"Found"

The woman across the café table holds my hands. Her palms are rough from years of housework, but her face is still youthful for her age, much younger than someone in her mid-forties.

Her eyes are dark and diamond cut, with one eye slightly wider than the other, like mine. Her nose is flat and broad – like mine. The heart-shape of her face ends in a pointy chin, the one I’ve hated on myself since I was a kid. I wanted a round chin like my sister’s.

The woman says something. I don’t understand. My Chinese, from a few classes in college, is shaky. I look it up in my palm pilot. Genetic testing. She wants to know if I want to go in for testing together. I open my mouth to answer and my phone rings. It’s my mother.

***

My life was already complicated enough. A week ago I was at home, in Jersey, at my parents’ house. I had lost my job as an artist-in-residence at a school in L.A. Cutbacks, recession. All that bullshit. I hadn’t been home in about a year.

I hadn’t meant for so much time to go by. It’s just that my mother’s health, for the most part, was improving, lung cancer in remission. It was a miracle actually.

The last time I was home we had fought, as usual. I had screamed at her for smoking. She refused to stop. “You can’t deny a dying woman her last pleasure,” she said and laughed. But I knew she was scared and that she knew how it was hurting us, my father, my sister and me, to never know when it would be the last time. “You don’t care about anyone but yourself! You never have!” I shouted.

I was back to check out jobs in New York. And yes I wanted to see how she was doing. She looked frail but not bad.

My first night home the phone rang. I answered. It was a man with an Asian accent.

“Mrs. O’Connell, we’ve found her.”

“Who?” I asked, already suspecting the answer.

“Your daughter Dana’s birth mother.”

He went on. “The Chinese government has recently started a campaign to reunite adoptees with birth parents through monthly gatherings. This month the Little Sheep Orphanage of Wuxu village in Hunan, where Dana is from, is part of the gathering in the Hunan capital of Changsha.”

I hung up on him. My mother remained calm as I railed away at her. How could she, look for her, behind my back?

“It’s what you wanted,” she said. “Your sister told me, you’ve been trying on the Internet since you were in college.”

I glared at Patty who was home from grad school on Spring Break. Her green eyes turned away from me.

***

When I was ten, my mother found a Christmas wish list under my bed that I had meant for Santa. At the bottom were things like Barbie Dream House, gumball machine and Merlin. At the very top was: to find my real mom.

***

“You know, Mom really wants you to go.”

“So what? So what if I find her, then what?”

“Then you’ll know.”

“Know what?”

“Who she is—where you came from.”

***

My parents insisted on buying our tickets. It was Patty’s idea to tag along, as usual, and though much of me always dreamt it would be a solo journey, part of me was glad to have her there—my kid sister, the one who came two years after I was adopted, the one with the dusty blonde hair I wanted, the freckled nose, the green eyes like my Skipper doll, the rosy skin that burned and never turned dark like mine did and made me look dirty.

We arrive in Changsha, a smoggy, crowded city full of new cars and old trucks, bicycles pulling wagons full of meat and vegetables. The gathering of the province’s orphanages was like that game we played as kids, Red Rover. Red Rover, Red Rover, calling Johnnie over. And kids would run to the other side. In one line, Chinese women, and some men, looked over at us with wet anticipatory eyes. Across, our side was Chinese girls of different ages, ranging mostly from elementary school to high school.

I seemed to be among the oldest ones there. Also on our side, a number of white men and women, adoptive parents, well meaning, here to help their little girls find some connection to the people who made them, and left them. I wanted to yell at them, you’re making a mistake, they’re too young! Or maybe what I wanted to say is, you should never have let them leave this country in the first place. They’ll be all fucked up.

My head hurt. I was sweating.

“They all look like you,” Patty said.

“Don’t be stupid. That’s like me saying all white people look the same.”

She looked hurt and I felt sorry.

Some of the younger Chinese girls were crying. An official took our personal information and interviewed us all. Slowly matches were made. Some could be confirmed at once, by matching baby photos or if the adoptive parents already had the birth mother’s real name, age, date of birth, etc.

It seemed at least half were reunited. The tears and sobs of joy (regret?) were overwhelming. The lines thinned. I wanted to leave.

The officials said my case was too difficult. I’d been left on the orphanage doorstep at night. The only photo I have as a baby in China is at age one and a half, more than six months after I was abandoned. It was taken at the orphanage. In it I have stubby ponytails that stick straight up. I’m wearing a white tank top. My expression is of wonder.

“We’ll keep looking,” Patty whispered. “This isn’t the only way. Don’t worry.”

A woman in a pink shirt with full cheeks came running up to me and started talking excitedly. An interpreter said, “She says she thinks you are her friend’s daughter. Wu Shuli. She says you look just like her.”

***

So this is me at Starbucks in Beijing with Wu Shuli – who left Hunan after the Cultural Revolution, after her parents forced her to give up her baby girl, and after her lover was jailed for making a joke at a family dinner about Mao. He died in jail. He was my father.

She is in many ways the way I’ve pictured her. Like me, but older. She’s spunkier than I had imagined. She says she wants to take me shopping and even if we find out we’re not related, maybe we could be friends. I had heard American agencies who deal with Chinese orphanages warn about scams, of Chinese people who trick adoptees into believing they are family to get money, green cards, etc. But Shuli seems honest, she does well for herself, cleaning house for the wealthy, including some expats so that she even knows a bit of English.

“I think of you always,” she says.

We smile when we discover we both paint. In fact some of her paintings she sells at the flea market, which helps her make extra money.

This is me, mulling the words “genetic”, “testing”, when my phone rings.

It’s my mother.

“Don’t listen to your father!”

My father grabs the phone from her.

“Dana, your mother is in the hospital. It’s her organs. They’re shutting down. The cancer, it’s everywhere…” He begins sobbing.

My mother regains the phone. Her voice is all weak yet rough with all her strength.

“Dana, I want you to stay. Do you hear me? Patty told me you found her. I don’t want you to come home until you feel you’re ready. If you need time to find out for sure and spend more time with her…”

“Mom, Jesus, I’m coming home. Get off the phone. You’re using all of your energy.”

“Dana Margaret O’Connell!” she musters a final shout. “You better listen to me. I want you to stay—for me—please.”

***

There are times now I can’t believe I didn’t go back home. That I let Patty talk me into staying and getting the test, and finding out the results. But at the moment it seemed I had no choice, because whenever I heard my mother use my full name—Dana Margaret O’Connell, she was really mad, and she meant it. And it was usually followed by: “Because I said so. Because I’m your mother.”

In a few days the tests came back. Positive. Wu Shuli was my birth mother.

I called my mother and told her. She cried. It was with joy. I’m pretty sure.

“I wanted this for you, always.”

It was our last call. That weekend she died.

I went home for the funeral and stayed a few months to be with my father and Patty. It was not an easy time for us, and all of us felt guilty for our own reasons, missed her for our own reasons.

That summer I moved to Beijing to an apartment near Shuli’s. We became more like friends than mother and daughter. I took Chinese classes and started teaching English.

There were many things I thought about my mother, Sandra O’Connell, while she was alive—that she was stubborn, tough, too sensitive, and the truth is I’m all of those things too, and all I can hope for going forward is that if I ever have kids someday, I hope I can give them something that even closely resembles what she gave me.


(photo from Wang Chao's film "The Orphan of Anyang")