As I was getting ready for the scheduled dinner with Honey that evening, Yolanda appeared in my room and thrust a green leather box at me. Inside, wrapped around a tiny velvet cushion, was a delicate gold Rolex, the hours marked by diamonds. “She remembered,” I remarked to myself in surprise, snapping the slinky mesh strap closed on my wrist.
“Remembered what?” Yolanda asked, gazing with green envy at the watch.
“My birthday,” I said, putting my sparkling watch next to her dull, diamond-less one.
Wrapping her hand protectively over her wrist, a gesture that told me that her watch had also been a gift from Madam, she sneered, “I doubt it. She didn’t say anything to me about it. She just got you the watch because you’ve been bitching about not being able to tell what time it is.”
Later, over a dinner of pan-fried trout with lemon and capers, I thanked her.
“Every businesswoman needs a watch!” she exclaimed brightly.
But no champagne toast, no cake for dessert, not even a candle in the crème caramel. By the time dinner was over, I knew for certain that Honey had forgotten about my birthday. I tried to revel in the sick irony of it all, that my crazy birth mother didn’t even remember the anniversary of the momentous event that had led to this crazy situation she had orchestrated, but I only felt hurt. The watch was pretty and extravagant, but it didn’t mean anything, and I would have gladly swapped it for one of Mindy’s journals.
To celebrate my twenty-fifth birthday, Mindy and I met for dinner at an Italian place in the Village, the halfway point between our neighborhoods of the Upper East Side and Flatbush. The restaurant was deserted—not a good sign—and the place had the generic whiff of a tourist trap. After we ordered, Mindy gave me my birthday present, the same present she gave every year, a journal, this one bound in full-grain green leather, the pages edged with gilt.
Plopping the journal into my bag without a word of thanks, I whined, “The only thing I want for my birthday is for you to tell me that you loved the first chapter of my novel.”
I could see from the apologetic puckering of her brow that she was going to be critical. She toyed with her knife. “It’s just that it doesn’t feel authentic. It doesn’t sound like your voice.”
My tongue swelled in anger and embarrassment against my teeth. When the waiter came, I grabbed my drink and swished it around in my mouth, the strong taste of gin replacing the bitter bile of her words. She looked at me pleadingly, and I saw the inky stains under her eyes, her wan complexion, posture uncharacteristically droopy, hair overdue for a trim; medical school had drained all the youth and exuberance from her.
“I mean, why make the protagonist a white guy? You’re not white. You’re a beautiful young Asian American woman—you need to write about beautiful young Asian American women. What do you know about white men?”
“That’s all I know about is white men, Mindy! From Dante to Dickens to goddamn Don DeLillo, white men have dominated my life. Trust me, I know more about white men than I do about beautiful young Asian women.”
She exhaled impatiently. “Mmkay. Look, I’m not saying that you write something similar to this, but at the hospital gift shop they are selling a novel by Nicole Richie, about the adopted daughter of a fabulously wealthy Hollywood family who struggles through adolescence and early adulthood, and just as she is about to get her life on track, her birth father comes on the scene to throw her life back into turmoil. It’s the write-what-you-know thing. She’s using the compelling circumstances of her own life to write a novel. You could do that, but in a literary way. Instead of writing about some pale Victorian poet, you should be writing the Great Adoption Novel, where you unveil universal truths and shit by exploring the adoption story.”
Voice high with resentment, I demanded, “How do you know my manuscript won’t do all those things, unveil universal truths and shit? All you’ve done is read the first chapter. There are four hundred more pages to go. You haven’t even gotten to the part where you find out he’s an orphan yet.”
“An orphan?!” she echoed, openmouthed with incredulity. “Seriously?”
She didn’t have to tell me why that got her agitated. Orphans were not adoptees like us. Orphans had parents who died, not parents who had abandoned them, shunting them off to be raised by strangers. Orphans were Disney and Hallmark, orphans were a half-hearted gesture, orphans were less than full disclosure.
“I just think…” she blurted out, and then paused as the waiter brought our appetizers. “I just think you need to write about yourself.”
“I do write about myself! All the time! In my journals.”
“Then why don’t you use that to write a novel?” she asked, as if it were as simple as all that.
I clicked my tongue impatiently. “What the fuck do you know about novels anyway? When was the last time you read one?”
“God, Lisa, I’m just trying to help you.” She angrily patted at her mouth with her napkin.
“Well, it doesn’t matter anyway,” I said, the words slipping from my lips with venomous glee, happy to change the subject and avoid having to consider whether Mindy was right about my wasting two years of my life writing about the wrong thing. “Because I’m going to Japan.”
Chapter 14
“I would lose the family I have now if people found out [about him].”
–Anonymous birth mother of Toby Dawson
Pondering how to use Jonny’s glamorous wife on our website, I asked Honey to show me a photo of her. Sally, as Honey called her, was a famous singer who encompassed the Korean ideal of beauty: plump face, half-moon eyes, enameled complexion, delicately molded mouth, and a demure, supportive manner. Honey explained, “She comes from a good family and is already well known throughout the land.”
Fingers vibrating like a struck tuning fork from the bluies—which were definitely not the vitamins Jonny claimed they were, but more reminiscent of the amphetamines I sometimes popped in high school—she had to try several times before she typed the right thing into the search engine, retrieving a badly pixelated video of a young woman in a gaudy hanbok singing in front of a full orchestra, mouth set in a permanent smile that showed off her fine white teeth whose only flaw was a small gap between a central incisor and a canine, her hair auburn, the color mine used to be.
“See how poised she is, how her face is so charmingly blank, every expression finely modulated to please and not offend? She’s the perfect political wife, flawlessly inscrutable. I helped Jonny pick her out. We, of course, had a trusted doctor check for an intact hymen. And she was kind enough to submit a photo of herself in a bathing suit. Actually, Jonny has known her for some years—social circles in Pyongyang are fairly small, after all. Most important, we made a strategic alliance with her father, who is a marshal in the KPA.”
Honey searched for the bathing suit photo, awkwardly manipulating the touchpad, refusing my offer to help, the synthetic cocoon of chemical camaraderie only taking us so far.
“Ah, here it is!” Honey announced after a very circuitous route through her hard drive. A photo filled the screen of Sally in a modestly cut one-piece, skin opalescent, legs slightly knock-kneed, plump arms crossed modestly over her stomach, elbows notched with dimples. “Keep in mind that the Koreans like a little meat on their women. It’s a sign of prosperity.”
“Well, she does have a nice hourglass figure,” I said. “But that pale skin! She looks like a piece of whale blubber.”
“Oh, you!” Honey scrunched up her face in feigned shock, knocking me hard in the side with an elbow but relishing my criticism.
“Does she have any idea who you are?” I asked, lips sticking to my teeth. The bluies gave me awful cottonmouth.
“No! And she never will, for it would be much too dangerous. Her family has too many connections.”
“What if,” I asked, rubbing my hands against my thighs, “they have a baby…”
“Oh, they will have a baby. That’s the whole point of her,” Honey murmured.
>
“…and he comes out looking Caucasian? You know, with brown hair or blue eyes or something. Then surely she’d guess.”
“Why would he have blue eyes?” Honey scoffed. “Jonny doesn’t.”
“Blue eyes are a recessive gene, which means they can skip a generation.”
“What?” Her baby voice deepened. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Adoptees tend to be interested in genetics,” I explained. “We like to look for clues that might help us solve the mystery of where, or I should say who, we came from.”
“Oh.” She rolled her eyes.
“Well, let’s look it up,” I suggested brightly, always happy to wander the internet, even if it was over her shoulder.
Obediently, she brought up the search page and slowly pecked out “blue eyes recessive gene.”
Suddenly, with no warning, there was Jonny sprawled sideways on the couch, leaving just a sliver of space for Honey, who had folded herself up with origami precision to take up as little room as possible as she chatted with a third person slouched into a club chair.
“Ji Hoon!” I exclaimed, blinking from the shock, paralyzed as a fulminating mushroom cloud of nostalgia, shame, helplessness, and anger rose in a column through my body, expanding, spreading, fallout raining everywhere. I saw the sharp interest in Jonny’s gaze, the amused expectation in Honey’s, and endeavored to mold my expression into sweet complacency, bending my neck as Sally had done in the bathing suit photo to look at them from uptilted eyes, curving my lips into a Mona Lisa smile, masking the murderous rage that scalded me from within.
Scrambling up from the chair, Ji Hoon swept into a chivalrous bow. “Lisa! I hardly recognize you. You look… awesome!”
Without getting up, Jonny held out a hand to me, crushing mine with a painful squeeze. “Love the hair!” he purred. “And what else is new about you?” He tapped the side of his cheek contemplatively as he inspected my nose.
My four-inch heels wobbled underneath me as I quavered out a thank you. I wondered if he had seen the video of my defilement. Had Ji Hoon seen it as well? I gave him a sideways glance, but he was looking at Honey, who was beckoning Yolanda, who was pouring golden champagne into coupe glasses. After we saluted the new guest with a welcome home toast, Honey pouted. “What’s this name Lisa keeps calling you?”
His luscious lips quivered into an embarrassed smile. “Ji Hoon. It was the first name that came to my mind when Lisa asked me what my real name was.”
Honey turned to me and announced airily, “But, Lisa, Harrison is his real name.”
I nodded, forming my mouth into a parabola of sweetness. “You’ve had a haircut too.”
He passed a hand over the tight cap of a crew cut. “Feels better this way.”
“Very handsome,” I murmured, though it wasn’t flattering in the least. Or maybe it was just that I hated the sight of him, this twisted Adonis who did the bidding of his perverted overlords for the privilege of a Rolex and an Audi.
Yolanda flitted up with a tray loaded with hors d’oeuvres, which Honey waved toward Jonny. “Darling, please eat. You are looking worryingly thin.”
He placed a chubby hand on his belly, the soft curve of which pressed up against the thick polyester mesh of a LeBron James Miami Heat jersey. In truth, he appeared to be more bloated and corpulent than when I last saw him just a few months ago, while Honey was the one who looked like she needed the snacks, cheeks hollowed into dramatic canyons, hips sharp under the stretch jersey of her little black dress. “I’ve been with Father these past few days. His appetite is not strong. I didn’t want to gorge myself while he picked away at his food.” He stuffed a puff pastry piled high with black caviar into his mouth.
“Oh!” Honey put a humming hand up to her mouth. “But my spies tell me he is looking well. They say he is on the road to recovery.”
“How many times do I have to tell you not to trust what those people say? They’re just telling you what you want to hear, Moms. The truth is I don’t think he has much more time,” Jonny observed gravely, fingers fluttering over the platter as he searched for his next morsel.
Pinching her eyes shut, Honey clapped her hands over her ears, teeth raking the lipstick glaze off her lower lip as she whipped her head back and forth. Jonny rolled his eyes, delivered an entire deviled egg into his waiting maw. “So, Ji Hoon, how does it feel to be home?” he asked, mashed egg yolk squelching between his teeth.
“Stop!” Honey gurgled.
“Really good!” Ji Hoon boomed, licking caviar bubbles from his fingertips. “I was so terribly homesick every minute of those seven years. I only wish that I did not have to leave in such dishonor.” He hung his head, the heroic angle of his jawline trembling.
“There, there, Harrison, you did your best,” Honey cooed. “We will always remember your loyalty. And ultimately, your mission was successful, even if it did get a little messy there at the end.”
“If only I had taken away her cell phone at the beginning,” he moaned.
“Are you talking about me?” I asked.
Honey shook an admonishing finger at me. “That last phone call you made from the airport? It pointed authorities to Jeju-do and the hotel where you were last seen. Harrison had to make a hasty and unplanned departure. One of our best undercover agents out of commission.”
This news caused my heart to beat so hard my teeth chattered, a happy rush of blood surging through my veins. Authorities were looking for me! My disappearance was being investigated! I quickly brought my glass to my lips to hide the excited tremor that disarranged my careful mask, hardening it back into place before tilting my head with birdlike coquettishness to inquire sweetly of Ji Hoon, “What about your girlfriend? Did she have to come back too?”
“Girlfriend?” Jonny leered. “Who’s that?”
“She means Mi Yung.” He sighed, flicking a restless thumb against the cleft of his chin.
Jonny snorted. “She’s not his girlfriend, she’s his fiancée!”
The three of them laughed as if at a particularly hilarious joke, while I escalated my smile to show some teeth in respectful appreciation of their badinage. “How is Mi Yung?”
“Last time I saw her,” Ji Hoon admitted grimly, “she was screaming at me, then she kicked me in the crotch when I tried to kiss her good-bye. She couldn’t believe I had been so stupid as to let Lisa hold on to her cell phone.”
“She was piiiiissed off,” Jonny said with satisfaction. “I could have had you executed, you know.”
Eyes squinted tightly closed, Ji Hoon clasped his hands above his head as he bowed low to Jonny.
“Translating for the KCNA is just about a fate worse than death,” Jonny teased with a laugh. “No wonder Mi Yung was angry with you. Now she has to come back to marry you.”
We had finished the champagne, and Yolanda placed a bottle of Johnnie Walker Gold Label, a bucket of ice, and crystal tumblers onto the elephant-tusk coffee table.
“Ah!” Jonny motioned for her to pour him a glass, scratching at his belly with satisfaction. “It’s nice to be out of those damn monkey suits! The high collars really chafe at the neck.” He slapped at his, the flesh quaking with the impact. “Dear Leader has been rocking a new cut, though, have you seen it?”
“Not the lapels?” Honey murmured reverently.
“Yeah, the lapels!” Jonny howled, pointing at his mother. “How’d you know? Were you behind that? I should’ve known.”
“Ohhh!” She patted herself on the chest with tiny, rapid flutters. “He wore it! I wasn’t sure if he would. Was there a photo taken? Can you send it to me?”
They both looked expectantly at Ji Hoon, who had been gazing with unfocused eyes at a spot in between Jonny and Honey. Becoming aware that they expected something of him, he perked up. “What? A photo of the Dear Leader? Where were you?”
“Mokran,” Jonny replied out of the side of his mouth as he wrestled a fat shrimp off a skewer with his teeth.
“Your father is a master o
f the power of the image,” Honey twittered away. “By transitioning from the dour, laughable commie suit toward something more businesslike, he’s preparing the people for controlled private enterprise, sending a message that they must stop sponging off the state and get their lazy butts in gear to start making money!”
“Yeah, Ma, whatever,” Jonny said, leaning over for another canapé.
Miura-san, attired in a full chef’s uniform replete with a double-breasted jacket with COOKIE embroidered over the breast pocket and an absurdly high toque, slipped into the room to announce sonorously, “Ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served,” before retreating backward with slow, measured steps.
Stuffing a caviar puff into his mouth and taking another for the road, Jonny lumbered from the room, Honey and Yolanda trailing him, leaving Ji Hoon and me alone. He gently touched my arm. “I just want to say I’m sorry for tricking you, Lisa. I… It’s just… I did it because…” His lips worked to get the right words out, but it seemed they couldn’t be found.
Now that it was just he and I, I dropped the mask, allowing my features to curdle into a sneer. “You did it because you’re a fucking coward, and a tool, and a heartless minion.”
“You don’t understand,” he muttered, petting nervously at the unruly circumflex of an eyebrow.
“You could have defected instead of doing what you did.”
“If I’d done that, my whole family would have been executed. And they would have hunted me down. I’d have to live the rest of my life in hiding.”
“Better me than you, is that it?”
“Come on, Lisa,” he pleaded. “It’s not a bad life.”
He gestured at the mounted heads staring sadly down at us, the animal pelts padding our feet, the picked-over platter of fancy nibbles.
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