by Nicole Chung
They thought adoption was the best thing for you.
They were right, Mom.
“Maybe it would have been good if they had gotten counseling as a family before the adoption,” my mother ventured. “Maybe you would have been better off if your birth father had divorced your birth mother earlier, and kept you and Cindy. Then you wouldn’t have been separated.”
I shook my head a little, not disagreeing so much as acknowledging the impossibility of ever knowing: it was so hard to say, three decades later, what would have been best for the largest number of people. I thought of something Jessica had told me once, when I asked if she ever resented my sudden reappearance and the unearthing of family secrets. I never blamed you, she insisted. I’m glad you opened everything up and showed us the truth. It was hard, but it’s the end result that matters. Remembering her words now, I could better appreciate that wisdom. Maybe I would have been happy growing up with my sister after our parents divorced. And maybe my adoptive parents would have eventually found another child to adopt, one who would have been less of a mystery to them.
But just as I bristled when people clung to platitudes about adoption giving kids “a better life,” I was unsure what “better off” would have meant in my own case. Could my birth father have made different choices and raised Cindy and me, together? Of course, but he didn’t. He had—like my adoptive parents—done the best he could, improvising a new plan when the first went awry. Even now that we’ve met, now that I genuinely care for and respect him as the real person he is and not the nebulous, idealized parent I’d once imagined, I find it difficult to imagine growing up as my birth father’s child. I don’t know if I ever would have measured up to his standards; a part of me will always feel a little relieved I never had to try.
As for my birth mother, we remain estranged, if that is the correct term for a relationship that never truly began. I pity her, for many reasons, though I am certain she wouldn’t want me to. Jessica once told me that if our mother had gotten help, if she had been able to go to therapy, she might be different, but there were real barriers: there was no way to pay for the help she likely needed, and even if they’d had the means, she would have had to find a doctor who spoke Korean. When my birth parents were considering adoption for me, the child welfare system that took charge of my placement overlooked the opportunity to look closer and see children at risk, a family in crisis.
When she called out of the blue one Saturday not long ago, as I stood on the sidelines at my daughter’s soccer game, I answered and then froze when I realized who it was—much like I had all those years ago when Abby was just one week old. I thought, Here’s where you ask her not to call again. But I didn’t. I’ve squandered so many chances to tell her I don’t want to talk to her again. I’m incapable of imagining her in my life, and apparently also incapable of telling her to forget about me. Sometimes I can’t do it because her sins, while real, are not against me. Sometimes I don’t because I don’t want to give her one more thing to hold against Cindy. Sometimes I think about how she tried to find me when I was little, only to be turned away like a beggar at the gates.
And I know that if I told her, I know who you are and that’s why I don’t want anything to do with you, it would be false—her actions have ensured I’ll never truly know who she is. It is a different kind of ache than the pain of abandonment I once knew, the self-doubts and sense of inadequacy with which I grew up. It still hurts, but it’s a hurt I can understand, a sorrow I can bear, because I now know the reasons for it.
“I hope that now there is more knowledge and compassion in adoption,” my mother said to me not long after my reunion, “so that more birth parents and adoptive parents can figure out what’s best for them and their kids.”
I nodded, of course; it was like something plucked from my own head, a line I might offer to those considering adoption. Only later did it occur to me that this and other discussions with my mother would have seemed impossible before I found my birth family.
Until I decided to search, my adoption, important as it was, remained a single, settled matter relegated to the past—none of us had any reason to reconsider it. Reunion has done more than restore relationships that had once been beyond my ability to fully imagine; it has enabled a shift in existing ones. It has forced my adoptive parents to think about my birth parents not as poor, pitiable immigrants or people who might steal me away, but real people with their own feelings, fears, and failings. It’s forced them to think about how I must have felt when I lost not only my first family, but all knowledge of my roots.
I won’t ever regret my search or my reunion; how both opened up new possibilities while closing others. I am thankful to know my birth father, even just a little; to have met Cindy and talked with Jessica. My birth family’s importance, their place in my life, can never be denied again. But one thing has not wavered or changed: I am still my adoptive parents’ daughter. No matter what, no matter our differences, they will always be my parents, the ones who wanted me when no one else did.
Mama, am I a real Korean?”
Abby was five years and a few days old, perched on the edge of our couch, one finger hooked around the edge of her book. She asked me questions all the time, and had been doing so ever since she began to talk, but somehow I had never imagined her asking this one—why? Before I could recover, or reach for an answer, she added, “Because I don’t think I am.”
I watched the furrow on her brow deepen. This was a moment, brand-new, that somehow felt so familiar; it was one I’d always feared for her, and hoped she could somehow avoid. “What do you mean, honey?”
“I don’t know how to speak Korean,” she said. “I think that means I must not be a real one.”
I closed my eyes briefly. She didn’t seem upset, just puzzled—but I couldn’t help but feel upset on her behalf. Why had I been unprepared for this moment? How many times had I said the exact same thing to myself?
She went on to tell me that her “real” Chinese friends at school spoke Chinese, and one of them had asked her if she was Chinese, too. “I told her that you were Korean, and that I was Korean and Irish and Lemonese.”
“Lebanese.”
“Lebanese. And then she asked if I could speak Korean. I said I couldn’t, and she said, ‘Then how do you know you’re really Korean?’”
As an adoptee, I was well aware that my multiracial kids would one day have far more difficult, more complex questions of identity to answer for themselves—questions that could not be answered with a language litmus test. Abby had already overheard comments from strangers curious about her and her sister—So, what are they, exactly?—and she knew that our family looked different from some other families, not just because I was adopted. For the time being, though, while I could still provide some answers, I just wanted to reassure my older daughter. Wasn’t that why I had sought out my birth family in the first place—so that she wouldn’t have to doubt who she was, wonder about her history, the way I always had?
“You are a real Korean,” I said. “Lots of Koreans who live in America can’t speak the language, or don’t speak it well.”
“Auntie Cindy speaks Korean,” she pointed out. I smiled again: I would always feel happy when reminded of the wondrous fact that my children had always known Cindy as their aunt, had spent vacations and holidays with her family, and adored her and their uncle and little cousin. “Does Carrie speak Korean?” she added, referring to Cindy and Rick’s daughter, born two months before Grace.
“Carrie is little. Cindy might have taught her a little Korean, but not much.”
“I want to learn Korean. You should learn how to talk in Korean first, and then you can teach me.”
“Sweetheart,” I said, laughing in spite of the twinge in my heart, “it takes a long time to learn a language. Even if I started right now, I’m not sure when I would know enough to be able to teach you.”
Looking at my bewildered child, I was suddenly reminded
of the time she had asked me how airplanes stayed up in the air. I told her I would need to look it up to be able to fully understand and explain it to her, and she exclaimed, almost scandalized, “But you’re a grown-up! You’ve had your whole life to learn everything!” I had explained to her that even the smartest grown-up couldn’t possibly learn everything there was to know in the world. Her answering expression, one of mingled shock and deep disappointment, rooted itself in my memory. She wore the exact same look now as she watched me hedge on Korean lessons.
I had thought about trying to study Korean, though I had yet to pursue it between having her little sister and beginning graduate school. Studying a language was only one of many ways to feel connected to a culture, a history, a clan, but to me it had always seemed an important one. In college I had briefly considered enrolling in a Korean course, until I realized most of the other students were Koreans looking to “brush up”—I could not imagine anything that would make me feel like more of an imposter than starting from scratch in a room of near-fluent speakers. I had always envied other Koreans I knew who spoke the language so effortlessly, including my birth father and my sister; their cultural identities had seemed infinitely more natural, less ambiguous than my own.
Now I felt the same heavy inadequacy I had experienced when I was pregnant with Abby. I hadn’t been able to bear the thought of her growing up without her history; I had focused on reconnecting with my birth family, restoring those ties, believing that both she and I would benefit from it. And we had. I knew I would never stop feeling awed by this child who had inspired me, months before she was even born, to search for my birth family and my lost roots.
But currently her only understanding of her identity seemed to stem from the knowledge that she was not just one race or the other, and I wasn’t sure how to help her understand or feel proud of her mixed heritage, in all its fullness and complexity. I didn’t want her to always define herself in terms of the negative: I’m not this or that. I wanted her to be able to say—as I had not—This is who I am.
I thought about the words of a fellow adoptee and mother of a little girl, shared with me not long after I became a parent. “Being able to have a child, this biological connection, has meant everything to me,” she’d told me. “Everything she does, I’m amazed. I’m going to give her everything I can, teach her everything I can, share with her everything I can.” Perhaps studying a little Korean would be a fun and logical way to start filling in the gaps for my curious daughter. And what else might I do? I could try out my sister’s recipes, ones I had watched her prepare for us during visits. I could take out the hanbok my birth father and his wife had bought for our family in Korea and maybe even wear them sometime. Someday—we talked about it often—Cindy and I planned to take our children to Korea, so she could show all of us around together. I still hoped we might be able to do this before all our relatives there were gone.
I tried to ignore the voice of doubt suggesting that perhaps I had no right to any of this; that all of it, country visit and potential language study included, represented little more than a glorified, grasping form of cultural appropriation. If not for the adoption, I wouldn’t have thought twice about these things being part of my birthright. I had gained so much since I set out to find my birth family: another family, a deeper understanding of my history and my identity, people with whom I knew that I belonged. I had found Cindy, beyond any hope or expectation I had ever entertained in my wildest childhood imaginings. If that were possible—if a stranger could become my sister—surely I could also find some way to regain at least some part of my heritage, my cultural birthright, and pass on that knowledge and sense of belonging to my daughters.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I told Abby, and watched her break into a grin. “It’s going to be hard work, you know.”
“I can work very hard, Mama. And I hope you learn really fast so you can teach me,” she said. “But it’s fine if it takes a month or two. There are a lot of other things I have to focus on, like getting better on my bike.”
I found several local Korean schools affiliated with churches, but no one returned my calls—except for one man who informed me that the Korean school was for children (and native speakers) only. “Are you a child?” he demanded. When I admitted I was not, he hung up on me. Finally, after weeks of searching and calling around, a private tutor named Angie responded. I couldn’t help but think of a Korean American friend with the same name, who’d been a kind of big sister to me in college, years before I found my birth family. Nicole, I received your message about wanting to learn Korean. I would be happy to teach you. How is this Friday evening for you?
We arranged to meet at a coffee shop in the sprawling shopping complex down the road from my house. A woman I guessed to be in her forties, shorter and slimmer than me, Angie easily identified me near the pastry case. We found a table in the back of the coffee shop. She chuckled as she inspected me from behind rimless rectangular glasses. “When you told me that you had two children, I was expecting someone a lot older,” she said, over the low chatter of evening customers and the click of laptop keys one table over. “Why do you want to learn Korean?”
When I explained that I was adopted, and had not grown up speaking the language, her eyebrows disappeared under neat black bangs. “Your adoptive parents couldn’t find someone to teach you?” At this I was a bit taken aback; I had heard of adoptees of younger generations taking language lessons, learning to cook certain dishes, studying cultural dance or music, thanks to the newer focus on adoptive families celebrating a child’s heritage, but there had been few opportunities like that when I was a child. I doubted it had ever occurred to my adoptive parents that I might want to learn anything about Korea. Had they ever suggested a language class, I’m sure I would have complained—it was bad enough that I couldn’t change the way I looked; did I really have to emphasize my differences by learning a language no one else I knew could speak?
Angie produced a colorful workbook from her bag and pushed it across the table toward me. Smiling children—none of whom appeared to be Korean—danced in a circle around the book’s pale yellow cover. The cover wear and faint pencil markings along the edges made it clear that the book wasn’t new. It was a children’s book, of course, because I knew less than a child.
“This book used to be my son’s,” she said, opening to a page filled with characters that I recognized as consonants. “When he was young I tried to teach him Korean, but he never wanted to study. He’s just like you now—you know, very Americanized.”
Over the next hour, as my oversweetened black tea grew cold, Angie took me through all of the Korean consonants and vowels one by one. I did my best to parrot her pronunciations and write each character on a piece of scratch paper. Then we began pairing them up so that I could see how syllables and words were constructed. When she told me, “You know, you kind of say the words like a native speaker,” I felt absurdly pleased with myself, like a child praised by her schoolteacher.
I committed most of the new letters to mind right there at the table, thanks to a strong visual memory; I found I could copy them with surprising speed. They were easier than the Japanese character sets I’d learned in high school. Letters bloomed from my pencil, diminutive bars and circles and boxes that I would have to learn to decode. “You see how easy it is to write in Korean,” Angie said. “Now that you know these, you can put them together to make words. What do you want to write? Did your parents give you a Korean name?”
At her urging, I carefully wrote my Korean name on a fresh piece of paper, the name my birth father had chosen for me. In English, he spelled my first name Soo Jung, but in Korean its second syllable was actually identical to the family name: ?, Romanized as Chung in our family and pronounced more like Jung. ???, my full Korean birth name rendered in my new, shaky Hangul. For fun, I also wrote Cindy’s name: ???. I loved seeing our names, our common syllables, side by side: they had long bound us together without our kno
wledge, even though we had grown up apart.
Angie showed me the page in the book on introductions. She wrote and then read the line for me to parrot back, using my Korean name. “‘Je ireumeun Jung Soo Jung imnida.’”
It wasn’t, though it had been once. I hesitated, wondering if I should change the phrase, use my actual name. Instead I took a deep breath and repeated the words, trying to own and internalize the everyday statement that felt, to me, extraordinary.
She had me say it again, and again, making tiny adjustments to my pronunciation, and each time my voice got a little stronger. I had never claimed my birth name, associated myself or introduced myself with it, in English. It was strange to do so even in Korean, for an audience of one, but I felt like less of an imposter than I expected to. It made me wonder if there might come a day when I would reclaim my birth name, in part or in its entirety, as some other adopted people I knew had done.
By the time Angie concluded our lesson, an employee was sweeping up nearby, circling closer as we stood up to leave. I looked around, surprised to realize how much time had passed; we were the last customers in the café. “I want you to master the alphabet for next time,” the tutor said, handing me her son’s old book. “You should be able to write all the letters, and combine them into words, without looking at the book.”
I agreed with considerably more confidence than I felt. Yet I did feel heartened, even excited, as I slid the workbook into my bag. She hadn’t laughed at me, accused me of not being a “real” Korean, or told me it was impossible to learn at my age. While vowels and consonants were only the building blocks of words and sentences, the letters that filled my paper in neat, orderly columns already looked familiar—like new acquaintances, if not old friends. This language, the language of my original family, seemed just a little less mysterious than it had before.