by Nicole Chung
“Um,” I said. “Not since high school.”
“You can both read, and then we can discuss it.”
Yes, I thought. Transcendentalist family book club. All very normal.
Then he handed me a copy of the book of essays he’d written. When I reconnected with my birth family, I had been surprised to learn that my sister wrote poems and stories in her free time, while our father was a published author, a lover of language, and a scholar of Korean literature and linguistics. My own lifelong obsession with writing was a shared family trait, the inheritance of what I was told were generations of scholars and writers.
I wished I could read his essays. I was sure I would understand so much more about him if I could. But they were written in Korean, as inaccessible to me as the man himself had once been. I turned to the cover page and saw that he had written an inscription in English. I thanked him, happy all the same to be holding a book filled with his words, signed with his love and prayers, even though we both knew that his note was the only part I would be able to read.
Dan excused himself to wrangle Abby napwards. I could tell that my birth father and his wife already liked my daughter and would have been glad for her to stay, but she was still worn out from the flight the day before and now hours overdue for a nap, her mood fraying at the edges. Rick also disappeared upstairs, taking his in-laws’ luggage with him. Left alone—intentionally, I suspected—my birth father and I sat on one couch, while Cindy and her stepmother sat on the other. Watching her stepmom reach over to cover Cindy’s hand in a silent gesture of affection, I remembered she was more of a mother to my sister than her own had been.
I pulled out the album of pictures I’d brought, stuffed with photos traversing the years between infancy and my college graduation. My birth father and his wife both leaned over to look, holding themselves so still, listening while I narrated. “This is my mom and my dad,” I began, pointing to pictures of my parents holding me just days after they had brought me home. They both looked so happy, almost in disbelief, all wide smiles while I dozed on them in my premie-sized strawberry dress.
I hesitated as I said the words mom and dad, wondering if my birth father had noticed. Here he was, meeting his adult child for the first time, seeing pictures of a childhood he had missed and the white strangers who had raised her. It had to be as unsettling for him as it was for me. I wished I could say something comforting to him, but what?
I had told him so many times that I did not hold my adoption against him. But even two years after our first correspondence, his letters to me were filled with regret. He held it against himself, and I did not want him to. How strange, yet not strange at all, that I felt the same urge to protect him that I’d felt toward my adoptive parents. Perhaps it was a sign of how much I already cared about him. Was there some magical, inspired phrase I could snatch out of the stifled air between us, something I could say that would make him lay his guilt to rest, once and for all?
As we flipped through my pictures, I could tell that he was doing his best to listen and contribute to the conversation. At times the other three would lapse into Korean, and then one of them, usually Cindy or our father, would translate. Sometimes they apologized, but I felt no annoyance; only embarrassment at my own inability to understand the language I had been born to speak. I’d been cut off from my culture of origin, yes, but that had been decades ago; I’d had almost thirty years to ask questions, to try to learn more about it. The gap between us wasn’t just his to bridge, and yet I’d come without any real tools.
As we looked at pictures from my commencement, my grinning in a black robe and honor cords while my mom smiled proudly and my dad held my diploma tube aloft, my birth father told me how proud he was of me “for graduating from one of the best colleges in the world.” I turned the page, and there were a handful of wedding snapshots: Dan and me in one of them; another of me flanked by my parents. Since I’d learned about him, I had often wondered if my father would think of my quiet life of writing and editing at the margins. I was still thinking about graduate school, harboring dreams of becoming a writer, but had spent most of my time home with Abby ever since I’d been laid off following my maternity leave. Had my birth father hoped I would do more with my life? Wouldn’t a string of impressive accomplishments make his sacrifice seem more worthwhile?
As Rick would later point out, when he saw me last I had been a two-pound infant whose survival was far from certain. Based on what the doctors must have told him, I might have surpassed his expectations just by living. By thriving. “It must seem like a miracle to him,” my atheist brother-in-law told me.
When we had looked through all of my photos, they showed me their own family albums. I felt so nosy in my eagerness, asking so many questions they could hardly keep up, but I wanted so badly to know who everyone was, how I was related to them. My birth father told me about his deceased parents, to whom he’d been close—though he was not the eldest, he was the smartest, and they did what they could to help him further the education he wanted so much. He also told me about his brother and sisters in Korea, and showed me photographs of them. I wished I could meet them someday, though I knew it was unlikely.
I was most intrigued when he mentioned the ten volumes of family history in his elder brother’s library in Korea. Our oldest known ancestor had lived more than five hundred years ago, and our father and his siblings were of the seventeenth generation since. As an adoptee, I had never been part of such a lineage, generations stitched together through time and recorded memory. The common stories, the shared mannerisms, the physical traits linking one relative to another in a multigenerational tapestry—I had never known these particular aspects of family, of belonging. When I heard family stories growing up, I was always reminded that I had been grafted onto the family tree; I had never been of it, part of it, the way my other relatives were.
I wondered if nonadopted people could possibly appreciate what an unimaginable gift it was to possess such a history—the history my birth father apparently took for granted, recorded and preserved through the long generations. Who knew how the family book had been edited, facts suppressed or rewritten over the years—but it would still be a marvel to have that kind of legacy at my fingertips. What might those volumes spanning the centuries reveal, if I were able to read them? What might fall out as I turned the pages—sepia-toned photographs or hand-drawn portraits; dusty certificates announcing marriages or births?
I had never been a part of any of it. Yet just knowing that it existed made me feel connected, in some small way, to all the people who came before me. Of course, I would not have expected to be in the book, as Cindy was; you can’t keep your secret daughter a secret if you write her name in the family book. Theirs was an entire world I was not a part of, and so learning that I was—of course—omitted from the official family history did not surprise me.
As far as losses went, it was small compared to the loss of a parent, a sister, a language, a culture. But it did make me wonder exactly what and who had also been left out, forgotten, in the eighteen known generations of the family. Nineteen, I amended, thinking of Abby and her little sibling, and my sister’s baby on the way.
“Do you think I look like anyone in your family?” I asked.
With every question, every word, I feared my father would think I was asking too much, but he looked at me carefully, as if trying to read my face the way I’d tried to read his. “My mother, maybe, a little bit. You look a lot like Cindy, too.”
He said that he had chosen my Korean name, Soo Jung, before I was born. As it happened, the name Susan—the one on my original birth certificate, the one in my long-sealed adoption file—was chosen because it shared a first syllable with my Korean name, hitting the ear in a similar fashion. Cindy’s name was In Jong; in Korean, the second syllable of our names was the same. I watched our father’s finger fly in the air, tracing it out, and the movement reminded me of the day Cindy had caught me writing invisible words
on my place mat.
My sister would later tell me how surprised she was by how much our father talked during our visit. And he was talking to us—not only to me. He included Cindy, sometimes asking her questions in English or Korean about what she remembered. He told us things that made us sad, and also things that made us laugh—like how his lifelong sweet tooth developed when occupying soldiers gave him candy from their rations and care packages. Talking about the past clearly wasn’t easy, and both his own private nature and cultural conditioning should have made it challenging to defer to his daughters. Yet we could tell he was trying to do just that, all through the visit. He opened doors for us, cooked and served us dinner, fell silent when we spoke in order to listen. He answered all our questions, sharing what he remembered even when it was painful.
“Every word, every action, even his body language and manner of address was like an apology—to both you and Cindy,” Rick said afterward. “He was humbling himself.”
Sitting next to my father, listening to him speak, I felt sure that many of the things my adoptive family had always found puzzling—my studiousness, my freakish memory, my wide perfectionist streak—would have seemed natural to him. I thought again of my mother’s comment, long ago: “We weren’t prepared to raise a child like you.” When I asked what she meant, she did not mention my precociousness or my nonstop questions or my reading and scribbling in journals, but perhaps she was thinking of all those things when she said, “You were just really intense, and always surprising us.”
Who might I have been if my birth father had been the one to raise me? Even without his influence in my life, he had managed to pass things on. I considered his writing, his obvious pride in it and in his past scholarship. These seemed to be the essence of his identity, these passions that had never been his whole career—things he’d made time for at the edges of a life more focused on practical matters, hard work, survival. Whatever else he was, he was a student and a writer first. No, I would not have surprised him.
He was the one to bring up my birth mother. “When she became pregnant with you, she said she didn’t want another girl,” he said. Simply, calmly, without anger, but with a shake of the head as if to suggest he still couldn’t understand it. I nodded: I knew this already; he had told me before. But hearing the words in his voice made them seem more real.
“I knew how she treated Cindy, and I thought to myself, this woman cannot have a baby. Then you were born so early. I thought adoption was the only way. I didn’t know what else to do.”
His voice shook when he told me about visiting the NICU, seeing me in the incubator. “I went one time,” he admitted. I did not ask him why it was only once; I guessed it was because it was too hard to see me, as small and sick as I was, and he knew that soon I would not be his daughter to raise.
“You were so tiny, you fit in my hand, right in the palm of my hand!” He held out his hand, upturned, lined but still strong and firm, staring at it while he spoke—as if he could still make out the shape of a too-small baby in the curve of his palm. “I remember I was crying and crying,” he said, and then he was crying again.
Cindy had told me when she confronted him about the adoption, the secrets and omissions, he insisted that he had put me out of his thoughts. He thought I’d gone on to have a good life. He’d provided for me, in a sense, and had no choice but to move on. He claimed he had forgotten the adoption, for a time, and that’s why he denied it.
I still didn’t understand, not entirely. But I was moved to know that no matter how hard he may have tried, he hadn’t entirely forgotten about me after I was gone, adopted and beyond reach. He had retained this one memory of me from the hospital, and it meant something to him.
I meant something to him.
I wished we were close enough for me to take his hand. I wanted to fill it with mine, to banish the memory of a sick, tiny infant and replace it with a new one: his grown daughter, strong enough to comfort him.
“I didn’t know if you were going to be okay,” he said.
He waved his hand at me, not in greeting this time, or acknowledgment, but as if to say, See? You were okay.
I nodded, my throat tight. I am.
On our last morning together, we all went to breakfast at a diner owned by a Korean family. We ate pajeon, savory Korean pancakes, and Abby got American-style Minnie Mouse pancakes drenched in syrup. Everyone fussed over her, offering her more food, and she reveled in being the center of attention.
After we ate, Rick suggested a local Catholic shrine set on several acres of gardens, as a nice place to walk around and take some family photos before my birth father and his wife began their journey home. The National Sanctuary to Our Sorrowful Mother, he and I knew it as “the Grotto.” Like me, Rick had been raised Catholic, and both of us had childhood memories of the shrine—though he’d been there countless times, and I had visited only once, with my adoptive parents. I remembered the outdoor Stations of the Cross, and the gift shop where my mother bought me a Rosary of shiny green stones.
Sometimes my childhood faith had felt like my only culture, the one thing that had made me feel I was part of something larger. Now, standing in a chapel to Our Lady carved out of rock, Dan and Rick snapped several photos of Cindy and me with our father a short distance from a replica of Michelangelo’s Pietà. I thought of the real Pietà, which Dan and I had seen in Rome years ago, and the statues of Mary and Joseph that had stood on the dresser in my childhood bedroom. My Korean family spoke a language I couldn’t and shared a history of which I had never been a part, but here, surrounded by signs and symbols of my adopted faith, I was the one who felt most at home. Everyone watched me light a candle, one among rows of flickering votives, each one representing a prayer. As I recited a silent Hail Mary, I thought about two healthy babies, their names and their lives still unknown, part of the nineteenth generation since their oldest ancestor.
When it was time for them to leave, Cindy’s parents hugged her and her family goodbye. My father’s wife hugged me, too, before reaching into her purse to hand me an envelope. “Buy something for the baby,” she said.
I tried to tell her—tell them both—that it was unnecessary, but there was no refusing. “They don’t know what you need. They don’t want you to leave empty-handed,” Cindy whispered. I understood that giving back the money would be seen as a rejection—of the gift, and also of them; of whatever it was we now were to one another. So I thanked them, pocketing the cash, and promised to put it to good use.
My father’s wife kissed my cheek, squeezing my hands just as she had squeezed my sister’s, and then patted my stomach. I felt such a rush of affection for her—and gratitude for the love she’d shown Cindy. My father shook Dan’s hand, touched Abby’s cheek gently, and then turned to me. I was glad that he didn’t try to shake my hand this time. He embraced me, and it felt right.
When he stepped back, I saw that he was smiling. It occurred to me that I had not seen him smile much during our visit. I didn’t think he’d been unhappy—he seemed very happy indeed, if sometimes overwhelmed. Perhaps he really had been as nervous as I was, and his smile meant that he wasn’t anymore.
“Come and visit us someday,” he said to me. “We will be praying for you and your baby.”
He was a God-fearing man, I knew. Like my adoptive parents, he really would pray for us. I had no idea if their combined intercessions would make a difference. But they were all my parents, in vastly different ways, and I was glad to have their prayers.
My father and I parted unsure of what we were, what we would be, to each other. I did not feel like a reclaimed daughter. It would be years before he would offer to tell any of his siblings about me, and then only one of them. To most of my birth family, I remain and may forever be a secret.
Yet I didn’t watch him leave after our initial visit with a feeling of incompleteness, or dissatisfaction. I knew how much the handful of days in my company had cost him, not because he was unhappy t
o meet me, but because he had forced himself to be so open and vulnerable to someone who was still, essentially, a stranger. He wrote to me soon after our reunion, letting me know how much it had meant to him. At his request, I shared some of my writing with him, including an essay I’d written about my decision to search. He read it and responded kindly, without any criticism. He told me I took after him in my writing. He told me, again, that he was proud of me. It was almost enough.
It was an unforgettable meeting with you and Cindy. I was a little bit nervous and felt guilty. You were so special and nice to all of us with your understanding and love. It was just like a beautiful dream to see you last week. I pray every day for you and your baby as well as Cindy’s.
Most of my childhood assumptions about my biological parents now seem as foreign to me as the Korean culture I grew up without. But my father’s belief that adoption was truly the best option in a sea of imperfect ones is something of which I am now certain. I believe it was the only thing he thought he could do for me—perhaps even the most loving thing. An amended version of the guesswork from my adoptive parents, I suppose that is still what I want to believe, in some form; the power of the narrative I’d grown up hearing may never entirely loosen its hold over me. In my birth father’s case, I think the myth might actually be true: I remember it every time he expresses the old belief in his guilt, because I don’t think it would affect him so much if he had not cared. When I consider the depths of that emotion, long buried but still present in him, I believe in his intention to ensure I was safe.
Still, when we finally met face-to-face at my sister’s house, I wish I’d been brave enough to ask him just one more question. Did you want to keep me? Not Did you see me as your responsibility? Not Would you have kept me if things had been different?—but Did you want me?