Lucky Girl

by Mei-Ling Hopgood

  “I’ll talk to you soon. I love you.”

  “I love you too, Mom. Call me as soon as you can.”

  I hung up. It was rush hour. I couldn’t leave yet. I’d be stuck, angry and hysterical in traffic. I had a story to finish, so I would finish it. My bosses in Ohio and my husband—who was thirty miles away in his southern Maryland office—thought I was nuts.

  “Go home, honey,” Monte said. “I’ll meet you there.”

  I said I would write my story. What else could I do? My father was dead.

  I made it to our apartment, somehow. The traffic swelled around me on the parkway. I don’t remember parking the car or entering the house. I do remember changing clothes; I was wearing a black silk Banana Republic blouse, which I tossed aside and never found again. I called my brothers. We agreed that I should head home when Mom got to Michigan. I could only wait. Monte and I went out to eat that night to a bar-restaurant called Hard Times Café in Alexandria, needing a breath of air to avoid being suffocated by grief. We cried into our chili.

  When we got home, I sent messages to friends and family, including my birth sisters. Everyone was shocked.

  My sister Jin-Hong called me the next day to tell me how sorry she was.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Ba wants to talk to you,” she said.

  Ba was last person I wanted to speak to. I couldn’t bear to hear his gravelly voice, no matter how sympathetic he might be. I could not bear to not understand him, and I could not bear to understand him.

  Ba’s decision to give me away had been a good thing for me. He once told me that he decided to give me to Rollie and Chris Hopgood because he felt I’d have a better life, but Ba was also the first man to reject me. He would not have given me away had I been a boy. He was the man who cheated on our birth mother and broke my sisters’ hearts. Ba embodied some principles I could respect, but he was also a living and breathing example of others that I abhorred.

  I could not bear the thought that he was the father I had left.

  “Not now,” I said, firmly, and my sister understood.

  MOM MADE IT BACK to the U.S. mainland after a twenty-four-hour nightmare of flights and mishaps. Some jerk refused to give up a seat that was double assigned to my mother and him in Minneapolis. Then the airline lost her luggage. Hoon-Yung ably took charge of the service arrangements; he stepped into my father’s shoes and kept going. Monte and I sped across Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio. A trooper stopped us. I explained that my father had died, and he let us go.

  “Slower,” he warned. “But take care.”

  We arrived in the middle of the night and retired immediately to my childhood room. Early the next morning, I went upstairs to talk to Mom.

  “Come sit down next to me,” she said. “Dad wanted me to tell you something.”

  I sat down anxiously thinking from her solemn tone that she was about to reveal a huge family secret.

  “Dad thinks you are getting too skinny or could be anorexic. He thinks it’s because of my obsession with weight, and I’m sorry.”

  I stared at her a few seconds before bursting out laughing. I had lost some weight recently after running a marathon but still ate like a horse.

  “I am not anorexic!” I insisted.

  This was my dad. He was always worrying about our well-being to the point of being ridiculous.

  Dad had not wanted a traditional funeral. Have a party, he had joked, but that was a naïve and unrealistic request. Too many people loved him and had to mourn him. About a thousand people attended my father’s funeral “reception,” on March 17, 2002—many of the same people who had attended his retirement dinner almost exactly a year earlier in the very same Holiday Inn meeting room. A line of hundreds snaked through the room to express condolences to my mother. My family and I milled about, in a dreamlike-nightmarelike state. The number of people and the stories about my dad’s altruism, humor, commitment to education, the union, and politics touched us. He did not feel gone.

  I heard someone ask, “Where’s Dad?” to her mom. I almost answered, “He’ll be here any minute.”

  Sister Maureen gave a eulogy. She called Dad one of the most spiritual people she ever met even if he did not practice a religion. Hoon-Yung, Jung-Hoe, and I spoke. I knew my dad would want me to be like him, strong for everyone else in that room. As they used to look to him, they looked to us to set the tone for how they should feel about his death. As my mom said to us, “Our family is strong. We are getting our strength from him.”

  I did not shed a tear during his funeral service, though I cried oceans in the months and years later. There is not a day I don’t miss him.

  14

  THE BOY

  Humans are surprisingly resilient creatures. I think of my brothers, abandoned, starving orphans, whom my parents nursed back to health and raised into successful and happy human beings. My birth family made a better life for themselves despite the odds. How could I not get over my dad’s death? He would have demanded it of me, of all of us. He would have said in his own jolly and inappropriate way, “Get over me! I didn’t do all this work for nothing!”

  As time went by, the raw pain of my dad’s death faded some, though each big occasion—a wedding, the purchase of a first home, a change in job, a change in country, the birth of a child—was a bittersweet reminder that these things could not have happened without him, and yet they were happening without him. Hoon-Yung worked his tail off campaigning and won in a landslide election a seat in the Michigan state legislature. Jung-Hoe, who was working as an environmental engineer, met a Korean woman at his church, and they married in both the United States and Korea. Mom took control of her bills and her life and eventually began dating. We knew our father would not want her to live the rest of her life alone. We all wanted her to be happy.

  I continued to be wrapped up in work, my marriage, and in the old, charming, and problematic house we had bought on Capitol Hill. Irene and I remained in fairly regular contact; she tried to visit me wherever I lived—St. Louis, Hawaii, Washington, D.C. She even attended our wedding in Detroit. I also traveled a couple times to Switzerland, where she took me sledding and introduced me to Swiss carnival. Our visits together were relaxed and easy; her English was better than that of many Americans and we weren’t contending with the emotional baggage in Taiwan. We just enjoyed each other.

  Taiwan, on the other hand, seemed farther and farther away. I stopped trying so hard to stay in touch with my family there. It was not a deliberate decision, but looking back I think they reminded me too much of what I had lost. Until that moment, I had been able to keep an open mind, to endure their quirks and criticisms, and to take each secret in stride because I had two “normal” parents to return to. My dad had encouraged me to keep a level head, to leave the past in the past, to be thankful for what we had. Now Dad could no longer be a buffer for any raw feelings that festered in me. I knew I had to heal before I continued my relationship with my biological family. So I fell back into my American rhythms, and my sisters went on with their lives. Min-Wei moved to Australia for a while with her husband and two young children. Jin-Hong had gotten a divorce, and Jin-Zhi changed her name to Ya-Ling, married, and had two sons. I knew very little about these major events because we exchanged few letters and e-mail.

  It was not until 2004 that I realized how distant we had become. Monte and I were planning a vacation to Vietnam after friends told us how wonderful the landscape, people, food, and the general experience had been. We always loved to travel abroad. My husband had lived in Egypt and Kuwait for a couple years; I had lived in Mexico. We had traveled in Europe, Asia, and Latin America together. Vietnam seemed like a great next destination.

  I knew I couldn’t visit the Asian Pacific without visiting my birth family. It had been five years since I had last seen them, and despite everything that had happened, I still felt the pull of sisterhood and of questions left unanswered. It had been comfortable to settle back into my old life and let my com
plicated past and relatives slip away. But I never forgot and I never stopped wanting to be part of the Wang family. So Monte and I decided that we would go back to Taiwan for a week before heading to Vietnam.

  MOST OF MY FAMILY came to Taipei in honor of my return. We all stayed with Min-Wei and Jin-Hong and their families, who lived together in an apartment near Neihu Road. Ba and Ma came to meet us and take us to Kinmen Island for a couple days. Ya-Ling also visited with her two kids from Taitung. Monte and I squeezed into Min-Wei’s children’s bunk beds, and everyone else found a place to crash in the bedrooms, on the floor, and on couches. It was like old times.

  My sisters took us to do the usual touristy things during the day: the national museum, shopping malls, pools where we fished for prawns. They made their children perform for us. Xiao Ru played the flute. Tasia danced and sang. Rocco ran around like an Energizer bunny and then crawled into Monte’s arms and fell asleep. Each day and night one of my sisters or our parents would take us out to eat at some amazing restaurant or would cook a terrific meal. Treating in Chinese culture is an expression of hospitality, duty, and “face.” As usual, neither my birth father nor my older sisters let me pay for a meal, even if I insisted and begged.

  All of this felt easy and familiar. Sure, there were times in which Monte and I had to seek refuge in the bedroom, away from the kids, the bickering, or just the sheer number of family members, but reentry was not as tough as I had anticipated. I just had to hold my breath and jump.

  “DO YOU KNOW?” Sister no. 5 asked me early one morning.

  “What?” I asked groggily. I had just pulled myself out of bed and trudged into the living room.

  “There is a Boy.”

  Ya-Ling, formerly known as Jin-Zhi, was holding her second son. Jin-Zhi had changed her name because she believed her old name had been bad luck. She went to a fortune-teller who gave her the name Ya-Ling, which she said meant elegance, like a bird that flies gracefully.

  She was the perfect picture of a frazzled young mother. Her eyes were heavy and her thick hair—my mother’s hair—was pulled back but spraying out in all directions. Her big baby boy was trying to squirm out of her arms. He was wide-eyed and his hairline was set back beyond the top of his forehead. He looked like a tiny balding Chinese man. Her other toddler ran around knocking things off tables, screeching. Despite the babies falling all over her, she wanted to fill me in on the latest juicy family story as soon as she saw me that morning.

  “Do you know?” she asked again.

  “A boy,” I responded, blankly, thinking she must mean her own rascals.

  “Ba has a Boy,” she said.

  In 2003 Ba told Ma that he had been keeping in secret two children from an ongoing affair with another woman. That woman had come down with cancer, and he wanted to bring these children—a boy and a girl—home to live with them.

  Ya-Ling told me that Ma was infuriated.

  “How could you do this? How could you do this and give away my daughters?” she had yelled at him. Still, as she had all her life, she gave in and let the boy come and live with them. But she did not allow Ba’s daughter into her home. Not after you gave away my daughters.

  “He loves this Boy,” my sister said. “More than he has ever loved any of us.”

  Ya-Ling was living in the house in Taitung then. She said Ba had tried to throw her out of house because she would not accept this son, and she was nine months’ pregnant.

  I stared at Ya-Ling, amazed. I studied her face and saw pain in her eyes, the shame of having a father who kept doing these things. I felt repulsed and angry. Will this man ever stop? This was not rural China. This was 2004, for crying out loud. How could he not see that what he was doing was selfish and wrong?

  You can’t make up this stuff, I thought. Each story seemed more unbelievable, so I had to confirm this with another sister. I asked Jin-Hong.

  “Who told you?” she demanded.

  “Ya-Ling,” I said, not thinking anything of it. Jin-Hong, Min-Wei, and Ya-Ling always had been my truth tellers, but this time Jin-Hong’s face darkened, her mouth grew stern, and her eyes narrowed.

  “How does this make you feel?” she asked, concerned.

  “Don’t worry, I just want to know the truth,” I said. I wanted to scream, I want the truth! like Tom Cruise’s character in the movie A Few Good Men, and I could hear my sisters screaming back at me Jack Nicholson’s line: You can’t handle the truth!

  “Please,” I told my sister, “you don’t have to lie to make me feel better.”

  She nodded, but I could tell she was angry. Later she would scold Ya-Ling for telling me. She and other sisters worried that I would feel hurt. My sisters had to live with my father’s erratic behavior, but they wanted to protect me.

  At this point, the Boy was more scandal than anyone wanted to deal with. He made my sisters not want to go home to Taitung during the New Year, a family tradition. Again, they tried to convince Ma to leave.

  “Get out of the relationship. You can move in with us,” they said. “We will take care of you.”

  Still, Ma would not leave him. Her life, her home, and her friends were in Taitung and Kinmen.

  I couldn’t understand how Ma put up with this man’s behavior. I had grown up with a different set of values, to be sure. My own mom could be soft and sensitive, but she was also strong and matter-of-fact; before she had met my dad, she had divorced a man who was unfaithful. My dad had always stepped up when any of his children needed it. My husband was loving, supportive, and loyal, and I would have expected no less. I couldn’t imagine living with a man like my birth father, not as a daughter and most certainly not as a wife.

  My sisters said they, too, would never tolerate Ba’s behavior and would leave in a second. Ba’s antics had made most of them resolve never to be treated that way by a man. However, Ma was different. She was too traditional, too set in her ways, they told me. Still, my sisters loved her. If this was what she decided to do, they had to put up with it.

  I observed Ma with great interest. I was expecting to see a broken, suffering woman, but actually she seemed much more energetic and happy than I remembered. She woke early and marched around my sisters’ apartment, cleaning and exercising. Each morning, we found her flapping her arms, slapping her legs to get her blood flowing. My sisters told me that she had become a regular at a Buddhist temple, and she found solace in worship. She could escape all these things, her past and her husband. She could leave herself behind and be at peace. She had a glow about her. She smiled and laughed more.

  “Doesn’t Ma look good?” my sisters said, beaming.

  Yet this whole son thing bothered me. My sisters feared that I would feel hurt that my father wanted a boy more than he had wanted me, but if anything, each atrocity that my father committed reinforced my belief that I had gotten the better end of the deal. I was flat-out angry at his selfishness and chauvinism.

  Would Ba really care if I knew what he had done and what I thought of it? I wondered. I mentioned to Min-Wei that I might ask Ba about this son. She laughed and said, “I’m not going to translate!”

  The question continued to nag me every time I was around Ba, who behaved pretty much the same, if a bit distracted. He was still overbearing and overgenerous, making us eat too much and buying me gifts, such as a jade pendant and ring. As usual, he quizzed me on my job and apartment in Washington, D.C. He paid for our plane tickets to Kinmen. He insisted we see the usual landmarks and again bought us an obscene amount of Kinmen’s special peanut candy.

  Ba told us that he would only accompany us to Kinmen and would head back to Taitung early, skipping my last day in Taiwan. We all assumed he wanted to be with his son instead. During our two-day Kinmen stay, I couldn’t muster the nerve to confront him. I had grown to dread trying to talk to him. I couldn’t understand his brusque Mandarin, and he always persisted as if repeating himself and pulling at my arm would help me understand. Knowing my sisters’ discomfort with the subject, I wanted to w
ait until we were alone to talk.

  I finally got my chance when we were standing in the Taipei airport, after returning from Kinmen. We were waiting with our luggage and for someone to pull the car around.

  I asked, “Ba, you have a son?”

  He stared at me and blinked, surprised.

  “You have a son?”

  “Yes,” he said, composing himself. His surprise turned quickly to pride. “Yes, he is your little brother. He is six years old.”

  My head was starting to pound. I felt as if I had opened Pandora’s box, reached in, and pulled out one of the demons and wiggled it in front of his and everyone’s face. I may have been hurting my sisters and my mother more by bringing this up, showing that I had been told, that I was not ignorant to who he was and what he was doing, but I couldn’t help it. In any other place and time, I’m not one to keep an opinion to myself. In Taiwan, I had tried to act like the forgiving daughter, but this time I wanted to express my true feelings.

  Ba babbled something else. I think he was bragging about how smart the child was. I said nothing. I did not try to understand and looked away. It was a small gesture, but I thought it was clear: I didn’t like what I had heard and did not care to hear more. Ba stopped trying to talk to me. We awkwardly parted ways when my sister and husband returned to the baggage area.

  That night my sisters’ apartment was full of tension. Everyone seemed angry and annoyed. Sister at sister. Father at sister, because he thought she told me and because she didn’t approve. Mother at father. Ya-Ling worried she had upset me by telling me because our sisters had chastized her.

  “But they don’t know how bad it is in that house,” she repeated, “how much he worships this son. He never love us like that. Never.”

  I told Jin-Hong that I confronted Ba, and she retorted sarcastically, “Did he feel bad? Did he feel bad that he gave up his daughter?”

  Later, Jin-Hong watched me from her armchair. She was tired of the fighting, but she smiled. She told me she was thinking about my family and my life. Monte and I received news—right there in Taiwan—that his newspaper was assigning him to Buenos Aires. I would be leaving all this soon, and if I chose not to, I didn’t have to look back.