My family I (don’t) have to know
story by Jinae West :: photos by Adam Harris
By blood, I am not related to my parents or brother. We look nothing alike. In a sense, we are strangers, bound by signed government documents and a last name and obligation and love.
By blood, I am related to a man and woman I’ve never met. They live halfway across the world in miles I can only fathom on elementary school globes. I do not know their names or their favorite colors. I have no knowledge of their birthdays or present whereabouts. Sometimes I wonder if they’re even alive.
The only information I have is 21 years out of date, a frayed manila folder that’s 2 inches thick and 12 inches wide. On the front, it reads: “Jin Yung Ae, K88-1515,” my birth name and case number.
At 8, I was naïve to think that finding my birth parents would be like finding a friend in the phonebook. And if then it still proved to be difficult, I had faith in good fortune. Like the Nancy Drews and Encyclopedia Browns I read about in books, I would discover a clue that would lead to their identities. Or better yet, they would come looking for me.
Around the same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus and magic and superheroes, I realized they wouldn’t.
The folder is a good place to start.
I was born in Daegu, South Korea, in May 1988. My parents were unable to have biological children and looked into adopting overseas. They adopted my brother, Ben, from Korea three years earlier and wanted a second child. On a walk in the park, pushing my brother in the stroller, my mother turned to my father and told him she was ready for another one. He smiled and said, “Me, too.”
According to an article by Joan Heifetz Hollinger in “Adoption Quarterly,” nearly 30 percent of foreign-born adoptees came from South Korea in the late 1980s in the aftermath of the Korean War. At its peak, more than 8,000 children were sent abroad a year, mostly to the United States.
At the time I was born, Seoul was the host of the 1988 Summer Olympics. Holt International, an adoption agency, told my parents, instead of their child arriving in September, the flight would be delayed until February. The agency said it didn’t reflect well on Korea, exporting its children to other countries during the international games. My parents were heartbroken. They checked into getting visas to get me themselves but didn’t have to. I arrived in September.
“We have no idea why it changed,” my mother says, flipping through my baby book. “Sept. 29, the flight came into Detroit. Look, there you are!”
She leans against the dining room table, staring at the overexposed photographs and handwritten captions. Her fingers glide over each photo, touching it gently and remembering that split-second moment as only a mother could.
“See this photo?” she says, pointing. “Ben is whispering in my ear. I remember he said, ‘She doesn’t have very much hair, does she?’”
“Oh, and this one,” she says. “I love this one.”
After a while, I leave her at the table with her photos. They are hers, after all, more than they are mine. She’s lost between the pages of memories I’m unable to recall but she’ll never forget, 5-by-7s of candid smiles and first birthdays and first everythings.
When I come back downstairs an hour later, she’s still poring over the photo album.
“Are you coming up?” I ask. “Mom?”
But she’s far away and doesn’t seem to hear me. I watch as she presses her finger against the laminated page, bemused and bewildered by how all those years have melted away.
In seventh grade, my health teacher taught us about different families. There were single-parent families, families who had both parents, families who had none and families who had adopted.
It’s not that I was ashamed of being adopted; I feared being different. My classmates knew my parents and knew we didn’t look alike, but I didn’t care to bring it up. It was what set me apart from my friends when I longed to fit in.
Although I sat with my back to the teacher, I felt her eyes on me. “Jinae, you’re adopted, aren’t you?” she asked.
At the sound of my name, my shoulders slumped forward and I sank in my chair. My face glowed red. I wished she would stop picking on me. But I half-nodded, half-shrugged that yes, I was.
“Do you want to tell us about it?”
I concentrated hard at the textbook in front of me until the words began to blur. I couldn’t see her or my classmates. I was disappearing into a haze, safe from all the stares outside it.
“I don’t really want to talk about it,” I said.
It was something I struggled with for a while. Growing up in a predominantly white middle-class suburb in Akron, I had always felt uncomfortable, always knew I didn’t quite fit in and, at the same time, couldn’t see why. My parents were white, and I wasn’t. That was never a question. Neither was the fact I was adopted. But I didn’t appreciate people assuming my mother wasn’t my mother because we didn’t look the same or I was fluent in Korean or good at math. I ran home crying when I was made fun of at school. And I became painfully aware that I was different, but not in a way I thought was special and not in a way I could change.
As a child, I drew stick figures with brown hair and blue eyes. My dolls were blond. I pretended to struggle in school, even though most of the assignments came easy to me. I refused to perpetuate a stereotype I thought others expected me to fulfill. I lashed out at my parents unfairly for reasons they couldn’t understand, telling them I hated them for bringing me here.
When I was 10, I had a bad fight with my mother. By its end, I knew I had nothing else to gain. I screamed at her until my voice was raw and my lungs burned. It started as a trivial argument, the kind you remember for its foolishness but not its cause. I felt backed into a wall and let slip the words I knew would hurt the most. As a child, it was the only real leverage I had.
“You’re not my real mother,” I told her. “I hate you. I wish I lived with my real parents.”
The words lingered, hanging between us, stinging a reverberating silence. I waited for her rebuttal. A lifelong punishment. A week’s resentment. But none came because she sat there and took it and said nothing.
Holt International’s Web site offers services to adult adoptees to find their birth parents. It’s unrealistic to think I’ll find them in a short amount of time, but I hope for the best. I click on a link called “Information request,” which brings me to a blank form. It asks for general knowledge, like my birthplace, the names of my adoptive parents and so on. The Web site also has a message board. A lot of the topics deal with reaching out to birth families. Most of the posts are about how to begin finding them, but not what actually happens when you try. One user is in the process of tracking his birth family. He says it took more than six months for Holt to send the information he requested.
The frayed manila folder now sits on a shelf in my room and is the only thing that connects me to my birth parents. While I’ve always been curious, part of me never wants to know what’s inside. Knowing for sure why they decided to give me up would make it real and finite. The mystery gives it a sense of fiction. For all I know, they died in some tragic car accident or house fire and abandoned me involuntarily. I’ve built them up in my mind as a loving couple who would’ve kept me if they could, not allowing myself to believe otherwise.
I think of them on almost every birthday. It’s the only time I feel a real kinship because I figure if they think of me at all, it would be on the day I was born. And it’s nice to know we’re thinking of each other at the same time, a world apart.
In the past, I’ve told friends I remember my birth mother, or at least, one brief moment with her: I was in my crib, and she was staring down at me — a split-second memory. Of course, it defies all logic. Children don’t develop a sense of memory until they’re 3 or 4 years old. But I’m positive it was her. I don’t know who else it could’ve been. And her face was full of love and adoration, I’m sure of it.
When I call my brother to ask if he has ever tried to find his birth parents, he tells me no. His answer is abrupt. He doesn’t want that burden. He doesn’t want to have to take care of them if they need it.
“You never even thought about it?” I ask.
“No. Never.”
Around the same time I began to wonder about my birth parents a few years ago, my mother and father had told me about Ben’s. His birth mother was deaf, mute and unmarried. Her circumstances were grim. She was very young and didn’t have money to support a baby, so she gave him up. They said Ben never asked about his file or his birth parents.
On the phone, Ben tells me about how difficult it was growing up, feeling like a loner at recess, having trouble making friends and being made fun of all the time. It’s then when I realize we’ve never talked about this before. My phone calls to him are usually short and polite: I ask him how he’s doing in Baltimore, he asks how I’m doing in school and then we hang up. But this time is different. We laugh and reminisce about what was great and awful about being adopted — the teasing and loss of culture but, at home, a sense that we belonged. I tell him I think I want to try to find my birth parents, and by the end of the call, he seems to have a change of heart.
“Well, maybe I’ll try to find them, too,” he says. “Maybe one day.”
His voice trails off.
Silently, we both know he won’t. And I decide not to tell him I know about his file, to hide the fact that, deep down, I don’t think there’s anyone to find.
At the beginning of my baby book, a photo is missing. The caption reads: “Jinae with her foster mother, 4 months old.”
I ask my mother what happened to the photo. She says she doesn’t know but will keep an eye out for it.
“Mom,” I say, “what do you think about me trying to find my birth parents?” I don’t ask, but what I really want to know is if it will bother her. I wonder if she’ll get mad.
“I want you to do whatever would make you the happiest,” she says. I look for hints of insincerity in her voice, in her open face, but find none. She’s being honest. All she has ever wanted is for me to be happy.
I go up to my room, back to the folder that has sat on my shelf for so long and open it. My parents gave it to me years ago, and I put it out of sight and out of mind until now. The first page is a pre-flight child report that lists my eating and sleeping habits, speech abilities and personality: “Squeals and laughs aloud. Recognizes a familiar voice. Likes to be taken (for) a bath. Is a gentle, cute baby. Loves to be held in one’s arms.” Some of the papers are just brochures to take trips back to Korea, but most are agreements between my parents and the adoption agency, saying they can’t give me back if they find something wrong — a no-return policy, all sales final.
But there is a packet stapled five pages deep that catches my interest — “Confidential Information.” I can feel my heart race faster.
In movies, the protagonist always has a turning point. It’s the moment when his or her life changes forever. He gets bitten by a spider or goes to the mattresses for his family or takes the red pill instead of the blue one. To a lesser extent, I realize this is one of those moments.
The first page is basic information, like my height and weight when I was born. The second is a little more interesting. It mentions my foster family, “composed of four members: her foster mother in her late 40s, two foster brothers and one foster sister. Her foster mother is a diligent woman with a loving nature.”
I turn the page. In cold, flat type, it reads: “The natural parents were legally married and had three children. As they were very poor, they practiced birth control not to have any more, but they came to have the baby unintentionally due to failure of contraception. The natural parents could not bring up the baby adequately due to their unfavorable financial circumstances. They relinquished their parental rights toward the baby, wanting the baby to be adopted into a good home for the sake of the baby’s optimum future.”
The baby.
According to the file, they were poor farmers, both receiving only a primary school education. My birth mother was 32 and my birth father, 34. I was taken into the adoption agency the day I was born. It doesn’t say, but I get the sense she never held me. It makes me wonder if she saw what I looked like or if she thought it would be better not to know at all. I also learn the social worker who named me.
To my birth family, I was, simply, the baby.
The next two pages are medical forms and don’t hold my interest. I close the folder and put it back on the shelf. At first, I feel numb, unchanged. There was no tragic car crash or house fire, but I think they did care for me in the only way they knew how — by giving me up to someone else. Learning I have three siblings, though, when all this time I assumed I was an only child, is off-putting. Two sisters and one brother, and I got the golden ticket out. I’ve always wanted a sister.
I decide to send the request to Holt, but I don’t expect it to lead anywhere. And if it does, I don’t have the funds to pursue it further. Korea is a long way from Kent, and the older I get, the farther it seems.
I’m not sure I’ll ever know the details I still ache to know, like if they regretted their decision or thought about me as much as I thought about them. Or even their names. To me, they still exist as fiction, an intangible idea that’s far removed from reality. It makes me wonder if they’ve begun to tell themselves the same thing. And it dawns on me that the memory I held so closely of my birth mother is just the missing photo in my baby book. It’s one more piece of fiction to the story, though my ending remains unread and unfinished and ambiguous at best.
That leaves me with the people who fill the rest of the album, whose pictures have always been right where they need to be. They offer no mysteries to solve. If my birth parents are the missing photo, my family is the book: the father who let me sit on his lap in the evenings to read the Sunday comics, the brother who awaited my arrival wriggling in his seat at the airport in September and my mother — my mother, whose heart I broke when I was 10, at the dining room table, lost in all those memories gone by.
What a touching story! I’m going to share it with my friend who also has 2 adopted children of mixed race. It may help them uderstand each other a bit better. Again, a wonderfully written, touching story. Thanks for sharing.