Lucky Girl

by Mei-Ling Hopgood

  Yet as soon as I mentioned that it might be best if I went alone, Dad said, “That’s fine.”

  “We understand,” he told me. “But someone should still go with you. How about Sister Maureen? We could pay for her ticket.”

  I asked Maureen and she graciously accepted. It was settled: my birth parents would pay for my flight, and my adopted parents would pay for hers.

  As a final gift to my birth family, I decided to put together a photo album. Photos seemed the best way to show them a bit of what my childhood, my adolescence, and my family were like. Mom and Dad wholeheartedly agreed, and on my visit home we spread their photo albums and hundreds of old pictures on the brown living-room carpet and began sorting. I always loved to leaf through those old books with the psychedelic, 1970s-style green, blue, purple, and white covers and the crinkling plastic photo slips. We picked though the precious memories in our history, lingering, laughing, and reminiscing.

  We chose photos of me after I arrived in San Francisco and became part of the Hopgood family: me, hugging my Asian Raggedy Ann doll; Mom holding me after she put my ponytails in curlers; my new Korean brother, Hoon-Yung, and me, standing knee deep in Michigan snow, so bundled up in winter coats that our arms looked stiff; me posing in my green tutu, hamming it up as usual; Dad helping me do my homework; the arrival of Jung-Hoe, at five years old, at the airport, grinning as he clutched his favorite stuffed bear, Cherry; me with big, frighteningly flammable 1980s hair in high school prom pictures. There were first Halloweens, first Santa Claus visits, first days of school, and college graduations. We giggled over the bell-bottomed hipster style of my parents, the bowl haircuts of our youth, my forced toothbrushings of my brother, and my unflinching knack as a child for showing off my (often ruffled) underwear.

  “Am I taking too many pictures?” I asked my mother. Didn’t they want to keep some of these photos for themselves?

  “Take what you want, honey,” Mom said. “We’ve got lots.”

  ON THE MORNING of Friday, March 28, 1997, my boyfriend drove me to the St. Louis airport. I would fly through Detroit, meet Sister Maureen, and we would continue to Taiwan with a short stop in Japan. I made a point of trying to record everything I could in my diary and notebooks.

  8:03 a.m. I am sitting in Gate 3 of Lambert Airport waiting to board the flight. Monte, tired mussy-haired boy that he is, dropped me off. I adore him. He is so disheveled—flannel this way, hair that way, smelling like the Bass Ale he drank at King Louie’s last night—but as sweet as can be. He bought me a neck cushion and a soft handle to pull my luggage. I adore him. Maybe I love him.

  Right now I feel … tranquil. Like I better not get excited because it’s a long, long trip. I think I still feel a little disbelief, kinda outside my body instead of being in the guts of what’s happening today/tomorrow. In exactly 24 hours I am to walk off this plane and meet the parents I left almost 23 years ago.

  9:30 p.m. CST. Flying over the vast Pacific Ocean. A smaller plane is leaving a puffy line of smoke to the south of us. We are headed West to get East. How true.

  So far I think Sister Maureen and I are going to be fine. She is kind and very friendly and open-minded. She is trying to sleep finally now. I think I may be done sleeping. My eyes are tired but I can’t seem to drift off. I do wonder what [my family will] think of me, and I hope it is good. I think the healthiest way to look at all this is to think that they are friends. New and great friends. Will we hug? Laugh? Cry? Will my emotional “wall” lift? I feel as if I should be feeling more.

  2:15 a.m. CST, 5:12 p.m. Japan time in Narita Tokyo National Airport. I just washed my face and wet my hair and brushed my teeth so I feel like half a new woman, anyway. Everyone around us is Asian. How cool.

  4:30 a.m. CST. My journal just fell apart and I’m pretty sure I’ve reached the state of pure, absolute exhaustion. On my flight to Taipei. I’m sitting in Row 22, Seat G, reciting, “Wo shi nida nuer. Wo hen gaosheen hui dao jia” (I am your daughter. I am very happy to have come home). I am pooped to the point where I think it is extra hard to concentrate.

  4:45 a.m. CST. I spoke my first Chinese to someone I do not know. The stewardess asked me in Chinese if I wanted café—or cha (tea) or orange juice and then gave the English translation. And I said, “Cha. Xiexie” (Tea. Thank you). She answered, “Bu kequi” (You’re welcome). Yeah! The simplest things make me happy.

  6:30 a.m. CST. OK. So we’re half an hour away from Taipei and I just took a long nap but I have a fishy taste in my mouth from the salmon dinner. And I’m dressed now but my hair looks like complete shit. I don’t know why I did not have the foresight to curl my bangs. So basically my hair is going to look horrid at this sacred moment. Terrific …

  Well, here’s goes nothing.

  We landed, hurriedly grabbed our things and made for the exit.

  Okay, now I am nervous.

  We stopped in the airport bathroom and splashed cold water on our faces. I stared at myself in the mirror. Indeed, my hair was deformed, eyes baggy. I was hot, sweating even.

  Oh God. I look awful.

  “How do you feel?” asked Maureen.

  “Fine,” I snapped at her. She understood; she was nervous for me. I was shaking inside as I handed Maureen my camera.

  “I hope I can get more than just your back,” she mumbled. We hurried down the sparkling pink and white tiled corridor and toward the baggage claim.

  ALMOST THE ENTIRE FAMILY had gathered in Chiang Kai-shek International Airport: parents, sisters, brothers-in-law, and children. They had written MEI-LING on a sign and bought a fake plastic flower lei to throw over my shoulders when I arrived.

  They fidgeted. Ba paced back and forth. My fourth sister, Jin-Zhi, filmed everyone and everything. She would record this scene on tape and later give a copy to me.

  “Look, Ma,” she said, pointing the camera her way. “Look how pretty you look.”

  “Stop it!” Ma snapped. She had chosen a yellow and green flowered top and a scarf, and wore bright red lipstick.

  “I will not cry, I will not cry,” she repeated to her daughters.

  MAUREEN AND I STOOD among the chaos just beyond the customs exit, scanning the crowd for a familiar face. We looked to the left, and two men were waving furiously. I recognized them from pictures. My brother-in-law. My father.

  “Mei-Ling-Ah!”

  My sisters practically shoved my Chinese parents my way.

  “Ni hao,” I said as Ma walked up to me and burst into tears. We hugged, and then Ba embraced me, crying. I let out a sob and was surprised by my own sorrow.

  We squeezed each other’s hands for an awkward instant, celebrating and mourning everything that had happened and was happening. Ma turned away, trying to compose herself.

  I had no time to think or catch my breath. Sisters, nieces, and nephews were hurdling my way. I suddenly had the lei around my neck and an unruly mob consumed me.

  I am Jin-Hong. I am Jin-Zhi. I am Jin-Feng. Jin-Xia. Jin-Qiong. I am Min-Wei. This is my son. This is my daughter. This is my husband. Take a picture with your nephew, Hong-Yu. Can you say Mei-Ling Aiyi (Auntie Mei-Ling)? How was your flight? Are you hungry? Why you have such big eyes? We go now to Jin-Feng house. You hungry? Do you want something to eat?

  I tried to speak in Mandarin to my mother, to say, “I am very happy to come home,” but she looked at me blankly. One of my sisters translated, repeating what I had said correctly, with the right inflection. Ma smiled. She worried that I was chilly, although I was wearing long sleeves and a long skirt. She pointed to me, wrapped her arms around herself and feigned a shiver. She told my sisters she felt cold just looking at me.

  MAUREEN AND I CRAMMED into a black car with Ba, Ma, and a brother-in-law for the trip to the home of my oldest sister, Jin-Feng, in Hsinchu. Because she was still acclimating to Chinese, Sister Maureen couldn’t translate the long strings of conversation that passed between everyone in the car. I began to sulk, staring out the window, cursing myself for not learning more
Mandarin.

  Suddenly, Ba turned to me and started talking so fast it seemed as if he’d burst. Maureen translated the best she could.

  “He says that he liked what he had heard when I told him about your mother and father,” she said.

  “We had too many children,” Ba explained. “We had a hard life and were very poor. We wanted to give you a better life, so we gave you up, but it still broke our hearts.”

  Pause.

  “I want you to know. I hope you understand.”

  I expected this moment. I had practiced my response with a tutor and on the plane. I wanted to be sure I was understood. For now, I was open. For now, I meant what I said. The doubts would not come until later.

  “Meiguanxi. Wo ai nimen.” It doesn’t matter. I love all of you.

  Ba’s eyes welled with tears.

  BIG AND BRIGHT SIGNS in Chinese characters lit up the night. Cars and mopeds carelessly swerved in and out of traffic. We were sharing the road with millions of crazy people, I thought, as I stared wide-eyed at this exotic world.

  We arrived at the house of my oldest sister, jumped out of the car and waited outside holding our bags. Ba barked orders, arguing with Ma and the sisters. Jin-Xia told me not to mind his nervous fidgeting.

  “He just want to make this night perfect,” she said.

  We walked through a ceramic tiled courtyard to the apartment. Before we entered, we took off our shoes and put on plastic house slippers. My sisters sat me down in the middle of a black leather sofa. They insisted that my mother sit next to me and they squeezed in nearby. Suddenly I was part of that pile of sisters, and of nieces and nephews, who were hoisted onto my lap, forced to pronounce my name and give me hugs.

  “Say ‘I love you, Auntie,’” they were told.

  “I luh-vah you, Ahn-tee,” they squeaked.

  Jin-Feng, pregnant with her second daughter, brought out a porcelain tea set. Her husband poured the steaming water from the regular pot to a fancy clay pot and then into tiny cups.

  “To family,” they said, raising their cups. “To being together again.”

  They fed me pastries filled with chunks of meat, and giant, dripping pork dumplings. They were both impressed and amused with the way I used my chopsticks. (I usually hold one chopstick like you might hold a pencil, braced between the tip of my middle finger and the knuckle of my thumb; the other I maneuver up and down with the top of my thumb and my index finger.) They made me talk on the phone to an uncle and my older brother, who waited for my arrival in Taitung, even if I couldn’t speak Mandarin. They took pictures and filmed every move I made.

  They showered me with gifts. Jin-Feng gave me a jade necklace and ladybug earrings. Jin-Xia got me a teapot set engraved with dragons. Jin-Zhi gave me CDs of Chinese pop music. The booty piled on the table in front of me: secondhand jewelry, a huge sack of peanut candy from Kinmen Island, Chinese-language books, tapes, and even an electronic Chinese-English translator (I got the hint). Ba gave me a red envelope with one thousand U.S. dollars to cover most of my plane trip.

  Offerings of welcome, offerings of guilt, I thought. I wanted to pass out my gifts, but my sisters would not let me.

  “This is your time,” they said. “Tomorrow you can give.”

  “Ba want to buy you your gold jewelry for when you marry,” they said. I told them this was not necessary because I did not plan to wed anytime soon. They ignored me.

  They proclaimed that I looked like the fourth sister, Jin-Hong, and Min-Wei, who sat nearby, grinning. Min-Wei was a year younger than me. She had long hair, highlighted red, and olive skin. Like me, she looked more like our father, with the same nose, chin, and brow.

  “Min-Wei always say she is number one best-looking sister, but now you number one,” one sister said.

  Min-Wei laughed. “You like KTV?” She asked.

  “KTV?”

  “Karaoke.”

  “Ummmm.” I paused, and then said, “Sure.”

  She loved karaoke, something I could not imagine doing unless good and buzzed. Min-Wei told me she liked to sing Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart,” and that she and her Australian boyfriend, Patrick, sang Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” in a karaoke contest, which they ended up winning.

  Next came the presentation of the cake, a pillow-sized monster covered with fresh fruits, including bright green melon pieces, orange peaches, and ruby red strawberries on pale purple icing. The cake was in honor of my arrival and my oldest brother-in-law’s fifty-sixth birthday.

  Ba sat on the corner of the couch, observing and hovering. He wanted badly to speak with me, to ask me questions, to tell me what to do as he did to everyone else. Little did I know what a blessing it was to not understand. Ba made one of the sisters translate.

  “Ba want to know how much money you make.”

  I raised my eyebrows, but my friends back in the United States and my Asian American literature had prepared me for these types of questions, so I answered: about thirty-eight thousand dollars. Ba calculated this in his head and laughed and announced that I made more than my brother-in-law, who is an engineer.

  Then he asked me how much I paid for my apartment. About five hundred dollars a month, I told him.

  “You pay too much,” he said.

  By the time all the food and the questions and conversation ended, it was about three in the morning. Maureen and I were beat, achy, and tired from the long journey. We were given the pink bedroom of Jin-Feng’s daughter. The rest of the family would cram into the other bedroom and living room, sleeping together on beds and the floor, like they had as children. I listened to low talking and the clap of slippers on tile as I lay on my niece’s rock-hard bed. A giant poster of Woody from A Toy Story stared down from the wall and a McDonald’s Happy Meal box sat on her desk.

  Before I drifted off, I heard Maureen’s voice, distant and soft in the darkness: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Chinese man cry.”

  I WOKE TO THE SOUND of roosters. The exhaustion of the day before had not worn off, but excitement did not allow me to sleep any longer. We were going on a picnic. We had to take pictures first. I posed with everyone, in every possible combination—with my parents, with just Ba, with just Ma, with my sisters, with my brothers-in-law, with each sister and her family, with each niece and nephew. Then at the park we did the same. I am sure there is not one undocumented moment from that visit.

  Then we began a unbelievable feeding frenzy that would not end until I stepped back onto the plane.

  I have always loved—obsessed over—food. I plan my life around food. I apparently have always been this way. When I was little, I would pester my parents with loud, insistent proclamations of hunger at inappropriate times and always remembered places according to the food I consumed. I may not remember the name of the people we met or the monuments we visited on a family outing, but I remember what we ate. The buttery corn at former Congressman Bill Ford’s annual fund-raiser. The hot dogs at Tiger Stadium. The oranges on a trip to California. When I go to different cities, I plan in advance what I will eat. Home to Detroit? A Coney Island and chili fries, or avegolemeno soup and flaming cheese in Greektown, or crushed lentil soup and fattosh salad at any Lebanese restaurant. New York? Soup dumplings.

  I love to cut grocery coupons from the Sunday newspaper, not because I will buy these food products, but because I can think about eating them. I always buy several restaurant guides for whatever city I live in and relish each as if it is a favorite novel. My husband dreads when it’s my turn to order at restaurants because I almost always have trouble deciding. I grill waiters on the daily specials, just so I can imagine them. Choosing means having to eliminate other potentially delicious options.

  In Taiwan I fit right in. Eating is an event, a vital part of the culture. People greet each other, not by asking, “How are you?” but “Have you eaten?” When my family was not eating a meal, they were snacking. When they were not snacking they were talking about the next meal. We ate beef
noodles, whole white fish, spare ribs, shallot pancakes, rice porridge, eel, frog, dim sum, and tofu. We had shrimp dumplings, pork dumplings, boiled dumplings, and pan-fried dumplings. We had sushi, sashimi, fish ball soup, and spring rolls that you wrap in lettuce and eat with your hands. We drank soy milk, bubble tea, orange juice, guava juice, and the occasional Taiwan Beer. We snacked on Chinese star fruits, kiwis, apples, and sweet bean cakes. We ate in kitchens, in dining and living rooms, at Japanese and Hong Kong restaurants, in cars, on benches, and during walks.

  I ate most everything they put in front of me. It took me a while to learn to leave a bit of food in my bowl to show that I could eat no more. Only a couple times did I taste something I could not stand. A family member bought me a fish cake, a crowd favorite in Taiwan. I took one bite and almost vomited. When the woman was not looking I spit my mouthful into a bush and threw away the remains. I declined trying the chicken feet that my oldest sister slurped and snacked on. I also passed on stinky tofu; a delicacy to many, it reeked to high heaven to me.

  If I remarked that something was tasty, I got more of it than I could possibly eat. I mentioned I liked fenglishu, the pineapple cakes that I had tried at my Chinese tutor’s house in St. Louis, mostly because it was one of the few words I could say. I ended up receiving several ornate boxes to take home.

  Really, if I admired anything aloud, Ma, Ba, or my sisters tried to give it to me.

  “What pretty teapots you have.”

  Ba opened the cabinet and offered one as a gift.

  “No! No! No!”

  They even tried to give things I didn’t admire. At one point, Ba tried to give me a dozen toothbrushes.