Lucky Girl Read online

  Lucky Girl

  MEI-LING HOPGOOD

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  For Rollie and Chris

  You find yourself in the world at all, only through

  an infinity of chances. Your birth depends on a marriage,

  or rather on the marriages of all those from whom you

  descend. But upon what do these marriages depend?

  A visit made by chance, an idle word,

  a thousand unforeseen occasions.

  —Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  1 Come Back Taiwan

  2 The Birth of a Family

  3 Twisting Fate

  4 The Odd Couple

  5 Happy Days

  6 The Return

  7 A Perfect Reunion

  8 Meimei

  9 Through the Looking Glass

  10 Crosscurrents

  11 The Biology of Adoption

  12 Handmade Dumplings

  13 Daddy’s Girl

  14 The Boy

  15 Mother-Daughter Banquet

  16 The Namesakes

  17 The Lucky Eight

  EPILOGUE

  READER’S GUIDE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to Ma, Ba, and my Chinese family for their willingness to recount their experiences, some of which were quite painful. Special appreciation goes to all my sisters—but especially Min-Wei, Jin-Hong, and Ya-Ling—and to my brother-in-law Patrick Hafenstein for their honesty and for patiently answering, asking, and re-asking questions on my behalf and for translating to and from three languages.

  Thanks to my mom, Chris Hopgood, for entertaining my constant inquisition, and to my younger siblings, Hoon-Yung and Jung-Hoe Hopgood and Irene Hofmann, for sharing their stories. My family is indebted to Sister Maureen Sinnott for making my adoption and our reunification possible.

  Thank you to my editor, Andra Miller, and agents, Larry Weissman and Sascha Alper, for their guidance and for believing in the project, and to Kristina Geiser, Alexandra Salas, Kelly McMasters, Susan Ager, and Vikki Ortiz for challenging me to dig deeper.

  I owe my husband, Monte Reel, endless gratitude for his good-humored affection for my family and for his encouragement, support, and invaluable feedback throughout the conception and writing of this book. He is the reason these pages saw the light of day.

  Finally, I dedicate this book to my parents, Rollie and Chris Hopgood, who gave my story its happy ending.

  Author’s Note

  I have tried to reproduce events and conversations as accurately as possible, drawing from my own memories and journals and countless conversations, letters, e-mail, and interviews with family, friends, and acquaintances. Some letters and journal entries have been edited for repetition, grammar, and punctuation.

  For my biological family’s history, I depended mostly on the interpretation and translation of my sisters and brother-in-law and tried to verify the facts as I understood them. For scenes and circumstances that lacked concrete or clear testimony, I re-created from imagination, and those instances are noted in the text. I have changed my birth family’s Chinese surname, as well as the names of a few family members, in the interest of protecting their privacy.

  Lucky Girl

  PROLOGUE

  Taoyuan, Taiwan, March 29, 1997

  The luggage was coming fast. Too fast.

  I stood in the baggage claim of Chiang-kai Shek International Airport, silently watching the overstuffed Samsonite suitcases, the giant cardboard boxes tied shut with red string, and the chewed-up duffel bags speed by on the conveyor belt. I was dizzy from the buzz of Mandarin—a language I could not understand—and anxious from wondering who might be waiting behind the exit door.

  I was about to meet the Chinese family that gave me up for adoption days after I was born, twenty-three years earlier. During the past two months since we made first contact, I had lingered in a state of hazy, almost unnatural calm over the sudden appearance of my long-lost parents and sisters. But as I stood in the Taipei airport, I realized this reunion was real, not a dream, not just some story I might write for the newspaper I worked for. This was actually happening. To me.

  Nervous and sweating, I pulled my bags off of the belt and adjusted my brown polyester shirt and skirt, an outfit I chose for its simplicity and wrinkle resistance. The rest of me looked horrible. What a grand first impression I would make: wild hair and bleary eyes, smelling of airplane funk and the smokers who puffed away during the Japan-Taiwan leg of the eighteen-hour journey. I thought my heart was going to jump out of my throat.

  A perky airline employee directed me through customs and to exit 4. The doors slid open to reveal a room filled with people. They were pushing, hanging, and standing on a wood rail, waving signs in Chinese characters. They jumped up and down, wailed and shouted. I had seen my relatives in pictures, but as I scanned the Chinese faces, all of them seemed to look alike, with eyes as dark as mine.

  My God. How will I know them?

  Then I saw the sign, handwritten in thick, black, slanted letters: MEI-LING. A crowd of strangers rushed toward me.

  1

  COME BACK TAIWAN

  Royal Oak, Michigan, May 1995

  I had recently moved back to metro Detroit after graduating from college, and was working as a rookie reporter for the Detroit Free Press, writing about such cheery topics as violent teens who stalk police officers and mothers who go mad and stab their children. I rented a place on the second floor of a rickety old house smeared with a thin coat of mustard yellow paint on South Washington Avenue in the suburb of Royal Oak. I was twenty-one years old and single, so a trendy neighborhood and the abundance of nearby bars always made up for a crappy apartment. I loved my starter life, and for the first time I was feeling confident in my own skin. I believed I had conquered the insecurities over being Asian that had vexed me for so long. I thought I finally was getting a grip on who I wanted to be.

  Then one afternoon, my mom called. She and Dad still lived in my hometown of Taylor, a forty-minute drive south, and now that I was back in the area we were able to chat and visit much more often. Usually we just traded mother-daughter banter on the temperamental Michigan weather, work, my brothers, my current boyfriend, and so forth, but on this day, Mom had some more interesting news to share.

  “Sister Maureen called us today,” she said. “She’s in town and she wants to see you.”

  Sister Maureen Sinnott had been a distant, almost mythical figure that my parents talked about with reverence. Shortly after they married, my parents had contacted Maureen, hoping she could help them adopt a child. The nun gladly acted as the link between my birth family and my adoptive parents, maneuvering me through the maddening Taiwan and U.S. bureaucracies and caring for me for the almost eight months it took to get me out of the country. Maureen and I had exchanged letters occasionally when I was a girl, but I couldn’t remember much about her.

  Mom said that after many years living in other states and abroad, Maureen had returned to her native Allen Park, a Detroit suburb that borders Taylor’s northeast side.

  “You should call her,” Mom said.

  The seven or so months I had spent in Taiwan as a baby never interested me much. My birth parents were shadows, known to me only in the folds of my eyelids, the curve of my chin, or the shiny dark of my hair. They were merely characters in some childhood fairy tale, ghosts of a former lifetime, memories that only existed because I was told they existed. The details had little to do with my happy life as an American girl who grew up with blue-eyed parents and two Korean brothers, who were also adopted. I was just another one of the endless unwanted baby girls born to and disc
arded by poor Chinese families. The past was the past.

  Still, I was intrigued with the idea that I might meet the woman who made it possible for me to have a different life. I asked my mom for her phone number.

  Maureen was bubbly, thrilled to hear that my life had turned out wonderfully.

  “Oh, Mei-Ling,” she said. “I’m so glad to know I made the right decision to arrange your adoption. I took care of you and I felt like a mother to you, too.”

  She invited me to dinner at her home.

  “I have pictures,” Maureen said. “Of you … and your mother and your father.”

  “You have pictures of my mother?” I asked. I had wondered, on and off, throughout my adolescence about what my mother looked like, if I had inherited my body from her, for example. For some reason, my curiosity was always focused on my birth mother, rather than my father. I never knew any photos of either existed.

  “Your mother loved you, Mei-Ling. She didn’t want to give you up.”

  Tears sprang to my eyes, catching me off guard. A surprising wave of sadness and relief washed over me. Maureen had just offered an answer to a question I never had dared to ask. She didn’t want to. I paused before accepting the invitation for dinner. I did not want Maureen to hear my voice cracking.

  MAUREEN’S ONE-BEDROOM APARTMENT in Allen Park was small, but cozy, decorated with mementos of the many years she spent globetrotting. A hand-painted scroll, a farewell gift given to her when she left Taiwan after eight years, hung on her living-room wall. She had watched a friend paint the snowy mountain scene and write in Chinese characters, “You may be leaving us, but you are leaving your footsteps behind.” Maureen used an African kitenge as a tablecloth and displayed a hand-carved ebony African head purchased from an artist in Tanzania. On another wall she kept a large framed profile of an African woman with a tear running down her cheek. Maureen said she bought the picture at an ethnic festival in Detroit about twenty years ago and took it wherever she went because, to her, it symbolized all who are oppressed.

  I recognized Maureen only a little from old black-and-white pictures my parents had shown me. She had been thirty-one years old when she cared for me. Back then, she was quite thin and kept her hair tucked under her veil. The modern, in-living-color Maureen was age fifty-four, short and robust. Her dark, wavy hair was uncovered and she wore pants and a purple sweater over a blue and white shirt. She had sharp blue eyes that welled up with tears when she saw me. We hugged like old friends.

  “It is so good to see you,” Maureen said. “You turned out so well.”

  She introduced me to Sister Shirley Smith, who also had helped care for me at St. Mary’s Hospital. The three of us sat on Maureen’s couch, drank tea, and chatted about my blossoming career as a journalist and Maureen’s world adventures and new psychology practice. Maureen cooked a chicken and veggie stir-fry dinner, which we ate with chopsticks. After our meal, Maureen took out an envelope filled with dozens of photos she had taken in Taiwan, of St. Mary’s hospital, of the nurses, of my birth family. We examined each while Maureen and Shirley reminisced, laughing at how young and skinny they were back then.

  In one picture, Maureen holds me as I reach down to pull the hair of one of my sisters. My grandmother, an auntie, and Shirley stand nearby. In another, also taken the day I left Taitung, Maureen and I pose with several nurses and my birth parents, who had come to say goodbye. I am in Maureen’s arms, but my biological mother stands nearby, resting her hand on my arm. Her hair is pulled back and she is wearing a striped sweater over a yellow button-down shirt and red shoes. My birth father stands to Maureen’s right, partially cut out of the frame. He is wearing a brown jacket. I didn’t see myself in either of them. I examined the way my mother touched me—her face seemed almost expressionless—and wondered what she must have felt.

  At the end of the evening, Maureen said, “You know, Mei-Ling, if you ever want to contact your birth family, I am sure they would be exactly in the same place you left them.”

  I stared at her. It was the first time that the possibility of searching for my biological family—and the prospect that I might actually find them—had crossed my mind seriously. While I was growing up, when anyone would ask me if I wondered what became of them, I’d answer no. No, I did not know how many siblings I had. No, I did not know much about Taiwan. No, I did not care to meet them. As a teenager, I practically took pride in my ignorance.

  I mean, why dwell on the past? A choice was made for my good or theirs, or for both, and ultimately, as soon as I was poured into the arms of Rollie and Chris Hopgood one April afternoon in 1974, these two midwestern teachers became my real family. They read me bedtime stories, attended my recitals, helped me build homecoming floats, and took me on vacations to Florida. My mom dressed me in pretty clothes and drove me to dance class; I admired her pale, slender beauty and her measured patience, even when our opposite personalities clashed. My dad took me grocery shopping, to the dances he chaperoned, and on the picket lines when he led strikes. I was just like him, strong-willed, independent, and passionate; our battles shook the windows, but we were fiercely devoted to each other. Hoon-Yung and Jung-Hoe, who were both adopted from South Korea, were my real brothers, my playtime companions. I taught Hoon-Yung to play house and camp out and helped Jung-Hoe speak English and sleep on a bed. Instead of enduring poverty and prejudice against girls and women, I had been raised to believe I could do anything that I wanted. I had a close family, a rich life, and the endless opportunities of the great United States of America.

  I’m lucky, I’ve always told myself.

  Perhaps one day I might like to know more about these figures from my past and the reasons they made the decisions that they did. One day. But not today.

  I thanked Maureen for the suggestion but told her I’d have to think about it.

  “Maybe if you want to write to the hospital in Taitung,” I suggested, “just to see if the nurses know where my family is? But not to contact them … Just to see …” I said.

  Because my response was less than enthusiastic, Maureen decided to wait. Not long afterward, I left Detroit, chased away by a labor strike at my newspaper. I moved to St. Louis and started another reporting job. I had a great group of fun friends. We were young and ambitious, spending our days dissecting other people’s stories, but I still had little interest in digging into my own.

  In late 1996 I was jotting down a holiday note to Maureen when I remembered our conversation from the year before. I wondered if she had ever written to St. Mary’s to confirm the whereabouts of my family. I casually asked, “Did you ever write to the hospital?”

  Maureen interpreted my question as a request: Write to the hospital. And she did.

  BARELY A MONTH LATER, on January 26, 1997, I was folding phyllo dough into triangles, getting ready for a cocktail party at my apartment in the Central West End neighborhood of St. Louis. I had fussed over a simple menu: bagel chips with hummus, veggies, spanikopita, quiches, dips and chips, the usual party fare. The house reeked of slightly burnt cooking oil, and my kitchen was a mess. Pans, knives, opened packages, strips of phyllo dough, and cut vegetables were piled on my counter. My dog waited expectantly at my feet, hoping to profit from the disorder and my general sympathy for her forlorn face. I planned to play jazzy tunes, serve martinis, and wear a short purple velvet dress bought at a secondhand store. We would talk some shop—lamenting missed deadlines and dreadful assignments—but mostly we would laugh and tell stories about crazy politicians, bad dates, about our families and our quirky midwestern hometowns.

  I was far behind schedule, frantic, and covered in flour, when the phone rang. I wiped my sticky fingers on a towel and grabbed the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  It was Maureen.

  “Mei-Ling,” she said, her voice bubbling with excitement. “I have a letter from the hospital.”

  A nun at St. Mary’s had sent her information about my birth family.

  “Both mother and father are
from Kinmen. The father is fifty-nine years old, while the mother is fifty-four,” Maureen read. “The occupation of the father is a farmer. Mother, a housewife.”

  The letter recited a laundry list of dry statistics with no names from a family on the other side of the world: “First female, married, a government-employed researcher …” In all, there were seven siblings in Taiwan, six sisters and one brother whom they had adopted. One more daughter, the youngest, had been given up for adoption to a couple in Switzerland.

  I froze, leaning hard on my kitchen counter.

  My mother and father? My sisters and brother?

  Maureen read on: “The father is excited to see Mei-Ling. He is inviting her if she could come on Chinese New Year, which will be on February 7, 1997. He said the children do come at this time.” He had included a business card and a self-addressed envelope.

  “Can you believe it?” she asked.

  I couldn’t—I was shocked. I think I said something like “Wow! That’s amazing.”

  Still, I didn’t want this strange news to crowd my busy life. There were too many unknowns, and deep down I was a little afraid of being too curious. I preferred not caring about my biological past. What if I was disappointed or hurt by what I discovered? Maureen told me she’d forward me the letter, and we could decide what to do next.

  Dazed and unbelieving, I called my parents. They were excited and eager to know more. I recounted the story again to friends who came over that night. We oohed and ahhed, and speculated about what it all might mean. An Asian American colleague pointed out that my family had appeared at the turn of the Chinese Year of the Ox, in which we both were born.

  “They waited until our year to find you,” she marveled. We raised our glasses and toasted this revelation. I felt elated and strange, with only a vague sense that much of what I knew about who I was and what I believed about my past and future was about to change.