All You Can Ever Know

by Nicole Chung

  The baby is coming, Cindy heard her say.

  Her mother’s belly was too small. The baby wasn’t supposed to be born yet. Despite her pain and fear, her mother did not want to go to the hospital: hospitals and doctors cost money. But finally, when it became clear the baby wasn’t going to wait, she agreed to go.

  At home, Cindy waited. She had always been very good at waiting.

  When her parents came home without a baby, she and Jessica didn’t know what to think. And then, eventually, Cindy found out the baby had died in the hospital. She didn’t dare demand any more details. Not then, not in the years that followed. She felt sad—and very confused—whenever she thought about her little sister, but she knew it wasn’t her place to ask her mom or dad to explain. They were her parents. All she could know was what they told her.

  Growing up, I often wished I could be more like my adoptive parents. And not just because they were white, but because they possessed—outwardly, at least—what I saw as an enviable sort of nonchalance about my adoption. My father liked to answer especially nosy questions by saying, If you put a Pole and a Hungarian together, you get a Korean! Where do you think they all came from? My mother had the rare gift of making a person feel sorry they had asked, with little more than a hard, eloquent look. For your sake, her scornful expression seemed to say, I will endeavor to forget this exchange ever happened.

  I wasn’t like my parents. I couldn’t turn other people’s nosiness into a joke, and I couldn’t make them regret it, either. Though it never seemed like the place or the time to offer an annotated personal history of adoption, when asked, I frequently did just that. I never even questioned why. It was the only way to make people understand, wasn’t it? Yes, there were things I might never know about my origins, but I could do this much; I could explain it, capped with a smile, when people asked. I could let the story that had convinced me convince everyone.

  But I did not have much to offer beyond a succession of half-guessed facts and a simple, happy ending. I was certainly not going to volunteer the fact that it hurt to know that I had been given up as a baby. It was a point of pride, I think, more than anything else. Why should strangers or even friends know just how often I thought about my birth family? Why should I give anyone a reason to feel sorry for me? I didn’t know what to tell people about surviving a loss I couldn’t even remember, or how the face I saw reflected in the mirror often seemed like a stranger’s. And I couldn’t lie to myself about why I struggled to feel I belonged in my own life; not since the day I’d finally asked a classmate why she didn’t like me, and she pulled her eyes back and said, “The same reason no one else likes you.” No matter how many answers I doled out or how much I prayed for acceptance, I was never going to grow out of being Korean in a white town. The truth was there not just in the daily torment of Catholic school, but in every “compliment” to my English, every question about where I was really from.

  My parents, I assumed, would never accept this. To them, I was not their Korean child, I was their child, their chosen gift from God. They had waited so long and then they had gotten me, and there was no room in this radiant narrative to explain why I did not quite fit in. It would have felt like the greatest of betrayals to tell them I didn’t belong in this place, this town, this life—all they would hear, I felt sure, was that I didn’t think I belonged in our family.

  It’s unsurprising that a fanciful, weird, lonely kid like me would turn to stories, those already published and those yet to be written, in an attempt to flee the uncomfortable spaces I knew. When I felt unable to face my classmates at recess, I would usually ask to go to the library, where the school librarian would smile and point me toward the middle-grade shelves. The knot of tension in my chest eased as I paced the silent aisles, my eyes skipping from spine to spine. I lived through adventures pored over at the big wooden table behind the card catalog, through characters I considered friends—from Ramona Quimby and Sara Crewe to Meg Murry and Anne Shirley. But as much as I loved these spunky literary heroines, they too were all white, and I couldn’t see how I would ever find my way into lives like theirs. The only children’s book I read in those years with an Asian American protagonist was Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir about her family’s incarceration at a Japanese American internment camp. In the TV shows and movies I watched, the classic films my mother and grandmother loved, people who looked like me were either invisible or presented for laughs—bowing and grinning, rarely speaking except with a heavy accent, sometimes even portrayed by white actors with exaggerated makeup and taped-back eyes. I knew I wasn’t necessarily supposed to see myself in these laughable, silent, or tragic tropes, but they were all I had.

  The stories I wrote throughout my grade school years were sites for my fledgling dreams of belonging. These invented worlds were another kind of refuge, but for a long time I had trouble locating myself in my own creations. Even when I was at my freest and most imaginative, peering beyond the limits of my own lived reality, I couldn’t picture someone like me at the center of the story. When I tried to write novels, sprawled on my bed with a ballpoint pen and spiral notebook, I imagined girls who outsmarted grown-ups and rescued their best friends from kidnappers, girls who raced in the Iditarod and girls who traveled to worlds far beyond our galaxy—girls who were always white. To be a hero, I thought, you had to be beautiful and adored. To be beautiful and adored, you had to be white. That there were millions of Asian girls like me out there in the world, starring in their own dramas large and small, had not yet occurred to me, as I had neither lived nor seen it.

  One spring when I was ten years old, my parents took me back to Seattle. I remember many steep walks up hills that week, stunning views of Mount Rainier rising over the city. Standing on the deck of a ferry and watching the foamy white cleft in the ship’s wake widen as we lumbered toward land, I felt as though we were riding atop a skyscraper. My parents drove by the house whose attic apartment they had rented, and we slowed and lingered at the curb long enough for me to imagine my twenty-something father or mother peering down from the highest windows.

  But my favorite outing of the week was to the Chinatown–International District and Uwajimaya, the enormous Asian supermarket. The cavernous store was so different from the Food-4-Less where we shopped for groceries at home; it was bursting with strange, wonderful smells, crammed with boxes and barrels of vegetables and fruits, tanks of live fish and still more seafood and meat on ice, jumbled displays of crockery and ceramics and lacquered chopsticks. While there were a hundred thousand things to touch and taste and try to take in, what truly enthralled me were the people: never before had I been entirely surrounded by Asians.

  I had seen others, of course—one by one, back at home, and many more here in Seattle than in all the places we’d visited—but at this magical store they were everywhere: busy Asian shoppers hurried past us, clutching shopping lists; Asian grandmothers and aunties scanned products with a critical eye, weighed down by large purses; Asian parents pushed carts and strollers, towing their children by the hand. My mother and I cooed in unison over chubby-cheeked babies and toddlers with the same stick-up-straight, gravity-defying hair I had seen in my baby pictures—the hair that my mom had struggled with so, trying everything she could think of to make it lie down flat. “Don’t you wish we could take one home with us?” Mom said to me. “A little brother or sister for you!”

  At home, I kept a secret running tally of every single Asian person I had ever seen in public. I was on nodding terms with some of them: The woman at the Minute Market. The people who owned the Chinese restaurant. The couple who were always behind the counter at the Donut Den. It was possible to go months, even years without seeing any who were new to me. Walking around Seattle that week, I tried to play my Count the Asian game and lost track every time. Here, finally, I was inconspicuous. There was no reason for anyone to look twice at me—though, in truth, a few passersby probably did glance at us, their eyes flickin
g over and up to my white parents and then back to my face. It was novel, exhilarating, to be one among so many; it was a glimpse of the world as it could be.

  Why hadn’t my parents raised me in a place like this? When I asked if we could move back here, I’m sure they thought I was kidding, but I wasn’t. The seed of an idea, strange and hopeful, had been planted in my mind: there were real places, not far off in Korea, but here in my own country, where I could be just another face in the crowd.

  I couldn’t count all the Asians. But I quickly found another secret game to play. Although I believed that I would never meet anyone from my birth family—that, even if I did, it wouldn’t be because they had recognized me wandering the streets of Seattle with my white parents—I spent the entire week scanning the faces of Asian people walking by. Every time we passed an Asian woman around my mother’s age, I could not help but wonder if she might be my mother. A relative, at least, or perhaps just someone who’d known my birth family. They might still live here, all of them. I could not imagine passing a blood relation and remaining in total ignorance, our chance meeting neither sensed nor acknowledged by either of us.

  If I walked by any of them on the street, I’d recognize them, wouldn’t I? I would just know. In passing, I imagined, my birth mother and I would both suddenly be aware of a connection, unexpected and undeniable. Something in her would call out to me. I’d look into her face, overcome by a flash of familiarity, a memory woken. It seemed impossible that we would be able to cross paths like strangers and keep moving down the sidewalk away from each other, never to know, never to meet again.

  Toward the end of our vacation, we visited the hospital where I had stayed as an infant. We had no actual business there, so I’m not sure how we ended up on the nursery floor, looking through a window at the rows of newborn babies in their plastic cots. Maybe my mother or father explained to the staff that I had been born there, that it had been my home for months while awaiting adoption. Standing before the newborns on the other side of the glass, Mom and Dad told me how they had rushed all the way, trying not to speed in the car. How they had met and talked with the doctors before grabbing my swaddled form from the nurse on duty, who cried as she said goodbye.

  “What did the doctors tell you?” I asked, even though I’d heard the story many times before.

  My mother recited the familiar litany of medical predictions. “But we weren’t too worried about that,” she said. “We had everyone we knew praying for you.”

  As I gazed at the babies in their hats and hospital-issue blankets, I thought about how I had started my life by proving these doctors wrong. My parents had not left everything to prayer; there had been a battery of screenings and tests when I was too young to remember, as well as a study of prematurely born children in which my mother made me participate around the age of three. The researchers quizzed me and the other children on shapes, colors, foods, and I answered every question incorrectly. I called a hamburger a hot dog, a circle a square; said, over and over, “I don’t know,” even though I did. My father would always laugh himself silly recalling every cheerful wrong answer I’d given the investigators. But I stumped them, he said, when they asked me to draw a picture. “Oh,” I exclaimed, according to Dad, “I’ll have to use my imagination!” And then I gave them my drawing and described it to them in detail, spinning the scene into a story. How, they wondered, could this poor child, who doesn’t even know her colors, invent something like that on the spot? Where did her vocabulary come from?

  Later, when Dad told Mom about my participation, she shook her head. It had never occurred to her that I would purposefully throw the test. When she asked me why, I told her I didn’t like the people asking the questions. They talked to me like I was stupid.

  As we made our way out of the hospital, I looked at everyone we passed in the pristine corridors, half hoping we’d run into a doctor my parents would recognize. My pediatrician at home was a woman, but for some reason I pictured this pessimistic know-it-all hospital doctor as a man. He would be wearing glasses, I decided, and he’d be walking briskly, eyes down, reading something on a clipboard, and my parents would stop him and say, Oh, Dr. So-and-So, do you remember us? We came here to adopt this little girl in 1981! The doctor would peer at me and ask how I was doing, and I would tell him: I’m alive and completely fine, which just goes to show that doctors aren’t always right. He’d have the grace to look embarrassed; maybe he would even apologize. My parents would chime in with their usual line about prayer, angels watching over me, but the doctor and I would know the truth: I was not a miracle. I was a fighter. I was also lucky. And no one, no matter how smart or experienced, could expect to look at a tiny baby and know exactly who or what she would grow up to be.

  For days and months afterward, for years, I would think about our visit to the city of my birth and wonder how a town I saw only through the eyes of a tourist could feel like home. After that trip, the idea began to grow in my mind that I had lost things, too, all those years ago when I was born too soon and my life changed course. These losses were not limited to personal history or the chance to know the people I’d come from. I had missed out on growing up in a place where my presence was not just accepted or tolerated, but a matter of course; where I might have heard others speaking my native language; where people like me were commonplace, not a wonder.

  My parents had brought me to Seattle to show me where our stories had finally, fatefully converged, not to make me question the life that followed. And I didn’t question it, not aloud. My rebellion was quieter, dreamy and ongoing and almost entirely page-bound. Writing was many different things: an outlet for experimentation, a means of wish fulfillment, a source of pride as I slowly improved and shared my stories with a couple of trusted teachers. But the most important thing my expanding creative life gave me as a girl, in terms of survival, was the permission to imagine a world I simply could not see in my white hometown. Only on the page could I build and live in a world that felt better, felt right. I was still alone at school, in my family, and in my town, but I could fill my notebooks with stories featuring some of my first Asian American characters. Childhood was perhaps something to be endured—but in adulthood, you got to choose your own setting, make your own story.

  So I let my own characters grow up, though of course I knew almost nothing of the adult world, and I put them in hilltop houses and glamorous apartments in mostly unnamed cities, populating their lives and their workplaces and their histories with people of varying backgrounds, people who saw and understood them. At the time, I don’t think I realized what a defiant and hopeful act it was to try to claim this kind of life for myself through the stories I made more and more my own. In most published stories, adoptees still aren’t the adults, the ones with power or agency or desires that matter—we’re the babies in the orphanage; we’re the kids who don’t quite fit in; we are struggling souls our adoptive families fought for, objects of hope, symbols of tantalizing potential and parental magnanimity and wishes fulfilled. We are wanted, found, or saved, but never grown, never entirely our own.

  As a child, writing became my way to look ahead to the unknowable future, the one adoptees in stories so rarely get to have. To imagine that it would be better somehow. My parents might not have expected or fully understood it, but they did encourage it, buying me notebooks and then a series of old electric typewriters and pre-owned computers. They read what I deigned to show them and never complained about the hours I spent at work, imagining these other existences.

  Turning to stories of my own imagination for refuge and rescue didn’t mean I stopped wishing I were someone else, someone white. That change would come later, and so gradually that I would never be able to name the precise moment when the old insidious desire evaporated. Nor did I gain any true sense of myself as Korean, in Seattle or at any point before adulthood; I still had no idea what it meant, or what I’d lost. If asked, I would almost certainly have refused to take Korean lessons or go away to
adoption “culture camp,” as some adoptees do now. I still did not want to be Asian if it meant being alone.

  All the same, I found a measure of previously unknown power as I envisioned, in my own stories, places where someone like me could be happy, accepted, normal. My self-drawn heroines weren’t alone, and I didn’t have to be, either. Somewhere out there was the life I was meant for, a life I might find in time. It never seemed more possible than it did during the week I spent circling unfamiliar city streets crowded with other Asian Americans, my eyes drawn over and over to the faces of strangers as I looked for my people, for my parents, for a sudden light of recognition that never came.

  The lawyer who handled the adoption of Infant Girl Chung had known the birth parents, at least by sight, since before the adoption occurred. When she popped into their store once, several years later, the birth mother recognized her immediately. She greeted the lawyer by name, her voice low as she spoke from behind the cash register, and asked the same questions, over and over. Do you know how she is? Do you know what happened to her?

  Kathy still hadn’t had much experience with adoption. And this one, she recalled, had been a rather strange case. It had been classified as a “special-needs” adoption. It had been fast. And, not that it really mattered, she supposed, but the two families had been from such different worlds. The only thing they’d seemed to share was relief once the matter was settled.

  She couldn’t say how the girl was, or even where she was, not for certain; she hadn’t kept in touch with the adoptive family. Even if she had, she couldn’t pass along any information without the parents’ permission. The mother, undeterred, said she wanted to see a photograph. She wanted to get in touch with the child and her parents. She wanted to speak with them, with her child. Would Kathy ask for her?