Found Adoption Essay

 I don't know how I forgot that I'd written this essay on adoption in the early 2000s. I believe it was for a project that never got off the ground, so I let it rest, and then it disappeared from memory. I found it a few months ago, then lost it again. Perhaps there's something psychological about all this, but I do want the essay to see the light of day, if only here. Feels outdated, but more interesting that I remembered (forgot!).

Now I remember that the essay was turned down by a poetry journal because the editor did not like Jackie Kay's poetry. Woo!

 

Susan M. Schultz


Adoption meditations : meditations on poetic influence

Is family learned
Or instinctual:
    --Craig Watson, “Ecuador”
    

This is an essay about what gets left out of stories.  In particular, I want to write about what gets left out of some narratives of family and, by extension, taxonomies of poetic influence.  

A spate of op-ed articles in late 2003 on Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s revelation that she is the biological daughter of Strom Thurmond concentrated on the explosive subject of race,   What these articles tell us about the American construction of family apart from race is just as telling.  Cynthia Williams writes in her syndicated column that the contrast between Washington-Williams’s protection of Thurmond and Thurmond’s hypocrsy “just goes to show you a child can rise above vile parentage” (Star-Bulletin 12/21/03, D3).  Thurmond’s hypocrisy was sealed by the secret he and his daughter kept for 78 years; as Colbert King writes in the Washington Post, “the legacy of the Thurmonds of America is more odious than the mere fact of having fathered but not publicly owned up to children they brought into this world” (WP, 12/20/03).  The missing father motif is not one that belongs solely to the world of segregationists and their mixed race children, however.  It also belongs to the world of adoption, where there has always  been a parent or two missing from the narratives told about children born to one set of parents and adopted by another.  In the old days, which live on in people adopted under a closed system, the missing parent (usually a mother) was the one who gave birth, so the parent of record was the one who adopted the child born into secrecy.  In more recent times, after the adoption rights movement of the 1980s and 1990s, publicized by activists like Betty Jean Lifton, represented by organizations like Bastard Nation (and its website, bastardnation.com), the missing parent belongs to the adoptive family.  Consider any number of “reunion narratives” such as that of the New York Giants coach, his wife, and the son they relinquished for adoption over 30 years ago.  Their dramatic reunion story was published in the New York Times (5/16/2003) to much fanfare, replete with the usual descriptions of family resemblance between the coach’s family and their new-found son.  Photos confirm the statement that the son “shares a resemblance right down to the chin dimply inherited from their father,” if not necessarily the son’s claim that, “Finally, I can look around and say, ‘I fit in somewhere.’”  The conflation of physical and spiritual ties in biological families  becomes apparent the moment one enters into family relations that do not fit this pattern.  Almost completely hidden from this story, as from most other reunion stories covered by the media, was mention of the son’s adoptive family, who had provided a bridge between birth and “reunion” during a 30-year period   In one short paragraph we learn that Matthieson’s adoptive father is dead and that his adoptive mother wishes him well with his newfound relatives, saying a tad pointedly that “John is more or less getting something like an extended family.”  Barbara Melosh, among other recent commentators on adoption in America, has written about the “reunion narrative” as a prototypical, rather than a unique, story.  In some ways, that story provides an antidote to the hiddenness of the first family; in others, it merely replicates the disappearing of an entire family history.  And history is to adoptive families what DNA is to genetic ones.

So, to pose again the question put to us by Cynthia Tucker, how does a child like Essie Mae Washington-Williams “rise above vile parentage”?  Did Washington-Williams simply fall on the other side of the apple tree, as Jon Stewart of The Daily Show suggested?  In posing the question this way, I do not mean to disparage birthfamilies, most of whom are not vile, but to point to what is missing from Tucker’s and King’s and Stewart’s analyses of the Strom Thurmond story.  Because what is missing is any mention of the adoptive family that Washington-Williams thanked, however briefly, in a statement otherwise devoted to discussion of her “father.”  What is missing is, for the most part, the story of what happened between Thurmond’s abandonment of his daughter’s mother and that daughter’s announcement of her parentage.  To some extent this is a story of race.  If the South was full of segregationist white men who were the unacknowledged fathers of mixed race children, then the secret history of these unions contains within it the equally secret story of African American families who adopted the children of these unions.  In odd fashion, it aggrandizes the importance of the white father at the expense of black parents who perform the labor of parenthood aside from the initial labor of giving birth.  But this story is not exclusive to family narratives like Washington-Williams’s.

Birth is at once a “natural” and a “historical” marker; natural because it ties us to a genetic stream we as yet know nothing of, and may not ever if we were adopted, and historical because it signifies a moment in time when origin turned into onset, the spinning out of days and weeks and decades.  Yet often the natural and the historical are conflated, as if our histories, spinning forth as they do, are natural rather than constructed, however accidentally.  They are certainly twin nodes of something quite familiar (as it were) to adoptive parents, namely other people’s curiosity.  My son, by virtue of his mysterious beginnings, becomes the object of historical inquiry, where others’ children are permitted a future, not anchored to the past.  At a party shortly after the adoption of my son (at a year), I was quizzed by an acquaintance about my son’s orphanage, how he was cared for, all those past-tense questions that I’ve become awkwardly accustomed to.  From another room entered a woman who had recently given birth to a child.  My acquaintance turned to her and asked if she was going to have another child, telling her with emphasis that one of the best aspects of his life was his relationship with his brother.  It’s good to have a sibling, was his message to her.  It took me some time to realize precisely why that exchange made me so angry.  My son, still pre-toddler, was rhetorically denied the future that the other child was assumed to have.  Unlike the other child, my son would not enjoy the company of a sibling because siblings are “natural” companions, not historical ones.

One might think that motherhood could be as easily defined historically as naturally.  But Any biologist will tell you that your real father is the biological one, says one relative told us.  I do hope that he finds his mother someday, says another, of my son.  If language has its slips, then these are not slips, but internal scars where the meanings are, as Dickinson wrote of despair.  There are words for the kind of family that interests me, but these words are not often used, or not used in sequences I would recognize as true to my experience, historical and, by now, quite natural.  

There is  a stream of adoption literature that considers birth to be a natural marker, a necessary origin.  Sandra McPherson, a poet who found her birthparents, asks a question more rhetorical than not in the following stanza of “Wings and Seeds”::
    Separately our lives have passed from earthy passion
    To wilder highliving creatures with wings.
    With our early expectancies
    Did we come to think ourselves a flight of nature?  (Ghost  334)
The poet’s birthmother, who could not teach her child to read, can yet teach her daughter about nature (“To believe / The hummingbird mistrusts its feet”).  This poem, so saturated in natural imagery, ends with the poet’s statement of her need to return to her “natural” origins:
    I was a child of pleasure.
    The strong pleasurable seeds of life
    Found each other.
    And I was created by passion’s impatience
    For the long wait till our meeting. (334)
There is probably something to be made (in another essay) of two currents of adoption writing, the one to which McPherson belongs, which brings together nature and family to assert the necessary bond of birth, and another, whose landscape is more urban, more fascinated by the constructedness of family.  


Michael Davidson’s recent examination of Walt Whitman’s constructions of gender uses the term “adoption” in almost obsessive fashion.  The first meaning of adoption, if you look to the OED, is one of “adopting” ideas as one’s own; this is the meaning to which Davidson looks..  Davidson argues that Whitman’s “radical view of the self as ensemble” is borne out (to pun on the trope of birth) in his consideration of gender from more than one standpoint.  Listen to Davidson spin this argument out (the italics are mine): “The good gay poet, however, might hear in such lines not simply identity within difference but identity within identity, the adoption of one role to articulate another” (100); “If a poet like Emily Dickinson adopts, as she often does, the role of a male when she wants to describe conditions of power unavailable to women in the 1860s” (101); “In Whitman, the adoption of female personae signals the emergence of new emerging sexual categories in the postbellum period that were beginning to be defined” (102); “the poet adopts feminine position in order to participate erotically with other males” (102).  For Davidson’s Whitman, the poet’s “self-conscious reinvention of himself” is best described through the trope of adoption.  If identity is considered a central issue in adoption, then issues of identity are often expressed through metaphors of adoption.  

But Davidson falls short of abstracting his metaphor of adoption as a marker of identity-creation.  When he moves on to consider Whitman’s “influence” on later poets, he quotes Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s phrase, “Whitman’s wild children,” to describe his followers.  These “wild children,” Davidson makes clear, do not abide by Harold Bloom’s taxonomy of poetic influence.  What Davidson does not raise is the possibility that Bloom’s taxonomy of younger poets as the rejecting sons of their poetic fathers (Ashbery of Stevens, Stevens of Whitman, and so on) might instead be translated into a less tense, yet still familial, model of the son or daughter “adopting” his or her poetic for”bears.”  Such a model, among other things, releases the student of influence from a masculinist model of father and son, and admits a wider spectrum of possibility that includes (to follow Davidson’s main track) gay parenting.  More on this later . . . as it will become the crux of my argument about poetic influence.

British poet, Denise Riley, who was adopted, posits human identity as resulting from the movements of language, its performance about and by the speaker and poet.  “Self-named, I’m already more than halfway out of my dully private skin.  I am being lived” (Words 51).  Identity, as revealed in autobiography, comes from the outside, moving in, rather than the other way around; identity must be “performed” rather than lived, because in life, as in writing, there are prefabrications, not moments of originality.  Publication, then, means a literal death of the author into her text’s reading (and its inevitable misinterpretations by the critics, whose ears hear allusions where there are none, or original statements where there are allusions).  Riley plays on the usual trope of writing-as-birth thusly: “Maybe there is a moment, just before death via publication, when the organic connection between the author and her text isn’t quite severed—or in the old metaphor, when the umbilical cord hasn’t yet been cut, so that the work hasn’t quite come to birth as a text which will trot off on its own” (75).  No surprise, then, that this writer whose life is itself an act of “writing,” or a performance of and through language, should speak of “adopting an identity” (51).  (My emphasis.)  In her poem, “What I Do,” Riley writes:
        I am in several cupboards
        deep, and wish well out,
        with out from this
        dark air of china.
        Is my name ‘skeleton’
        or only ‘cup’?
        A crack of light falls round me.  (Selected 26).
Her name is whatever she gives herself, or is given.  But “Who anyone is or I am is nothing to the work” (“Dark Looks” 74).  Poetry is, then, an act of humility, as it forms as the result of the poet’s acknowledgment of her “inauthenticity” as a self, her “performance” as poet or as woman—better stated as “one who writes poetry” or “one who acts occasionally as women are seen to act.”  Riley, more than most writers, understands the intimate connection between “performance” and “adoption.”  Where a writer like Davidson “performs” that connection without interrogating it, Riley knows its truth and makes her own poetics of it.  

Digression (or not!) on family language: on our way to pick up Thanksgiving turkey from my husband’s high school imu (outdoor oven), our son asks if that means that we are going to ‘adopt” the turkey.  Several startled moments later, I realize that our adoption story often includes the phrase, “when we picked you up,” so he associates the verb “to pick up” with the concept of adoption.  “No,” my husband responds, “we are going  to eat the turkey.”  And then our rhetorical scramble really begins!

Riley turns the argument on its head, as she so often does—the argument that adoption disrupts identity-formation—by suggesting that adoption only reveals everyone’s lack of a stable identity: “to be brought up as the child of one set of parents, then much later to stumble upon the fact that these were not one’s original parents at all, might well be assumed to generate ‘a crisis of identity’.  Yet it can do the very opposite” (135), she writes.  What the suppression of adoption records does, according to Riley, is not to deny its “victims” their identity, but their history; in conversation with me, she said that she searched for her birthmother because she wanted to know her history.  For Riley, the discovery of a second family only confirms the “impossibility of having an identity” (136).  As Craig Watson writes in a long poem about adopting his daughter from Ecuador, “That which we inhabit / inhabits us” (55).  We cling to identities out of a sense of lack, she notes, and the danger to anyone who embraces the identity of a “victim” is that of not opening up to a future free of such an identification.  Lack is, indeed, a powerful thing: what I do not know about my son’s birthparents is a palpable presence in my life.  The story I was told of his relinquishment bore the mark of legend about it; I do not feel I can trust it, though it offers a root on which to hang my own story of his adoption.  What my son’s birthparents, if they are alive, know of his fate is a more difficult prospect.  One wants them to know everything.  What effect does this lack of knowing, combined with a desire to tell, have on my identity as a mother or as someone who writes about mothering?  Those are questions I’ve not seen asked, however familiar I am with the arguments about “unresolved infertility issues,” issues that were once unresolved, and now dissolve into the plenitude of adoption.  “Adoption” signifies my raising a son whose inclinations and temperament are presumed to be different from my own.  He is not my mirror, but the agent of joyful refractions, views I had not previously imagined.  I cannot spill myself into him, but am the rock in his waterfall (his favorite image), around which experience flows and is redirected.  If my identity is more than mother, is “adoptive mother,” then what it says about me and my relationship with my son is subject to perpetual conjecture.  On the one hand, adoption is seen as a chancy, iffy proposition, and I am the lucky participant in a lucky adoption.  On the other, adoption skirts the dangers of genetic dysfunctions as lived out in ordinary families.  But neither of these options really says much, does it?

Jackie Kay is a poet of the performative self, a poet whose The Adoption Papers (1991) is already a mainstay of the adoption community.  Her book is spoken in three voices, those of the adopted child and her two mothers; the mothers’ voices are typed in slightly different fonts, which my students were quick to point out to me are very easy to confuse with one another.  So the daughter’s head fills with mothers’ voices, both at once (the “real” and the “imagined”), and the reader cannot easily tell them apart.  Kay, whose identity was complicated by her being a biracial person in very white Scotland, the adopted half-African daughter of white parents, “adopted” models of her own, including Angela Davis.
    Maybe it’s really Bette Davis I want
    to be the good twin or even better the bad
    one or a nanny who drowns a baby in a bath.
    I’m not sure maybe I’d prefer Katharine
    Hepburn tossing my red hair, having a hot
    temper. I says to my teacher Can’t I be
    Elizabeth Taylor, drunk and fat and she
    just laughed, not much chance of that.
    I went for an audition for The Prime
    Of Miss Jean Brodie,  I didn’t get a part
    even though I’ve been acting longer
    than Beverley Innes. So I have. Honest. (26)
If Denise Riley persuades us that identity is formed in and through language, then certainly Jackie Kay’s work illustrates the idea well.  That written language is crucial for adoptive families is evident; there are the home studies, agency paperwork, certificates of birth and adoption (often conflated).  Kay’s origin is hidden away in paperwork; all she knows of her birthmother is a haiku-like statement on a piece of paper.  Her adoptive mother remembers that “I’m not a mother / until I’ve signed that piece of paper” (16).  Significantly, the book ends with writing about writing, the birthmother’s sister saying “she write me a letter,” as she awaits “the soft thud of words on the mat” and wonders if the writer will underline “First Class” “or have a large circle over her ‘i’s” (likely a marker of class as much as anything) (34).  This book is not, like so many coming-of-age stories, about the “birth” of the writer; rather, it concerns the “adoption” of the writer.  Later, we will see why Kay’s extensive use of quotation makes her a prime example of what I am calling the “poetics of adoption.”

Yet much of the rhetoric used to discuss adoption issues refuses the notion that identity is performed or, if it is, that such performances are creative, generative, even poetic enterprises.  The idea that there are identities, and that we “own” them, is strong in the adoption community, in part as a reaction against the notion that it “doesn’t matter” if your papers were switched and you were presented as someone else in order to be adopted, or against the feeling that it is, in fact, best if birthparents are not sought for or found (an idea that governed social workers’ constructions of adoption during the mid-part of the 20th century).  

To a literary critic who unlearned the notion of “organic form” as the false association of a construct (form) with nature, this plunge back into the language of firm origins was disturbing, if not unfamiliar after the re-learning of identity-politics in Hawai`i.  For, if the writers of The Empire Writes Back deploy the language of adoption to convey the ideas of cultural studies, they are doing so in a rather different fashion from Denise Riley’s use of the term, it seems to me.  Adoptions of colonial rhetoric, say, are simply not as desirable as the performances of the poet’s self.  Consider the backspin on the following phrases: “”post-colonial writers, whose traditions were by European definitions ‘childish’, ‘immature’, or ‘tributary’ (to adopt the most favoured metaphors of the period” or “the way in which New Criticism facilitated the ‘adoption’ of individual post-colonial authors by the ‘parent’ tradition” (160).  That book about postcolonial thinking came out of a society, namely that of Australia, where adoption was given a terrible name through its use by the government to “mainstream” half-aboriginal children—by kidnapping them, as any viewer of Rabbit Proof Fence can attest.  A headline in the local newspaper a couple of years back alluded to “suicide, imprisonment, and adoption of Hawaiians,” as if these three were equal instances.  In postcolonial societies, where “authenticity” is crucial, the rhetoric, or even the fact of adoption (especially if it is adoption out), can be problematic.   

One of the more egregious conflations of adoption with colonialism appeared in The New York Times on May 4, 2003 under the headline “Our New Baby.”  In his op-ed column, Thomas Friedman un-self-consciously employed the language of adoption to describe the United States’s relationship to Iraq.  After positing that the US must rebuild the nation of Iraq, Friedman turned to metaphor to elaborate, moving quickly from “state” to “adoption” tropes: “We now have a 51st state of 23 million people.  We just adopted a baby called Baghdad—and this is no time for the parents to get a divorce.  Because raising that baby, in the neighborhood it lives in, is going to be a mammoth task” (NYT op-ed).  I can hardly begin to explain the rhetorical over-reaching of this metaphor.  If Baghdad is “our baby,” then is adoption seen as the forcible capture of a “rogue nation” in the guise of an “innocent child”?  Are adoptive children, then, from “bad neighborhoods”?  Is the taking of a colony (not a state, which gets ratified) to be equated with the taking (in) of a child?  Kipling would be proud of such language, but that the New York Times is running it in 2003 strikes me as remarkable (or does it?)

International adoption is often conflated (with some justice, perhaps) with colonialism, that unnatural historical inclination of powerful countries to overtake, “adopt,” less powerful ones.  Reviews of the John Sayles film, Casa de los Babys, played up this aspect of his film while harping—extra-filmically, it often seemed—on the pathetic “nature” of adoptive mothers.  As is typical of treatments of women who do not “carry” but only want to “care” for children, their desire for motherhood is figured as more unnatural than not.  So, the question, according to Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune is: “Can you make an interesting drama on the spectacle of women wanting babies and what happens as they wait to have them?”  His answer is yes, if you consider the 1958 Ingmar Bergman film, Brink of Life.  But, Wilmington continues, “that was about life in a maternity ward.  ‘Casa de los Babys’ is about adoption.  It has the added disadvantage of being about childless solitary women with little or no hope of actual motherhood” (Rottentomatoes.com). And yet reviewers are not beyond the “play on words” that links birth (which is desirable), to adoption (which is not).  Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe, writes: “The Americans are in labor to receive children in this south-of-the-border purgatory, this limbo, to borrow one of Sayles's old titles. The adoption procedure stipulates that they have to reside here indefinitely. This is something of a sick joke -- Sayles seems to enjoy these women's miseries -- with a loud political snap” (Rottentomatoes.com).  The Honolulu Weekly’s headline over a review by Aarin Correa was more to this particular point: “Buying Motherhood” was all it said.  Thus the conflation of unnatural motherhood, bad politics, and money, is confirmed by reviewers who leave the scene of the film to scatter pre-existing stereotypes before them.  My husband and I watched the movie months after reading the reviews.  We were only astonished by the fact that Sayles’s portrayal of the women adopting children was so sympathetic.  No, they were not angels, with the possible exception of the Irish mother-to-be, but they were also not rank consumers of children, either.  They were pretty nearly human.

That there are deep ethical problems with international adoption is not to be denied.  Anyone who has read the Cambodia adoption email list over the past several years, as I have, and followed the news out of Cambodia, knows that the ethics of adoptions from that country were (they have since been halted, first by the Cambodian government, then by the INS) often dubious.  The facilitator of our adoption has been indicted on charges of visa fraud, among other things.  (More recently, she pleaded guilty to visa fraud.)  Mixing money and children may well be a match made in some version of ethical purgatory, if not hell.  Yet the method by which the reviewers of Sayles’s movie assail adoptive motherhood is not an ethical way to open a valid issue to the larger cultural conversation; instead, it enforces—on the one side—stereotypes based on ignorance and—on the other—defensiveness before everyone except others in your ethically challenged boat.  There have been eloquent statements of horror on the email list, as well as equally eloquent acknowledgements of ambivalence from parents thankful to have the very children they have, horrified that the way in which they became a family may have been polluted by greed and the peculiar globalization of adoption, among so many other aspects of our lives.  To replace one incomplete narrative with another is not to complete narration’s circuit; instead, it is to shift the angle of reproach.  And that is not a way to get at the real issues, which may or may not have answers or solutions.

Michael Davidson begins his chapter on Whitman by quoting Patrick Buchanan at the 1992 Republican convention.  Buchanan accused the Democrats of “cross-dressing,” thereby calling into question their gender identity (where Democratic men are women and women like Hillary Clinton become men, no doubt).  That the far-right is homophobic goes without saying, as does the perhaps lesser known fact that the far-right advocates adoption as a counterweight to abortion.  But mix homosexuality and adoption and you get reams of text in “defense” of the heterosexual family.  It seems no mistake that these two forms of parenting, gay and adoptive, should be such an explosive mix, as they both partake, for the dominant society, of “unnaturalness.”  If a gay (unnatural) couple is to provide a good home for their (unnatural) family, it should be in the guise of sainthood; consider Rosie O’Donnell’s defense of the Florida couple who adopted AIDS babies that no one else wanted.  As sainthood is a status much admired for its unnaturalness (the saint is celibate, or self-abnegating, or anorexic, usually), then saintly parents can be unnatural.  Rather as Joseph was, when he adopted Jesus as his son.  If one cares enough, perhaps one does not need to carry.  But of course many people find any form of gay parenting abhorrent, hence the hullabaloo about adoption.

Earlier, I quoted Michael Davidson’s discussion of Whitman at some length, and promised to return to the poetic implications of his references to “adoption,” which are then tellingly dropped when Davidson gets to the question of influence.  I’d like to look in that Bible of influence study, Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, for the origins of the agonistics between father and son that becomes Bloom’s model for poets and their rejecting “sons.”  For, while Bloom’s model now seems more quaint than central to literary critical narratives, I have always felt that there is some truth to his model; certainly poets are influenced by earlier poets, and much of what they write can be heard as variation on themes already put into play.  “Battle between strong equals, father and son as mighty opposites, Laius and Oedipus at the crossroads; only this is my subject here, though some of the fathers, as will be seen, are composite figures,” he writes in the introduction to his study (11).  What Bloom does not say is that he is writing about unacknowledged (because unknown) biological fatherhood and sonship, not fatherhood per se.  The Oedipus complex depends upon Oedipus’s not knowing who his father actually is.  In the meantime, of course, another narrative is left out utterly, the narrative of Oedipus and his adopted father.  Read the Oedipus play and you find nothing about their relationship, the nurturing relationship of father and son; rather, you get the disastrous results of the non-nurturant relationship, which is perhaps bound to result in mis-communication, if not death.  Tragedy thrives always on not-knowing, and Bloom’s theory of poetry is tragic.  

But what if influence were not a tragic process, but the ordinary interaction between a child and his or her adopted parents?  What might be the implications of a theory of poetry based on “adoption” (more as concept than as fact, like Bloom’s use of parenthood) rather than on biology?  What of the poet whose parent is seen as the rescuer of an abandoned child, to continue with the Oedipus story for a moment?  Then Kierkegaard might be rephrased this way: “He who is willing to work [adopts] his own father” (26).  Then Riley’s nearly contented admission that poetry is never, can never be, original, takes the place of Bloom’s proposition that poetry ought to be original and—quite tragically—is not.  Consider the difference in tone between my hypothetical statement and that of  Bloom: “In departing from the unitary aspiration of his own youth Milton may be said to have fathered the poetry that we call post-Enlightenment or Romantic, the poetry that takes as its obsessive theme the power of the mind over the universe of death, or as Wordsworth phrased it, to what extent the mind is lord and master, outward sense the servant of her will” (34-35).  Substitute the word “adopted” for “fathered” and a world of difference emerges.  “Fathered” and “mastered” and “lorded” suggest raw power, while “adopted” implies a kind of gathering in, a joining together rather than the separation Bloom always imagines for his poets.  Likewise, when Bloom discusses the “begetting” of poets: “To beget here means to usurp,” he adds (37).  

This is not to say, however, that we are replacing a natural model, albeit one mediated by Freud’s intellections, with one that is not natural except insofar as nature is borrowed.  Adoption, an adoptive parent would argue, is as “natural” as “giving birth,” even if the “giving” is another kind of activity all together.  “Giving birth,” to follow Bloom’s model, casts away; “adopting,” we might say in a moment of adoption chauvinism, takes in, makes a community of what is otherwise perceived as lack.  In place of Bloom’s emphasis on power, we might (if alls works well) set one of power-sharing.  The violence of Bloom’s birthing is met by a less violent impulse to heal what has been rent.  But I wax sentimental now, and that is not my intention here.  Instead, I would like to look at some of the possibilities that lurk in the notion that poetic influence is related more to adoption than to fathering and sonning.  

Adoption, then, is also at once an “historical” and a “natural” marker.  Nature hardly exists in a vacuum, but bends to the shape of circumstance, so we can speak of the “nature” of adoption, as well as its marker of a certain kind of history.  We might assume, then, that any theory of poetic influence based on adoption would be open to discussions of both ways of reading and writing.  On the model of an “open adoption,” whether it be in the contemporary of sense of extended family or the more belated sense of honesty in adoption, the poet would be influenced not by a single, “genetic,” thread, but by many strands, and more than one “family” of writers.  This would mitigate the secrecy of Bloom’s Oedipus, for whom the central mystery is not inheritance per se, but origin.  And there would be fascinating twists along the way, such as the one experienced by my husband’s birthfather, who becomes the “grandfather by birth” of my son, even though there is no biological link between them.  What might we then expect from an adoptive poetics?  Let’s for a moment play with some of Bloom’s adopted Greek terminology and deliberately misread it as an incomplete view of the family of poetry:

Tessara, the second of Bloom’s “revisionary ratios”: “A poet antithetically ‘completes’ his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough” (14).  The model of lack and completion tends to rest on the family model of continuity, that generations somehow “complete” each other, moving ineluctably from the issues of the parent to those of the child.  What if we assume that such completion is simply not necessary, or possible, and argue that poetry does something else, indeed, that it “adds” rather than “completes”?  Then we might be getting at an adoptive model.

Kenosis, the third of Bloom’s terms, “is a movement towards discontinuity with the precursor.”  In the narcissistic model that Bloom sets forth, discontinuity is above all difficult, requires breaking of vessels, agonistics, other models of rejection.  In an adoptive poetics discontinuity is always already assumed.  Such discontinuity is not so much desired as arrived at before the fact of the poem itself.  At issue, then, is more of a binding of voices than a break of them.  Jackie Kay’s Adoption Papers could not be composed under the rule of “originality” that Bloom proposes, for Kay needs to compose three voices, her own (as adopted person), and those of her mothers, birth and adoptive.  What is important in this sequence is not discontinuity, but the communication that crosses the discontinuities, that explains the break to the poet in such a way that she can live inside the ambiguities that have created her.

Askesis involves the state of solitude that is necessary for Bloom’s poets to write, indeed for any traditional lyric poet to compose.  Many critics and poets have written in opposition to this Romantic notion of the poet—I hardly need make the argument myself, except to say that an adoptive poetics creates a new framework within which to contain (or not) the notion of poetry as multivocal.  Such a theory does not depend on theorists who are otherwise most interested in the workings of prose, whose theories are then “transposed” onto poetry as if it played second fiddle.  Bloom’s obsession with “separation” is based on the ironic model of Oedipus, who was separated from his birthparents, without knowing it, but whose actual family ties get lost in the mythology to whose flaws Bloom is blinded.

The term that has always most appealed to me is that of apophrades, which results in the earlier poet sounding as if he or she had written after the later one.  Denise Riley has profound meditations on looking backward, and I would say that this aspect of looking backward as if it were forward is what makes the reading of poetry such a wonderful chamber of echoes.  But Bloom’s attempt to dramatize a reconciliation between son and father through this last term is not necessary (as synthesis) unless there has been a previous breaking.  Why maintain the need for a dialectical narrative of breaking and synthesis, when synthesis is the presumed beginning of the poem that follows the adoptive model?  This is what the adoptive model offers: an explanation for the manic synthesis of poems that bring together traditions otherwise at odds with one another.  Bloom’s own favorite poet, Hart Crane, can be read more as a synthetic poet than one who breaks from his precursors; in fact, it is the burden of bringing together so many parents that threatens Crane’s work, more than the need to break from the precursor.  In addition, the way in which Crane, in The Bridge, uses marginalia, not only to explain his poem, but also to acknowledge an affinity with Coleridge, suggests another aspect of adoptive poetics.

It seems no accident that the poets who fit into Bloom’s taxonomy of influence are those who refuse to quote other poets, except obliquely.  Following Emerson’s edict about not refusing to quote, Stevens and Ashbery ingest previous poets into their own linguistic brew, making the hunt for allusions more of a challenge, something on which a critic might stake his career.  The poets who do not fit Bloom’s program, and here I’m thinking in particular of the modernists T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, are poets who use quotation liberally, who even, in the case of Eliot, footnote other writers, for whom quotation is indeed a poetics.  Denise Riley again helps us, caught as she so often is, in the middle of the conversation.  Riley sometimes tries to avoid quotation, but her use of popular song lyrics in particular alert us to the conscious way in which she incorporates language outside the poem, outside her own head.  She writes about the phenomenon of having allusions attributed to one’s work that are not there, even as one tries hard to acknowledge the author’s death.  
    To allude brings up the risks of impenetrably private reference.  Footnoting
    might cover this, although it lays you open to charges of being pedantic.
    But the case of misattributed allusions will perplex anyone who can get
    haunted by sound-echoes, aural ghosts of lines from, say, Wordsworth
    or Auden.  (75)
Then, she continues, the critic either credits her with inventing phrases she borrowed, or borrowing phrases she invented.  For Riley what is at stake is identity, and the ambivalent regard she has for that concept.  For me, what resonates is the way quotation can itself be construed as part of an adoptive poetics.  The poets who claim originality, or for whom originality is claimed by a critics like Bloom, are staking their claim to an “organic” use of language, where those for whom originality is a red herring write “poems including history,” as did Ezra Pound.  Pound’s sense of language was multiple and historical, as was Eliot’s.  To expand upon Riley’s notion, then, is to suggest that the poem whose “identity” is most permeable, open to the voices of others, is one most likely to fit into the poetics of adoption.  It is the openness of it that matters, not the fact of there being quotation in the first place.  (Adoption simply raises into full consciousness issues of family and identity that already exist for each and all of us; so too does an adoptive poetics address issues in poetry of which we are aware, but perhaps do not yet have the conceptual framework for.)

Let me conclude with but a single test case for my adoptive poetics, suggested by the poet himself when I ran my general idea by him over breakfast in Honolulu months ago.  That is the case of Hank Lazer and his book, Days.  Lazer was not adopted, though he does have a stepdaughter, hence knows the dynamics of family apart from blood relationship.  There are two aspects of Days that interest me in terms of an adoptive poetics.  The first is Lazer’s fascination with history, his own poem’s history.  Each of the 233 poems in this book begins from a date.  That date is not typeset but printed (I assume in the poet’s hand).  The poems are then arranged in chronological order.  This fact would not be crucial to my reading were it not also the case that Lazer places citations for his poems in the margins, again in hand-written notes.  Thus we find links to Thelonius Monk, Norman Fischer, Louis Zukofsky, Jackson MacLow,  Robert Duncan, Lyn Hejinian, and other poets in Lazer’s “family.”  The notes point to differences inside the text: once pointed to, a citation is no longer incorporated into the body of the text, but set beside it.  The text no longer resembles itself as an entity entire, but reveals its own differences, the various voices out of which the poem is constructed.  Thus the dates are revealed as important because they suggest historical links, not simply between the poet’s ideas and the day on which he wrote the poems, but also between the poet and members of his family.  Their relationship is not organic, hidden within the very resemblance of a text to itself (where quotation is suppressed), but it is adoptive.  Lazer’s family photos do not show us individuals who share biological, but historical, traits.  To my mind, that way of looking at influence is more compelling than Bloom’s, which suppresses history in favor of a metaphorical genetics.  I believe that this model holds true not only for other poets who make their quotations conscious to themselves and their readers, but also to those for whom the genetic model drowns out the adoptive one.  When these connections are brought forward, what emerges is the central place of history in family creation, whether families are “actual” or “poetic.”  No longer is there a missing parent, rather there are a plenitude of them.



Works Cited


Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, Eds.  The Empire Writes
    
    Back.  NY: Routledge, 1990.
    
Bloom, Harold.  The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd Edition.  NY: Oxford,
    
    1997.

Davidson, Michael.  Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics.  Berkeley:
    
    U of California P, 2003.

Friedman, Thomas.  “Our New Baby.”  The New York Times.  May 4, 2003.  

Kay, Jackie.  The Adoption Papers.  London: Bloodaxe, 1992.

King, Colbert.  “A Story Much Older Than Ol’ Strom.”  Washington Post.
    December 20, 2003: A21.
Lazer, Hank.  Days.  New Orleans: Lavendar Ink, 2002.
McPherson, Sandra.  “Wings and Seeds.”  In A Ghost at Heart’s Edge:
    Stories and Poems of Adoption.  Eds. Susan Ito and Tina Cervin.
    Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1999.  334
Riley, Denise.  Selected Poems.  London: Reality Street Editions, 2000.
---.  The Words of Selves: identification, Solidarity, Irony.  Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
Tucker, Cynthia.  “Thurmond didn’t deserve such a good daughter.”  
    Honolulu Star-Bulletin.  December 21, 2003.  D3.
Watson, Craig.  True News.  2002.  Santa Cruz: Instance Press, 2002.

Meditation: On Family

All families are word problems. This seems especially true when you drift into the exurbs of kinship: those cousins once or twice "removed," or "step" grandparents. There's an odd arithmetic to it: siblings come in halves or steps, some parents are single, while couples come intact (addition) or as exes (subtraction). And there's the difficulty of blood, so often presumed to denote "fullness," and adoption, considered a different kind of addition, post-subtraction. There's the birth father who is more a telephone buddy than a dad, and the dad who married into parenthood. The math is emotional, but we often repress our emotions into number and portion. The "closed" adoption is not a simple equation. Nor is the "open" one. Family is one math problem to which there's no solution, only remainder and--too often--division.

_____

Math was always painful for me, but not for my father, who enjoyed helping me with my homework. He loved word problems. When I took the GREs the first time--before I decided to skip the math section altogether--I spent at least half the time allotted for the math section sussing out a word problem about baseball. Because I love baseball, I enjoyed this problem, was patient with it, so patient that I had hardly any time left for the rest of the test. My scores came out exceedingly low, but I was proud to tell my father the story of how I figured out that word problem. I no longer remember the content of that problem, only the joy I felt at solving it.

_____


Here's one of the word problems I live with: what do I call the mother of my daughter's sister?

_____

One reason I love this problem is that there is no answer to it in our language, or any I can imagine. She is not sister, not in-law. While she's "aunty" to my daughter, she isn't to me. She's fallen between the dictionary's alphabetical cracks. When I state the problem to friends, their brows furrow and they come up with possible nomenclature, but these are words already used for other relations. For now, she's the "other mother" in a family whose bonds are genetic and adopted. My friend, Dennis Etzel, Jr., whose mother "came out" in the 1980s in Topeka, Kansas, has "another mother," but she's different again.

When we arrived in Kathmandu in December, 2004 to adopt our daughter, we were told by the local facilitator that she had a sister. He informed us one hour before we drove to the orphanage to meet our daughter, who'd appeared to us in a tiny photograph, dressed in red, stern, looking away from the camera. Her sister, we learned, was one year older, and was being adopted by a woman in Miami. I remember the pit-fall of that moment of recognition. It would not have mattered to know earlier, because Nepalese law forbids the adoption of two children of the same gender, but that hardly made the news easier to absorb. The US embassy asked after our daughter's sister, too; when they saw the report of two girls found together, two girls whose photos resembled one another, they'd put two and two together. The report was as detailed as it was almost certainly fictional. Found by a road. Taken to the orphanage by the authorities. The facilitator seemed to know more, and what he seemed to know was disturbing, but he never filled out the impressionist picture.

On our second trip to the orphanage, which was bursting with children (Nepal was in the midst of a civil war), we met our daughter's sister, briefly, in a stone courtyard. She had big dark eyes and wore a dirty frock. Her name then was Nirmala. It had been Rita, and would be L. Radhika's name had been Sarmilla, L would later tell her mother. We gave her something, I don't remember what, and I tried to let her know that we would see her again, that Radhika would be ok with us. Did I say all that? Who knows. I only remember the intensity of the effort to express something, anything, in the face of this little girl's loss of her sister. I'm the only one of us who remembers this moment. Was I the only one there? Where was my husband? What memory withholds bears affect, though sometimes we can't locate its particular name.

And so these two little girls (then 3 and 4) from Nepal ended up in Hawai`i and in Miami (and from there to Walla Walla, then Seattle, and now Chicago). We heard from L's mother V that her daughter was very worried about Radhika; as her older sister, she felt responsible for the fate of her younger sister. So my husband made a video: here is Radhika on her tricycle; here is Radhika kicking a ball; here is Radhika's room; here is Radhika's brother; here are her parents. We sent the video off. And then they came to Hawai`i' another year we met in San Francisco, then in Walla Walla, and for the last two summers, south of Chicago. The intensity of coming together, sandwiched in time by months of infrequent contact.

If "does she know you?" is THE question to someone whose parent has Alzheimer's, then "do they look alike?" is the first question everyone asks me about the sisters. Definition 12 of the word "family" in the OED reads: "A category or group of musical instruments which share the same basic method of sound production." When my daughter asks her dad if the purple flower is a daisy and he responds that it's "in the same family," we're talking about similarities. While I realize the inevitability of this question--the nicest thing anyone says about family on facebook is "you so look alike"--I don't find it very interesting. Our culture has institutionalized family into likeness, both where it exists and where it does not. Yes, there's the family nose and even a family sense of humor. But only the first is genetic, especially when my son's jokes are so like my husband's, and my daughter's sarcasm reminds me of my mother's acerbic wit. Then again, the first definition of family in the OED has to do with servants. Go figure.

_____

I look like my father and his sister, Gretchen; increasingly, I see my mother's features in my face, as well, and hear her laughter when I talk to our kittens. Sometimes I even make what my grad school boyfriend called her "mother noises." Her sense of humor became mine, though perhaps it softened a a bit in me. I acquired her anxiety, though hers was constant, mine explosive and intermittent. She became depressed, but denied it. I couldn't deny it, because mine was worse. But growing up I felt alienated from my parents, not like them in any way. My mother was too insistently practical and rigid, my dad too quiet and detached. Where the puzzle comes together in my middle age, it was in my younger years a jigsaw scattered over a large floor, with little hope of solution, fitting together.

_____

And so there are two girls, one now 13 and the other 14. They are both short and in constant motion. Radhika plays soccer, her sister volleyball (despite her size).  They are both spirited. They play like puppies. They play with their brother and without him. When I came into the room the other day, he was leaning over to pull out a thorn from L's foot. Gently, slowly. He also pokes his sisters, teases them. She was leaning over to make his hair into a crazy pig tail the day before in the park. L rebels against school; Radhika adores it. L warmly offers hugs to everyone; Radhika does not. Radhika can be sardonic; L is softer, more distractable. Neither one of them likes to read. They are both fierce, in their own ways. "Description" is also a word problem: how to get it all right. Bryant says he hates that the girls are separated; I say it's good they're in touch. Those are the scales we work with. Imbalanced, but. (In Hawai`i we end sentences with but.)

_____

After a couple of early visits from my father's sister's family to spend time with us in St. Louis and in Alexandria, Virginia, we saw them at only the longest of intervals. My mother distrusted family, spoke critically of my father's sister (a very kind woman), didn't get along with her parents or her brother (there was also a short early visit from his family, which included an adopted daughter). Later, my aunt told me that my father had come to see her and said, "I'm ok, I'm ok," then disappeared for some time. It was my mother's doing, of that she was certain. My aunt forgave my mother, but she didn't refrain from telling my mother's daughter the story.

_____

To the extent that international adoption is an oft-maligned institution, it's due to trauma. That trauma exists before the adoption, when children lose their parents and extended families, and are placed in other institutions--the third world orphanages our kids spent months in--and then moved across the world into new cultures and languages and families. But the critiques often devolve on those who adopt these children, and are made easier by the frequent corruption involved in such adoptions. Our children don't suffer the kind of racial trauma than many international adoptees do: we live in Hawai'i, which is predominantly Asian, and L lives in Chicago with a family of Indian Guyanese origin. But clearly, it's not easy to get your feet underneath you when so many questions hover over your history, questions that are likely never to be answered. Denise Riley, with whom I once shared lunch in London, said she found her birth mother not because she wanted to find her genetic origins, but to learn more about her history. The irony was that her mother then expected her to care for her, based on that problematic origin. Word problems are also a hermeneutics. Genetics is as much a mode of interpretation as it is our make-up. In other words, it's as made up as it is determinative. But made up things--fictions, interpretations, desires--do often determine us.

_____

I moved five thousand miles away from my parents. I'd gotten to know my dad better, and discovered in him the kindness that my mother had always spoken of. "He's a saint," my mother would say, but like many saints, he had seemed far away. He came closer in his later years. Before he died, he made sure to close his accounts lovingly. My mother grew ever more difficult, tried to "disown" me at least once or twice, then succumbed to the long forgetting of Alzheimer's. That disease oddly brought us closer. If "closure" is indeed to be desired in our emotional lives, then she and I closed our accounts without too many losses. The difficult story had a happy ending. Or that chapter of it. Time feels different now, more enclosed. Family deaths do that; they alter time. Our maps shrink. We stop getting lost and turn to a GPS. It talks to us in a funny accent, but gets us where we're going. We hope.

_____

We've taken this word problem and created of it a family. This "other mother" and I have become friends and--during our brief weeks together--co-parents of a kind. While we work at this, the kids slip into family mode seemingly without effort. The first time L and V came to visit and I took them and our kids to the airport, we were heading back over H3 when Radhika started crying. She stopped, and then Sangha started weeping. They only stopped sobbing woefully when I got them home. There's less weeping now, but I have little access to the questions the girls ask each other, or those Sangha asks about his birth family in Cambodia. On occasion, over dinner as we did recently in Chicago, we start talking about what we remember and what has been forgotten. That's a genetic thread of its own. History, and its ruptures, take the place of the supposed truth of origins. The adoption story is a different genre from the biological (or "natural") one. It's hard to tell because one's audience so often doesn't get it. The visa problems, the travel plans, the delays, the coming into a large room in an old palace and seeing your daughter holding the hand of her didi and then taking her into your arms, a smelly child in dirty blue jacket, her sandals broken in winter. How she became sister to her sister, who also became sister to a brother.

_____

We tell such stories to make them inevitable. And ordinary, as love is.

Conversations with John Gallaher's _In a Landscape_

I'm not sure why I bought John Galleher's new book, though it was probably because we've been neighbors in Facebook comment boxes (little boxes!) on such topics as adoption--he's adopted, I have adopted children. He lives in Missouri, which was intriguing to me until I found out that he clearly, obstinately, doesn't know about the Cardinals. So I bought his book from BOA Editions, In a Landscape: A Poem. It's got 71 sections--LXXI, rather--constituting a discursive meditation on his own mid-American middle-aged daily life. It's a masculine Midwinter's Day, perhaps, though when I wrote to tell him I liked the book, I said it reminded me of Douglas Crase. He responded by saying he hadn't thought of Crase in a long time. There was that book in the 1980s, right? Yes, The Revisionist, 1981. Was that his only book? I looked Crase up, found an official website. Yes, that was the only book of poems, but then there's been a daybook and a co-biography since, along with a book of essays about American literature. No mention of "real" work, the kind that pays the bills. How does he live such a life? John wondered. So I went prowling and found a New York Times wedding announcement from 2011 for Crase and his partner Frank Polach. By this time, I'd veered away from my comment on John's book and into a wild goose chase after Douglas Crase's finances, which seemed odd. Then I remembered that Crase had written me a couple of times, but stopped after I suggested (as I recall) that he write more poems. (Was that why he stopped?) I just now (later) took The Revisionist down from my office shelf. Inside it, I find a note in an envelope dated March 17, 1992. It's in response to review I wrote of a book I no longer remember reading, though I do remember his poems, not exactly what was in them, but their density, their careful thoughtfulness, like Ashbery poems that were more linear than Ashbery poems, more deliberate.

I started sending John brief messages in response to his book and began to think that this was one way to read the book, talking back to it as I flip through it, sometimes forward, sometimes back. It started with funny stuff. Like a rumination on numbers and porn. I'd just talked about this in class when we started the Dover edition of Shakespeare's sonnets with the old numerals we no longer learn in school, and then saw this--



XXXI:

Whenever I see the roman numeral XXX
I think of pornography.

For a few months the site meter for this Tinfish Editor's blog recorded repeated attempts to find pornography. Searches like "XXX stories for my husband" came in from Arkansas, which might not have been Arkansas because I remember using blogger in Los Angeles and seeing it logged as Arkansas. When the tickle became an itch of curiosity, I investigated. The search landed curious yellows at a post that included discussion of Shakespeare's sonnet XXX. Sad pornographees. I'd forgotten that the post included my mother, ended with a photo of her in her Alzheimer's. Forgetting can be a kind of grace.


XLII

I changed my mind. I was going to stop writing this poem, but now
I'm not, because I heard someone say, in the hallway earlier,
that she had changed her mind, and it seemed a lovely idea, the way
it struck me to "change one's mind." I'd like to do that. Presto
Change-O.

When we adopted our daughter, Radhika, at age three, she spoke trillingly in Nepali. The difference in our languages mattered far less than I had feared. She conveyed her needs, and we provided them. But as soon as she started learning English, she discovered words to say and repeat. The first was "TRAFFICS," which she would yell from the back seat of the car as we drove home from my job and her first day care person. (My daughter is not a patient person, I remember thinking.) Then came the brief era of "change mind!" She'd walk around the house calling out, "change mind! change mind!" There was a beautiful constancy to her announcement of inconstancy. "Inconstant stay," in sonnet XV, can be read quickly as "inconstancy." I think it was Garrett Stewart who taught me that.


XXVIII

"It changes you," they say about a lot of different things,
but what they don't say is that most people
change right back.

We had a chat about "change," John and I. My week has been like carrying a pile of dirty nickels in my purse. I can't even reach them to spend. He liked the mention of "spare change." Brother can you spare a dime? Pair one?


XXVI

What does it mean to be useful? To be a useful person? My son's
watching Thomas the Tank Engine, where the goal is ever
to be useful.

When Bryant, Sangha and I were in London, during autumn 2002, Sangha (then 3) spent hours watching Thomas the Tank Engine videos, the ones that featured English accents. Ringo Starr! This was also the era of Bob the Builder. That December we even had a Bob the Builder advent calendar with chocolates behind each pair of shutters. We traveled a bit, once to Essex, and another time to Ireland. When he got tired in his stroller, Sangha started singing at the top of his lungs, usually "Bob the Builda." Through the cathedral square of Essex he sang; and, on the tube from Heathrow after an exhilarating and exhausting trip to Ireland, he belted out the tune as tube riders stared. Children are utterly useless sometimes. That's why we love them. Like poems.

LX

That probably doesn't connect to anything, I'm thinking
right now, a few hours later. But Bob the Builder is playing
on the TV, and my son's watching it, and he's named
Eliot with the E-L-I-O-T" spelling. Bob has just dropped
his construction helmet . . . 


John Cage keeps coming up in these poems, which are not acrostics, or especially quiet, unless you mean written in a steady even tone. They're not quiet, or random, even if they take some chances. Somewhere Gallaher refers to 4 minutes and 33 seconds. I went to hear this at the Honolulu Art Academy with Bryant when we first started dating. A woman sat at the piano and prepared to play. You could tell who was in or not in on the joke. There were the coughers, the whisperers. She got up once to look inside the piano, then sat down again, which felt a bit like cheating, because she was doing something. I once played the Frank Zappa version of 4'33" to a freshman composition class. One football player started pounding on his desk, another got up and danced. Only one student said she enjoyed the time to herself.


LV

When I was young, I lived in Orange County and ended up
going to Disneyland thirty-five times. I was trapped at "Yo ho,
yo ho, a pirate's life for me" once, for about forty-five minutes."


When I first moved to Hawai`i, I had a colleague named Alan who was in his late 30s. That was back before air-conditioning and stark ideologies, when we drifted between our offices and chatted. His office was on the same corridor as Joe's who died of AIDS. Alan was a storyteller, but he kept telling the same one. Soon, he was teaching less and less, and his students complained about him. Then--and this was beautiful--his friends (three or four or five of them) took over his classes until he had 10 years vested in the system, first while he was still in his apartment, then in a home. They would shop for him, do his taxes. And then he was gone to California, where his older sister had died of early onset Alzheimer's, like their father. Alan had never made commitments to people, because he knew his DNA. But I bring this up because Alan was once trapped in the "It's a Small World" ride at Disneyland for a very long time. Whenever he and his friends were on an academic panel together, one or the other of them would slip "it's a small world" into their talks. Even now, years after Alan's death, his friends wear funny ties on his birthday, go out to lunch. So, when John asks in

LIV

Where's the line between what constitutes repetition
and what constitutes change? Right now I'm thinking forgetfulness
is just as good as careful planning . . .

I think of Alan, for whom forgetting was repetition, and repetition of forgetting a story told over and again in my doorway on the 6th floor of Kuykendall. I'm no longer there--I moved to the 2nd floor years ago--and that's a kind of change I can count. 4 floors. How many years now?

Alan was adopted by his friends, and then relinquished into "care."

LXVII

His mother
was the sister of my father, until years later, when we were adopted
and became brothers. Our mother now, back then, was the daughter
of the brother of my birth grandmother. We scratch our heads about it
now and then, how every family has these stories, these little
     shufflings,
somewhere.

When our daughter came home with us from Nepal, people would ask if she and Sangha were siblings. I'd say yes, or "they are now," knowing precisely what they were getting at. Now, when I say we're going to visit the kids' sister, friends look confused. Isn't she Radhika's sister? And the mother of my daughter's sister is what to me? There are not enough names for us, or there are too many, usually fractions, like half- or step-. Before I adopted my children I had the same odd way of apportioning relation, of who was what to whom. A woman stopped me in a park where I went with Sangha; she had a son his age. She wondered if she could love someone not related to her by blood. Her son was conceived in vitro. She really wanted me to answer her question.

Are poets related genetically? Or are they made by way of similar strands of DNA, and then adopt each other? The torque of synapse from direct address to punch line suggests yes. The poetry gene is clearly recessive, popping up at random chance moments in the larger population, causing no small amount of distress (existential and otherwise) to its carriers. We are the kids who don't know about each other until there's an odd early a.m. call or facebook post that suggests we might share a parent. Maybe that parent is assigned us by Harold Bloom, but most likely we can't understand each other (misprision, baby!) because we didn't share four walls and an Oldsmobile. But there's no statute of limitations on this recognition scene, with all its joys and disappointments, its promise of getting out of time, only to fall back into it. Our cousin ended up choosing her late-birth-father's wife over her half!! biological sisters. It's like that with families, the choices forced upon us by politics. Or the way institutions bind us together as parents, siblings, and kids over the space of decades until we don't need to go to meetings, because everything we would say is there in the room already, hanging not as possibility but as what simply would be. When I meditate, my brain starts off that way, full of conversations remaining from 3 a.m. wake-up-to-pee time, a choreography of sounds more chaotic than those in "Truck Stop," where Glenn Gould goes to a diner, and overhears voices as if they were part of a Bach Fugue. I often wish there had been more fugue states in my life; at least then, there's focus amid all the remembering and forgetting and counterpoint of voices. Once I walked miles in New Haven in one--some guy had made me angry--and only later did I realize that had been it. So unlike Bach. Bach was what soothed me as a teenager, because he was complicated but still made sense. States render everything into static.

Somewhere in the book there's a discussion of nothing, probably related to Cage and his silences, and I'm thinking that the most difficult course requirement I gave my students this semester is to spend 10 minutes a day doing nothing. One said she'd never done nothing before, another that he just kept thinking, and was that ok? One woman said she kept thinking about how many pages of her reading she could do. So I suggested that she take her 10 minutes out of Facebook times and she confessed. The woman who said she'd never done nothing before disappeared from the class, as did the woman who might have been the man arrested for prostitution in 2003. Why are you so nosy, my daughter asked, looking everyone up on the computer, so I point out that she's being nosy when she asks. It's true, I like the way the internet imitates thought, but not the way its creativity erases ours, all those links following each other like flash metaphors without the synapses that might hatch them. Not the nada who art in nada. There's more there than that. But soft purple flower cheeks at the pond that spill into the olive green water, then sink. Radhika gets on the elevator with me and smiles at the colleague I don't like. "He talked to you because I was there," she said once in her crazy wise way. And I've acknowledged him ever since.

LIII

When I was young, we moved every three years. You
could set your watch to it. It's been mostly convenient.

We made one big move when I was a kid that shook me more than I realized then. Looking back, it was like a boundary fence beyond which things got more confusing and full of strange and violent melancholy. At the time, I only remember I wanted to say I did not want to move but did not allow myself to say so. Not that it would have mattered. This section of John's poem asks the question, "Have you had a good life?" one he returns to over and again, reframing it only slightly. Sometimes it's called "happiness." One of my students last semester wrote about how his parents want him to be happy in the life he chooses. I asked him how he defines "happiness" and he looked at me like I was nuts. But really, I asked. There are researchers who study this! What do we mean when we say the word "happy"? When my daughter scored a goal in soccer once, I got up on the sideline and started singing "I'm happy!" (Pharrell Williams-style). Afterwards, she gave me stink-eye. "Mom, NEVER EVER sing like that again." But I was happy, just then, without knowing how to define it. Just was.

I wonder if Douglas Crase has moved since he sent me that kind note in the 1990s. Should I write him back now? Should I send him this blog post and say we were talking about you and that book of poems you wrote that we all remember, but so little after. "What we bring back is the sense of the size of it," he writes in "Blue Poles." It's the length of his lines and Galleher's that made me think of that genetic connection between them, the discursive moving toward something--an idea, a shaped sensation--the brain's foraging in what's left of Stevens's dump. The the.

Meditation: On Traffic

We traveled to Kathmandu in December, 2004 to adopt our daughter, who was then three years old. My husband's videos of the events include many minutes of Kathmandu traffic footage. There were rules to the road, but sometimes that meant driving off the road. The road has edges, but no shoulders; you might find yourself in a car driving on bricks set beside it, or in a gully, or--on occasion--on the other side of the road. Even during a three day strike by Maoists, the traffic piled up, though cab drivers--if they drove at all--blanked their plates. At three, our daughter was talking a blue streak in Nepalese. We put her in day care with a Nepali woman in Honolulu who lived in a walk-up near the university, and spoke to Radhika in her native tongue. Radhika chose instead to operate in English, even before she could say much of anything in it. In the afternoon, when I picked her up and drove her home, we'd  get on the H1 freeway and--as is almost always the case--we'd sit there, millimetering along, boxed in by others (un)like us. Then she would inevitably call out the word "TRAFFICS! TRAFFICS!!" She was not going to be a patient child, I could tell, but her use of the English word did make more sense than mine. Each time I corrected her to "traffic," I suspected that her use of the plural made more sense than my static singular noun. I have no idea when she switched over to "traffic," but it was not for many months and never while we took that particular drive together.


In second year German, the joke was that at the end of Kafka's short story, "The Judgment," the word "Vehrkehr" means both "traffic" and "sexual intercourse." According to that unimpeachable source, Wikipedia: "The sentence can be translated as: 'At this moment an unending stream of traffic was just going over the bridge.' What gives added weight to the obvious double meaning of Verkehr is Kafka's confession to his friend and biographer Max Brod that when he wrote that final line, he was thinking of 'a violent ejaculation.'"

When I sit in Honolulu traffic (today it took 2 1/2 hours to drive my son and daughter to their schools and then to return home, where I meditate on the subject) I see an "unending stream of traffic," but it foretells no climax, no ejaculation, hardly even a trickling.  If my car is a soccer ball, there is an invisible keeper at every turn, dressed in loud and yet dimly seen colors, leaping out to halt my progress, return me to visible traffic. To stuckness, stickiness, and thus to all that meditation seeks to ease.


Someone posted on Facebook (another form of traffic) an article that compared adoption to child-trafficking. When we adopted our children, we devoted hours to contemplating the issues of where they came from, how they were relinquished, who was getting our money, if there were (other) ethical issues involved. Our meditations were busy, like a freeway just before rush-hour, pushing forward with the frantic pace of worry, dreading slower traffic. (During my meditations, I want slow traffic; in traffic, I want quicker traffic.) As we climbed a mountain just outside Katmandhu, we passed an enormous billboard with images of women, children, and huge print.  Our driver told us the billboard warned against the trafficking of women.


Such postings cause me a form of road rage on my internal streets, the crooked ones that cannot yet find out how to become straight. Yesterday, a woman in traffic on H3 called her family, reported the locations of a motorcyclist who had cut her off. Family members drove out, confronted the motorcyclist, who shot a gun at the ground. It was in the "breaking news."


Not too long after we adopted our daughter, a writer came to our house with a friend we didn't know. The friend was quite intense, a writer too, we were told. Also a doctor. With our daughter in the room, he turned to me and asked, "is she a real orphan?" What was it made him think he could traffic in our business, our intimate family life?! Traffic is intrusive, it busies the moral mind, it asks questions it has no business--but traffic is what makes business happen. I sputtered, still unsure how to handle intimate adoption questions, even as they kept coming in all their complicated patterns off poorly constructed exit ramps and into our home. Later, I wrote to him and said, "I gather you've been following media coverage of adoption issues [which is never good, whether positive or negative]." I told him that was not a question to be asked, especially not when my daughter was in the room.



In French, the word is "circulation," as if traffic moved in circles, leaving a fixed point and returning to it. If John Donne had known H1, he might have written not about the compass but about the cars. Fixed marks, indeed!



My job is to traffic in words, to exchange them (if never for profit), propel them across state boundaries, international ones. My classes circulate; my students remain young, while I grow older, my cataracting eye on their halting syntax at once more jaded and more kind. Isn't life itself a halting syntax, phrase in search of a comma to slow its trajectory?



When I put a micro-version of the "traffics" story up on Facebook the other day and told my daughter, she said, "mom, you're always having that memory!" But it's never the same memory, I want to say; it has its own traffic patterns depending on the time of day, the year, the weather. I am not Funes, whose memory is so perfect it can never alter. He died of congestion, like many a drive home.



We traffic. That word, like so many, bears no moral or ethical charge until it's modified. But we insist on dipping it in the lye of our conversation, or the traffic words make of us. Traffic is dead adrenaline, but not so the words that pierce us. I yearn for the contra-flow, the zipper lane, the HOV lane, the traffic cop, the off-peak drive.

Of blood and its discontents:

This was the week of the Voting Rights Act decision by the Supreme Court (awful) and the gay marriage decisions (mostly good); it was also the week of the Adoptive Parents v. Baby Girl case, otherwise referred to as the Baby Veronica case. This case pitted the adoptive parents of a child (the case has been going almost as long as Jarndyce at this point) against her birth father. He gained custody of her a couple of years into her life because the American Indian Child Welfare Act mandates that Indian children remain with Indian parents. (More on the history and the case here and here. Google will open more sites, too.) While the Act makes sense, the case itself seemed a nightmare that King Solomon himself could not resolve, unless perhaps he were to decide that instead of cutting the baby in half, the baby ought to be shared among her four parents. Better have the Court decide this than I. But on facebook, friends put up status lines that with great simplicity rooted for the birth father and dismissed the adoptive parents. The case was termed utterly crucial for native rights; the birth father's actions were excused (at worst) or extolled (at best). Some sources were presented as dubious (NPR, for example) and others as true (tribal sources). The outcome of the case in favor of the birth father was, in other words, deemed absolutely necessary. The status of status lines is always dubious, of course, because they tend not to argue but to state. They are messages to friends, not provocations to complexity and debate. They are ideological statements of purpose and belief, not (usually) admissions of confusion or inability to decide.

Even given this fact, along with the way in which these friends were clearly positioning themselves as supporters of native rights in ways that more resembled flags than actions, the blurts of opinions hurt. When I wrote in a time or two or three to say simply that there was clearly a lot of suffering to go around in the case, someone would inevitably click the "like" button and move on to explain why the case had to be decided against the adoptive parents. My emotions were getting in the way, it seemed, and if I could only clear my adoptive mother eyes, I could see that the law was just and must be enforced in all cases. Since the decision came down, one that splits the difference between this case and the principle of the Act more generally--a decision that strikes me as the best possible of many bad options--more opinions have been spilled on the pages of facebook and the internet. But also by one of Slate's resident opiners, Marcia Zug, went so far as to generalize beyond the boundaries of what is an equation of tribe and culture (babies stay with the tribe so that the culture does not die) to what strikes me as a symptom of our culture's deep distrust of adoption. She argues for biology, pure and simple:

--This disagreement over the importance of biology is at the heart of the Baby Girl case and it is why this case should matter to more than just Indian families and their advocates. For the majority, biology is insignificant, but as Scalia notes, “it has been the constant practice of common law to respect the entitlement of those who bring a child into the world to raise that child.” More importantly, this recognition of parental rights is not arbitrary. It is a recognition that biology matters. As Justice Sotomayor wrote, “the biological bond between a parent and child is meaningful.” I have no doubt that the Capobiancos also have a deeply meaningful bond with Veronica, and I cannot imagine their pain since losing her last year. But Dusten Brown is Veronica’s biological father, he loves her and wants to raise her. This should matter."

Leave aside the odd bed fellow agreement between Scalia and Sotomayor, and here you see an expression of the belief that biology does not just matter, but that it trumps all other notions of family. Children should always be placed with birth family (unless they are being abused), someone else opined on the Donaldson Adoption facebook page. And you know, I might have agreed with that, or not cared about it, were I not a mother by adoption.


Some things happened:

: My husband and I adopted our son at 12 months. Twice when I was at the cash register of the local supermarket, I looked at my Cambodian son in his stroller and saw the face of my father. This was not his face from old photographs of his childhood, but his face as I last knew him. A white man with wrinkled face and white hair.

: A few months ago, we traveled to our son's birth village in Takeo Province. I saw in his face in that of one of his Cambodian cousins. I was happily, eerily, astonished. This is to say--among many things--that when we identify physical likeness, we automatically extrapolate to other forms of relation. "He looks like you!" is one of the most common forms of praise for parents of children who resemble them, sometimes even those who not. No one needs to add "and this is a good thing," because no one needs to. That we do not say this to someone whose father abused her ("wow, you look so much alike!') or to someone whose father killed his mother ("how similar are your smiles!") also goes without saying. To be fair, my mother would tell me I was like her mother only when I was being difficult. She had a real quarrel with genetics as hers involved alcoholism and chaos.

:"Are your kids related to each other?" one baseball mom asked me; I dislike this question, because I know what she's asking, but refuse to answer it in those terms. "Because they look so much alike!" Well, not only do my children not look alike, but they are not related by birth. The fact that they are members of a family, however, tends to make people think they look alike.

 :A woman at a playground years ago asked me if my son were adopted. She wanted to know because she had assumed that she could never love an adopted child as much as she could love a child she bore herself.

: "Where do they come from?" "Do you know their families?" "Were his parents tall?" "Is she a real orphan?" "Why didn't you adopt an American child?" "Does he remember his language?" To which I explain that height also correlates to diet, that a one-year old or three-year old learns a new language and forgets the old, that it's none of your business what the details were of our adoptions (or that it would take months to tell the stories with their meandering and doubt and hope and disappointment and frustration). To which I explain that we are family. 

When you are an adoptive parent, you become a teacher. Or, when you are a teacher, you play that role in the parts of your life that don't match the mainstream. But first you are your own teacher. I can remember wondering how to parcel out the feelings you might have toward children who are fully yours biologically, or related biologically to your partner but not to you, or conceived in-vitro, were only 1/2 or 1/4 of your blood, or or or. It seemed such a puzzle, how feelings might follow biology, how you might have different feelings toward children based on whether or not they looked like you, or like your partner, or like someone else entirely. Such speculations turned meditative hours into exercises in percentages, blood quantum and made me miserable because I'm not good at math. To say nothing of the fact that hypotheticals can't be resolved on their own hypothetical terms.

And then came a boy and a girl, he at one and she at three. Those hours of parsing and measuring and wondering now seem comical in retrospect, because it has mattered not a whit. When I saw my father's aged face in my son's one year old visage I saw a likeness not recognized by those who would base family solely on blood ties. Someone suggested that this palimpsest meant I had accepted my son. Maybe so. He has my father's middle name, Frederick. He also has my father's gentleness and dry wit. My daughter resembles my mother in her utter lack of a sense of direction--if she turns left, know to turn right--and in her glinting eyed sarcasm. Are these markers of relation, happy coincidences, or figments of my imagination? As Nancy Pelosi said of Michelle Bachmann's opinion of the gay rights decision this week, "Who cares?" And if my children decide some day to find out more, it's their business, not yours.

"Awkwardness, Joy, Sadness": a trip to Cambodia

History matters, chronology less so.  That's what a trip like ours to Cambodia (and three days in Vietnam) teaches, if only because its intensity so outstrips sequence. No events on the trip proved banal, but none were as powerful as the few hours we spent in Prey Phkoam Village, Angkor Borei District, Takeo Province, Cambodia, where our son Sangha was born. There we found many of his blood relatives and their entire village waiting to meet us. 

But let me start with Hongly Khuy.  We've known Hongly since 1999 or 2000, when we were in the process of adopting our son from Cambodia.  He was the go-to guy for translations of paper work, so much paper work. He also wrote me large note cards to let restaurant workers know of my allergy to peanuts, an important part of many Cambodian dishes. Hongly has visited several of my classes over the years to talk about his experiences during the Khmer Rouge genocide. His first visit was the most raw; many of the students had a hard time dealing with the fact that he laughed after telling the story of a woman who asked for more food and was killed on the spot. (Such laughter, I've come to learn, is culturally determined, although I also read into it a response to horror's absurdity.) In later classes, he moderated the tale until it lost much of its bite. Nonetheless, students had met a man who nearly starved to death, and who is now at the center of Oahu's Cambodian community of two or three hundred people. 

Outside Battambong, we made a mysterious stop. This was not unusual; those of us who hadn't traveled with Hongly before (this was his 13th mission under the auspices of the University Baptist Church, whose Cambodian congregation he heads) rarely knew what would happen next. The written itinerary was wrong as often as it was accurate, and left many such stops off. I and several others scampered behind Hongly, who was carrying a small bouquet of flowers, past the Buddhist temple on the left, past the monks' housing on the right, to a small cemetery beside a rice paddy. There were several large, engraved stones. Off to the side was a smaller stone, unmarked, on which Hongly put his flowers before he ducked behind some bushes to do other, more secular, business. This was the marker for his father's grave, one of thousands in the area, who'd starved to death in the late 1970s. Hongly found the site at the time and left a brick or stone; he came back later and had the body moved to his village near Phnom Penh. But the stone remains, as does his pilgrimage.

As we walked back to the bus we paused to look at a building next to the parking lot. A dour blue building, it appeared unpopulated. That had been a hospital where many died, including Hongly's nieces and nephews. His sister had seen light flowing out of the building at night when they died.

We got on the bus and went to a restaurant to eat. Such was our trip and, in some ways, a notion of Cambodian history that emerged from it. Memories, often without memorials. A haunted landscape on which was little evidence of what haunted it--after all, the country is full of young people, and is changing rapidly, its cities full of new construction, its roads cluttered with pony carts, buses, motor bikes, and Lexuses (evidence of new ostentation, along with the large gated houses going up in cities and rural areas). Memories like those of James Chan, who grew up so poor he didn't have a shirt for school and got thrown out. Who needed a bicycle tire and was given the money for it by a friend of his brother, who then couldn't afford lunch. Who escaped Cambodia in the late 70s, like so many, spending two years in Thailand's refugee camps, who is still married to the woman (Yun) his parents chose for him 45 years ago. Who played the mandolin non-stop in and out of the bus. Memories like Hongly's, who saved two Khmer Rouge soldiers (they wondered why) and who cannot but forgive those caught up in that net of history. And rituals like eating, whether under a school or house, in a road-side restaurant, or in the bus. Those added a layer of myth, a happier circularity, to the history.

We traveled to Angkor Wat. For Bryant and me it was a second visit. For Sangha and Radhika a first. Sangha, who was given a permanent visa on entry (I could here the immigration men say "Khmer" as they set eyes on him) got in free, the rest of us paid $20. Twelve years ago the place was teeming less with tourists than with landmine victims resting on a crutch, begging, and children begging. There was no security then; you could scramble over the temples as you wished. This time the place was crowded with tourists--local, European, Asian--and we didn't see a single landmine victim. Sellers were the new beggars, urging you into their shops, plying you with cheap teeshirts and books and other trinkets. (The relation between souvenirs and memorials troubles my writing.) The temples here are too magnificent to be mere memorials, but of course they are, to a time in Khmer history when invaders and locals alike built long walls that they covered with carvings of Hindu battle scenes, then long walls they didn't get around to carving because another edifice needed to be constructed. It's an amazing place, resting in a heavy humidity, and hot. As in a mall in Phnom Penh, Hongly ran into someone he knew here, this time a man who lived in Hawai`i for a while, and now works for months at a time with a telecom company in Cambodia.

Our trip was a mission by the Cambodian congregation and friends from the University Baptist Church in Honolulu. There were many sermons, short and long, including one by a Cambodian pastor named Barnabas Mam; his sermon was in Khmer, but those of us stuck in English sensed that it was a stem-winder. This was the 13th iteration of the mission, which stops at small villages, many of them those from which team members came, and at churches (those with buildings and those without). We stopped at many schools to give bicycles, toothpaste and toothbrushes, over-the-counter medications (to the elders), balloons and toys, and to sing and speak. My family is not Christian and at one point I said so, adding that the Buddhist principles I try to live by include compassion, a cornerstone of this trip. We felt awkwardness about the emphasis on Christ and God, but not an aversion. Never did I get the sense that we were putting a dent in the poverty we encountered in these villages, but I also did not feel that our visits were trivial, especially those that involved family.

The least successful of these visits was to the Center of Peace Orphanage in Phnom Penh, where what was often an act of sharing--we brought gifts and songs, and got food and dance in return--seemed more a dog and pony show. Hongly, usually so funny and vibrant, began talking about "obedience and commitment," rather than joy. I felt a horrible weight as we entered the compound, encased in wire fencing, and saw the children seated across from the chairs we came to sit in. (The weight was mostly one of my memories of other orphanages.) They were older kids--the younger ones were on a trip, we were told--and the making of balloons thus seemed odd (though I never tire of seeing my husband making dogs and swords out of balloons). A middle-aged white man sat next to me in the back row. He let drop that these events happen often, that the kids have to sit through lots of singing and dancing, that the well-meaning purveyors of the entertainment never ask the kids about themselves. This was Brian Maher, a Christian minister, as it turned out engaged to the orphanage director Bophal Yos, Obama supporter, and one of the more incisive analysts of Cambodia that we met on the trip. He came to Cambodia in the early 1990s, stayed 15 years, and now moves back and forth between Phnom Penh and Seattle. From him we learned that the human rights violations of the Hun Sen government are mainly land grabs (later, with Sreang Heng of PEN Cambodia, we saw where parks had been taken for large buildings, where people had been kicked out of their homes and mansions built in their place, where a large Korean-financed building had been half-built, then abandoned in the face of the bad business outlook caused in large part by so much corruption). Brian told us that Cambodia has very few orphanages now; many were simply cash cows (we know about that first-hand) and how many were used to manufacture Christians--my words here. The government has closed most of them down. He said most of the children in Center of Peace were abused by family members. The grandmother of one child tried to bury her alive. When he asked them to chart their own journeys, one boy burst into tears. No one had asked him before.  But Brian added that he can't prod too much, because he has no idea how to put the pieces back together. To talk about trauma only sometimes alleviates it, as any reader of Holocaust or genocide literature knows. To talk about trauma can crack, break the nutshell that shields it.

Much of the rest of the trip seems an intense blur of events, children, games and songs, heat, roaming dogs and cats (in villages, restaurants, hotels), the sounds of dog fights at night and restaurant workers by day, calling out orders to the kitchen, long long dusty rides on the bumpy roads in a bus, and three days in Vietnam, where we were tourists and not relief workers or family. As these memories settle, doubtless some will come to the surface, earning their significance with time. But for now, one day and one day only stands out, comes back at all hours, and will. That was the day (December 24) when we visited our son's birth village in Takeo Province.

Several years ago a friend who adopted three Cambodian children with her husband told me that our former Phnom Penh driver was doing research for families who wanted to know their children's origins, that he had done work for her and her husband, that it was good work. Thinking we had nothing to lose, fearing that the corruption that ended all adoptions from Cambodia had touched ours, we asked him to do research for us. Not too long after I sent the first email to him, he sent back a long and very detailed report of his work, beginning with a bribe paid to the orphanage (which had told us nothing more than that our son was from Takeo Province, which is poor), and including two trips. He sent us a long story, a brief genealogy, and photographs.  A couple years later, Hongly's wife's relative Phally went to visit the village we learned about and sent more photographs. We went on this trip because Hongly said he would include the village on the itinerary if we came.

As the time drew near for the long ride to the village in Takeo Province, Sangha grew more and more anxious. He seemed angry that we'd taken him on the trip. He never much likes to travel, but is rarely hostile. There were a couple of evenings when I worried that the trip might implode for us over his unhappiness. I grew anxious that the story we had was not true (amazing how someone who doesn't believe in the truth in her own work suddenly becomes obsessed with it). Phally had made arrangements: there was to be a gift of rice, of lunch, of bicycles, and of the usual supplies. So we went.

As we drove through the arch that marks entry to the temple, an arch that reads Sambo Sakoa (or Ocean of Plenty) in Khmer, I saw a woman out the window to the left waiting for the bus. She was dressed in bright blue blouse and pants. I recognized her, but was unsure why. We got off the bus, stepping into a large public area near a huge gathering of children in white school shirts and many more villagers. An enormous sow walked around. But before I saw any of those clearly, she walked firmly up to Sangha and hugged him. She had tears in her eyes. She'd been in the photographs, was his aunt. Then, while certain moments stand out in my mind, others blur; there is no cause and effect any more, just feeling, confusion, sensation, confusion. The mission team did their bit for the gathered school children, including Sangha, who was called to say something by way of a Khmer translator. But we were drawn back into another crowd, one that contained two of Sangha's siblings, another aunt, a cousin (with orange hair and a cell phone), and dozens of curious onlookers. Photographs show Sangha and his birth family members in a tight circle inside another circle of people looking on.

Bryant and I left for a while to take photographs of the lake, what we could see of the village from its banks, the boats and large pigs strolling on the shore, rolling in the mud, stood in the quiet away from the central event. 

When we returned, we were told that there was a gathering at the one aunt's house, and we should  walk back out through the arch and into the village.  As we started down a small lane between houses (the village was very cramped for being in such a large landscape), a smiling woman stopped her motorbike and invited me on the back. I got on and off we went, down the lane, past people, past dogs, past pigs, past thatched and wooden houses, bouncing on the dirt road. She then led me to the gathering--more hundreds of people under a bright tarp--and Bryant and I were asked to sit on chairs that faced the crowd. Someone brought two glasses and a metal container of tea. Sangha sat in a small group in the front row of the large group. He was next to an old woman who turned out to be his grandmother; she looked stricken throughout the ceremony. She reached out and put her hand on his leg, then pulled it back. He also sat with siblings, a sister who had also been adopted out into Takeo Province at age four and had not returned until the day before this one, and a brother (another brother had left and has not been heard from). His aunt handed him a framed photograph (the photo only awkwardly nestles into the frame) of his birth mother, which he held on his lap. The town entertainer/MC took the mic and sang a song. Hongly was surprised that the song was so sad. But it was a song about losing someone you love and having that person return and so it made sense, even down to the moment he either forgot or claimed to forget the lyrics. Hongly called him to task for that, and the crowd laughed.

There were songs, and there was speaking by Hongly. At least a hundred people stared back, each adorned with a ticket pinned to their shirts and blouses indicating they'd had lunch sponsored by our group. Sangha began to look glassy-eyed, exhausted. Members of his birth family faded into their faces, showing little. And then we had to go. Sangha's orange-haired cousin took me by the arm and we tried to talk as we walked to the bus with the other aunty, more round-faced than the first, wearing a green blouse. We lingered at the bus, as others caught up to us. We got on the bus, Sangha near the back beside a the window, which he opened. Someone thrust a small school photo of Sangha from years ago at him. He pushed it back, wondering how the photograph had gotten there in the first place. Someone else stuck a piece of paper at him, pointing to his sister. It had on it a cell phone number and some names. And then we were gone.

When asked about the event the next day, Sangha said with great economy and wisdom that he'd felt "awkward, joyful because they are family, and sad when we left." He's given me permission to write this. I'm sure I have not done the day justice, but there will be many more days in which to meditate on what it means to find history, family, and then to see the moment close off again. To consider what it means to find family with whom one does not share language or culture. To meet family that's extremely poor and lives thousands of miles away. To acknowledge their grief, while permitting oneself joy in the presence of a son.

On the plane trip from Taipei to Japan's Narita Airport, I read an article in the International Herald Tribune about George Saunders, a writer whose work I know nothing about. It was one of those articles you read because you have time, not because you want to. Saunders came across as singularly wise, a man attuned to the teaching of writing as a spiritual rather than a professional activity. At one point in the interview, he talks about what it means to experience days when you observe everything: “For three or four days after that,” he said of the aftermath of a near plane crash, “it was the most beautiful world. To have gotten back in it, you know? And I thought, If you could walk around like that all the time, to really have that awareness that it’s actually going to end. That’s the trick.” These are days when a parent dies, a child is born or adopted, or the day we found Sangha's village and birth family. To be a writer means to cultivate these days, to try to have as many of them as you can. But they are necessarily rare. The universe opens a louver, then it closes. To have seen that shaft of light is what makes these days beautiful. To refuse the darkness that follows is a lesson at once spiritual and historical.

It was an honor traveling with Hongly and his team. I've known for a long time that Hongly is a remarkable man--Khmer Rouge survivor, community leader, husband, father--but what I learned on this trip is that he is also an ordinary person. There were over half a dozen other people like him on the trip, some older and less mobile than he is. Sambath Neuov, who was wheeled through every airport in a chair, submitted to all the rigors of the trip. Her lovely husband, Tan, to whom the TSA pays foolish attention. Muy Teck Chan, who sells aloha shirts in Waikiki and checks his stocks whenever wifi is up, bought ice cream and Cambodian malasadas and sugar cane juicers at every school stop, making both the vendors (their entire days' supply suddenly sold) and the children happy. Renee Keo, who said only that Thailand's refugee camps were awful places--she volunteered for the Red Cross so that she had something to eat--loved having her hair done by my daughter, and by hers. Her husband also came to Hawai`i in 1981. James and Yun Chan, Hongly and Chana, all of them ordinary beautiful people.

Relevant Tinfish publication, Corpse Watching, by Sarith Peou, can be found here (free pdf).