I labor through “Puff the Magic Dragon” and a roar of applause fills the comfy den, punctuated by calls of “You sing one more, you sing one more.” And so one more I sing, and another after that and then still another. My rendition of Elvis’s “I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You” is not too bad.
I’m actually starting to enjoy myself, but it’s time for bed. My wife joins me later, exhausted from a night of piecing together the mystery of her past with her birth sisters and brother. None of them, it seems, had wanted to keep up the ruse. All of them wanted her as part of their family. But the wishes of the two men prevailed, for 40 years.
The next day was taken to pay our respects at the birth father’s grave. Then there’s a tour of one of the families’ successful start-up businesses – a fiber-optics company, where jobs await us for the asking. After that they show us around the surrounding communities and pitch us on the merits of the local real estate market.
Expectations mount – unspoken but clear – that we’ll see the light and my wife will rejoin what they believe is her rightful family. For a while, we politely go along. But then comes the evening of The Great Reunion Ceremony, when our moment of truth arrives.
We’re showered with small, sentimental gifts, and then given a black satin box that looks like it might contain a necklace or bracelet. Instead, it holds a five-or six-inch section of gnarled, interwoven earthen strands. “It’s a ginseng root,” a family member explains. “It symbolizes all the different roots coming together as part of one family.”
My wife’s brother squeezes next to me on the couch and takes a small notebook from his jacket pocket. “This was our father’s notebook,” he tells me, showing me a page of handwritten numbers and Chinese characters. “He recorded the births of each of his children here,” he says.” Sure enough, written there in the hand of my wife’s biological father, is her date of birth: November 3, 1959.
Now things go from not-so-subtle to intensely serious. As far as my wife’s birth family is concerned, we’d hopped on the bus to reunification and it had left the station.
My wife, the otherwise assertive and dependably formidable New York lawyer, takes me aside and informs me that Chinese culture and tradition require me to sit down face-to-face with her brother to tell him what’s what. So he and I sit down on a couple of folding chairs, just the two of us, in an empty room.
“We truly appreciate your inviting us here and welcoming us into your family and showing us all this wonderful hospitality,” I tell him. “But if you’re expecting us to drop everything and set aside the life we built together in New York, I’m sorry but we can’t do that.”
He responds with grace and sincerity. Visibly relieved that he’d done his best to fulfill his father’s wishes, he relents.
The Long Road Home
My wife and I returned to our lives as we knew them, which was still an evolving reality for her, as she struggled to accommodate the startling facts of her adoption and the existence of a whole new family to embrace or resist as her heart dictated.
And what conflicting feelings tugged at her heart in the time that followed, as she grappled with the why’s of her life and attempted to navigate what must have seemed like a treacherous mountain pass, hoping to find herself again.
She didn’t feel capable of handling that journey under the pressures of our life in New York, with every ounce of her energy consumed by a hundred legal cases and 12-hour work days that piled commuting on top of court appearances and office duties. So when we sat down for dinner that evening with my future boss, she saw a chance to escape and she seized it.
It’s been said that Switzerland is like a natural tranquilizer: scenic, relaxed, conflict-averse, slower-paced. Our time abroad, at the time it came, was just what the doctor ordered.
Life had pulled my wife’s reality right out from under her. In New York, she may never have had the chance to regain her balance. But in the quaint confines of Basel, she had the perfect microclimate to figure out who she was aside from her profession, what if any difference it made that she’d been given up as an infant to two adoptive parents who loved and raised her as their own, and how she could learn to be happy and confident in her true self — the one she was lucky enough to find, even if it was later than she would have liked.
Postscript
According to a recent article in the Washington Post, of China’s population of 1.4 billion today, there are nearly 34 million more males than females. Sadly, the backward thinking that caused my wife’s birth parents to give her away some 58 years ago just because she was a girl still exists today.
Wow! Very intense yet touching article
Throughly enjoyed this article, relating to much of its story. You took me back to the past. Thank you
Thank you, Lynn. Very glad you enjoyed it. I guess you were adopted? Hope you found out when you were younger! Best, Martin
No was not adopted but similar rugs pulled out from underneath! Your article helped me realize so much of the reality of the pass.