Lucky Girl

by Mei-Ling Hopgood

  Jin-Hong and Ma took me to the local market where we picked the handmade dumpling wrappers and the freshest cabbage, carrots, and pork meat. At home, my sister took me to the kitchen and led me through the steps.

  First, you finely chop the pork into tiny pieces, and then the cabbage even more finely. Make sure you squeeze out the excess water from the cut vegetables and the juice from the meat; the mixture has to be as dry as possible.

  Jin-Hong added a dusting of what I believe was cornstarch, though neither of us could translate that word into the other sister’s language. Then she threw in some garlic. She opened the dumpling wrappers and placed one in my hand. They were light circles, floury and cool in the palm.

  She placed another wrapper in her slightly cupped left hand and put a dollop of the meat-vegetable mixture in the center. She folded the wrapper in half and pinched it together at the crest and she pulled delicately and quickly at the dough, folding forward tiny waves of wrapper until she had a perfect pregnant-looking crescent. She set it on a plate and picked up another wrapper. I clumsily tried to imitate her fluid movements.

  Dumpling making is often a team sport, with the entire household participating. My other sisters and even brothers-in-law gathered around the table, joking, laughing. They filled and folded their lopsided dumplings and declared, “Mine is most beautiful!”

  When all the wrappers were used up, Jin-Hong showed me how to cook the shuijiao just right, dropping them in a boiling wok adding a cup of cool water, waiting until the water bubbled up again and then repeating twice more. She scooped out the result in a strainer, and tossed them steaming hot on a plate. They tasted fantastic, especially with soy sauce, vinegar, and chili sauce. They disappeared in seconds.

  I mentally recorded Jin-Hong’s lesson and practiced it when I returned to the United States, assisted by a newly purchased Chinese cookbook. Each time, I got better and better at making them. Wherever I lived, I sought out Chinese grocery stores, hunting down the best place to buy the wrappers and fresh ingredients. I adapted the recipe to American products and cooking accessories. I bought the pork already ground, and after spending many hours using a knife to chop the cabbage into tiny pieces, I purchased a food processor. I used my sister’s boiling method for a time but later switched to a bamboo steamer. That way I could make more, faster. I mixed Chinese tradition with a few modern conveniences to satisfy my American impatience.

  I enjoy the ritual of making dumplings, the feel of the soft, malleable dough against my fingertips. It’s therapeutic to spend an hour folding in front of the television the afternoon before a party. Sometimes I invite girlfriends over to bond over dumpling making. My dumplings are, to this day, the most popular dish at my dinner parties.

  “You made these by hand?” People ask in wonder.

  “Yes,” I say proudly.

  “Where’d you learn?”

  “My sisters,” I respond. And they nod approvingly, as if it must come naturally.

  I HAD SPENT most of my young life trying to prove how American I was. I had wanted more than anything to disassociate myself with anything Asian. When I went away to the University of Missouri in Columbia (nicknamed Mizzou), I rushed a sorority, in which aside from the half-Asian president, I was the only minority. I wore those Greek letters big and bright on my chest like an announcement: “Look! I am American.” However, among the white girls from mid-Missouri with big bows on their heads, I still felt awkward and out of place even though no one treated me that way. I stared at the other Asians on campus, noting how foreign they seemed, and felt ashamed that in my own head I was perpetuating the stereotypes I abhorred.

  It wasn’t until my sophomore year that I began to figure out that being different was okay, and one of the touchstone events was when I made my first Asian American friend in college.

  Her name was Tisha Narimatsu, and she was in my news writing class, which she hated because she planned to go into advertising. Tisha had been born and raised in Honolulu, where more than half of the residents have some kind of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, or other Asian blood. She was half Chinese, half Japanese, an unusual combination considering that the two ethnicities generally hated each other. The issue of race to her at Mizzou was something completely different; she had never been in the minority before. She was stunningly blunt and spoke with a slightly pidgin accent when she relaxed and stopped carefully cleaning her speech. For example, she said “da” instead of “the” and “I’m code” instead of “I’m cold.” I thought she was interesting, and the perfect candidate for an Asian partner in crime after deciding out of the blue that I was ready for one. I liked that she seemed comfortable in her skin in ways I was not and pursued her friendship aggressively. I talked to her during class, asked for her number, and invited her out. I was like a kid with a crush. Tisha was used to a more polite, nonintrusive Asian style, and I scared her a little, but she went along with it. In the end, we became good friends. Mainly, we went out to parties and bars, drank a lot of Bud Light, and met guys.

  One night after returning from happy hour, I made her stand in front of a mirror in my bedroom next to me so I could compare our eye shape. I was a little buzzed and wanted to see if it was true that we looked alike, as so many white folks in Columbia said. Tisha thought all this was ridiculous but humored me. I remember giggling as we stared at each other in the mirror. In fact, we did not look so alike. My eyes were bigger, more almond-shaped and slightly crooked. Hers were more even, a bit longer, shaped more like a thin slice of the moon. My nose protruded; hers was wider. I had angular eyebrows; hers were more curved.

  This firsthand proof—that all Asians, in fact, do not look alike—was one in a series of discoveries that might have been obvious to Tisha, my sisters, and others but was not so apparent to me. At about the same time, I was recruited, still reluctantly, into the first and only Asian American group on campus back then. That first meeting was strange, all of us in once place. I remember nibbling the Korean cookies that someone brought and being ultra-aware of the Asian-ness of everyone in the room. I wondered what I had in common with them, besides our ancestors being from the same general continent, but I related to their tales of feeling harassed or isolated. I attended more meetings and began to forget about race: theirs and mine. I also got involved with the Asian American Journalists Association, through which I met a ton of incredibly smart and successful Asian Americans who defied the stereotypes.

  By the time I graduated from college, I had figured out that I actually liked being Chinese American, but I still tried to convince people—most of all myself—that my past might have dictated what I looked like, but it would not determine who I was or would become.

  Then I met my birth family and suddenly found myself trying to be Chinese.

  I yearned to understand my birth parents’ words with my own ears, instead of always having to rely on the labored and carefully edited translations of my sisters. I had studied Mandarin with friends and at a local Chinese school, and I listened to the tapes that my sisters gave me, but my grasp of the language was still abysmal. I read some books and saw some more movies, but I knew little about what it meant to be Chinese.

  The only way to learn, I decided, was to get out of St. Louis, to slam the brakes on the quick progress I was making as a young journalist at the newspaper there. My bosses liked me, my sources trusted me, and my articles were making the front page. Yet my world had changed. The history that once seemed so irrelevant to the life I was leading in the United States was now shaping the future I envisioned for myself. The contours of the American identity that I hard worked so hard to forge were graying and morphing. I was embracing a kind of dual citizenship but was not sure yet what membership meant. What I did know was that I wanted to know more, and that meant a complete revision of my life’s plan. I won a journalism fellowship to study Mandarin and Chinese history, politics, economics, and literature. My next destination: Hawaii.

  TRADE WINDS. Marbled blue waters. Killer wa
ves. Taut and tan bodies. Lots and lots of Asians, hoppas. Pidgin English. Incredible pan-Asian food. My friend Tisha and her Hawaii pals. Island life was in my blood, you could say, but who wouldn’t want to live in Hawaii? For eight months I lived within a bike ride of my classes at the University of Hawaii and a short walk to the ocean. Aside from my real classes, I took scuba, hula, and surfing and I got to be part of the “majority,” just another Asian face (until I opened my mouth and talked like a haole, a white person). Aside from soaking up the sun, I did in fact improve my Mandarin during those two semesters, although I finished far from fluent. I visited China and found I could strike up a low-level debate with Beijing cabbies on the significance of the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and I could avoid ordering dishes at restaurant with dog or snake meat. I was making some progress, but I was a long way from figuring out how all these changes fit into my life.

  LITTLE MORE THAN a year and a half had gone by since Min-Wei stayed with me in the United States. Her life had changed drastically by the time I returned to Taiwan in July 1999. Not long after she returned to Taipei she married Patrick and got pregnant. When I arrived for a visit with Monte and my brother Jung-Hoe, the couple were living with their new baby girl, Tasia, and running an English school out of their apartment.

  Ba at first disapproved of Min-Wei’s marriage to Patrick—whom he saw as a white foreigner who was not rich enough—and made it rudely and painfully obvious when he arrived in Taipei to meet me. When he walked into their apartment, Ba completely brushed by his daughter, ignored Patrick, and showed no interest in her baby.

  “I don’t care,” Min-Wei said, waving it off, but I was annoyed. My own dad had not always been thrilled with my taste in boyfriends through the years, but he always treated my dates with courtesy, and above all he respected my opinion. It seemed to me that Ba selectively valued his daughters’ opinions. He had wanted Min-Wei to marry some older Chinese man, who supposedly had money. It was for her own good, he said, but that wasn’t what Min-Wei wanted. Ba did try in his own gruff way to welcome Monte, who had asked me to marry him only a couple weeks prior in a courtyard in Singapore. Monte and I had been dating for three years, since right around the time I made first contact with my birth family. He had been patient and tolerant, joking with the sisters who visited and putting up with incredibly early phone calls from Taiwan; my family often miscalculated or did not bother to heed the fourteen-hour time difference. In Taiwan, Monte took in stride my birth father’s brusque behavior. The two men couldn’t speak to each other, anyway, but at least Ba acknowledged his presence by pushing him to eat. I guessed that since I was a foreigner, Ba knew he had to accept that I would have a foreign husband. Ba knew his influence in my life was limited, but that didn’t mean he did not try to impose his opinion.

  MY BIRTH PARENTS had shared with me tidbits about Kinmen during previous visits, stories of my grandparents and of the war and the poverty that had dogged them. Ma and Ba were anxious for me to return so that I could meet my many aunties, uncles, cousins, and friends—or rather, so they could meet me. So this time, we went with my sister Jin-Hong.

  In 1999 Kinmen still seemed suspended between China and Taiwan, communism and capitalism, war and peace. The old-style homes were magnificent with their red sloping roofs, but spanking new multilevel homes towered over them, making them seem almost shabby. The island looked and felt like a military town, in various shades of gray and khaki. Villagers selling fruit trudged past infantrymen, who stood in the shade of roadside trees and smoked Marlboros. Many of my relatives were hard country folk, with leathery skin, missing teeth, long hairs growing out of cheeks, and facial moles. (My birth father sometimes let grow a few curly and rather creepy sprouts on his chin.)

  We visited Ba’s ancestral home in the West Garden neighborhood where he and Ma lived during the early years of their marriage. We parked the car and walked down the narrow alleyway that led to the house. A small wooden door opened to a traditional Chinese courtyard. The space was dirty with only a few stray tools and pieces of random furniture strewn here and there. A layer of dust covered everything. A central room still held our dilapidated ancestral shrine, and we paid our respects. The rest of the house, which consisted of a few small rooms emanating from the main courtyard, was abandoned. Ba showed me a small garden area, now overgrown with weeds and vines, where he said Chinese bombs had almost killed him. Before we left West Garden, we tended the graves of Ba’s parents, which were nestled in a nearby field.

  During the evening we stayed in the modern house that Ba and Ma had bought, a few hundred feet from the sea. I took a walk down a newly paved road along the coast, watching the ocean pound against old gun turrets and inspecting rocks covered in shards of glass. You wouldn’t risk swimming here for fear of being crushed by the surf or dashed on the wreckage left from the war.

  All of this was interesting to me, but I felt little if any romantic attachment to Kinmen’s rustic charm. I think my own mixed feelings about my birth parents might have clouded my opinion of the place.

  As usual, I was always on display. Not only did they want to show me the war memorials, they wanted to introduce me to all the relatives they could round up. Certainly everyone was welcoming. They cooked elaborate meals and gave me improvised gifts: jewelry, cakes, pens, and clothing. Everyone wanted to toast me with the throat blistering rice liquor that Kinmen is known for. But it was tiring to be the center of so much attention, especially when I still did not understand the language. In Kinmen, the common language was Holo (Taiwanese), so despite my best efforts to learn Mandarin, I was still left out of most conversations and tired quickly of those I did recognize: where I lived, and what I did, how much I made, why I was so “black.”

  In Taiwan and China, being “black”—meaning tanned or darker skinned—is undesirable. Color was considered a sign that you were from a lower class, that you labored outside or had indigenous roots. My family had been poor once, but they preferred not to look like it. When my Chinese sisters came to visit me in Hawaii, they hid in the shade, slathered themselves with super-strong sunscreen, and wore hats. In sharp contrast, when Irene came to visit me in Hawaii, we loved lounging at the beach. To us, being tan meant we were healthy, vacationed, and relaxed. I liked how I looked with a little color, but for my Chinese father it was something that he had to excuse.

  “She is so black because she lived in Hawaii, where she had a scholarship,” he told everyone.

  After hearing this refrain over and I over, I grew annoyed. Why should I make excuses for the way I look? Despite my best efforts to understand their culture, I felt like some members of my family didn’t even try to understand mine.

  Finally, during one dinner, when my skin color came up again, I said in Chinese, defiantly: “I like being black.”

  Jin-Hong glanced at me surprised but then smiled at this small retort, a flickering of protest from the American daughter. Ba and everyone else just looked at me like I was crazy and went on with their meal.

  I WAS SO GLAD to have Jin-Hong in Kinmen, to be able to devote these two short days to getting to know her a little better. I was drawn to my fourth-oldest sister, who seemed levelheaded but still fun and fairly liberal-minded. She was four years my elder, and the other sister aside from Min-Wei that everyone thought I resembled. She and I had the same kind of curvy body, though she was taller and paler. She was a wonderful cook. She tended to be more mature and responsible than Min-Wei growing up but still did things like drink a beer once in a while.

  At the time, she was married with two young children, but she took time off from her job to accompany my parents and me to Kinmen. Jin-Hong was used to the indiscriminate comings and goings and last-minute decisions our parents imposed. They were always jumping in and out of the car, running into a store to buy vegetables or into a friend’s home to say hi. She and I were often left sitting in the car, her in the driver’s seat shaking her head at whatever was just said or done, and me watching her,
confused.

  Once, after Ma and Ba had said something to her in Taiwanese and exited the car, Jin-Hong looked at me, narrowing her eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “Did you understand that?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You know what my Taiwan name, Awan, mean?” she said, referring to the nickname that our grandmother and parents had given her when she was born.

  I shook my head no.

  “My name mean ‘no more girls,’” she said. I stared back at her, watching her watching me. She didn’t blink.

  We have another cousin, too, she told me, who has a name that means “wish for a boy.”

  I grimaced and shook my head, feeling sorry for her and my cousin. Some Chinese families named their children after qualities one might aspire to, such as grace or justice. Mine named a daughter after an obsession. Jin-Hong seemed unmoved. That’s just how our parents were. Ba had paid for her schooling, encouraged her to study, but it was she herself who managed to rise above this nickname, become a computer engineer and saleswoman, and lead a good life. She had defined who she was.

  During the evening, Jin-Hong and I snuck away to the roof of our parents’ home, where they had spread peanuts on the floor to dry. We sat in white plastic garden chairs and on crates and talked while we looked at the brilliantly starry sky.

  My sister’s marriage was on the verge of breaking up. She and her husband had married young, not long out of college. She wanted a divorce, but she told me, in Taiwan, children belonged genetically and legally to their fathers. She would have little ground to fight for custody, since her husband had not carried out any grave offense against her. If she left, she would undoubtedly lose her kids, and she couldn’t bear that thought. That’s why she stuck around in an unhappy situation, because fathers had more rights than mothers.

  I told her in the United States the opposite was often true. She nodded sadly and stared into the night.