I had lit another cigarette without even noticing. I sat hunched over, my forearms on my knees, puffing away. What made him my father? Or my mother my mother? The adoption papers they had signed a few months after I was born? My childhood memories? Our relationship now? I didn’t remember my birth parents; as far as I was concerned, they had never existed. If I went back to Korea, I would know no one there. Nothing would be recognizable. These were the parents I had lived with my whole life, the parents I loved. But if they could get divorced, if he could remarry, what made my bond with either of them permanent? Documents were useless. My mother kept her divorce decree in a safe deposit box right next to my adoption papers and the revoked marriage license. If my parents’ feelings for each other could change, they could also stop loving me. How else could he have moved so far away, to San Diego? Why else would he work so much that I hardly ever saw him face to face? Sitting on the porch steps, watching Clara in the darkening yard below brush the dirt off her hands, gather her tools, and head inside, I tried to list the ways he had remained my father. He had paid child support. He was paying for massage school. He called me a couple of times a year. I couldn’t think of anything more.
I smashed my cigarette out in the bottom of the tuna can. I wanted to grind it into my own flesh, feel its searing heat. I breathed out abruptly, breathed in again. At the massage school we had been learning to use our breath as a way to ground ourselves, sinking our energy down into the center of our pelvis where it could take root and keep us from getting carried away by negative feelings. When we were first asked to do this, I thought it was bullshit. Yet I was already breathing deeply, my body softening as it did only when I was in bed with someone else.
Now I breathed the late afternoon air slowly, drawing in from the backyard trees a tangy scent like rust. I couldn’t get that grounded feeling. Maybe I was trying too hard. Somewhere in the street out front I heard a car honking. A light went on in the house next door and a man crossed from one side of the window to the other. He was home. Where was I? Even if I admitted to wanting it, there was no home to go to. Not my first home. Not my second. Now I shared an apartment with a Chinese-American man who was a bass player in a local band when he wasn’t studying medicine. Answering his ad looking for a student, preferably someone neat, responsible, and Asian, I had felt like a fraud on every count. Before my interview, I had been most afraid he’d make references to Asian culture I wouldn’t pick up on. As it turned out, Henry was easy to live with, but we had almost nothing in common.
How would I even recognize home now?
Natalie both fascinated and terrified me. She was a black woman in my class at the massage school, one of three other minority people in a group of twenty-five. The other two were Japanese. In the beginning I had avoided speaking to all three of them. I had hardly been able to look the Japanese women in the eye. One day when the class split up to practice strokes for the neck and shoulders, Natalie looked at me expectantly. I couldn’t refuse. She lay on the table, and when I raised her head and rolled it slowly to the side, surprised at how much it weighed, she asked me, “Why do you hang out with white people all the time? Why don’t you talk to your sisters?”
At first I was pissed. What right did she have to tell me what to do? But as I slid my oiled palm down the length of her neck, working the sternocleidomastoid with my thumb, I also felt let in. She breathed deeply, and I could feel the muscle under my thumb soften just a little. It was a revelation to me: I could create change in another person’s body; I could help them to feel better. I had thought up to then I was learning bodywork for my own enjoyment. My realization gave me a rush of power and of something else. Gratitude. It softened me as well, let me think again about what she had said.
We exchanged a lot of information about ourselves that afternoon. She told me she was biracial: half white. I told her that I felt white, until somebody made a comment that reminded me I was not, and somebody always did. I told her that a couple of ex-lovers had said they considered me white, as though they were paying me the highest compliment. I felt hopeful, talking to her. I went home that evening and called the group she had told me about. Then I got freaked out and fell asleep for ten hours. After the day she questioned my alliances, I returned to avoiding Natalie. I was aware of her silent condemnation during our classes, only to be surprised when she caught my eye and grinned. She had a beautiful smile.
One night a couple of weeks after I received my father’s wedding invitation, I went to Maud’s with my ex-lover Alison and some of her friends, all white, and Natalie was there, playing pool with some of her friends, all black. I wasn’t surprised to see her; I’d been wondering since before she’d approached me in class if she was a dyke. We smiled and nodded to each other, and I followed my crowd further back into the large room. They all wanted to sit at the bar drinking and scoping out the girls. With Natalie there, I felt even more self-conscious than I usually did at the clubs. For a while, Alison and I stood together at the far end of the bar with our beers. The music was loud and the room was stuffy and hazy with smoke. Alison shouted the story of how she had met her current lover, who was sitting three stools down from us, and I grinned and asked increasingly personal questions. I kept lighting up cigarettes and looking over toward the pool game, wondering which of those women was Natalie’s lover. I assumed she had a lover. Once, while Alison was admitting out loud that she thought she was falling in love, I caught Natalie’s eye, and she lifted her brows at me. I knew exactly what she meant: why are you hanging out with those white girls? But she wasn’t making it any easier for me to cross the slowly filling dance floor between us to join her and her friends. Besides, I wasn’t white, but I wasn’t black either. What made her think her crowd was “my people” more than my friends were?
When Alison rejoined her girlfriend, I pushed my way through the women milling around and stood in line for the bathroom. After peeing, I looked at myself critically in the mirror as I washed my hands. Was I attractive? It wasn’t a question I had bothered with in a long time. When I looked at myself, the first thing I always focused on was my ears, which I thought stuck out too far, and the mole that had appeared a couple of years before on my temple. My hair was fairly short, cut to about the level of my chin. My face was flushed and slightly oily. I had never liked the soft roundness of my face much, but I was proud of my clear skin and wide, outgoing mouth. Many of the women I had slept with had told me they loved my mouth, which was so much fuller than their own. Natalie had full lips too, and tight, kinky hair, and large, liquid-brown eyes. She had probably never been in a white woman’s bed, whereas all my women lovers had been white. Studying myself in the mirror, I had no idea what, if anything, Natalie might be attracted to in me. I took a breath and turned to leave the cramped little room.
When I emerged, I pushed through to the pool table, where Natalie and her friends had just finished a second game and were ceding the cues to another group of women. The noise of people shouting over the thudding music disoriented me. I went to the clubs to meet women, but I disliked the crowds pressing in and the jarring motion of dancing separate from my partners. The booming, mindless songs often gave me headaches. I was much more suited to silence.
As I approached, Natalie, who was yelling into the ear of one of her friends, saw me and grinned. I noticed for the first time how endearingly she dipped her head before speaking, as though she were bashful, though I guessed it had more to do with being tall. I stood in front of them as she finished whatever she was saying.
Her friend turned to look at her, and they both burst out laughing. Then Natalie introduced me to Tracy, and we shook hands, and Natalie said she needed some air, would we walk with her? Tracy wanted a beer, but I said I’d go outside with her.
The cool night air was a relief. Behind the ivy-covered wall, the muffled music seemed a world away. Across the street, I could make out cans of paint arranged in pyramids in the window display of a darkened hardware store. I lit a cigarette. We started
walking toward the Haight. I felt a little awkward, uncertain. I was extremely aware of her height, her arm near mine, of our steps gradually falling into synch. I realized I knew nothing at all about this woman.
We walked for a block in silence and then I said, “Can I ask you a question?”
Natalie looked at me and grinned as if she knew what it was going to be. “Sure.”
“Do you ever sleep with white women?” Only after I had asked did it occur to me that she might be offended by the suggestion.
Natalie laughed, and, fascinated, I watched her head tilt back. “Not if I can help it!”
“But you’re half white,” I said.
“So?”
“Aren’t you rejecting a part of yourself?”
“No, I’m rejecting white women.” She waited, and when I didn’t say anything, she said, “Do I have to explain it to you?”
“No.” But I was amazed that without white women she apparently had a large enough community of people in whom she found herself. “I went to that group you told me about,” I said.
“Finally.” She glanced down at me, and I saw from the sly, self-mocking curl of her smile that she was flirting with me. “And?” she prompted.
I grinned back, feeling more sure of myself, more at ease in my body as I strode beside her down Haight Street. We passed the Double Rainbow where I used to work with Alison.
“I didn’t make any great discovery,” I admitted, feeling I had failed somehow, as I had felt while I waited for the meeting to be over. I hadn’t passed this simple test of Asian-American identification. “I tried to. There were about ten women. They all seemed to have known each other for years. I tend to have a hard time with groups, being the outsider.”
We passed the free medical clinic and Reckless Records and the head shop where I had bought my bong that same summer I was scooping ice cream. “They seemed to be in the middle of a fight about whether to become more politically active or whether to continue to be a social group. I didn’t say a word the entire meeting. I wasn’t even that interested, to tell you the truth. Their concerns were foreign to me. I’m not into making a statement, and I’m not looking for a group to go on picnics with.” I saw Natalie’s frown. “No, they do other stuff, but that’s what it felt like.” One woman had talked about her parents’ continual insistence that she marry a man who was also Korean. Another woman complained that her favorite dim sum restaurant had closed, causing the whole room to burst out laughing. I sat, bewildered, looking at each of their faces in turn and feeling despair.
“Were there any lesbians?” Natalie asked.
“Two.” I couldn’t tell her that they had turned me off the most with their ridiculous multisyllabic rhetoric. One of them had asked me after the meeting if I’d like to go out with a few of them for a late snack. Though I was grateful for the invitation, I knew I would have to force myself to sit through it. I told her thanks, maybe next time, but I hadn’t gone back. “They didn’t impress me particularly.”
“You didn’t give them a chance.”
Natalie knew them, I realized then. Maybe she had even told her friends to expect me. I felt my face get hot. At least I hadn’t been rude.
“I guess I connect with people better individually.”
She looked thoughtful. “I wonder if there are any support groups for people adopted from other countries.”
“No,” I said, cutting her off. “I don’t need a support group.”
“But meeting other Asian adoptees—”
“No,” I repeated. The idea terrified me. What if I met them and I still couldn’t recognize myself?
“Hmmm. Well, when you’re ready, I could help you look.”
I glanced up at Natalie and was aware again of her height, her thick eyelashes, the scoop of her bent neck. Her hair, cut so short she was almost bald, made the shape of her head more prominent. I wanted to put my hand in her hair, feel her scalp beneath my fingers. I wasn’t used to her style of kindness.
“I’ll answer your earlier question, if you want,” she offered. I nodded. On the side of an apartment building someone had spray-painted, “Be the bomb you throw.” We walked down the hill toward Divisadero.
“I may be half white, but I was raised by a black mother. White women were raised white.” She said it flatly, her voice dismissive.
“I was raised white too,” I reminded her, bristling. “In a sense, I’m more white than you are.”
“Yeah, you definitely are.” She laughed. I wondered what she was thinking of and if I would recognize it in myself. I could feel my jealousy snaking through me: her parents, black and white, reflected who she was.
She went on, “I realized in college that I had to choose, one way or another. Not how I was perceived, because other people would take care of that for me. But how I lived inside that perception. And, more importantly, what the world looked like from where I stood.”
We were meandering toward Fillmore by then, passing bars with darkened windows lit only by neon beer signs and a café from which a surge of voices and the bitter odor of coffee emanated. Diagonally across from a corner health food store was a storefront with “Meat Market” on its awning. The gate that had been rolled down in front of its windows was covered with graffiti. A mix of people was out on the street—heading up to the clubs on Haight, out late buying food from the health food store, waiting around. It was an odd part of town, bordered by the projects on one side and peeling stately old Victorians on the other. We stopped in front of a display of fruit in baskets. I liked the energy and light on that block. It was a border, and it was coming into its own.
Natalie said she lived nearby. I walked with her to her building. Standing on the steps, she said, “You don’t have to choose anything. That’s a choice too. But you can’t reject your choices until you know what they are.” She bent down and kissed me lightly. I followed her upstairs.
I whipped out the long cord behind me to untangle it, taking the phone to my room and closing the door. Sitting on my bed, the pillows propping me up, I settled in for the conversation. I was ready to savor every brief minute.
“It was beautiful here today,” he said. “Not a cloud in the sky.”
I heard my father’s voice three, maybe four times a year, but I still knew it inside and out. Closing my eyes, it was possible to pretend that we were walking down a trail on Mount Tam and he was holding my hand, pointing out wildflowers and telling me their names. He’d always been proud of how quickly I learned. Sometimes I would make up silly pretend names just to tease him. Bananaberry bush. Skyhighflower. He’d giggle with me, squeezing my hand.
“So are you coming to the wedding?”
I opened my eyes. The small lamp by my bed cast a shadow against the far wall. I could hear Henry in the kitchen singing “Born in the USA” with the radio as he washed the dishes.
“I guess so,” I said. I had put the wedding out of my head since I’d received the invitation three weeks before. “Do you want me to be there?”
“Of course, Min. Didn’t we send an invitation? Aren’t I calling you?”
I flinched at the “we.” For a brief moment I felt stupid, as though I hadn’t remembered the name of a simple lupine. Then I was angry. How was I supposed to know what he wanted from me now, after all these years when he’d made no effort to see me? I didn’t count his money for the train to visit him a total of three times in five years as “effort.” I had initiated every trip, willing to give up days of school and to lie to my mother in order to work around his busy schedule.
“Maybe you feel you have to,” I answered.
“Min, sweetheart, what’s this all about? You’re my daughter. I love you. Of course I want you to be at my wedding. Angie and I want to see more of you from now on. I will admit it’s odd asking my grown-up child to watch me get married.” The idea seemed to strike him as amusing, but it only made me sad.
“I’m not technically your child,” I reminded him. I couldn’t keep myself from tryin
g to hurt him.
“Yes, you are,” he responded angrily. “Don’t do that to yourself. Remember when you would tell me about what one or another of your classmates called you, when I gave you a backrub before you went to sleep? Remember what I said to you then?”
I remembered the clean smell of the sheets, the faint rustling of Bingo, my parakeet, beneath the cloth draping his cage in the corner, my father’s warm hand on my back. His touch had made the outside world shrink away to where it couldn’t hurt me. Those long backrubs had been my resting place, the only time I felt what it was to be myself. When being me was easy. Clasping my hands around my knees, listening to my father’s voice hundreds of miles away, I thought of my life now. I wondered for the first time if I was actually in search of just one thing: those murmured conferences, the comfort of his firm touch, my certainty of receiving such simple care again, the next night.
I couldn’t answer right away. “You said they were just repeating what they heard their parents say.”
“And?” he prompted.
“You knew who I was. I was your little girl.” I could hear him saying it, in memory.
Now he said nothing. I listened to the crackle of static on the phone line, that slight, tenuous thread of communication.
“Dad?” I asked. “Are you happy being with Angela?”
“Yes, I am. We’re very happy.”
“Why weren’t you happy with Mom?”
“Did she tell you that? I think she was the one who was unhappy with me.”
“But you left.”
Silence. “I had to, Min.” I wished he would say more. I hadn’t known they were fighting that much when he moved out. My mother still refused to talk about it.
“What about me?” I asked, hating myself for asking. “Why didn’t you take me?”
“Sweetheart, I wanted to, believe me.” He stopped speaking, and I thought for a second that the line had gone dead. “But you were settled at home, you had school, your whole life. Besides, it’s hard for fathers to get custody of their kids.”
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