All You Can Ever Know

by Nicole Chung

  It was the question that had hung over my every childhood thought about my birth family. It was the question that mattered most. My birth mother had answered it, once, in her way, though I still didn’t know if I believed her. If I had asked my birth father, what would he have said?

  In a way, I tried to answer it myself, by taking my unknown birth parents’ love for granted all those years. Maybe believing that I had their love and regard functioned much the same as having it, being assured of it, would have. The belief that I’d actually been wanted from the beginning, paired with the sure knowledge that my adoptive parents loved me, allowed me to grasp at self-worth, despite my doubts; to grow up and live my life free of the darkest feelings of abandonment.

  But for all my birth father’s kindness, for all his humanity and moving humility, in the end I simply couldn’t bring myself to ask if he had wanted to keep me. To ask would be to know, and I didn’t want to have to live with the answer if it was no. Though he and I have seen each other, had other conversations since, it remains the one question I have never found the courage to ask.

  For a long time, Abby clearly remembered our first meeting with my birth father and his wife, though now that she is older that memory has faded. She knows that they gave her gifts; she and her little sister, Grace, have seen them in person and in pictures since. She knows my adoptive parents, and Dan’s parents, and understands that in a way she has three sets of grandparents, not the usual two.

  She is also beginning to understand my adoption, in the words and the stories I’ve given her. She was barely four years old the first time she asked me, “Mama, what does ‘adopted’ mean?”

  Her question and her steady, inquisitive eyes pulled me away from a grad school assignment. She must have heard me say the word in conversation, one of many times I’d assumed she wasn’t listening, and waited to question me. And at first I was grateful to be ready with an answer, one I had formed with my own children in mind years before either of them were born.

  “If you’re adopted, like me, it means you need someone to be your mama or daddy, and someone else wants to take care of you and be your parent,” I said. “So instead of being born to my parents, I was born to other parents first, and then Grandma and Grandpa took care of me.”

  As I watched her frown, I began to doubt whether my carefully worded definition made sense to her. It had seemed as good a place as any to begin, but was she, after all, too young to hear it or understand? Until this moment, I doubted if she had ever so much as imagined that a parent might not keep their child. Somehow, in all the times I’d pictured having this conversation, I had never thought about how strange or frightening even the simplest definition of adoption might sound to a child.

  “Am I going to be adopted, too?” she asked.

  “No! Most kids, like you, live with the parents they were born to. You will always be mine and Daddy’s.”

  “I bet you liked your first mama best,” she said, not realizing how much these words devastated me, “because Gracie and I like you the best.”

  I hesitated. Words I’d once heard from a birth mother flashed in my mind: If there’s something that everyone should know about adoption, it’s that there is no end to this. There’s no closure. Now, more than ever, I knew that was true. Everything I had learned would have to be reexamined, relearned, and handed on to my children. Abby would have to know about my birth mother one day. She would learn that I had spoken with her on the phone. She would know why Cindy wasn’t in contact with her.

  My sister, of course, never told me I should choose sides. One day, many years after we met, she would confess that sometimes she still felt guilty for telling me the truth. “If I hadn’t, then maybe you would have reached out to our mom. Maybe you would have had a relationship with her.”

  But whenever I tried to imagine Cindy hiding what really happened to her for my sake, it struck me as unbearably sad: how could we have gotten to know each other; grown as close as we have, with this secret between us? Eventually, I would have asked why she never talked to our mom, and what could she have said? She never asked me to choose; she never would. I felt I had to make a choice. I’d choose her, every time.

  “I don’t remember my first mother, so I don’t really miss her,” I finally told Abby, knowing she was too young to know everything. What I gave her was almost the truth. It was the only thing I felt ready to tell her about the one grandparent she’ll never know. Though I still have not told my own daughters the full truth about the woman who bore me, I’m sure that—with my sister’s help—I will tell them one day.

  Since our first conversation, Abby has often asked what it was like for me, growing up adopted. Each time she aims her questions at different aspects of the experience: being Korean in a white family, being Korean when I didn’t know any other Koreans, not knowing the people I’d come from, not having anyone I could ask. She knows I was probably better off for being adopted, though she doesn’t yet know all the reasons, but she does think of it as hard. One time she told me it made her sad for me. I have never told her not to think of it that way—to be separated from your first family when you are too young to remember is a loss. That my deeply empathic, thoughtful older child is aware of that no longer surprises me.

  Of course, plenty of adoptees don’t think about their adoptions as much as I do. And many don’t think about or dwell on the possible losses. When fellow adoptees tell me they don’t really think about their birth parents, about being adopted at all, I believe them. All the same, my adoption no longer feels like mine alone to wonder about, or not—if it ever was. It is part of my sister’s legacy, and our children’s, too. So I don’t try to convince my daughter that the way I lost one family and entered into a new one is entirely natural, that it was an uncomplicated happy event. It was happy, in a way, but it has also been a source of grief for many. It meant years of wondering and confusion for me; for her, it means she will know less about Korean culture than many other Korean kids whose parents were not adopted. It’s okay if she sometimes feels sad when she thinks about that, about everything we’ve lost.

  There are many different kinds of inheritances, many things we pass on, and adoption is only one of ours. If my children and my niece have a more complicated family history than some do, they also have a wonderful story to learn and tell someday. Another adoptee I know who has children—children who, like mine, have always known both their birth and adoptive relatives—once told me that, for all its challenges and surprises, she’ll never take her family for granted. “Creating a home for my own children, seeing their absolute love for this family we’ve made, I always think: Is this a dream? When am I going to wake up?”

  Over the years, I have heard more than one adopted person say, “We adoptees have a way of finding one another.” I believe this is true—and to this day, it’s always a welcome relief to find myself in the company of other adopted people, because only we can understand what it means to grow up adopted. To navigate our adoptive families, and our birth families, too, if we are privileged to know them, and build an identity from what has been lost and found.

  Yet I’ve also found common ground sharing my story with people who, while not adopted, have distant or absent parents. Some of them, too, seek reconnection and reunion, with complicated results. A year or two after I met my birth father, I became friends with a woman who had grown up without her father, only to look for him as an adult. She seemed to understand and relate to my story as much as a fellow adoptee might.

  Some of my friends who come from difficult or estranged families, who have lost and regained biological connections, wonder, as I do, whether our own kids will ever truly grasp what it was like for us growing up. While many of us earnestly try to share our truths and our memories with our children, because it is part of sharing our whole selves with them, it’s not always easy to find the words. When my girls were younger, an adoption counselor told me that the most important thing is creating a culture of
openness within the family, in which hard questions are never off-limits. “They should know they can ask you anything they want about the past, even if the answer is ‘I will tell you when you’re older,’” she said. “And then you have to follow through on that promise.”

  As our children have gotten older, Cindy and I have talked with greater intensity about when and how we will tell our daughters the whole truth about our family. We agree that it is their history to know one day; we have no interest in withholding it. And from a lifetime of questions, ones I often pondered all on my own, I know that one question will always lead to another and to another.

  A few days before the first Christmas my sister and I were ever able to spend together, we stopped in at a neighborhood wine bar. Before ringing up our beer, wine, and the hard blackberry cider I persuaded my sister to try, the owner asked to see my ID. “Good genes!” she said, when she saw my age. “You two should really thank your parents.” Cindy and I exchanged loaded glances; I could tell that she was trying not to laugh aloud.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “We’ll definitely do that.”

  It’s true that lurking somewhere in the material we received from each of our parents is the explanation for our similar looks, our shared curiosity and stubbornness, our catalog of similar facial expressions (never more alike than when we are annoyed or skeptical), my impatience, my sister’s gentleness. As different as we are—I sometimes feel that every single weakness of mine is somehow magically balanced out, almost neutralized, by her many strengths—the older we get, the more time we spend together, the more I see how we are alike.

  Some might say I shouldn’t grieve for the years we missed, for how can you miss something, someone, you’ve never known? Yet I still feel it, all the time, especially as I watch my own two daughters chatter and play and grow up together. People are always commenting on how similar they look. Even when they annoy each other, the connection they share is astonishing to me; it’s just as deep, as constant and visceral, as their love for my husband and me, and will hopefully endure long after we are gone. They were made to go the distance together, I think; I cannot imagine one of them without the other.

  Cindy and I are recognized as sisters, too, even when we don’t volunteer the information. Our children have mistaken us for one another, from the back. Every time anyone comments on our similarities, it makes me smile, though I know most of the people looking at us probably imagine we had a shared childhood, like most other pairs of sisters. It’s happened at restaurants, at stores, at the nail salon: You’re sisters, right? I can just tell. I like to imagine that people can tell from the connection between us, the one that has grown up over the years since we first met—the one that even a childhood spent apart couldn’t fully sever. In my more fanciful moments, I wonder if others can see my esteem for her, that half idolizing, almost palpable love I imagine a lot of younger sisters feel. Maybe people can tell that we, too, belong together, like my own daughters do. That we, too, were made to go the distance; that we have always shared a bond, and it was only waiting for us to meet and make something new.

  The last time my older daughter asked me about adoption, I was honest about the fact that growing up adopted, the only Korean I knew, was hard for me. She knows that reunion changed everything, but that it was difficult, too. It was my choice, I have explained to her; I wanted my life to change. I searched because I wasn’t content with what I’d always known—I knew there was more out there. Reunion has taught me that there is no way to remake your history or your family in the image you want. But there can be more, if you are willing to look for those stories that were lost—you might just find someone new to forgive, to love, to grow with. Someone to take your hand and search with you.

  When I went looking for my past, I told my daughter, I had to take what I found, the good and the bad. I would do it all again, a hundred times over, to find my sister. As a sister, I think she understood.

  In the end, I think no one was more surprised than my adoptive parents that the story they told me as a child—one they had faithfully passed on to me, despite the holes, the speculation, because they believed in it—bore little resemblance to the truth. While my reunion hasn’t always been easy for them, they were genuinely happy when I met Cindy, and have now met her and Rick and my niece Carrie, too. The only thing they all have in common is their love for me, and it turns out that is enough to begin building a friendly relationship.

  Since my reunion, my parents have begun to question some of the long-held assumptions about my adoption and the circumstances that led to it. A few months after I met my birth father, my mother asked me, “What do you think about your adoption now? Do you think it was a good thing?” The question represented a possibility we had never before acknowledged. That she might be willing to reconsider the sacred scripture of my childhood—adoption as not just “a good thing,” but ordered by God himself—was so shocking I didn’t know what to say.

  I know my place in my adoptive family is secure. That is not the same thing as always feeling that I belong. My grandmother and my mother will talk about other people in the family, the cousins I do not resemble even slightly—He looks exactly like John at that age or She’s Margaret all over—and I’ll know that when they look at me, they can’t see generations of people they’ve known and loved. At some age I cannot identify with certainty, I began to realize that they all felt comfortable, settled within our family in ways I still do not at times. It wasn’t just our obvious physical differences that made me question if I belonged: when I heard a beloved relative use an Asian slur, refer to a Chinese dish as “flied lice,” or joke about not being able to tell Asian people apart—when they would rail about immigration or ask me what I thought about “open borders” or “anchor babies”—when I grew up and we began to argue about our votes and our values—the words it’s because I’m Asian and none of you can understand what it’s like would often be on the edge of my tongue.

  Though I’ve sometimes grieved for absent solidarity, now that I am raising children of color in a starkly divided America I feel, even more strongly, that maintaining my silence with my relatives—pretending my race does not matter—is no longer a choice I can make. It feels like my duty as my white family’s de facto Asian ambassador to remind them that I am not white, that we do experience this country in different ways because of it, that many people still know oppression far more insidious and harmful than anything I’ve ever faced. Every time I do this, I am breaching the sacred pact of our family, our once-shared belief that my race is irrelevant in the presence of their love. But withholding hard truths and my honest opinions would also sell short the love I have for them, and they for me. The fierce wish I still harbor for them to understand me for who I am, stand with me in love and full acceptance, persists because they chose me and they raised me: we are one another’s responsibility.

  When my mother asked if I thought my transracial adoption was “a good thing,” I was reminded, again, of the fact that I no longer think of it in terms of good or bad, but realistic versus oversimplified. Yes, I often felt alone, unseen in my white family. At times, I still do. But to be adopted is to know only the rewritten story, one of an infinite number possible. I will never be able to honestly say I would have fared better with my birth parents, or any other unknown family.

  “I do wish you and Dad had tried to find out more about my birth family,” I said. “I could have learned more if I’d just had help.”

  Now I was within a breath of my birth mother’s onetime attempt at contact. I suspected my parents were trying to protect me by “losing” the letter; ensuring I could never read or act on it, even when I was older. But I also knew they were protecting themselves. The terror of having me taken away had never entirely left them—and maybe that was a motivation I would never fully understand, because I had never been in their position.

  Sometimes I still wonder what might have happened if they had given my birth mother a different answe
r. I might have grown up knowing my birth family—knowing their names, at least; knowing their faces. I might have reached an understanding of myself as a Korean, found a way to embrace that fact without shame, many years earlier. I don’t know if I would have learned the whole truth, or if it would have been somehow kept from me until Cindy or Jessica could break the rule of family silence and let me in. Still, I might have learned so much more about them. If there were risks, perhaps there would have been certain unexpected gifts as well.

  For all my wondering and questions as a child, it’s taken me a long time to understand that, as adopters and adoptee, my parents and I will always view my adoption in vastly different ways. There are some things your parents are never going to fully understand, just because they have never experienced being adopted, a fellow adoptee told me years ago, before I decided to search for my birth family. The questions that sometimes kept me awake at night, the ones I hoarded and kept to myself, afraid to even scribble in my diary, did not haunt my mother and father at all. It took me many years to recognize and give voice to this fundamental dissonance: their gain was mine, too, but only after I experienced a deep loss. I suspect they are probably a little relieved that I did not find a happy, intact biological family to rejoin.

  “We weren’t even sure what questions to ask when she reached out through the lawyer,” Mom admitted. “The idea of sharing you with them scared us. We never wanted or planned to be in contact with your birth family, and we didn’t know how to support you in a more open adoption.”

  In other words, we were a family, sufficient unto ourselves. My unknown, unseen birth mother had been trying to step out of the shadows—of course my parents had been afraid. I knew this already, but was glad my mother felt able to say it aloud. And when I told her, “Being adopted probably saved my life,” it wasn’t an appeasement, a melodramatic or magnanimous offering. Reunion had given me many truths, some of them difficult to bear. This was one I would always believe.