Arrivals

When I was about two days old, I was abandoned on a street in Seoul, South Korea, and found by a passerby. (If you've heard this story from JS, you may have heard that I was found in a dump. That wasn't me. A streetcorner is much more prestigious.) The records from the adoption agency are terse on this point, leaving space for the kinds of questions that really don’t make a difference, but that spin out from such a tiny, astonishing fact. I used to wonder whether it was a populated street or a side street, as if the busy-ness of the street might signify whether they intended me to be found. I considered this question like a clue in a mystery story. When I think about that day even now (to the extent I do), I imagine a dark street at dawn, a man placing a bundle on the sidewalk and scurrying away, returning to a woman recovering from childbirth to tell her, “It’s done.” In my imagination, those moments take place in the still-dark hours of early morning, like the scenes in a movie that is actually going to be about something else, filmed in an entirely different style. After the dark, furtive preface comes an abrupt scenic shift to the bright lights and excitement of an all-American childhood, which brings the relief of the familiar and the optimistic.

As a small child, I always thought of my life as having begun five months after my birth, when I arrived at JFK International Airport in New York City. The story of that day, which I loved to hear my mother tell when I was small, goes like this: After a week of anxiously waiting “on pins and needles!” my parents and grandparents piled into the car and drove the three and a half hours to New York. Even now, I can’t imagine what that day must have been like—my experience with life-changing events has been that they seem impossibly ordinary. The photographs show a big window with a view of the tarmac, on which the long Pan American airplane had come to rest. Standing in front of the window, my mother wears a red dress and a necklace with big white beads; she says that when she held me, I put them in my mouth. My mother’s all-time favorite photograph comes from that day—it’s the one my father took as the attendant handed me to her. She is sobbing as she reaches out to take the solemn-looking infant with the lopsided head into her arms. In the next picture, my dad is wearing a brown polyester shirt with a big collar into which his long hair hangs. Looking at the pictures now, he says with wonderment in his voice, “I can’t believe they gave a baby to people who dressed like us.”