by Nicole Chung
These people weren’t my parents. I knew that. But they seemed meant to be parents, if anyone was, and I could already tell they had the best of intentions. They wanted a child badly enough to open up to a near-stranger, make themselves vulnerable and lay their fears bare. Their longing for a baby to love, for things to work out in their favor, couldn’t help but move me.
Though I felt like I’d been stalling, considering their question for far too long, it was probably only the space of a few breaths. I stretched my mouth into a smile. I tried to radiate the real warmth I felt toward them, though we had only just met. I leaned forward a little in my chair, and I told them no. No, there were no big “issues.” I’d been loved. I’d been okay. Their child would be okay, too.
I was rewarded with twin beams of happiness and relief, and I found myself smiling wider in spite of myself. I could tell they weren’t especially surprised. Of course I had been okay. I was sitting here now, with them, wasn’t I—healthy, happy, well-adjusted, weeks away from a bachelor’s degree, an engagement ring on my finger? Clearly everything in my life had worked out fine. Their child would be just fine, too. That was what they had wanted, expected to hear, all along.
I was in second or third grade when I heard my first slur.
I argued with a boy on the playground—I don’t remember the reason. He called me ugly, which stung a bit, but it was also the sort of generic insult kids flung at one another all the time. If he’d stopped there, it might have remained a remote, laughable memory, a childhood squabble buried alongside dozens of other such moments.
Instead, he pulled his eyes into slits. His voice turned shrill as he sneered, “You’re so ugly, your own parents didn’t even want you!”
It was the first time anyone had ever used my adoption as an insult, and it would have been shocking and painful enough without the eyes, the broken singsong chant. He screwed up his face into a squint, asking how I could see. “Me Chinee, me can’t see!”
Was “Chinee” supposed to be a nickname? I did not know what it meant, but I instinctively understood that he wasn’t making fun of something about me, or something I had done. He wasn’t mocking a name I could change into a nickname, or clothes my parents could replace, or glasses I could take off at recess. His target was who I was. How I’d come to be here, in this place where he believed I did not belong.
I waited, almost in suspense, for my own voice to emerge, for my sharp tongue to go on the attack. But any return insults withered and died in my throat. I couldn’t have been more passive had I been invisible, a ghost floating high above the blacktop, watching the other kids laughing and feeling surprised, just as any witness or casual observer might, by my own shame and silence.
He made more faces, his eyes still pulled back tight; I wondered if he could see. To anyone watching, I probably looked eerily calm—the same girl I’d always been. This boy was in my carpool, and lived in my neighborhood, and until this day I’d thought of him as a kind of friend. When we rode home together that afternoon, side by side in the backseat of his mother’s blue sedan, I was silent and so was he, pretending nothing had happened between us that day. But inside of me, something still and deep, something precious, had broken.
After that day, when I heard more words like that from him and other classmates—when adults I met questioned my nationality or my lack of an accent, or measured me against Asian stereotypes that were true in their minds—I would, to some degree, expect it. Each and every time I found myself on the defensive, defining an identity that seemed to require endless explanations, it would remind me of that day at recess when I learned what a slur meant, even if I did not yet know the name for it. And maybe I should have known to be angry as a child. Maybe I should have realized that others were the problem, not me. But hadn’t I already been suspicious before that day when my neighbor’s words hit the bull’s-eye? Hadn’t I already wondered if I might be wrong, taking up space where I did not have a right to? The self-consciousness I’d felt but hardly known how to track since starting at that small white school bloomed to sudden, painful awareness. If I wasn’t safe with a boy who’d known me for years, who knew where I lived, whose mother knew mine, then I couldn’t trust anyone.
I remember I could tell my parents only part of the truth. I said that someone had made fun of me for being adopted. I didn’t mention the other words the boy had used. This felt like a different kind of humiliation, one I could not expect them to understand. They had always insisted the fact that I was Korean didn’t matter; what mattered was “the kind of person” I was. How could I tell them they were wrong?
If my parents were surprised or upset, they didn’t show it. They have both always possessed a rather low opinion of human nature, and spitefulness, even outright cruelty, from an ignorant boy could not have shocked them. My mother said that he shouldn’t have teased me for being adopted. “He’s only doing it to get a reaction,” she told me.
“If you ignore him, he’ll stop,” my father agreed.
I tried, but the schoolyard taunts multiplied, spreading beyond the first boy to other classmates. When they tried out new words, or told me to go back to China, or babbled in their made-up languages, no one stood up for me. Kids I’d known since kindergarten now seemed like strangers—either hostile, or else somehow remote and inaccessible. I had not changed, and maybe they hadn’t, either, but when they looked at me it was as if we’d never known each other at all.
At our school, you were with the same kids grade after grade, the same boys with saints’ names and the same pretty, fair-haired girls. Who you were in second grade was who you were in fourth grade and who you were in sixth. So the taunts continued, all the way until I completed sixth grade and moved on to another school, where sometimes I still heard the same words. Remembering my parents’ advice, I tried not to react to the pulled-back eyes, the stinging chants, the cold shoulder from kids I’d once thought of as friends. The closest anyone ever got to noticing what was going on was when my second-grade teacher alluded to my general unhappiness on my third-quarter report card. But my grades were always good, and I was targeted only when there were no teachers around. If I was isolating myself more and more at school, retreating to the library as often as possible, well, I’d always been a bookish child.
I never had a name for what was happening. I had never heard or read about any racism other than the kind that outright destroys your life and blots out your physical existence; even that was relegated in books and lessons to “it happened in the past.” What I experienced on the elementary school playground, and then later on my middle school bus, and for the rest of my years in southern Oregon when people demanded to know where I was from and why I had a white family, always seemed too insignificant to be even remotely connected to real racism. My parents and I had certainly never discussed the possibility that I might encounter bigots within my school, our neighborhood, our family, in places they believed were safe for me.
The strange thing was that, inside, I always felt I was the same as everyone around me. I am just like you, I thought when kids squinted at me in mockery of my own eyes; why can’t you see that? When I was young I certainly felt more like a white girl than an Asian one, and sometimes it was shocking to catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror and be forced to catalog the hated differences; to encounter tormentors and former friends and know that what they saw was so at odds with the person I believed I was. Why did I have to look the way I did—like a foreigner; like my birth parents, two people I would never even meet? Why hadn’t my adoption transformed me into the person I felt I was?
If I were a heroine in a fairy tale, I often thought, and a fairy godmother offered to grant me wishes, I would ask for peaches-and-cream skin, eyes like deep blue pools, hair like spun gold instead of blackest ink. I knew I would be worthy of it all. There was nothing I wouldn’t trade for that kind of magic, that kind of beauty. If you were pretty, if you were normal, if you were white, then the good things everyone saw
on the outside would match the goodness you knew existed on the inside. And wouldn’t it be wonderful to go to sleep one night and wake up an entirely different person, one who would be loved and welcomed everywhere? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to look at your face in the mirror and know you would always belong?
When the couple hoping to adopt asked me what it had been like to grow up the Korean child of white parents—Was it all right? Had I ever minded it?—I didn’t want to tell them that I had minded not being white every day for years on end. That sometimes it still bothered me, because while I had finally found another life for myself, my story was still not quite what others expected when they saw me.
And I didn’t want to tell them about the day my parents and teachers finally caught me twirling my hair, the black hair that was so unlike the beautiful blond hair I wanted, twisting it around and around the first joint of my forefinger so tightly I couldn’t free it without yanking a few strands out. After my alarmed parents spotted the tiny bald spot on the left side of my head, I spent a year and a half in play therapy with a counselor named Charlotte. Once a week, I followed her into her expansive office/playroom, tucked up in the gable of a stately old house, where we played dress-up and painted pictures of our fears. I talked to Charlotte about how I felt, though now I cannot remember what I said; I know she in turn talked to my parents.
An Asian baby doll appeared under the tree one Christmas, specially ordered, though I was probably a little too old for dolls. At nine, I turned on the television one night to discover Kristi Yamaguchi, my first Asian American childhood hero, being cheered by crowds and adored in a way I did not think people who looked like me could be. I wrote stories, dozens of them, about other people, other lives I craved. I stopped twirling my hair. Eventually, I stopped seeing the therapist. But I would never forget the hair-pulling, would never be able to think of it without deep and terrible shame. If I still felt I did not belong, I decided I could not allow others to see it. The only way out of my school, out of this town, was to grow up and leave—I could not wallow in fear or sadness again if I wanted to escape.
And escape I did: by the time I met the young wife and husband who were nothing and everything like my own parents, I had run as far as I could to college and spent years fighting to define myself in ways that had nothing to do with being Korean or adopted. The old “race-blind” view of my adoption was one I was just beginning to question in my early twenties. Now I was able to call out bigotry only when it was staring me in the face, and never without a deeply self-conscious blush, a pounding heart, and sharp, squirming discomfort.
Unbidden, a memory surfaced: a day in fourth or fifth grade when a group of white girls had climbed up close to my perch on the monkey bars. I’d felt such hope when I saw their smiles. Had they changed their minds about me? One of them, whose particular shade of blond hair was ashier, whose face was sharper and not as pretty as some of the others’, leaned toward me, her voice low: “We have a question, Nicole, and you’re the only one we can ask.” And though I had been conditioned, through years of experience, to expect a trap, still I was momentarily taken in, expecting a friendly word or an invitation to play—until she said in a louder voice, “Do you have a sideways vagina? My brother told me Asian girls have those.”
And I knew this and other such moments from my childhood were almost laughably tame compared to what other people of color endured. Was it my place to explain as much to this hopeful couple? To warn them that even if their adopted child’s race didn’t matter to them, it would matter to others—that it would be brought up, in countless situations they could not hope to control, in ways and in words that might not even reach their ears? Before I could decide, one of them asked the question I had known was coming.
“Do you think we should adopt?”
They had already investigated and ranked international adoption programs. They had discussed their favorite baby names. The room still smelled like the delicious meal the wife had cooked for us, and their comfortable apartment felt so much more like a home than my own tiny place, still filled with secondhand furniture and posters I’d bought in college. These people were only four or five years older than me, but they were adults—responsible, settled, employed, and not just eager but ready to be parents. They both came from loving, supportive families excited to welcome their children through birth, or adoption, or both. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything that would make them reconsider the goodness of their plans, or the rightness of families that looked like mine.
My brain, or maybe my fiercely loyal adoptee heart, scrambled and rewrote the question I’d been set. Did I think they would love their child? Of course. And they would do their best. What more could they do? What more could anyone do?
“Absolutely,” I heard myself say. “Adoption is no big deal. It’s just another way to join a family. I know I was very lucky, and your child will be, too.”
It’s not that I think I gave the wrong answer, or that there was a right or wrong answer to begin with. Today, when I’m asked, I often say that I no longer consider adoption—individual adoptions, or adoption as a practice—in terms of right or wrong. I urge people to go into it with their eyes open, recognizing how complex it truly is; I encourage adopted people to tell their stories, our stories, and let no one else define these experiences for us.
But back then, I still had to think of adoption as an unqualified good, a benefit to every adoptee, sure proof of unselfish love, because to do otherwise felt like a betrayal of my family and their love for me. I still remember how good it felt, how right, to reassure that couple in the moment. I did not have to tell them any of the things I was so ashamed to remember. I did not have to burden them with knowledge of all the ways I had never quite fit in. Their future child wasn’t me; their family was not mine. They just wanted to be happy, and why shouldn’t they be?
The wife gave me a long hug at the door. “I hope our kid grows up to be just like you,” she said. As I left, I was aware of no internal second guesses, no prickings of conscience. What I said to them wasn’t a lie, I thought, nor was it cowardice or denial. I was lucky. I was grateful. What would have happened to me if I had never been adopted? These people were trying to write their own story, build a beautiful family against the odds. I was glad I wouldn’t walk away from them wondering if I’d broken it up before it had even begun. I was glad they wouldn’t remember me as the person who’d made them question their happy ending.
My parents’ story together began in the spring of 1973 when they married and struck out west. She was twenty-one, he was twenty-two, and they’d been dating a matter of months when she told him she was leaving Cleveland, a city she had never much liked, for Seattle—where she had always planned to live, and where her own mother had spent the war years, living with her aunt and her uncle, the Swedish fisherman. My mother had not inherited much from her mother, save her red hair, quick temper, and stubborn attachment to the green beauty of provincial Washington State, so different from the smoke and cement of Cleveland and the small farm community outside it where her family lived. She had been to Seattle, carted along on cross-country road trips in the family station wagon, to visit her great-aunt and great-uncle, and she’d never forgotten the pine-scented air or the snow-tipped mountains wreathed in clouds, the hilly city lapped at its edges by a cold saltwater sound. Now she had gotten into nursing school out there—so, was he coming with her or not?
Though their families charged them with desertion, the move had its appeal: they were each one of five siblings, high in the birth order, and in different but defining ways their parents had been hard on them. More than three hundred people attended their wedding. Back then, it was still a little unusual for a Hungarian boy from one neighborhood to marry a Polish girl from another. There were fisticuffs at the reception, and it was generally agreed that the bride’s relatives both began and ended the fight, but everyone was laughing by the time they farewelled the couple.
They did mov
e out west, but not to Seattle; not yet. A printing company had offered him a job in Ketchikan, Alaska, on Revillagigedo Island in the Alexander Archipelago. She found a job at the local hospital. They rented a basement apartment in a cottage on the edge of the Inside Passage, where they could step outside and watch eagles wheeling over the ruffled water. For a pair of born-and-bred Clevelanders, Ketchikan was almost too quaint to be believed with its fishermen and modest tourist trade, its streets and wooden pilings slick with rain one hundred and forty days out of the year. It was not quite the change she had envisioned, but a chance it still was, to escape Ohio and try on a different life. They liked it there, and felt like pioneers.
Still, when the transfer to Seattle came a few years later, they were ready to live in a city again, eager to meet new people. One Sunday, on a whim, they visited a little white-steepled church set into the hills above the neighborhood where they rented an attic apartment. It was nothing like the large, drafty old churches they’d attended as children in Cleveland; everyone wore jeans. The priest’s gentle Polish accent reminded her of her beloved grandfather, but it was someone else at the parish who commandeered their attention: a short, stout nun with blunt brown bangs peeking out from under her minimal wimple, a far cry from the strict, ruler-wielding sisters of their youth. They told Sister Mary Francis they had little interest in organized religion, let alone the church in which they’d both been raised, but the nun somehow convinced them to return. Soon my mother was leading a Bible-study group and my father was running errands for Sister Mary Francis’s elderly mother. They were back in the fold, with barely a token argument raised in their own defense.