept through the revolving door into complete darkness. “Hello?” I called.

  A scuffling came from somewhere deep in the shadows, and then the lights flooded on, bouncing off the spit-shiny glaze of the marble entrance and flashing off mirrored columns and the glass and chrome of display cases. The soft leather soles of my Louboutins slipped against gray-veined marble as I wandered past shelves stocked with plastic buckets, hot water thermoses, shiny metal pots, and rice cookers. I had just discovered the liquor—Dragon Heart Dry Gin, Soleil Banana Liqueur, Amitié Brandy—when a woman came running up behind me, still buttoning the form-hugging jacket of her uniform.

  “Please, please, can I help you?” she panted, wriggling her hand in her sleeve to straighten an errant cuff. When she noticed my outfit, her brow crinkled in astonishment before she managed to subdue her features into an impassive mask.

  “I’m looking for women’s clothes.”

  “Please,” she said uncertainly.

  “Women’s clothes,” I said, plucking at my shirt.

  “Ah, clothes,” she echoed, literally wiping her brow with relief before marching off at a brisk, businesslike pace. I hustled to keep up with her as she led me up a wide staircase banked with vitrines offering a random selection of luxury goodies, then past a counter displaying timepieces that would have proudly graced the wrists of westerners forty years ago and into the women’s clothing section, where she began to aggressively rattle clothes at me.

  “I need pants,” I said, not seeing any. I waved my hand up and down my legs, but her brain seemed to comprehend only the leather and not the pants.

  “No have, no have,” she repeated with aghast vehemence. />
  I spied some shirts and unfolded one. It was shiny and slippery, the material slimy against my fingers. Pointing at her shirt, I said, “I want one like yours. Do you have that?”

  Her fingers crept apprehensively up to her collar.

  “Something like that? A long-sleeved button-up?”

  She began to undo the buttons of her jacket.

  “No, no, don’t do that.”

  She worked faster, flinging off the jacket and then picking open the buttons of her blouse.

  “Oh for god’s sake,” I pleaded. “No.”

  But she peeled off her shirt, proffering it to me with a stiff-armed gesture, as if she were thrusting something into a fiery furnace. Her undershirt was frayed, the cotton flossy from washing, brown crescents darkening the armpits, and she made such a pathetic picture that there was nothing for it but to put her out of her misery. I took off my shirt and offered it to her in exchange. She pinched it between two fingers as if it were a used tissue before stuffing it into her suit jacket pocket, which she had buttoned all the way to the top so only a small triangle of her undershirt was visible.

  “Now for pants,” I said, not even daring to look toward her skirt.

  She trailed me, touching the very same clothes I touched to show me she was searching hard for whatever it was that I was looking for. It turned out there were no pants, only skirts. I randomly picked a pleated black polyester number with an elastic waistband. “Can I try it on?” I asked, aping the motions.

  The salesgirl led me at a brisk trot to the changing room, where it took me a while to rip the leather pants off my legs. The skirt fell like a bell from my waist to my calves, and I smiled at my reflection, thinking how horrified Honey would be. The salesgirl would not even take the leather pants that I extended to her, pretending not to see them as she bowed me toward the cash register.

  “Oh, but I don’t have any money,” I said, patting my nonexistent pockets in dumb show as she gaped at me. “I have to wait here for my, er, friend to come. He’ll pay for me.”