All You Can Ever Know

by Nicole Chung

  But if she felt confused, disappointed, she was also resigned. All her life, it had been drilled into her not to talk back, not to get upset, not to question her family. She had other means of getting the story now. If her father didn’t want to tell her what had happened, Cindy didn’t have the will or the energy to try to change his mind. Not tonight. “Okay,” she said, and ended the call.

  Cindy and Rick—whose birthdays were in January, days apart—had been planning to spend their birthday weekend with her father and stepmother. Now Cindy couldn’t imagine going ahead with the visit as planned. There was no way she was going to see them, she told Rick. She signed up to be on call at the clinic that weekend, which effectively made it impossible for her to travel, and then called and told her stepmom that she and Rick were staying home.

  Her stepmother was not only disappointed, but troubled: Cindy’s father had been acting strangely ever since their call. He seemed anxious. He had been queasy. Now Cindy and Rick weren’t coming to visit? What was wrong with everyone? What was going on?

  Cindy loved her stepmother. In many ways, she had been more of a parent to her than anyone else; she had helped give Cindy the only stable home she’d known as a child. Her father would most likely prefer she not say anything about the adoption to her stepmom. But Cindy didn’t want to lie to the woman who’d raised her, and she couldn’t bring herself to deny how upset she was.

  She was so tired of the lies.

  “I just found out I have a sister no one ever told me about,” she said.

  “What? What do you mean? Who is she?”

  “She’s my full sister. She sent a letter to our mom. They had her when I was six years old. When I asked Dad, he said he didn’t know anything about it.”

  “I see,” her stepmother said. “Well, we certainly have a lot to talk about. We’ll come to your house.”

  Cindy didn’t think that was a good idea. She didn’t feel ready to confront her father. But her stepmom insisted they were coming that very weekend.

  Maybe, Cindy thought, her father would tell her more in person. She agreed to the visit, instructing her concerned husband to “behave” while her parents were there. Then she steeled herself for the hardest conversation she would ever have with her father.

  In the first picture Cindy ever sent me, she is smiling so you can’t see her teeth, dark brown eyes gazing directly into the camera. Her shoulder-length black hair is pulled back in what I now know to be her customary ponytail. A white top and a long brown skirt skim her slender, sturdy frame. She and her husband, Rick, are standing in front of some trees in someone’s backyard, and my sister’s face and arms look paler than usual in the sunlight. You cannot see her freckles.

  Nicole, I was very shocked to find out I had another sister. I don’t know how much you want to know. Our parents told us that you died. I have heard two versions of the story since we found out about you, and it could be both are untrue or only one is true.

  There she was, my sister. I don’t know how long I stared at the picture, eagerly searching for the familiar in her face. “I always expected your sisters to look like you, only a little older,” Dan said. “You two really do look very different.” But, he added, Cindy was my closest genetic relative, and though we’d never pass for twins, the resemblance was undeniable.

  I could see we were alike, but it was difficult to name just how we were alike. As I homed in on her features, I cataloged, one by one, the disparities between our eyes and our noses, the shapes of our faces, the sweep of our hair. The differences were easy to spot; they announced themselves. There was no single thing I could point to and say, That’s me. Yet as Dan had pointed out, no one who saw us together would doubt we were sisters.

  I thought of my years in Oregon, my white school and our white neighborhood, all the times I’d wished I could just talk to someone who looked like me. My longing for Korean family, for people who understood, was one of so many things my adoptive parents had not been told to expect; the day I came home from school and told her how much I wished I knew other Asians stuck in my mother’s memory precisely because it had surprised her. I didn’t mention the bullies, but I didn’t have to—as someone who loved me, she felt uneasy just knowing that I had noticed. Eventually, I had learned to stop voicing such thoughts. What could my parents say about it? What could they do?

  I sent my own pictures to Cindy, the same ones I had included in the letter to our mother: a black-and-white photo of Dan and me on our wedding day, and a picture of me sitting alone in our woodsy backyard in our woodsy backyard. She told me that she loved the photos, and thanked me for sending them. I keep looking at your face, and I think you look a little like both Mom and Dad.

  Cindy said she was trying to gather information. She was no longer in touch with our mother, but she had heard her side of it from Jessica, and was also talking with our father. During a recent visit, our father told Cindy he had believed it would be too terrible for her, knowing that she had a sister who had been given away. He had been sure she would go to a good family, a good home. Knowing how our family was, Cindy wrote to me, I have to agree the adoption was probably for the best.

  I thought of all the times I had heard that phrase—for the best—or one like it. I was sure my sister believed it was true, and perhaps it was in my case. But I was growing so tired of it, this line we all said to try to make something simple out of a deeply complicated situation. It was no longer enough.

  All the same, there was an openness in Cindy’s emails that immediately appealed to me—maybe I took it as an early hint that we were alike, at least, in how our minds worked, or in valuing the truth. Maybe the barely leashed anger I sensed beneath her compassionate words also came as a kind of reassurance, proof that something important had happened. We were united, even if it was only in our curiosity and frustration at a lack of openness in our family. She clearly didn’t blame me for unwittingly revealing such an enormous family secret. But she also felt wronged, and made it clear she would accept nothing but the truth going forward.

  She said she had asked our father if he would like to be in touch with me. I still hadn’t written to him. After learning they’d hidden the adoption, I had wondered if he would even want to hear from me—I’d almost convinced myself that he wouldn’t. Our mother had told Jessica that he hadn’t wanted me, and that was partly why he pushed for the adoption. It didn’t make me eager to reach out. But Cindy believed he felt differently.

  I spoke to my father last month and he expressed guilt and shame for having made the decision to give you away. He is interested in speaking with you if you wish to speak to him.

  Cindy seemed to want to know everything—everything she hadn’t been told. Just knowing that my sister and I might share the same questions about what had happened to our family felt like vindication decades in the making.

  Nicole—Nikki—I feel very fortunate that you have let us in your life and want to know who we are.

  She had used my nickname. I tried to remember: in my letter to my birth mom, I was sure I’d signed off as Nicole, but maybe I had mentioned that friends call me Nikki. Family, too. It was silly and fanciful to imagine Cindy calling me that if we’d grown up together, since I knew my birth family had planned to call me Susie. But I liked that she was already using the name chosen by the people closest to me.

  I never asked Cindy to demand answers from our parents. I wouldn’t have presumed, especially not so soon after connecting with her. Without my having to ask, she promised: I will not hide anything from you that is mine to share. There was still so much we didn’t know, but at last, I wasn’t all alone in my wondering.

  A week after receiving Cindy’s first email, I reached full term. The girl who had filled my thoughts since long before she could make herself known in kicks and rolls was big enough to be born. People kept asking how I was doing, often with a half-knowing smile and some variation on “Bet you’re ready for that kid to be born!” I thought I was. B
ut inside, she was safe, and I was safe from whatever her birth would bring, an upheaval I wasn’t sure I was ready for.

  As Cindy’s emails flooded my inbox, the reality of reunion began to feel overwhelming. Even as I devoured my sister’s words, a part of me resented my decision to search, the resulting distraction from our baby’s impending birth. And on nights when I did find myself awake in the wee hours, staring up at the ceiling, mind awhirl, it was always due to some new tidbit of information about my birth family, not the discomfort of being fully nine months pregnant.

  Jessica said that our mother had a hard, disappointing life; that she believed the adoption and the divorce and everything else that had gone wrong were due to her husband’s decisions. Cindy said that our parents divorced because they fought all the time, and that most of their fights stemmed from the way our mother treated Cindy. Our family was rife with problems. There is a lot I would love to tell you. But if you want, we can live in the present and I won’t mention difficult things.

  Cindy was offering me a choice: I could tell her I didn’t want to know about the “difficult things,” hide from new knowledge that would complicate the vision I’d had of my birth family. We could focus solely on the joy of being reunited. As Jessica said, the past was the past.

  I didn’t want to be disappointed. I had wanted to find my birth family for so long. But I was the one who had burst into their lives, and if I learned things that upset me, well, my relatives were only scrambling to respond to a situation I had created. I didn’t know what to make of my birth parents, but with Cindy, at least, I didn’t want to begin with lies and omissions. I didn’t want her to have to hide anything she had experienced or any part of who she was. Whatever she had been through, I wanted to know—to listen to and honor it. I didn’t have the inclination or energy to present a façade. What was the point of being reunited, being sisters, if we were both still alone?

  You can tell me anything you want, I wrote to her. I would rather know.

  It was eleven p.m. in my mother’s time zone when I called her—would she even pick up?

  She answered after a few rings. “Hi! Did you have the baby?”

  “No, I’m still pregnant.”

  I was sorry to disappoint her. Of course that was what she would think when I called her in the middle of the night, my time.

  “Oh. Well, what’s up?”

  Feeling helpless, I looked around our living room, silent and free from baby accoutrements—if not for long. When I slipped out of bed and took myself downstairs at two in the morning so my tossing and turning wouldn’t wake my husband, my mother had suddenly seemed like the only person in the world to call.

  I told her that I’d been talking a lot with Cindy: “Emailing, mostly.” Mom didn’t sound upset to hear this—on the contrary, her voice perked up considerably, despite the late hour. That was awfully exciting, wasn’t it? What was Cindy like? Where did she live? What did she do for work? Did she have kids?

  I wondered only a little at my mother’s reaction. Sisters, after all, were safe. Sisters could never take the place of parents.

  Cindy and Jessica had never known about the adoption, I explained. Each had talked to the parent of their choice, and the resulting stories conflicted. “Cindy believes her dad. She doesn’t talk to her mother at all. She told me her childhood was really unhappy.”

  “Unhappy how?”

  Cindy had told me that our mother had abused her. That she hit her, nearly every day. I opened my mouth a few times to say this, but the truth felt stuck like a hard lump in my throat. It wasn’t disbelief or even disappointment causing me to choke on my words. It was shame: shame that chilled me through.

  How could I be so disappointed in someone I had never even met?

  My mother was still waiting. Why couldn’t I tell her? Why else had I called home, if not to tell her what I had learned about the woman who bore me? Saying it aloud wasn’t going to be what made it true. I already knew it was true; I believed my sister, even though what she told me ran counter to everything I had ever wanted to believe about my birth mother.

  Earlier that day, when I’d told Dan, his shock and sorrow had been what I had expected. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for you and Cindy. That’s so horrible.” And then he’d asked the question I still did not know how to answer. “What are you going to do?” We both knew what he meant: What are you going to do about your birth mother? Are you going to talk to her?

  “Cindy said that our mother used to beat her.” I forced the words out, one by one. “Cindy was afraid of her.”

  One of my birth family’s many secrets, maybe the biggest one. But Cindy had said she didn’t care who I told. You’re family. Even if we didn’t grow up together, she seemed to be saying, this was part of my history, too. Because she was sure that the abuse was one reason our father had suggested adoption.

  Cindy got hit all the time. Like it was nothing. Like she deserved it. And for a long time, she thought this was normal. She imagined that her treatment was the lot of all youngest children. But then she had started noticing the other kids at school: how they didn’t seem to be afraid all the time; how they had nice clothes and shoes that fit; how they had a packed lunch or lunch money every single day. They must have had someone at home who took care of them, she realized.

  Her mother always believed she was justified in her anger, which could last for hours or days, and over which she seemed to have no control. She believed she had every right to “discipline” her own child. Cindy tried to tell a teacher what was happening, but the teacher didn’t believe her. She ran away. She slept outside on a bench, or in the woods, when it was warm enough. One time the police found her, listened to her, saw her bruises, and called child protective services. She spent a few weeks in a foster home. Eventually, she was released after her parents promised the abuse would stop. It never did—until after the divorce, when she went to live with her father.

  I was distantly aware that Cindy told me the truth because she was trying to protect me. She barely knew me, but she didn’t want to see me hurt. I didn’t want to taint your idea of our mom, she wrote. But I have been wanting to tell you just so you would be cautious.

  Sitting there on my sofa talking to my mother, hugely pregnant and fighting tears, I couldn’t yet understand that my birth mother’s nature would become the invisible thread connecting all my anxieties, my many shortcomings, all my worst moments as a parent. That it would cause me to question my instincts, bring me up short every time I lost my temper with one of my children. Years later, I would think of her when I stopped, mid-argument, to give my tearful daughter permission to challenge me if she ever thought I was being unfair: You can always tell me. You can say, I think you’re being too hard on me right now, and I promise I’ll stop and listen to you.

  The hopes I’d once harbored about talking with my birth mother, getting to know her—even the simple vision of us meeting face-to-face, embracing as parent and child—seemed so foolish now. I knew that whether we ever spoke, whether we met in person, I would never be able to think of her without also thinking of my sister. Perhaps our mother had wanted to keep me, for reasons I might never know. But I would never again be able to think of her as someone I had been meant to stay with. I wouldn’t imagine her looking at me with love on the last day she ever saw me. I’d picture her towering over my sister as a little girl, venting her anger and unhappiness on the small shoulders of a child who could not escape.

  “I guess it’s a good thing you didn’t grow up with her,” Mom said.

  She didn’t sound triumphant, exactly, but I still flinched. I left it alone. I hadn’t called her to argue. I wasn’t sure why I had called, really, or what I wanted from her—until suddenly I heard myself asking, “Do you think I could ever do something like that?”

  There was a long pause. I was sure she wouldn’t say yes, but for the space of a breath, two, three, I feared the answer would not be an unequivocal no.

&
nbsp; “You’re asking me if I think you would abuse your child?” she said.

  Yes. Yes, that was exactly what I was asking her, only I didn’t want to put it into words. She was the only one who would know. She and my father had known me the longest—until Dan, my mother had known me best. And unlike my husband, who, I was sure, didn’t fully see all of my failings or even recognize them as such, my mother never held back her views. I knew she adored me, but when she felt it was warranted, she would tell me the hard truths about who I was. What I lacked. Maybe this was leftover from growing up in her own tumultuous family, but Mom was not only unafraid to call things as she saw them; she didn’t know how to do anything else.

  “I’ve always had a temper,” I said, and this simple admission, which I wouldn’t have so much as blushed at a day before, was now so painful I had to whisper it. “I’m not patient.”

  “We’ve met, Nicole.”

  “I get mad, and I yell—what if that’s from her? What if I’m just angry at my kid all the time? Cindy said our mother was always angry. What if there’s—I don’t know, a child abuse gene, and she passed it on to me and I hurt my baby?”

  “Nicole! You could never hurt your child. Or any child. You’re going to love that little girl more than anything—don’t ever doubt that.”

  My throat ached with tears I wouldn’t let fall. I had to keep some control, even if my life had become almost unrecognizable. “How do you know?” I whispered.

  “Because I have known you your whole life,” she said firmly. “Because I’m your mother.”

  And despite my fear, the guilt I felt for escaping my sister’s fate, the lurking evils I now worried were part of my nature, I allowed myself to believe her.

  On the last Friday evening in February, Dan and I treated ourselves to takeout from our favorite Chinese restaurant. I broke my fortune cookie in half and read the little slip of paper. All your hard work is about to pay off. I slid it across the table to my husband. “Guess I’m about to go into labor!”