by Anne Moody
A final note: when Jocelyn was in middle school, the district hosted a conference on adoption, which the school social worker and I attended. I was heartened to discover that requesting teachers by race, for a child of the same race, was now accepted as not only legitimate but also enlightened policy.
18
A Sister’s Journey of the Heart
And here are Caitlin’s comments on the trip to Korea . . . and on her little sister. This article was published in the Seattle Times in 2003.
Coming Home: A Sister’s Journey of the Heart
By Caitlin Moody
Hey, you. Hey, Joss, Jawz, Jossie, Joey, JoJo. Jocelyn Okyung Moody. Hey, pal. Jocelyn. The young one. The third one. The last one. After Erin, after Caitlin, there is Jocelyn. Okyung. The infant you. The Korean you. The you with a mysterious biology. Was your mother athletic, too? Did her eyes weigh with the same intensity? Or your father? Are those his broad feet? His thick, straight hair, whispering red in the summer, blue-black in the snow? Who gave you the dimple? The petite nose and tiny moles you so lament? Moody. A last name. A family name. Your family name. Not to mention a certain trait in each of us. The talking you, the hearing you, the reading, writing, singing you. Your humor and your laughter. Your poetry. Your temper, or at least the resulting flow of curse words. It’s your “I love you.”
Just like mine, your first word was “Mom.” I taught you the alphabet on the same scratched, green easel during lesson after lesson of “school.” In our living room. In our pajamas. You sitting like an eager puppy, brown toes tucked under your new big-girl pants. “A, B, C, G, L-M-N-O-P.” Tripping over the same letters I frustrated Erin with so many times when I was the student. Different from the arrangements of lines, curves, dots and strokes they taught us, or tried to teach us, every summer at Korean Culture Camp.
Before you could speak, Erin and I were singing “Old MacDonald” in Korean, dancing in hanboks, and holding colorful fans. Looking at the camp pictures now, two white and fleshy faces pop out from the sea of smooth tan—a hundred Korean adoptees smiling back at the camera. We didn’t notice then, never felt strange. Not at five or at eight. Did you ever notice it at that age?
I still think it’s a little ironic you went to camp only a few times yourself. By the time you were old enough, I guess Mom had decided we’d all been sufficiently “cultured.” Or maybe she was just tired of the long trip into Seattle. Either way, you seemed to be more than well-adjusted. We talked so often and so positively about Korea and adoption, you had taken to asking Erin and me about our birth mothers. Entirely confused by our answers, you would search us for the joke and then feign an understanding. It was evident from your look that you felt terribly sorry for us, either for being so ignorant or for truly missing such a crucial part of life. Sure we had Mom, but no birth mom? We even looked the same. How boring.
Mom may have been right about the TV. It did make us fight sometimes. But it did worse things than that. Erin was fourteen already; I was eleven. I remember a day near the end of summer that had us home while Mom was in Seattle. Erin was already immersed in Jerry Springer when we sunk down onto the other sofa, ignoring the grass stains on our shorts and the mud on our bare feet. Jerry was talking to members of the Ku Klux Klan. We sat and listened to a man in a purple robe and sorcerer’s hat tell the audience about the natural superiority of his race, the white race. Uninterrupted, he told us of the hatred he felt—we should all feel—for less-evolved, inherently savage, dark-skinned races. I think you were too young to remember. “Caitlin,” you were still looking at the TV, “does he hate me?” I hope you were too young to remember.
You started looking. In the Nakatas’ grocery store you would tap Mom on the leg, “Look, Mom, an Asian like me!” So we all started looking. Everywhere we went. “Hey, Joss, there’s an Asian. Oh, and over there, there’s two.” You loved it. It was like our own little road-trip game: Spot the Asians.
We talked about a trip to Korea the way we talk about everything else: “Definitely someday. Maybe after Dad’s next book.”
So yeah, I was as surprised as you were when we boarded the plane at Sea-Tac—taking you back. Taking us with you. Thirteen years after your first flight and thirteen hours before landing in Seoul.
You didn’t sleep the whole way there. I know, because I couldn’t sleep, either. Exhaustion made the experience of maneuvering through the airport just that much more disorienting. But you were wide awake.
In the city, we immediately drew stares. An American family strolling through the crowded streets, craning our necks, saying nothing. It was the ultimate Korean Culture Camp, and we were all there.
Our second day out, winding through stand after stand of fresh fruit and dried fish in the covered market, you accidentally bumped into an older man. He turned and began scolding you in rapid Korean as you stood speechless. Appearing terrified, you returned to where the rest of us were standing, then immediately erupted into a grin I’d never seen on your face before. “He thought I was Korean!”
Mom couldn’t stop scrutinizing every face we saw. Looking for your features. Looking for you. She cried when we saw the building where you were born, back behind the fish market. It’s now a Buddhist temple.
After a few days, you were moving easily through the sidewalks and market, floating ahead as if holding an invisible pass. Remember the woman in the Cheju market? We were walking together past her stand when she stopped us—stopped you. Gripping your shoulders, she looked close into your face, then looked over at Mom. “Mother?” she asked, and you nodded. Her eyes filled with a smile that took over her intense expression. “Welcome back!”
The next day was the reunion of one hundred North and South Korean relatives separated by the division of the country. Apart for nearly fifty years, this small sample of families was allowed to meet in the Demilitarized Zone for one day as a sign of good faith, before returning to their respective sides. Every reunion was being televised on every channel, and every South Korean was watching.
I was watching you. Family after family fell together sobbing, touching each other’s faces, some fifty years older than their memories. Your eyes were attached to the screen in our hotel room, twenty stories above the traffic lights. I wondered if you were looking to find something familiar. I wondered if you knew the immensity of what you saw. I knew that you felt it. But were you feeling it because of history? Sympathy? Empathy? Biology? All of these?
Yes, when we met your foster mother, I could see that it was all of these. Sitting in the upstairs office of the orphanage, your orphanage, we waited with our photo album and gifts. Shin Hae Soon had arrived, they told us, but she was collecting her nerves and emotion before entering the room. Twenty-one foster children, and you were the first to return.
As soon as she stepped into the room, all her collecting was washed aside. Seeing you once, the tears took over. Her wiry four-foot-ten-inch frame taking you into her arms like the infant she remembered. She touched your hair, your face, your tummy.
She’d brought you that set of underwear—white with pink dots—the customary gift for a daughter on her thirteenth birthday. But American food had made you much bigger than the thirteen-year-old Korean girl she’d expected. Later, in the hotel room, we all laughed as you put the underwear on the only place they’d fit—your head. And we laughed harder when you put on your new hanbok, made of unbelievable silk with intricate embroidering, the underwear still pulled over your long, black hair. The perfect reconciliation: your body draped in exquisite, traditional Korean elegance; your head squeezed into a pair of cotton underwear, laughing to tears.
I had to leave the day you went to visit the Demilitarized Zone. I was flying straight to Los Angeles to start school, and wouldn’t see you again until Thanksgiving. It felt strange leaving you there. I was boarding my second leg of the round-trip flight, but you had already completed yours. Your next flight would be another take
off, another beginning. Walking away from you with my bags, I didn’t turn to wave, wanting no one to see the tears that invaded my eyes for the first time, betraying my nonchalance.
Mom called me when you all got home. I was doing fine, a little fuzzy, but fine. I showed pictures of the trip to my new friends, but they were difficult to explain. I couldn’t describe how different you looked in the pictures. How the quality of your expression was new, mature, fuller. I couldn’t define it for myself, let alone for people who’d never known you.
When I came home for Thanksgiving, Mom had put the map of Korea on the kitchen wall next to the one of the U.S. We told aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents stories from the trip while we stuffed ourselves with turkey, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie. You can always eat the most pumpkin pie.
I still get to laugh occasionally when someone new sees your picture and, after pausing to be sure it’s politically correct, they manage, “So she’s adopted, right?”
“No,” I begin, “it was the strangest thing”—but I never take it too far. Then I get to tell them how you’re the only Korean varsity player in your basketball league, and fill them in on your musical aspirations as “Lil’ Asian the Rap Sensation.” You always give me good material.
So anyway, I guess I’ll let you go. I just wanted to say hey.
Hey, you.
19
Awkward (and Worse) Encounters for Adoptive Families
One thing that can catch interracial adoptive families by surprise is the emergence of awkward misconceptions years later, when the adoption and the drama surrounding it are all but forgotten, and family members no longer expect people to remark upon it.
One lovely summer day, for example, Jocelyn, who was then twenty-one, and my husband took the ferry into downtown Seattle together. They were on their way to the Korean Consulate to get her a passport so that she could spend the summer in Seoul. It was the summer after her junior year in college, and she had gotten an internship with the City of Seattle Engineering Department. Incredibly, Seattle was working on a project with a professor at Seoul National University, and immediately upon Jocelyn’s accepting the internship, her boss asked if she would be willing to spend it in Korea.
My fifty-eight-year-old husband (a man with such a kind face that he used to be told he looked like Jesus, and whose appearance once rattled a middle-aged golfer so thoroughly that she gasped at the sight of him and then joked about “meeting my Maker”) was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, typical Northwest garb. Jocelyn, who was planning to meet friends for dinner in Seattle after the appointment, was wearing a bright red summer dress and sandals. As they boarded the boat, they noticed that a middle-aged woman was glaring at my husband. He turned in confusion to Jocelyn, to see if she noticed, and saw that she was barely managing to stifle a laugh. At which point my husband realized that the only reason this woman could imagine for a young Asian woman to be with an older Caucasian man was as his consort. She could not envision this lovely young woman as the beloved child that she actually was but instead saw her as the embodiment of exploitation.
Such stares, while not frequent, are certainly disquieting, and this proved not to be an isolated event. There were more such glaring incidents; and one day when Jocelyn and my husband ran into an acquaintance he had not seen for more than twenty years, the man asked, “Is this your wife?”
When Jocelyn was little, things were wonderfully different. When she rode the ferry with her father, they would both be bathed in the approving attention of strangers. The women who worked on the ferry dubbed themselves her “ferry godmothers” and would gather around to admire her whenever she was aboard. People didn’t treat me that way when I was with her, but something about the father/charming daughter combination drew their affection. My husband used to joke that it was great for his ego to go out alone with her.
So it was a difficult adjustment to find himself an object of scorn, but, characteristically, easygoing Jocelyn thought her father’s discomfort was pretty hilarious. Hopefully, the glaring woman figured out her mistake and learned something about pre-judging, even though, in truth, she was statistically more likely to have been right than wrong, and in that light, her disapproval was understandable, even laudable.
Uncomfortable encounters like these are inevitable, and adoptive families need to learn how to deal with them in positive ways. Ideally, their responses will serve to inform and educate others. It would have been great if my husband and daughter could have said or done something (like have her loudly call him Dad) that would have quickly clarified the situation and made everyone feel better. But one rarely has a great response available just exactly when it’s needed.
During most of Jocelyn’s childhood, people were pretty oblivious to her heritage. A favorite family story is about how her middle-school basketball coach, a Japanese American man who knew our family well, had a serious talk with her about her prospects as a ball player in high school. He concluded that her natural abilities as an athlete would be aided by the anticipated growth spurt “because your dad is pretty tall.” Even after she started laughing, it took him a minute to understand what was so funny.
As with many interracial adoptees, it wasn’t until she left home that Jocelyn started to really be identified primarily as Asian rather than as a member of our family or just as herself. She went to college in Massachusetts, where Korean adoption is less common than it is in Seattle, and discovered that no one, even upon learning her name, assumed that she was a Korean adoptee with Caucasian American parents. So she spent a fair amount of time educating the people she got to know about foreign adoption. One of her first stories along these lines involved the boyfriend of her first roommate, who recommended a movie to her one day.
“You’ll really like it. It has all kinds of kung-fu fighting and stuff,” he said.
“Well, . . . I may look Asian . . . ”
Things were weirder when she tried out a couple meetings of the Korean Student Association and discovered that she had nothing in common with the people there. In retrospect, this is puzzling, since she had been able to establish a number of good friendships with Korean women during her summer in Seoul, but it was nonetheless true, and she felt that her behavior and demeanor seemed boisterous and inappropriate compared to the other female students. (The fact that they were all engineers probably skewed things a bit socially.)
Jocelyn played soccer during her college years and was rewarded for her efforts with Most Valuable Player awards and team captain designation in her junior and senior seasons. She made close friends on that team and thrived on the competition of intercollegiate soccer. My husband and I took a five-day vacation to the East Coast each fall during Jocelyn’s college years so that we could watch a few of her games. We were able to attend the last game of her junior season, against the team that led her school’s division.
It was senior night for a number of the girls, there was some extra emotion on the field, and things seemed a little rougher than normal. Just before the end of the first half, which was scoreless, we were startled to see Jocelyn blatantly elbow an opponent and send her flying. The ball was nowhere near them and the referee apparently didn’t see what had happened. There was some buzz in the stands, though, and we exchanged “What’s up?” glances with the parents around us. A minute later, there was another ruckus on the field and this time the ref ejected one of the seniors on Jocelyn’s team, a gentle girl who had played for four years without a single foul. She came off the field in a rage, and the whistle blew for halftime. The second half of the game was without obvious drama, but clearly something was amiss, and, although the other team won, they didn’t seem to be celebrating their victory. Neither team was smiling.
The trouble had apparently started early in the game with a lot of trash talk, but the defining moment came when a pretty little blonde snarled, “Get off me, you Chink!” at Jocelyn, who reacted with the thrown elbow. Sh
e had then told an amazed teammate what had been said, and that girl had reacted with anger that quickly spread to the whole team. When I heard all this, I was furious and wanted to confront the girl, but Jocelyn assured me that that would be unwise. The tension was alleviated by an African American friend of hers, who ran up to Jocelyn as we were leaving the field, “You are so lucky! So lucky! I’ve waited all my life for someone to call me ‘N*****’ so I could take them out!” Jocelyn and the teammates around her laughed heartily, while the parents . . . well, none of us knew quite how to react, although the tension in the air had immediately lifted, for some reason.
Jocelyn’s coach and the athletic director asked to meet with her the next day, after my husband and I would be on our way back home. Jocelyn called just as we were boarding the plane to tell us that the incident was being taken seriously, that a report was being filed with their athletic conference, and that the other school would be expected to discipline the offending player, who was also a team captain. Jocelyn was surprised—and, ultimately, gratified—at the response. Eventually, she received a letter of apology from the girl, who was suspended for the rest of the season—a suspension that may have caused her team, which had been favored to win that year’s conference championship, to suffer a season-ending loss in their next game.
I don’t know what sort of long-term effect these punishments had on that girl or on her teammates. I don’t believe for a minute that she hadn’t used racial slurs before, as she claimed in her letter, or that she wouldn’t be using them again. But I do think that she and her teammates, as well as the girls on my daughter’s team and any other soccer players who heard about the incident, would now think twice about using racial slurs in a college game. It also sent a message to anyone on those teams who might have thought that using racial slurs wasn’t a big deal. And the aftermath meant a great deal to Jocelyn.