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The corners of Mom’s mouth tighten. The tears are still falling, but maybe she reads the resoluteness in my expression because she begins talking. “Choi Wansu reached out to me many years ago and told me she was your birth mother. She had hired a private investigator and said she’d been looking for you for a long time. You have to understand, I was just divorced and struggling to make ends meet. I had a small inheritance from your grandmother, but that was running out. I’d spent all those years as a homemaker and had no marketable skills. She proposed that she send money every month—like a child support payment—and all she wanted in return was regular reports on what you were up to. What grades you were getting. How tall you were. What foods you liked. The books you read. The friends you made. Photos. All of that.”
I rip off a paper towel and hand it over like a reward. “Why’d you hide it from me?”
“Hara, you have never properly grieved for your father.” Ellen tsks, avoiding my question. “I know that you were angry with him and you had every right to be, but he’s gone now. You hating him doesn’t bring him back to life. It doesn’t rewind the clock. It doesn’t make him feel regret. He’s not here anymore but you are. He wasn’t the father that you needed, but he was still the man who worked hard to put food on your table, who taught you how to throw a punch”—Tuck that thumb in, girl. “Running away to another country doesn’t make him any less of your father. Finding the man who donated the sperm to make you doesn’t erase all that Pat did for you.”
“Are we talking about Dad or you now?”
Ellen’s jaw tightens, but she continues as if I never said a thing. “You never wanted for anything because of the decisions I made for you.”
And the money that Choi Wansu sent. These excuses make me angry, though, hitting me right in that cross section of guilt and unjustness. Yes, I’ve had it good, but the two people who are supposed to love and cherish me most—the woman who gave birth to me and the woman who raised me—have lied to me all my life.
There’s a spot in my chest where the wound of my abandonment has festered ever since I knew what adoption was, and Ellen knows that. She held me when I cried. She told me I was precious when I wondered why my birth mother had given me up. She had raised me, had loved me, and yet, when she had answers that might’ve healed me, she hid those. I know she reads the resentment glowing in my eyes.
“You were fine, Hara,” she cries. “Before you knew anything about this—about Choi Wansu, about Korea, about anything. You didn’t want to know. I tried to take you to cultural events, food fairs, language lessons. Wansu would send me extra money for those things, but you hated being Korean.”
“I know!” The shame makes me angrier—at myself, at Wansu, at Ellen. “I know. I know I was embarrassed of it. I was embarrassed of being different, of looking different and smelling different, and lots of times I had convinced myself that I wasn’t different at all until I looked in the mirror and saw I looked nothing like you. And then one day I wanted to feel what it was like not to be the different one, and I came here and there was . . .” I close my eyes and drag in a shuddering breath. “There was no peace here either.”
There’s endless confusion and noise, and the only time it’s quiet in my head is when Yujun is holding my hand. But Wansu is telling me that even that small refuge has to be given up if I want to find a place in her family.
“Oh, baby, I’m sorry. I really am sorry.” Ellen jumps up and tries to force me into a hug. I freeze, wanting to wrestle away, but her mom strength keeps me tight against her. “Because I was afraid,” she rasps in my ear. “I don’t want to be replaced, and because when you were younger, you used to cry yourself to sleep some nights wondering why your mother had abandoned you. I thought I was protecting you.”
And yourself.
“Eventually you stopped asking those questions, so when Wansu contacted me the first time, it had been years since you’d asked that question and I didn’t want to bring that pain up again.” Ellen pulls back and grabs my cold hand between hers. “You’re my daughter. You’ve been the light of my life since I took you off that plane twenty-four years ago. To me, those people who created you, the woman who gave birth to you, they didn’t exist anymore. It has always been you and me against the world. We have never needed anyone else.”
