Ba drove us around, showing me off and showing off his city. One morning he wrested Jin-Zhi and me out of our sleep and forced us to go with him into town, presumably because his friends would be there. We accompanied Ma to the vegetable market, where she introduced me to the vendors, friends of hers. The sisters took turns taking me to the beach, the mountains, temples, parks, and hot springs. We also toured St. Mary’s Hospital. Sister Gertrude, who had been Maureen’s contact at the hospital and who had arranged the adoption of our youngest sister, led us on a tour. I met some of the nurses who had spoiled and fattened me. I saw the green surgery room where I was born. Sister Gertrude introduced me to nurses and patients and told them our story.
Unbeknownst to me, my sisters were livid. They pulled Sisters Maureen and Gertrude aside and asked them not to tell people this story. They were embarrassed that my parents had given me up. It was nothing to brag about, they said.
I WAS MORE than ready to leave Taitung after a few days. I was exhausted and feeling a little frustrated. Tougher questions had begun to nag at me. I still knew so little about my ancestry, my parents and sisters’ real lives. The language and cultural barrier seemed to grow minute by minute. I spent barely any time alone with my mother. Even when I did, I could only pat her hand, give her flowers or a kiss on the cheek. All these strong personalities conflicted, too. I knew there was bickering going on, though sometimes I couldn’t tell if it was real fighting or their normal manner of animated, agitated speech. I caught a cold, and my throat began to ache.
I tried to hide my relief when I said goodbye to my birth parents and headed back to Taipei with my sisters. My parents stayed in Taitung because during the upcoming holiday of Ching Ming, they had to sweep the graves of our ancestors. They told me many times that they hoped I would come back, maybe every year if I could.
“I will try,” I said, doubtful.
At the airport, Ba told me for the umpteenth time that he hoped I could find Mei-Hui, our Swiss sister, and bring her back.
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
Ma stood nearby as Ba waved frantically. I could see his hand flailing in the air above the crowds as my sisters and I disappeared into the airport.
IT RAINED ON my final full day in Taiwan. The fog hung on the mountains, and the bright colors of the temples and pagodas seemed gray. On the way to the airport in Jin-Xia’s car, we listened to an American Country Top 40 broadcast from an English-speaking station.
The twang of a Travis Tritt song somehow reminded me of the times I felt like an outsider in America, growing up. We went through the motions of the day, a trip to Tanshui Park and another unbelievable dinner at a Cantonese restaurant. After we ate, second sister, Jin-Qiong, had to return to Kaohsiung. As the taxi arrived to pick her up, she began to cry.
“I will miss you,” she sobbed, triggering my tears. The others began to cry, too. Head down and whimpering, she quickly jumped into the cab and drove away. Jin-Zhi put her arms around me. I felt an intense bond with these women, and I feared that once I left, it might disappear.
“We’ll see each other again, when you come back next year,” she said. We climbed into two cars. In the other car, my sisters tearfully grilled Maureen.
“How does she feel about all this?” they asked. “How does she feel about the fact that our parents adopted a boy and gave her away?”
“I’m not sure,” Maureen told them. In fact, I was not sure, either. During that whirlwind week, I didn’t have time to digest the immensity of what was happening. That would take months, even years. I still felt as if I would wake up at any moment.
Late that night, around 11 p.m., my sisters took me and Maureen shopping, by force.
“For what?” I asked. “At this hour?” They didn’t answer. They put me on the back of a moped and switched to Taiwanese so that even Maureen could not understand what they were conspiring. We sped through the streets of Taipei, passing darkened Buddhist temples and closed shops and restaurants. We stopped in front of a small jewelry store, where 24-karat gold necklaces, rings, and bracelets gleamed under harsh lights.
We were to pick my wedding jewelry. I stood there, helpless, while three of my sisters picked out two bracelets, a ring, and two necklaces. I did not want them to spend this kind of money on me.
“No! No! I don’t want!” Talking to them all week had reduced my English to fragments.
They didn’t listen; they just hovered over the jewelry case, pointing and picking.
They held pieces out for me to see. Exasperated, I kept protesting, paying little attention to what they were showing me.
“Ba does this for his daughters. All of us,” said Jin-Hong. I soon had a full set of wedding jewelry. I took home a red plastic oval full of gold.
OUR GOODBYE THE next morning was hasty. We were running late, as usual. At the airport terminal entrance, I hurriedly hugged everyone, while my six-year-old niece clung to my waist. My sisters were still waving, taking pictures, and filming until Maureen and I were out of sight.
I was relieved to be on the plane. I was worn out and wanted to go home. Maureen and I quietly chatted and joked about the unbelievable visit. Meanwhile, I opened the package of wedding jewelry that my sisters had forced on me. I was so distraught at the store that I hadn’t bothered to examine the actual booty. The only thing I remembered was that they had given me a bracelet made of twelve tiny gold circles, each engraved with an animal from the Chinese zodiac.
“Pretty!” they had said. “You like?”
“Yes, pretty,” I said. “But I don’t want.”
“You are Ox. We buy for match.”
Now, on the plane, Maureen and I inspected the results. The bracelet was exquisite, and the gang was all there: Dog, Pig, Rooster, Dragon, Sheep, Horse, Rabbit, Snake, Monkey, Rat, Tiger, and my sign, Ox. My sisters had followed the same theme when selecting most of my other pieces. They had chosen a thick gold chain with a circular charm engraved with the character for ox on one side and a picture of an ox on the other. I looked closer.
“That isn’t an ox,” I said. In fact, it was a galloping cartoon milk cow, with udders and a cowbell. Maureen agreed, laughing, too. It was a cow; the character for ox and cow is the same in Chinese.
Oh God. I better check the ring.
I looked closer.
I imagined a lovely wedding portrait, slightly out of focus except for the hands of the newlyweds. My husband’s long fingers, simply adorned with a gold band, gently clasping my manicured hand. And on my delicately placed ring finger sits a puffy, golden cow, with stubs for horns.
8
MEIMEI
As soon as I returned home, I dutifully did what my birth father asked. I found our youngest sister, our meimei.
She was surprisingly easy to locate. I simply wrote to the nuns at St. Mary’s Hospital that still kept in touch with the man who had arranged her adoption, and he contacted her. Her name was not Mei-Hui, but Irene Hofmann. The nuns told me that she wasn’t sure about communicating with our birth parents just yet, but she was open to hearing from me. They gave me her address in Switzerland.
So two weeks after I returned from Taiwan, on April 21, 1997, I wrote to Irene.
“I am not sure how to begin this letter—everything and anything I could possibly write sounds strange, too awkward. So I’ll get right to the point. I am your birth sister, Mei-Ling Hopgood.”
In eight short paragraphs, I told her about my family, where I went to school, what I did for a living, and a brief summary of all that had transpired in the past three months. I told her about our parents, sisters, and brother, and my visit to Taiwan.
I know that this is intense stuff. And perhaps it is overwhelming. I understand perfectly. But these people are good people and have no intention of interfering with your life.
I think Ma and Ba would, at least, like to hear from you again. To know you are happy. To know you are well. They mean no imposition on your family. They know who your “real” parents are and how
important they are in your life. And they respect that.
I do, too. And like I said I truly can imagine how this must feel! But I would love to hear from you—to find out who you are and what you like to do and what you do! A typical journalist! Please consider sending me a note. And ask me any questions you wish to know. Be as blunt or as straightforward as you want (I think it’s in our genes). And if you feel like this is too much, you can say “back off” without hurting me.
Again, I understand. But I hope you will get in touch with me. And we’ll take it from there! Love, Your sister Mei-Ling
Irene wrote me back immediately.
Dear Mei-Ling,
I hope you received my postcard. However, anyway, thanks a lot for your letter. As I wrote, I also wanted to find out your address. Maybe it was telepathy. Then I got your letter a short time later. It’s quite difficult for me to write this letter in English. It wouldn’t be easy even in my mother tongue, German.
Irene told me that the nuns at St. Mary’s had passed on the news that we were getting together in Taiwan, but she found out too late to join us.
She went on to tell me that she was preparing for English exams and told me a little bit about her life in Switzerland. She grew up in Zug, a canton between Zurich and Lucerne. She was twenty years old and lived in the one-room flat on the ground floor of her parents’ home. Her brother, Denis, was from Taiwan, too. She worked in a bank.
“Don’t think that everyone in Switzerland works in a bank,” she warned, jokingly. “A lot of people think of banks, cheese, and mountains if they hear Switzerland.”
She mentioned that she wanted to study English, and at first she had considered England or Australia, but now that she had heard from me, she was considering America. She asked me more about my life and my hobbies. She told me that she liked to snowboard, hang out with friends, take vacations, and listen to music.
“A bit of a strange letter, I think,” Irene finished. She said it was not so easy to write “the first letter to my true sister.”
“Nevertheless,” she continued, “I hope you understand most of it and you’ll write me again! Love, Your Irene.”
IRENE HAD BEEN BORN in August 1976, three years after me. Ba had already made arrangements to give her up if she was a girl. Still, Ma did not want to give her away, partly because she had been born in the celebrated Year of the Dragon, the most potent and promising of the twelve Chinese signs. Dragons could bring fortune and success. Ma thought the family needed such a child, and despite their promise to a foreign couple, she tried to keep Irene. Ba, not wanting to lose face, insisted on moving forward. He took Irene back to the hospital, where she stayed while the Swiss family made arrangements to come and adopt her.
About six months later, Monika and Othmar Hofmann, who were age twenty-eight and thirty-one, respectively, came to Taitung to pick her up. They made the trip a family holiday of sorts; a few of Othmar’s siblings tagged along, too. They met Ma and Ba in a brief and emotional meeting at the house. Jin-Hong remembers crying along with Ma as she bathed Irene on that final day.
Ba tried to convince the Hofmanns to take Min-Wei, who was not even two. The Hofmanns declined, in part because they already had arranged to adopt a little boy in Taipei. The couple took their new children and returned to Europe.
After Irene, Ba wanted to try to have more children, and Ma, only thirty-three, was not too old to keep trying. Yet she was afraid that they would have another girl, and once again they would just give the child away. She feared the vicious cycle of abandonment would continue in the quest for something that might never be. So this time Ma said no, and she ended her child-bearing years feeling like a failed mother and wife. And so my birth father began to look elsewhere for what he wanted.
THE FIRST EXCHANGES between Irene and me felt casual and breezy, as if we were merely international pen pals who had just been assigned to each other in class. Her extreme modesty aside, Irene’s English was impressive—she spoke four languages, including her native Swiss German (as well as high German) and some French and Italian—and her handwriting was impeccable, with each letter perfectly sculpted, as if penned by a professional calligrapher. Irene told me that, like me, she had never thought much of our biological parents or family, though unlike me, she knew where they were and how to contact them. Our family had sent her some dried pineapples once in the mail. Irene told me that the man who had arranged her adoption, a former priest, had told her about me when he told her about our reunion in Taiwan.
She told me about school and the latest movies she had seen—Speed II, My Best Friend’s Wedding. She said she shared my love for Chinese food, and food in general. I told her about my recent trips to Memphis, Los Angeles, and Mexico.
“You are a lucky girl, traveling around all the time,” she wrote on September 1, 1997. I thought Irene traveled even more: Valle di Verzasca in the canton of Ticino and other spots in Switzerland, Milan, London. She sent me postcards from Vienna and Kos, Greece. To me, she lived an exciting, European lifestyle.
Early on, Irene sent a picture of herself, and even though I didn’t think we looked much alike, I saw tiny bits of me in her. She was in Greece with a friend. She had short hair, a round face, and a dimpled smile, like many of our sisters have. She was wearing a white tank top that highlighted her tanned skin. She was adorable and petite (Irene described herself as 1.55 meters or about five feet tall; I’m only two inches taller) and was standing next to a very tall, white friend who had to bend down to fit in the frame with her. It reminded me of how so many of my American friends tower over me.
THE TOWN WHERE Irene grew up seems, like so many places in Switzerland, almost too idyllic to be real. In 2007 more than 103,000 people lived in the breathtaking region that embraces two crystalline lakes, Zug and Aegeri, and sits at the foot of Zugerberg. On clear days, the surrounding mountains, picturesque town, and Alpine homes reflect mirror-perfect in the lakes’ surface. Hünenberg is one of eleven communities in the canton of Zug. Downtown Zug is divided into two parts, the Old Town with cobblestone walkways and medieval churches and the ultramodern office area where multinational companies have flocked to take advantage of the town’s low tax rates. Zug is among the richest areas in Switzerland, a “magnet for the wealthy,” as the BBC once wrote, though Irene’s family was middle class. Irene told me her father, Othmar, worked as the head of the construction division in the municipality of Hünenberg, and her mother, Monika, worked part time as an accountant.
Irene grew up in a pretty four-bedroom home that her father designed with a pitched roof on a winding street called Ders-bachstrasse, not far from Lake Zug. The front yard was often garnished with brilliant red geraniums. They had a swing set, a tree that the kids loved to climb, and a huge garden in the backyard where they grew their own vegetables and fruits, including beans, potatoes, cucumbers, berries, and figs. From the back of the house, they had a marvelous lake view. Her childhood was happy and simple. Her mom loved to cook and made almost everything from scratch. Their neighborhood was full of kids their age, and they usually went on a vacation during the summer (to the beach, usually Italy) and winter (skiing at a small resort). Often their many aunts, uncles, and cousins came along. They also hiked in the mountains with their extended family.
I thought Switzerland must have been an incredible, intoxicating place to live, surrounded by such pristine physical beauty: the brilliant purple and pink summer flowers, the rolling green countryside, the snowy alpine peaks, the glittering lakes and castlelike homes. The people seemed polite and well put-together. Drivers actually stop their cars when they see you want to cross the road; pedestrians always have the right of way. The air is suspiciously crisp, and views are simply otherworldly, especially to someone who grew up in a pretty nondescript suburb of Detroit. When I visited Irene in later years, I couldn’t help but comment over and over again how “clean” Switzerland was.
Irene and I got a kick out of comparing the things we had in common. We loved the sam
e hockey player: Detroit Red Wing Steve Yzerman. We wore the same furrowed expression when we lost something and the same anguished, angry look when we were hungry. We both had remarkably prehensile toes. We viewed our Chinese family and our background with similar distance and ambivalence.
We also had identical insecurities growing up. Irene was sweet, thoughtful, and had lots of friends, but though she was well-loved she also said she felt different. The Swiss population is mostly Anglo-Saxon, more so than where I grew up. In 2007 about two-thirds of the population were of German descent, 18 percent were French, and 10 percent were Italian. Irene’s family is quintessentially Swiss; many of her relatives are tall, pale, and have the piercingly blue eyes of her father. Irene, too, longed to be more round-eyed and taller. Sometimes Swiss would assume she was a foreigner and speak to her in high German—Swiss speak a unique local dialect.
If someone did not like her, she wondered if it was because of who she was or what she looked like.
“I could never tell which answer would have hurt more,” she told me.
While Americans might be known for being talkative, outgoing, and sometimes superficial, the Swiss can be reserved and conservative, Irene said. Her parents were caring but did not show their feelings much, which bothered her because she tended to be more emotional. She was closest to her mom, a peacemaker of sorts when Irene and her father bumped heads. The family didn’t talk about her or her brother’s adoption much, and she didn’t ask. Actually, I would become the first person with whom she would discuss the feeling of “being different.”
Irene was only twenty years old when we first began corresponding. I wondered to myself what I would have done had I been just three years younger when all this happened to me. I would have been a sophomore at the University of Missouri and in the middle of my own Asian American identity crisis. I don’t think I would have been ready, although who knows if you can ever be ready for something as big as this. I wanted to ease Irene into the whole experience. From the get-go, I behaved like an overprotective big sister. She may have found our family on her own eventually, but I felt largely responsible for “bringing her back.” When Irene said that she and her mother would join my American family and me on a trip to Taiwan in 1998—her father showed no interest in going, though her mom thought it was very important that she accompany her daughter—I tried to prepare her and my birth family the best that I could. I explained to her that our family could be shockingly blunt and quite pushy, without meaning any harm. I also had to remind my birth family over and over again not to refer to Irene as Mei-Hui, a name she has never used. I tried to shelter Irene from the inevitable and constant confusion in Taiwan over our travel plans; at the last minute they tried to get us all to change our travel dates, for example. I had adapted quickly to the strong personalities in our family but didn’t know how Irene would react. It all could easily be suffocating, and I wanted our meimei’s landing to be as smooth as possible.
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