“I’m Iwish”

By Peter Kearly

That’s what I couldn’t seem to get through to Ms. Goodman. Of all the other kindergarten children, shouldn’t she have listened to the only one who was absolutely sure about who he was? Sure, my tongue didn’t yet heal from having its frenum cut, which I guess is a not so uncommon operation for Asian children (Maxine Hong Kingston recalls having hers cut in The Woman Warrior). But my message was clear: I was “Iwish.” Why else would Da make sure to point out to me that John Wayne was Irish, that the great jazz musician, Jerry Mulligan, was Irish, that the greatest author, James Joyce, was Irish. Why else would he teach me the difference between a shillelagh and a stick?

When the teacher had my parents try to explain to me what being “adopted” meant, I still couldn’t understand why I couldn’t be Irish. If Da said he was Irish, then I was Irish too. It didn’t matter where I came from. At least it didn’t matter until I became convinced that where I came from should matter, when I could no longer try to simply ignore the taunts of having a flat face, squinty eyes, and buck teeth. Then the traits that I thought I shared with my dad, his self-assuredness, his athleticism, his wit and aptitude to make friends, no longer seemed related to me.

How different we were became more obvious each time we crossed the border from Windsor, Canada back to Detroit. On most occasions, a border official would peer down at the obvious difference in complexion between my dad and me. When the official demanded papers to prove I was a U. S. citizen, my dad would try to repress his anger and explain that I was adopted. Even though he’d provide a copy of my adoption “birth certificate” we’d usually be asked to go to the immigration office. As I’d stare at my feet, hearing the angry buzz above me, I’d whisper the pledge of allegiance and feel a pat on my head as my dad finally led me back to the car to go home.

I can’t completely blame the border officials for not recognizing in me any legitimate signs of American-ness. I often look at the photograph stapled to my adoption “birth certificate” without any sense of recognition. How could my jolly face in the flesh match the distressed jaundiced face of the three year old in the photo? How can I even be sure that the birth date on the certificate is my real birth date? Without an actual birth certificate, the orphanage had to keep some kind of record of my existence and so created a document that might serve the same purpose. I know that that document, though, hides more about my past than it shows. The circumstances of my abandonment float somewhere between what is on paper and the memories of a birth mother that I may never meet.

I try to take solace in the idea that my birth mother never left me. She appears each time I study my face in the mirror. I see her in the folds around my eyes where wrinkles will form. I see her in the dimple in my left cheek and in the mole just below my right temple. I feel her in the warm embrace of my adoptive mother, entrusted through a universal maternal agreement.

My mother was eight months pregnant with my sister when I arrived. My mom would let me rest my head against her belly to feel the echo of two heartbeats, hers and that of the one soon to be. To some, I’m sure she looked commendable, even heroic: adopting a poor one with one already on the way. To her, the fact of the adoption seemed no more than a nuisance. I was her child, the same as the one she would give birth to. I grew up thanking my mother even though some unknown absence made me feel distant from her no matter how much I repeatedly thought of her as my mother and no matter how emphatically she cradled me with her absolute sense of being my mother. Her desire to downplay my cultural and racial difference, owing, of course, to the liberal American ideal that everyone should be seen as equal, or the same, instilled in me a sense of acceptance hinged to a sense of denial. I’d be accepted as a son, as a brother, but not enough to be understood as other. At school, I had to explain to curious friends how I could be my parents’ son. Often teachers who were too polite to be honest with their confusion gave me equally inquisitive looks. Rather than admit my adoption outright, though, I found myself joking that I was shipped UPS. Learning to joke about my status seemed to be an essential adaptation to a culture very naïve to the circulation of children between countries.

At four, actually three and a half, I was one of the oldest children on the plane from Seoul to Chicago. I have faint memories of the stench of vomit and the wines of confused and anxious infants and toddlers. For my mom, I wasn’t the oldest on the plane; I was the most responsible. She loves to recount how I helped to console the other children on the plane. I wonder if I wasn’t just fitting a role already established in the orphanage where the older kids were expected to help care for the younger ones. But such a fact can’t dim the fond memories of my arrival, memories that seem to differ inextricably from mine. Against the radiance of hers, my memories seem less enchanting and even cynical. In fact, my mother can carefully account for my skewed memories. I had to wear a girl’s blouse, for heaven’s sake, and a bowtie cinched so tight she had to cut it off. She often laughs as she retraces this image of a boy made so uncomfortable by the feeble attempt of a Catholic orphanage to make its adoptees look presentable to a modern American family.

Soon after I came, Stanley, the family fox terrier was put to sleep. My brother’s brown and white furry pal became replaced with a thick black haired boy with tawny skin. My coming probably had little to do with Stanley’s going. (Stanley did have a history of mental illness, I’d learn, and his brain most likely couldn’t handle me constantly confusing him for a “wolf.”) But several years would pass before another dog entered the house, and this dog would be a gift for my sister. As a child, I would never have a dog of my own. My mistake was that I never learned the American custom to point and ask for what I wanted.

One Christmas, my brother received a science set, complete with microscope and petri dishes. Empathetic to my envy, my brother invited me to compare my hair to his under the microscope. His hair was blond and thin, barely visible; mine was coarse and black. When my mother called us over to cut our hair before we’d go to Grandma’s for holiday supper, she’d taken out her sewing scissors for my brother. For me, however, she had to buy professional electric barber’s clippers. I’d watch my mother swiftly cut my brother’s hair, leaning back once or twice to be sure the bangs were straight. Then came my turn. The electric clippers would whrrr and hiss clumps of bristly black hair to the floor. This Christmas, though, the whrrr and hiss left steam rising from my scalp and the smell of cinged hair. I pointed fervently for my mother to stop cutting. How relieved she looked as her adopted son finally learned to express what he wanted.

At grade school, I began to blame my Asian-ness for my awkwardness on the playground rather than ask my parents to enroll me in any team sports. Teachers expected me to be the head of the class in math, science, and even English, but left the holiday and seasonal activities to the “popular” kids.

In middle school, I wanted to be popular with the girls; but the only popularity I received was by way of allowing classmates to copy my homework. I had to settle for the expected role my ethnicity dictated—to be the smart and quiet one that teachers praised and popular kids ignored or ridiculed.

I didn’t want to be like the Asian geeks I saw in movies like “Sixteen Candles” and “Revenge of the Nerds.” I’d watch these movies with my lighter complexioned friends and laugh along with them at “Long Duk Dong” being knocked senseless by the large breasts of a large-boned pudgy white girl who “manhandles” him into bed to his delight.

I tried to look to my dad for some guidance in the adolescent codes of American masculinity since he recounted often what a rebel and jock he was, what quirky but fun interludes with girls he had. But he would instead tell me stories of the non-white friends he had while growing up, or he’d tell me of the tough Irish girls in his neighborhood whom he respected but never had the balls to date.

In high school, when I began to read about the famine and wars in Ireland and compared what I learned to the Hollywood and St. Patrick’s Day images, I began to develop doubts about my dad’s Irish pride; for what claims to Irish-ness could he have other than the hearsay of American myths of ethnicity? By the same token, what claims to Korean-ness can I have? I know very little about the little nation stuck on China like a hangnail cracked in two. What I can know will always be second-hand knowledge. And, what is first hand knowledge for me will always be rendered illegitimate by my outward appearance.

Even now, as a college English instructor, I know to a certain extent I am valued because I know English well and because I am not white. I sense non-white students being comforted in knowing I overcame the so-called language barrier that English can create.

I do not want to be another typical Asian overachiever, both praised as a model minority that other people of color should follow and denigrated as an emasculated sex-starved wallflower. I do not want my success to overshadow the racial inequality others have experienced or continue to experience. I do not want my success to be used as an excuse to argue for the end of Affirmative Action programs or to be used to justify claims of “reverse discrimination” by self-interested whites naïve to the long history of the institutionalization of racism, people who think of history as being meaningful only if it happened during their own lifespan, people who very rarely are forced to think of themselves as a race but have the convenience of always being considered a full fledged identity, a true American.

March 2002

Plymouth, Michigan