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I once watched the tail end of a show where adoptees were reunited with their birth parents. Usually I avoided those emotional-porn shows like the plague but this one caught my attention. There were three adoptees onstage and one by one, each kid’s parents came out. Every time someone appeared from offstage, the crowd would erupt in cheers. The camera panned to the audience wiping away tears. The people on the stage were crying. The host was beaming, likely thinking of the giant ratings. It all made me so uncomfortable. I wondered what I would be doing. Would I cry? Would I break down? I imagined a lot of scenarios but none of them where my birth mother and I would be circling each other like caged tigers or perhaps gladiators waiting for the thumbs-up or thumbs-down from the emperor in order to know whether we should try to kill each other or whether we should retreat to our quarters.
“If you would rather stand, then do so,” Wansu concedes as if making a huge and meaningful gesture. She stops at the side of her desk, one hand lightly resting on the shiny wooden surface. “You must have many questions.”
“No. Only one.”
Wansu’s eyebrows go up. “Only one?”
“Why?” I look around the expensive office, at the discreet glass nameplate on Wansu’s desk, at the suit that Wansu is wearing that lies perfectly across her shoulders without a crease or a wrinkle. I think of Yujun’s expensive car, his US education, his designer clothes. I think of my home back in Iowa, the inheritance my adoptive father decided to leave his real son, and the near-empty funeral of my biological father. Yes, I have many questions, but they all start with why.
She doesn’t pretend she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. “My life when I was pregnant was very different than it is now.”
“And when it changed? When you had money and opportunity, you did nothing. Why?”
“Did you seek me out?” Wansu parries.
It is like a fight. Wansu wants to be right and I want to be aggrieved.
“No. I was left on the street. It wouldn’t be rational to think I could find my birth parents. All I have is a sheet of paper that says I eat rice and fish and can handle a spoon well.” A picture of myself with a number across my chest. It’s a mugshot of an abandoned child. I never look at it because I’m not a poor waif from a foreign country. I hated thinking of myself like that. Ellen made a point to tell me that I was wanted. At night when I cried for no reason, she held me and said that I was loved, that she chose me, that she wanted me over everything in the world and didn’t the divorce prove that? She chose me over Pat. She has always chosen me, but this woman in front of me with the frozen expression on her face, she threw me away. I clench my teeth to keep all those awful, vulnerable words from spilling out. This woman does not deserve to see my pain.
“Despite all of that, you have found me.”
“Not because of anything you did. Because of this.” I fumble in my purse and pull out the printed email that I’ve been carrying since I received it. The creases that I’ve made and the ones that Ellen made and those of my friends like Boyoung have softened it, and when I shove it in Wansu’s face it flops like a wet towel.
Wansu barely scans it. “A DNA test?”
Anger burns through me, rendering the lump in my throat to ash. “Yeah. Sorry, but you can’t reconnect with your old boyfriend because he’s dead.”
Not even a flinch. Had she known already?
“That which is yesterday should stay yesterday,” Wansu says.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The past is in the past.” She shakes her head lightly. “We should look to tomorrow. What is it that you need? Money? A place to live? A car?”
She could’ve slapped me and it would’ve hurt less. “Nothing. I don’t want anything.” This was a mistake. A huge mistake. While I refused to admit it, I thought that I’d find belonging, not from being in Korea but from finding my mother. I figured my mother would live in a small, barren room like Lee Jonghyung, not sit in a museum’s worth of marble and chrome with a bank account that would likely make millionaires blush.
I don’t belong here with the polka dots, particularly ones that are carved out of platinum and sprinkled with diamonds.
“I’m done here.” I walk to the door.
Wansu follows immediately. “What do you mean you’re done here?”
“I mean, I don’t care that you gave birth to me. I don’t want to know why any longer. The answers no longer interest me.” I stop and hold up a hand. “Don’t follow me. I know how to get home.” Besides, I have Yujun. I wrench open the door to tell him I’m ready to leave only to find the four chairs completely empty.
