Throwaway Daughter (11 page)

“When’s this over?” I asked.

“Soon. It’s a pretty good discussion of identity politics.”

“I’ll bet,” I said, sitting down. I had no intention of asking what identity politics meant. My show would start in ten minutes.

The men and women pounded each other with words. Big words. The only thing they agreed on was that society didn’t treat “persons of colour” equally. My father didn’t seem to realize that they were talking about me.

In Milford you could count on two hands the families of colour. Growing up a Parker, I had never thought of myself as ethnic, part of a visible minority, a hyphenated Canadian. I
knew
but I didn’t
realize
, if that makes any sense.

One of my elementary-school teachers, during a history lesson that stressed multiculturalism, asked me how long my parents had lived in Canada.

“They were born here,” I told him.

“And where did their parents come from?”

“Same thing,” I replied, feeling the eyes of the other kids crawling on my back. The teacher began to prattle on about how much “other cultures” had contributed to Canadian life. He meant well, I guess.

By the time I was in high school, I was fed up with people who needed to label me in some way before they felt comfortable. I hated the Chinese-Canadian tag and resented being lumped in with kids like Amy Diep, whose family were Vietnamese “boat people,” or Winston
Song, whose mother could be found at any hour of the day behind the counter of the family’s milk-store-plus-gas-station, selling ice cream bars and magazines, asking kids (like me) for I.D. before she’d sell them a pack of smokes, and contributing to the town stereotype that all Koreans owned a variety store. Once, I told Bobby McKay to piss off when he asked me to help him with his “Flags of the World” geography project. He was doing Japan.

At the same time, though, I envied the Songs, the Dieps, and the Lee family because they were all just that—families. Their parents spoke with accents. They ate their own kinds of food at dinner, and the better-off ones took trips “back home” to visit relatives, returning with lots of loot and photos of temples and gardens.

I was neither and nothing. A yellow face in a white family where freckles were the norm. Even my hair, according to a murder mystery I had watched on TV, was different, not just in colour but shape and texture. I didn’t fit. I was a Parker but I wasn’t. There were times when I felt like I didn’t really belong to our family, mostly when I looked at photos of the four of us. Mom is fair haired, plump, and pear shaped, and she’d kill me if she heard me use that description. Dad
has red hair, or used to, and freckles on his face and arms. Megan is in between, and very good looking. More obvious than my “ethnic” appearance is my height. I’m five-ten while all three would have trouble topping five-eight.

I’ve never had trouble because I’m not white. It’s not a racial thing. I’ve never felt like a victim of society. Sure, I’ve heard “Chink” behind my back, and in grade eight one guy called me “Rice-head” a few times. But he was a loser and everybody but him knew it. The people on the show Dad was watching were, as far as I was concerned, full of shit.

My parents and sister, even when we fight, have always treated me as if I came out of my mother’s womb in Milford’s Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital just like Megan did. I’ve always known I was adopted, but I always knew I was a Parker, too.

Maybe it’s all connected to Mom’s constant campaign to keep me in touch with my roots. I always hated that. Maybe my parents should have told me they knew nothing about my birth mother. Maybe they should have made up a story that they had picked me up at an adoption agency in Beijing or somewhere and left it at that. I wish they had.

You can’t be two people at the same time—not without ending up in a mental institution. I’m not just Grace Parker. I’ve accepted that. I wasn’t born at Soldiers’ Memorial. I was unwanted by my so-called real parents. That’s the hard part, like a toothache that won’t go away. They got rid of me. When I was little I fantasized that there was some romantic, adventurous, tragic reason why they couldn’t raise me themselves and I was torn from their loving arms as woeful music played in the background. But, seeing girls I know get pregnant and give up their babies, hearing stories on the news about mothers and fathers who beat up their kids or neglect them so badly they’re taken away by Children’s Aid—all that taught me that kids are sometimes not wanted, or even hated. Some parents would gladly get rid of their kid if they could. Mine had.

Low self-esteem is my problem, according to my guidance counsellor in grade ten. She seemed to think that by hanging a label on the issue she had solved it. We had quite a few sessions for a while when I was failing tests and skipping classes and mouthing off at my teachers. I have low self-esteem, she said, so I was “acting out.” She had to go to university and get a degree to
discover that? I thought I was just being a bitch. How high would her self-esteem be, I wanted to ask, if she knew her mother didn’t want her and had got rid of her after she was born?

It’s something I’ve never been able to shake. All the good will and kind words can’t change anything, so they just make me angry. I sometimes wonder if I wasn’t Asian, would I still have this feeling of not belonging, this sense that everybody is only
pretending
I’m a Parker? My hair, skin, and eyes are banners flagging my status as a drop-in visitor. I’m supposed to be proud I’m Chinese, like Mom says? Glad to be a person of colour?

I don’t remember when I began to fantasize about going to China. Would that help? Maybe, I’d think sometimes. Probably not, I’d tell myself at other times. But I couldn’t stop seeing my life as a jigsaw puzzle with one piece missing. I often imagined myself tracking down the two people who left me on the steps of the orphanage, knocking on their door.

“Thanks for the baggage,” I’d say.

I tried to sound calm but my heart raced up to my throat and I almost choked on a mouthful of apple pie. “I think I’ve decided what I’d like for my graduation present.”

I paused for a few seconds, waiting for my parents to pay attention.

“And my birthday is six months away, so this will be a two-in-one deal.”

“Good,” my father joked. “I’ll save a bundle.”

My eyes met Megan’s. She looked a bit uneasy, but gave me a thumbs-up that my parents didn’t see. “You know what Mom and Dad are like,” she had reminded me three times that week. “They always ask us way ahead of time what gift we’d like for an occasion. Your graduation is coming up, so you need to let them know our plan. They have to be prepared. We can’t drop it on them like a nuclear bomb.”

“You might be surprised,” I told Dad, pausing again, hoping to build the suspense. Megan isn’t the only dramatic daughter in this family, I thought.

My mother merely nodded, avoiding my eyes. Dad gazed at me expectantly. The whistling kettle brought Megan to her feet. She rushed into the kitchen, which was completely unlike her.

“Now I
am
curious,” Dad said.

“Wait ‘til Meagan comes back,” I said.

“Tea is ready, ladies and gentleman,” Megan announced cheerfully. Holding the blue and white teapot in her mittened palms, she looked
like the most awkward waitress in the world. “Did you tell them?” she asked.

“No, I waited for you. You’re in on this, too.”

“Come on, Grace, what’s the big surprise?” Mom asked.

I pulled a pamphlet out of my back pocket and held it up in front of me like a prize. “Huang-pu Summer Institute” it said in bold, flowing letters across a photo showing a river in the foreground and a cityscape in the background. “Shanghai, China, 1999.” I put the pamphlet down in front of my plate.

My parents looked at it as if a crow had just flown over and left a deposit.

“For my combined birthday/graduation present I would like an airline ticket to China,” I announced.

You’d have thought I had said “I’m pregnant” or “I’m running away with a fifty-five-year-old plumber.” Silence fell like a bag of wet sand. Mom poked a bit of pie crust around on her plate with her fork. Dad swallowed and looked at my mother, waiting for her reaction.

I wondered if she was surprised. After all, it was she who had pushed me all my life to get to know China, to learn Chinese, to continue with private lessons to this day. And it was Mom, not
Dad, who had insisted that she was Number Two Mama and Chun-mei was Number One.

Mother finally said something. “It’s a big step, Grace, going to school in another country. On your own.”

“Mom, it’s a great opportunity. Frank told me all about it and gave me the application forms last week. Huang-pu Business College runs an intensive Mandarin course for three weeks. Frank says I can easily qualify for the intermediate level. It’s part of their international business program. And since I want to do business studies at university, it’s perfect. The China-Canada Co-operation Society is promoting it. They also have a graduate program at Huang-pu. So if I like it there, I can—”

“Whoa, slow down!” Dad said, picking up the pamphlet and opening it.

“And the best part,” Megan put in, “is that there’s a two-week guided cultural tour of five cities in China when the course is finished. Can I tell them, Grace?”

I nodded.

“Here’s the second part of the news. Cheers, everybody,” Megan gushed, holding up her teacup. “I’m going to join Grace for the cultural tour.”

My parents looked at each other, exactly as they had when I was nine and my sister and I had brought a stray cat home to the house, announcing that we had adopted her.

“Hey, all of you,” Megan put in, “take it easy, will you? It’s about time you saw your investment pay off—the Chinese lessons for me and Grace, the gas consumed to take us there week after week, not to mention our putting up with Frank, listening to his endless stories—well, in my case, until I quit.” She raised her teacup again. “Everyone,
gan-bei!
Cheers!”

My father followed her lead. “I think it’s a great idea,” he said.

My mother said nothing.

That night, Mom came into my room, closed the door behind her, and sat on the edge of my bed. I was sitting up against the headboard, reading a travel book on China.

Mom gathered her housecoat tighter at the throat. She looked tense and sad at the same time. “When you go there,” she began, “are you planning to look for Chun-mei?”

I lowered my book. I’d thought about this a lot. “I don’t know, Mom. One minute I want to,
another I don’t. Maybe I’ll chicken out and just be a tourist.”

She nodded without saying anything.

“Mom, when I was growing up, you and Dad, particularly you, always made a big thing about my Chinese roots, and the so-called Number One Mama. I hated you for it then, you know. I didn’t want two mothers. Now I think I understand what you were trying to do.”

Mom began to cry quietly. “I wanted you to know about your birth mother because it’s the right thing to do. But now that maybe you’ll meet her, I feel jealous. I don’t want to share you with anyone.”

She leaned close and I put my arms around her. “Mom,” I said. “You’re my mother and this is my family. China is where I came from. This is what I am.”

O
h, wasn’t I the open-minded one! Insisting that Dong-mei stay connected to her roots, even calling myself “Mama Number Two,” until doing so upset her so much I backed off. Taking her to Chinatown, pushing her to take Chinese lessons. Wasn’t I the great liberal, unselfish and tolerant! Easy to do when the possibility of her ever wanting to find her birth mother was so remote, never mind actually tracking Chun-mei down. Now I feel like a hypocrite and a fool.

Kevin was skeptical from the start, but he went along with me, the teacher who knew all about children, who had taken all those psychology courses at university, the woman who,
as it turned out, didn’t know a damn thing. It was all theory, all talk. My daughter had had no interest in China or her original family. Why should she? All she knew was Kevin and me and Megan, our house in Milford, her school, her friends. What did she care about a country far away, even if she was born there?

But no one could tell me that. I had to insist, had to push. As she matured into a young woman, I hardly noticed her gradual change in attitude, her growing interest in China. Kevin had always wanted Dong-mei to take a business degree at university, and once I overheard him talking about what a great asset her knowledge of the Chinese language would be in the future. She didn’t fly into a rage the way she would have when she was a child. But none of that sank in.

When she made her birthday request at the dinner table, it struck me like a punch in the stomach. I could hardly speak. No, I wanted to say to her, you can’t go! You’re
my
daughter.
I
raised you. Insanely, I thought about my lost baby. I recalled the time I walked Megan to kindergarten on her first day of school, then years later took the same route with Dong-mei. I relived the aching sense of loss that only a mother can understand.