All You Can Ever Know

by Nicole Chung

  If only I knew Cindy well enough to read her expression. Was she in pain? Maybe seeing my daughter had made her sad, reminding her of her recent loss. I asked her a couple of times if she was okay, and each time she said she was all right. Still, her eyes looked slightly glazed, and she moved slowly, gingerly, in a way I doubted was usual for her.

  I had always been incapable of schooling my features into a mask; my feelings were always clearly etched on my face. But Cindy’s was still new, unfrozen from the photos I’d seen up to now. Her face was a story I couldn’t yet read. I was struck by the notion that I’d encountered another version of myself, the person I might have been if I’d been raised by my first parents. But that was ridiculous, wasn’t it? She was her own person.

  When she looked at me, what did she see? Was I a kind of mirror for her as well—a glimpse of who she could have been, how she might have turned out if others had raised her?

  Across the room, our husbands were obviously ready to pounce on any overlapping trait, no matter how insignificant. How could I blame them, really, when I was silently cataloguing all the similarities I could find? Still, I began to wish they would find something else to do as they looked from Cindy to me and back again, wearing matching grins.

  “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to meet someone who was actually related to Nikki,” Dan said to Cindy. “I thought I was prepared, but it’s still so strange to see the two of you together.”

  Rick held up his camera and snapped our picture. Cindy frowned—it wasn’t a quelling look, but it was clear she wished he had warned us. I was even less restrained, rolling my eyes before I could stop myself. “The paparazzi,” I said, hoping for a laugh.

  Rick tried to defend himself. “I had to! You should see yourselves. You both just tucked your hair behind your ear at the exact same time, the exact same way.”

  “How many different ways are there to do that?” Cindy asked, and I followed up: “You would do it, too, if you had long hair.”

  I didn’t see Rick’s reaction to being told off simultaneously by the two of us, though I heard Dan’s snort from across the room. My eyes snapped back to my sister. We looked at each other, laughing with mutual recognition of the pressure to search for similarities that had not yet revealed themselves—or might not even exist—and the weight of this beyond-believable moment. As we sat side by side, giggling together, I thought, Our voices may not sound alike, but our laughter does.

  On the second morning of Cindy’s visit, I admitted how strange it felt to be someone else’s biggest secret. I knew she understood secrets, especially the ones she’d been expected to keep for her family. “I’m glad you didn’t stay a secret to me,” she said.

  We were sitting together at the round kitchen table Dan and I had bought in college, secondhand, for fifteen dollars. The kitchen curtains were open to the rain-soaked backyard, the woods behind our house. Droplets of water spattered the glass as my sister spoke about her childhood. Her eyes flitted to the window often, too—not, I thought, because she wanted to avoid looking at me, but only semiconsciously, as she pulled me along through her memories.

  I already knew parts of the story. When Cindy was a baby, our parents and half sister, Jessica, moved to Seattle, and Cindy stayed behind with her maternal grandmother in Seoul. Partway through kindergarten, she reunited with her parents. “I couldn’t even remember our mom,” she said. “I just assumed that she loved me, that she had missed me. When I saw her again, I was so scared. I thought, ‘Who is this angry woman? Is this really my mother?’”

  Young, vulnerable, unsure of her place in the family she had not lived with for years, she made an easy target for our mother’s frustration and rage. For years, she thought, All parents must do this. Our father either wasn’t aware of how bad it was at first, working all the time and tutoring on the side, or didn’t know how to stop it. Their aging grandmother wasn’t able to protect her. Jessica, who was nearly ten years older than Cindy, was busy with work and school and rarely at home—she often complained about their family, but she had the ability to escape. As a teenager, Jessica was also big enough to grab their mother’s arm when it was raised against her. Cindy was too young and too small to fight back, so their mother focused on her.

  Gradually, Cindy realized that the way her mother treated her was not normal. She began to wish for a different life because hers made no sense to her. And even though our reasons were so different and she’d had the worst of it by far, this reminded me so poignantly of how I used to feel, too.

  As a child, Cindy never got the other life she wanted, though a friend’s mother did offer to take her in once—not because she knew the truth, but because she was kind and could see that Cindy was unhappy. “My parents would never have let me live with someone else. The shame, you know. They told me, all the time, ‘Don’t tell anyone what goes on in our family; it’s not their business.’” She swiped at her eyes as we talked. At some point I had reached over, I wasn’t sure when, to cover her hand with mine. I left it there, and listened.

  I wanted to cry, too, for my sister now and also for the child she’d been. But I knew it took courage for her to share these things with me, and I wanted to be strong for her and not break down. It seemed the least I owed her, when I had escaped, and she had not.

  Cindy had brought an old photo album with her, and she flipped through it with me, pointing out Jessica, our father, our maternal and paternal grandmothers, our aunts and uncles. She gave me a small stack of photos to keep. One of our father in an apartment in 1975. One of him and Cindy at her wedding reception in 2002. Jessica and Cindy shopping together at a mall, sometime in the 1990s.

  And then there were the rare, precious photos from her childhood in Korea. Two round-cheeked girls with shining black hair and serious expressions: Jessica at twelve, and Cindy as a toddler. A picture of Cindy by herself, her face in profile, which made me smile more than any of the others—not just because I could see that, as little girls, side by side, we would have resembled each other more closely than we did now. A green sundress, her hair in pigtails, her long legs dangling from a park bench—I could see traces of the woman beside me in the girl’s eyes: my sister, at the age of three, before our mother got a hold of her.

  She had no pictures from the Seattle years, before or after our parents’ divorce. No pictures of our mother at all. Jessica had emailed me a couple of photos of our mom, and I did not see the strong resemblance Cindy said she could see between us, but that might have been the age difference. There was something to the shape of our mother’s face, the softness around her cheeks and the point of her chin, that did remind me of my own reflection.

  “We weren’t the kind of family that took portraits,” Cindy said now. “Our parents spent most of their time working. When they were home, I just tried to stay out of their way.”

  Would it ever feel normal to hear my sister say the words our parents? Looking at Cindy’s few childhood photos, my thoughts turned to my husband’s relationship with his siblings, and how their common history had supplied them with a code, an understanding, unique to the three of them. They had grown up on the same island; the same people, stories, rituals, and rules, year in and year out, shaped each of them in turn and bound them together. Cindy and I would never have that kind of history. I would never know what it was like to grow up with her as my big sister, looking out for me.

  Looking at little Cindy on the park bench, I wished I could magically insert myself in the photograph. I wished we had actual memories together, instead of years of secrets and silence. As I sat there, wanting the impossible, a question formed in my mind—one I had wanted to give voice to ever since I learned of her, one I still wasn’t quite sure how to ask.

  “Do you see the pretty butterfly, Abby?”

  My sister was holding my daughter’s hand, gazing at a small yellow-and-black butterfly resting on a dewy leaf. We had spent the first couple of days of their visit at our house, just talkin
g, in part because Cindy still needed to rest. When she said she felt up to a little walking, we decided to visit the Museum of Life and Science. Abby was too young for most of the exhibits, but she was excited when we stopped in the butterfly house. She pulled her aunt by the hand, trying to follow one of the many hundreds of butterflies flitting through trees and vines and botanical flowers.

  “She’s really going to make Cindy want a baby,” Rick said as we watched them.

  Since he’d been the one to broach the topic, I mentioned Cindy had told me they were going to try again. I thought perhaps Rick would tell me to mind my own business, or clam up at least, but he didn’t. I wondered if he was beginning to think of me as family, too.

  Losing the pregnancy, he said, had been very difficult. But it had also made them realize how much they wanted to be parents.

  “I hope it’s not making it worse, seeing Abby.”

  “Not at all. Cindy is having a great time with her.” Rick grinned. “When she found out about you and learned you were pregnant, she said it was like getting two for the price of one.”

  That evening, Rick made us his “famous meat loaf” for dinner, promising us German pancakes for breakfast the following day. “I like to cook and bake,” he explained as he scribbled a grocery list. “I do all the baking, actually, because Cindy never wants to read the directions. She’s a great cook, but she can’t follow a recipe.”

  “Don’t you judge me,” Cindy told him. “Recipes are tedious.”

  Another way we were different: I had always loved a good set of clear instructions. “So I can’t ask you for your favorite Korean recipes, I guess?”

  “No, but I can show you how to make them.” I didn’t want her to go to the Korean grocery or spend more time on her feet, cooking for all of us. “Next time,” she agreed. We went out to a Korean restaurant instead, where we all ate bulgogi and I took pictures of Abby posing with her chopsticks arranged like elephant tusks. Cindy admitted that she loved when other people cooked for her—she’d often been responsible for making the meals, growing up with her dad and stepmom.

  This reminded me that I’d wanted to talk with her in person about our father. Fair or not, she was my gateway into the family and, by extension, into his world. He and I had not yet met, though we kept in touch via email—the simplest means for both of us, given his self-consciousness about his (very good) English and my nonexistent Korean. I was beginning to think I would like to meet him.

  When I asked questions, he didn’t always react well. I’d gotten crumbs about the family, sometimes from him and sometimes from Cindy; I’d heard things like Dad’s parents were farmers in Korea or I think you take after Mom and Grandma, a little bit. Once I asked my birth father what I thought was an innocent question, about the places he had lived and why he’d wanted to come to America. Please don’t ask me any more questions about the past, he wrote back. It’s my personal life. Horrified that I’d overstepped, I apologized, but of course I was still desperately curious. I feared alarming him, causing him to pull away from me entirely. I didn’t want his letters to stop for good. So I kept mine light, conversational, and tried not to ask too many questions.

  My birth father insisted he wanted to get to know me. But every communication seemed to remind him of the adoption, secrets long denied. Every time he wrote, would he feel the need to apologize for things for which I did not blame him? Adoption was normal for me in a way it wasn’t for him, or even my sister. While my adoptive parents balked at discussing certain things—while they never seemed comfortable talking about our differences, or the people who had created me—adoption was never a dark, embarrassing secret in our family. I had a lifetime of experience grappling and trying to come to terms with my adoption, a huge head start on anyone in my birth family.

  “I know he doesn’t like to talk about the past,” I said. “But that’s the part I missed. I don’t know what to talk to him about, if not that.”

  “He doesn’t really talk about it with me, either. Every once in a while he’ll tell me about someone, or share some story I’ve never heard before. But there is a lot I don’t know.”

  I was sorry to hear it, but in a way I also felt a little better: it wasn’t just me. If our father saw the past as none of my business, perhaps it wasn’t because I’d been adopted or because he didn’t think of me as his real daughter—perhaps that’s just how he was.

  “Dad is getting older,” Cindy said. “He seems healthy. But if you’re thinking about meeting him, asking him your questions in person . . . maybe don’t wait too long.”

  Was it a narrowing window she referred to, or a door closing? She had told me that our father had not told anyone else in the family about me. Sometimes I doubted he ever would. As happy as he was to be in contact, to know I was alive, he would prefer them to think me dead than learn about the adoption. Cindy told me some of our relatives in Korea might be shocked, lord it over him if they knew the truth about my adoption. For this reason—to save face, she supposed—and also for others she could only guess at, I remained our family’s biggest secret.

  What might Cindy and I do with the decades we had left, now that we knew about each other? I hoped we would become close; visit each other often. I had let myself imagine taking a trip to Korea together. But even if we did, I wouldn’t be able to meet our family. What would she do—introduce me as a “friend,” hope our relatives there wouldn’t see the resemblance? It seemed so ridiculous, yet I had to wonder if that lie was in our future.

  I studied Cindy again, doubts encroaching on the hope I had felt when she arrived at my home and hugged me. If I was our father’s unacknowledged, unknown child, what was I to Cindy, the legitimate daughter? Was I just a friend to her—someone she’d come to visit this once, someone to whom she would write, but not someone who would ever be family? Or were we on our way to being real sisters, despite our family’s secrets and all the years we had spent apart?

  The first time I asked someone to be my sister, I was ten years old.

  I was on the playground at school, sitting on my favorite swing, where I could watch some of the other kids playing kickball on the blacktop fifty feet away. I glanced over and there she was, a couple of swings over, a girl with long black braids, round glasses, a striped dress, and black patent-leather shoes. She was younger than me, I thought, by at least a year. Her head was turned toward the blacktop, too, as if she were wondering if it was all right to join the other kids.

  For an instant, in my excitement, I forgot about everyone else. Her hair, I thought. Her eyes! She looked like me. Well, more like me than anyone else I’d ever met at school. “Are you new?” I blurted.

  The braided pigtails bounced as she nodded.

  I told her my name. Hers was Kaitlyn, and she was two years younger than me. I wondered if the kids in her class were nice to her.

  After that, we often met by the swings. She would run up and find me, almost knocking me over with hugs. We found secret hiding places and exchanged handwritten, carefully folded notes to be unfurled and read later. We played hide-and-seek and hopscotch and jumped rope side by side. I stopped asking for library passes at recess.

  I often went to my grandmother’s house after school, as she lived not far from my elementary school and could easily pick me up when my parents were working. Grandma was a constant presence throughout my childhood; I spent countless weekends and vacations with her, learning how to plant a vegetable garden, roller-skate, bait a hook, can green beans and peaches, and pick out the most likely murderer on the weekly crime procedurals we both loved. We would go to the Oregon coast for weeks at a time every summer, where we slept in my grandparents’ camper and played pinochle and caught Dungeness crabs in the choppy waters of the bay. Grandma and I were always close, and I listened and deferred to her in a way I didn’t with anyone else in my life. One day after school, when I told her about my new friend, she said, “You should look out for her, Nicole. She’s younger than you.” />
  Grandma was always emphasizing the importance of responsibility; I had received the same direction on rare occasions when my younger cousins came to visit. But then she said something that surprised me: “Maybe you should ask her if she wants to be your sister. It’s a very special thing to have a sister.”

  She reminded me that my mother and my aunt, who lived thousands of miles apart, would talk on the phone for hours. She told me again how much she had loved and relied on her late sister, Mary, who died before my parents adopted me. “Mary always looked out for me,” she said. “All our lives! That’s what sisters do. Maybe your friend needs someone to look out for her, too.”

  So one day I asked Kaitlyn, rather nervously, if she already had a sister, because I didn’t want to take anyone else’s rightful place. Kaitlyn said no. “I don’t, either,” I said. “Do you want to be my little sister, just when we’re at school? Just for pretend?”

  To my joy and relief, she smiled and said, “Sure!” Then she asked if she could come over to my house to play sometime. I’d never had a school friend over before; I promised I would ask my parents.

  A few weeks later, I noticed she was absent for several days straight. Did she have the flu? The chicken pox? I wondered and worried for a week or so, then asked one of her classmates what was going on. “Kaitlyn doesn’t go here anymore,” she told me.

  She and I had never exchanged our phone numbers; I had no way to reach her. I had no idea if she had moved away or simply transferred schools. I felt sure if she’d known ahead of time, she would have warned me. Or maybe she just hadn’t known how to tell me? On my way in from recess I threw out a note I’d been holding for days, shifting from pocket to pocket, hoping for a chance to hand over to her.