All You Can Ever Know

by Nicole Chung

  There was no way for me to contact them. My birth parents never got in touch with us again. Occasionally, though, after that day when I learned that my birth mother had tried, I would imagine a thick sheaf of letters meant for me, from different members of my birth family—handwritten letters filled with stories, pictures, questions about my life, words of love and curiosity. Letters that might have led me back to them.

  Cindy was eleven when her parents ended their marriage. By then, Jessica was in college. Their mother moved to Oregon, where she had a cousin, and brought Cindy with her. After six months, Cindy asked to go live with her father. He didn’t come for her himself—maybe he didn’t want to see his ex-wife—but he said that she could come to him. A cousin was prevailed upon to drive Cindy back to Washington.

  For days leading up to the move, Cindy was terrified her parents would change their minds; that her mother wouldn’t let her go, or her father would say she had to stay. When it was finally time to leave, she grabbed her belongings—everything she had packed fit into a couple of plastic grocery sacks—and nervously bid her mother goodbye. They did not embrace. It would be many years before Cindy saw her again.

  Her father remarried about a year after Cindy came to live with him, and his new wife was very kind. Still, Cindy had a difficult time adjusting to life with her father and stepmother. The three of them lived in a small condominium, perhaps nine hundred square feet, and she didn’t have much space of her own. They had very high expectations—unrealistic ones, she sometimes thought. She was responsible for most of the cooking and cleaning while they both worked, and her father expected top grades. In her mother’s home, she’d always had to sneak around to do her homework, but to her father—a writer and erstwhile scholar—education was paramount. She worked as hard as she could, but didn’t always feel they approved of her. Cindy knew she was not allowed to complain. After all, wasn’t life with her father and stepmother much better?

  Her middle school, and the high school she attended for her freshman year, were very white. Cindy found a few good friends, but she knew she didn’t quite fit in. When she did see other Koreans, often at church on Sundays, she didn’t feel entirely at ease with them, either. There were so many things she wasn’t supposed to talk about, even with supposedly close friends of the family: the divorce; her mother, and why Cindy didn’t live with her; anything else that made her unhappy. She couldn’t be real with anyone, couldn’t show anyone who she truly was. She couldn’t speak without hearing a parent’s voice in her head: What would people think? It’s none of their business.

  After Cindy’s freshman year, the family relocated to Guam, where her father had gotten a job with a relative’s corporation. Now they lived in a two-story apartment complex, and most of their neighbors were Japanese. The few white people they knew were mostly military personnel and their families. Cindy found most of the island’s residents friendly and fun to be around, more relaxed than the people she’d known back home. She had friends who were Guamanian and Chamorro, Filipino, Korean, and Japanese; who hailed from other islands, such as Yap and Truk and Palau. They’d hold fiestas where Cindy stuffed herself with pancit and lumpia, chicken kelaguen and pork adobo, as well as familiar favorites like kimbap and galbi.

  She’d always lived in rainy northwest cities, but now she had to get used to a far more humid climate, and typhoons that battered the island every year. Before every storm in Guam, they would board up the windows, turn off the water and electricity, and collect water in large garbage cans for emergency use. Sometimes, depending on the might and duration of the storm, they’d have to go to the fire station and collect more water. Once the power was out for an entire month, and Cindy often cooked dinner on a single-burner propane stove.

  Though she enjoyed her life in Guam, as high school graduation neared she found herself wondering what she ought to do next. How would she get to college, and who would pay for it? One afternoon, while watching television, Cindy saw an enlistment commercial featuring a young army officer scaling a rope over a rushing river. I wonder if I could learn to do that, she thought. She knew people in the army and navy, and thought the military would be both change and challenge—a way to meet interesting people and have adventures far from her parents’ critical eyes, and eventually help her pay for school. The idea of being subordinate in a chain of command, of going where she was told and doing as she was ordered, didn’t especially bother her. Hadn’t she always been at the mercy of authority figures? At least in the army she would have hours off, the freedom to make some decisions on her own.

  She went down to the recruiting office after school, all alone, and signed up. Her parents were shocked when she told them what she’d done; while her father had completed his mandatory military service back in Korea, serving as a KATUSA—a Korean Army attaché to the U.S. Army—that didn’t mean he thought the army was the best choice for his daughter. You won’t make it, he tried to tell her. You’ll wash out and you’ll have to come back home. But if her family still didn’t know how strong or how determined she was, Cindy knew. She wanted to live on her own, see more of the world. She wanted to see if she could do something difficult, and do it well.

  She completed basic training at Fort Jackson in South Carolina and Advanced Individual Training at Fort Lee, Virginia, before being assigned to Fort Carson in Colorado. From there she deployed to Cuba, Kuwait, and eventually to USAG Yongsan in Korea, where she would spend a year and a half serving in the country of her birth. It was her first time back in Korea since she’d left as a child.

  Like most unmarried soldiers, Cindy lived on base, in the barracks, and shared a room with a fellow soldier from her company. There was always something to do, someone to meet, something new to learn, but she probably learned the most when she was off-duty and free to explore. Best of all, in her opinion, was the food: she found food stands that sold ddukbokki, bbundaegi, and fish cakes and took every opportunity to indulge in jjajangmyeon—her favorite comfort food. Cindy was fascinated by everything in Korea, especially all the Korean people. Sometimes she was filled with an undeniable sense of homecoming, or maybe just a sharp longing for it, yet she knew she was no longer Korean enough to belong here. She was an outsider, an American, and had been for a long time.

  While she was stationed in Korea, her father’s mother—who still lived there—passed away, and Cindy asked for leave to attend the funeral in Incheon. She welcomed the opportunity to reconnect with relatives who hadn’t seen her since she was a baby, but it was a strange visit, too; she had forgotten many of them, and assumed many had forgotten her. She did not get to stay with them long enough, or learn as much about them as she would have liked.

  For eighteen months, she lived at Yongsan and reveled in being back in her mother country. She squished into Seoul’s buses and subway cars and went out looking for novelty and adventure every chance she got. Sometimes she traveled around with a friend and fellow Korean American army specialist who also had personal reasons for wanting to be stationed at Yongsan—she had been adopted at the age of twelve, she explained to Cindy, and she’d always been curious about the people she’d left behind. Cindy knew her friend spent many off-duty hours searching for clues about her biological family. She wondered what it would be like to be of Korea, a long-lost daughter of the place, and know even less about your Korean family than Cindy knew about hers.

  I did not expect anyone from the adoption organization to return my call. I had stumbled across their website and requested an informational interview, though I did not even know to call it that—I just asked if anyone there had time to meet with me. Later I couldn’t even understand why I’d done it. Why was I looking for an opportunity to talk with strangers about adoption? Shouldn’t I have wanted to steer clear, after all the questions I’d had to answer as a child?

  I had been out of my parents’ home for five years, out of college less than a year. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do in the long term, but I could not see myself in
corporate life and I wasn’t quite ready to apply to graduate school. I had always been interested in adoption stories, and had by then even met a couple of other adult adoptees—including a college friend from the Midwest whose self-possession and adoption-related nonchalance I genuinely envied. I didn’t know anything about adoption or foster care policy; I had only my own experiences to draw on, but I had spent my entire life trying to help other people understand adoption so they would accept me and my family. Perhaps now I could help address those gaps in knowledge on a much larger scale. If families like mine were better understood, if more people knew that adoption was far more complicated than common media portrayals might suggest, maybe fewer adopted kids would have to answer the kinds of questions I had gotten, or feel pressured to uphold sunny narratives even they might not necessarily believe in.

  I took the entry-level position offered to me. After a lifetime of feeling isolated by my adoption, I began to think of myself as part of a broader culture of people affected by it. I could ponder and discuss its complications in ways I could never have done while under my parents’ roof, talking with people who knew more about the practices and policies than I did. On my own time, I researched what reunions typically involved and read blog posts and articles by adoptees and birth parents. I began connecting with and chatting with more adoptees, including some who were in open adoptions or had found their birth families.

  “I’ve always been interested,” said one woman who had been adopted as a child. Her original parents, like many around the world, hadn’t realized their daughter could be sent to live with people in another country when they placed her in an orphanage due to desperate hardship. “My curiosity was repressed for years, because I just wanted to fit in with everyone else and feel ‘normal,’” she told me, an admission I well understood. “But I never fully let go of my past.”

  I also spoke with birth parents in open adoptions, including a birth mother who had placed two children for adoption and later found both of them. She had become a therapist, focusing on adoption and family therapy. “I think that other than giving birth to my children, reunion was the most upending, surreal experience of my life,” she said. “If you do search for your birth family someday, don’t rush things. Just like any relationship, it’s delicate, and it should be allowed to grow and build as naturally as possible.” While this advice seemed sound, I still could not imagine meeting or talking with anyone in my birth family.

  Others I talked to freely offered their opinions about adoption and whether I should attempt to open up my own. One adoptee said, “Closed adoptions like ours are little better than child trafficking,” and another said, “I’ve really never thought about searching. I never think about my birth family at all.” One adoptive parent shocked me by saying, “I can’t imagine what my son would gain from knowing his birth mother; she has so many problems”; but another, a social worker who had an open adoption with his child’s birth family, said, “If you ever do decide to search for them, your birth parents will find a daughter they can be very proud of”—a kindness I never forgot. One person told me, “It’s usually unhappy adoptees who search; you probably haven’t because you’re so well adjusted!” and another person told me, “You should find your birth mother and let her know that you’re okay. I’ll bet she thinks about you every day.”

  It was this last comment I held in my mind, turning it over and over, sometimes with deep skepticism, sometimes with a longing I could not deny. Did she still think about me? It seemed too much to presume. Why should she? What about me was so worthy of daily remembrance, especially when she’d never had the chance to know me?

  Even if she did think about me, I knew I wasn’t ready to look for her. I wasn’t sure I ever would be.

  I don’t remember the exact day I learned there was another way to get more information without a search or a reunion, but as soon as I did, I thought about it almost nonstop. In many states, “nonidentifying information”—the brief social history of an adopted person’s biological parents, as much as they’d wanted to share at the time of placement—was kept on file and made available to any party to a closed adoption. I had never known that any information could be requested in closed adoptions like mine without opening records or appealing directly to the birth parents. One person requested information, and a neutral and uninvolved party responded: what could be simpler?

  A few weeks after my twenty-fourth birthday, I wrote a short letter to the King County Court in Seattle and requested all available nonidentifying information about my birth family. As I signed and sent it, I felt thankful that I could take this step—so benign, barely a baby step!—without stirring up anyone’s secrets or intruding in anyone’s life. I told no one about my decision to request the information. Not my friends, not my parents, not even my husband, Dan. If they knew, I thought, they would ask me if I wanted to find my birth family. And how would I answer?

  I never wanted or set out to begin in secrecy, or withhold part of myself from the people who cared about me. But long after the papers are signed and the original familial bonds are severed, adoption has a way of isolating the adoptee. For me, it had always been this way: a wide sea seemed to separate the lone island of my experience from the well-mapped continents on which other people, other families, resided. Despite how well my husband knew me, despite all of our conversations about our respective childhoods, I didn’t think even he could possibly understand how much my adoption had given me; how much it had taken away.

  The creased self-addressed envelope, freshly stamped in green with the county seal, arrived weeks sooner than I had expected. Inside I found two pieces of paper. Spanning one single-sided page was a profile of my birth parents; someone had transcribed bullet points of information, no doubt gathered by form, into short, choppy sentences. I read with heart pounding, hands trembling, though my eyes were as clear and dry as the list of facts. My birth mother was nine years younger than my birth father. She was five feet two and a half inches, and he was five feet seven and a half. Both were described as having “Korean features.” She had a high school degree; he was “a good student” who had gone to college and graduate school. Their religion was listed as Christian. They had come from Seoul, and both were “in good health” at the time of placement. They had other children—daughters, the form stated—whose names weren’t listed.

  I must have read the single sheet ten times or more before letting it fall to the desk. I had expected to feel excited, to be moved, no matter how much or how little I learned. In a way, it was a wealth of information—so much more than I’d ever had. But somehow the brisk, bare-bones facts seemed as cold and uninspiring as the database from which they had likely been retrieved. Holding it, reading it, left me feeling empty.

  On the second sheet of paper was a list of confidential intermediaries and an explanation of their role: for a fee, a third party could make contact with my birth parents and deliver a letter on my behalf. If I did want to learn more, if I wanted to ask any more questions, this was the only path forward.

  I would have to ask them.

  I considered this. It was one thing to petition some nameless, faceless county employee to spend a few minutes mining long-forgotten facts from a file drawer. It was another to address my birth parents directly, reminding them of an event—a person—they might not have talked of in years. They knew nothing about me; I was a stranger. They owed me nothing. Wasn’t that the whole point of my adoption? What right did I have to contact them, let alone ask them for anything?

  When I showed Dan the letter, he was surprised that I’d sent away for the information, though to his credit he did not ask why I’d initially kept it from him. His innocent reaction confirmed my fears: hadn’t this decision been entirely out of character, the last thing anyone would have expected me to do? Would others be surprised, too, if they knew I’d gone looking for more? I imagined my adoptive parents’ reactions, and wondered if even this tiniest of steps had been disloyal.
/>   Dan asked if I was glad to know more about my birth family. “It’s not very much,” I pointed out.

  “But if you want to find out more about them, at least now you know how.”

  I shook my head, as much in disbelief at my own choices—why had I gone looking, anyway?—as a rejection of his words. The idea of searching for my birth family, of talking to or even meeting them, felt less like betrayal now that I was grown up and out of my parents’ house. But I had always told everyone that one family was enough. My adoptive parents were my real parents; that was it.

  Though there was still so much to learn, could I be content with the information I already had? Dan was applying to graduate schools in several different states, and I knew we would likely be moving within the year—this was not the time to upend our lives by launching a reckless search for my birth family.

  But I kept the letter. When we moved the following year, I made sure to bring it with us.

  In the late summer of 2007, in a small antiseptic-scented exam room in North Carolina’s only freestanding birth center—a room just large enough for two chairs, an exam table, a wash station, and a padded swivel stool—my husband and I sat with a midwife who checked boxes and scribbled notes while we talked. Her low voice was friendly, if tired; she had been up all night with a laboring mother. I sat under the fluorescent lights, anxiety twisting through my excitement as we made our way through the patient forms. I was happy, and at the same time I did not feel ready.