Confessions of an Asian Male Adoptee

In one of our family albums is a black and white photo of me with my willie on full display. It isn't as gauche as it sounds because I am only a hundred days old. I am told it's some kind of a Corean tradition to record baby boys with their pecker front and center. I don't believe the same practice is followed for females.

     That single photo is my only proof that my earliest days were spent as a Corean. My next appearance in the album is in full living color. I am lovingly cradled in the arms of my mother, a happy woman with pink skin, brilliant blue eyes and permed strawberry hair. She isn't my birth mother, of course, but she is the only one I've known. Other pictures show my father, a reserved Viking with blond eyebrows, and my older sister. She has the coloring of a birthday cake -- pink and yellow and blue. And of course me, with my unruly brown-black hair, tanned skin and dark eyes. I am the polar opposite of the other members of my family. Yet as I look through the album I find nothing odd about my place in a Swedish American family. Over the past quarter century my eyes have fully adapted to my environment.

     I may have been the last kid in school to know that I was adopted. Somehow the issue didn't disturb my self-image until I was starting the second grade. I think everyone just assumed that I knew I was adopted and saw no reason to bring it up. If the question ever crossed my mind, I never considered asking my parents. I looked to the darker uncles, aunts and cousins in our extended family and subscribed to the notion that I was the product of recessive genes.

     Cute notions like that don't stand up to the society of seven-year-old boys. The charge of being adopted was leveled at me during a ballgame argument. "Sure it's a strike if you're a godamned adopted chink." A fistfight resolved the issue to everyone's satisfaction but my own. After a second similar incident my parents offered up the truth. "This doesn't change anything," my father insisted. "You are one of us." My heart agreed with him, but my mind had started down the road from smug all-American boy to conflicted seeker.

     I recognize the advantages of having been raised a middle class white boy. I didn't lose those advantages the instant I decided to recognize that I was different from my peers. In most social interactions, if you act the same, you are treated the same, even if everyone knows you're different. This is especially true in interactions among boys who have seen you fight to defend your asserted identity. All my childhood friends were so used to seeing me as one of them that they probably wouldn't have known how to treat me like anything else. The thing that usually isolates some kids is an annoying habit or personality trait. I didn't have any, so I was more popular than most.
 

     I am well positioned to see that the treatment we Asian Americans are accorded is a function of three distinct components: the racial, the cultural and the personal. Racially I am obviously Asian despite having been raised as a white boy by a white family. Culturally I am completely white middle-American. As for my personality, it evolved as my life moved beyond the confines of my home town where everyone had grown up with me.

     As a teenager growing up in a midwestern suburb, I encountered no racial prejudice to speak of. Maybe I should say, I have no recollection of any such racial prejudice. I was never rejected by a girl on the basis of race. How do I know? I was never rejected at all. I guess I was considered cute enough, smart enough, athletic enough and just generally normal enough to be considered a "catch". But who knows? Maybe my race was considered but outweighed by other factors deemed more important. On the whole, in the minds of the kids I grew up among, the cultural and personal seem to have overidden the racial.

     That changed when I left for college. My life as a white boy came to an abrupt end. How abrupt? As I was moving into my dorm room, my assigned roommate rushed down to the office to request a room change. I felt like I'd just entered the twilight zone. I was being rejected by some jug-eared pencilneck, the kind of geeky kid who wouldn't have dared step on my shadow back in high school. That night at the dorm dance I was turned down by the first girl I asked. She didn't even look at me, just turned her face away and acted like she didn't hear me. When I tried to talk to her, she just shook her head as though to say, "I don't understand your language."

     Those encounters were a brutal assault on my self image. I had always seen myself as someone who belonged. A few days of life among strangers made me start seeing the possibility of rejection in every encounter. I scrutinized the people I met for signs of bigotry. What did it mean if the eyes were averted? What about a weak handshake? What did she mean by "you all"?

     After a while I came to see that racial prejudice tended to lose its inportance whenever interactions went beyond an initial or casual meeting. With people I came to know over time, my culture and personality established my value as a social unit. Of course, the same went for everyone. By the end of the first week the jug-eared geek who had requested a room change was eating alone in Siberia while I ate amidst a crowd of new friends. The girl who had dissed me at the dance was written off as a cold bitch while I was getting signals from some cute girls.

     But my eyes had been opened. I no longer took my social status as a matter of birthright. Once you awaken to racial prejudice, you identify with everyone of your race, even if you know that you have little in common culturally. I began taking an interest in the Asians at the university. Even my untrained eyes could distinguish Asian newcomers from American-born Asians. But it didn't matter. I saw them all as comrades in a racist society.

     They reciprocated. No Asian guy tried to freeze me out of a conversation. No Asian girl refused me a dance. This automatic acceptance was what racial identification was about, and I came to value it. I began casting a wary eye on Whites with whom I wasn't already acquainted. I began avoiding people with whom I was obliged to prove myself to get ordinary respect. Race and bigotry had become one of the filters through which I saw my interactions.

     And it couldn't but become a filter through which my actions were seen, even by those closest to me.

     For Thanksgiving weekend I invited a foreign student from Corea to come home with me. My family gave Jungshik a warm welcome. They seemed genuinely happy that I had made friends with a Corean student. But I suspect they were also concerned that I was accepted by the white students. "So is he your closest friend at school?" my mother asked after we had left Jungshik to get settled into the guest bedroom. "He's one of them," I told her. "He's the only one who couldn't go home for Thanksgiving." That seemed to reassure her. She and my father became even warmer toward Jungshik. They seemed eager to show support for my effort at getting in touch with my roots.

     I was glad too that Jungshik could verify with his own eyes that I was a real son to this American couple and the younger brother of this spirited young American woman. At times I had felt that some of the newcomer Asian students at the university had seen me as the beneficiary of some international charitable outreach project rather than a real American who happened to be Asian.

     My only regret about that weekend was the reaction of my high school friends. They were friendly enough toward Jungshik, but they seemed to read into his presence a sign that I was moving away from my friendships with them. I had grown up with them, and they had accepted me as one of them. Now it was as though their acceptance hadn't been enough for me, and that I was throwing them over to seek frienship within my own race. Nothing could have been further from the truth. My true feelings and intentions fell victim to the significance people attached to race. I would soon discover that this was routine in the adult world.

     Once I completed my education and entered the professional world, I found myself moving even farther from the automatic acceptance I had enjoyed growing up. At the university there had been at least a polite pretense at acting as though race didn't matter. In the professional world that presumption was turned on its head. Race was seen as a presumptive guage of one's ability, character and social status. In my profession that translated into a presumption that I was less aggressive, more low-key and more scholarly. To my dismay I discovered that the presumption was all but irrebuttable. The fact that I was temperamentally the complete opposite of what I was assumed to be was not considered pertinent. The junior partner acting as my advisor encouraged me to work within the comfort zones of the partners responsible for my assignments. I was given projects calculated to keep me buried in the library, with minimal opportunities to make court appearances.

     But ultimately the biggest seismic disturbance wasn't produced by my grumblings about assignments but by my very un-lowkey personal style. I had been hired by a large conservative firm that was well suited to service the old-line corporate giants headquartered in the midwest. What had drawn me to the firm was its sterling reputation with my father who worked as a manager at one of our major corporate clients. Ironically, it was one of the very few times in my life that I had gone against my own instincts to give the old man a reason to be extra proud. I can still see the way he was beaming when I gave him the news. His head tilted and bounced like a bobblehead doll's, so delighted was he to think that his son was to become an associate at the venerable firm that had serviced his employer for over a century. "You have chosen well," he kept telling me. "You will go far in that wonderful old firm."

     All this is by way of explaining why I was willing to bite the bullet and hang in there despite my growing frustration with the type of work I was being assigned. When a young man feels oppressed, his sense of self is liable to assert itself in other ways. Without my even being aware of it, I was becoming an increasingly frequent topic of conversation among the old geezers who made up the firm's establishment. From what I gathered later from a fellow associate, it started with my "wild ties" and "gangster suits" and progressed quickly to my relations with secretaries, female opposing counsel and, ultimately, the wife of a certain young partner.

     My first step toward the first real crisis of my life began with my secretary. She was every young male attorney's fantasy -- a pretty green-eyed blond with the body of a cheerleader and a totally guileless fondness for men. The fact that Patty frequently misplaced files, bobbled appointments, couldn't write intelligent letters and accidentally deleted important emails and pleadings were minor drawbacks that I learned to work around. They were more than made up for by the adoring way she would smile up at me while kneeling at my feet to fuss with files.

     I had heard that she was engaged but dismissed the suggestion as a groundless rumor. If she were engaged, I was the pope. Patty made a habit of coming into my office at odd moments and kneeling at my feet, often while wearing a short skirt and/or a top that emphasized her well-shaped breasts. In that position she would go over questions, correspondence, court calendars, time sheets and filing details. One day at quitting time Patty came in, closed the door behind her and told me that she found me "irresistable". As I said, I wasn't the pope, and nature took its course, right there in my little junior associate's office.

     It didn't take long for her fiance to discover why Patty wasn't coming home directly after work. He retained a shrewd lawyer who sent a "confidential" letter to my firm's managing partner threatening an alienation of affection suit. It was legally groundless as Patty wasn't yet actually married, but the fear of publicity was enough to send the management committee into immediate damage-control mode. They worked out a settlement that involved Patty leaving with a big payout to her and her (ex-) fiance and a censure letter to me for violating the firm's theretofore nonexistent no-fraternization policy.

     I was angered at not having been consulted on the settlement despite the lack of legal grounds for the fiance's threatened suit. I went to the managing partner to voice my indignation at having my record dinged without a chance to speak on my own behalf.

     "Consider yourself lucky," said the managing partner, a balding tax lawyer with coke-bottle wirerims. "We took a chance on you. Your conduct hasn't borne us out." When I continued to protest having been censured for something against which no rules had existed, he pointed to the door. "You can go voluntarily or you can be helped out." The look in his magnified eyes made it clear that his words applied not just to my leaving his office, but to my leaving the firm.

     I knew that I wasn't the only lawyer in the firm who had dated support staff, even married ones. The only thing that made my case different, I concluded, was that I wasn't white. I was also convinced that the firm's management would have loved to fire me. They hadn't only because they didn't want to invite a potentially embarrassing wrongful termination suit. But they made it clear they wouldn't have been sorry to see me quit. As far as they were concerned, I had become a nuisance.

     I wasn't without friends among lawyers in my associate class and even a few in more senior positions. But once word spread about my affair with Patty and the censure letter, attitudes toward me cooled. Even partners who had liked my work stopped giving me new assignments. I was forced to knock on doors and ask for new work. I wrote a letter to the managing partner complaining that I wasn't being given enough assignments to stay within guidelines for billable hours. That prompted a sudden change of tactics. One morning I found my desk covered with case files. They were going to bury me in the hope that I would suffocate.

     The files were mostly the types of mass-tort defense cases where the quality of pleadings and appearances by any one party defendant was rarely critical. Yet each file called for the filing of papers and appearances at hearings and depositions according to strict calendars. The hope was that I would buckle under the pressure of trying to juggle too many files. It was a low-risk tactic from their standpoint. From mine, it was actually a blessing in disguise. My new responsbilities let me spend more time away from the office and learn the routine at hearings and depositions. Often I would be gone most of the day, then return late in the afternoon to put together whatever papers had to be filed. I was spending most of my days on repetitive appearances but billing stellar hours.

     If I had continued that way for a few years, I might well have restored myself to the good graces of the powers that be on the strength of the sheer number of hours I was piling up. But I was undergoing a rapid evolution in the way I saw my place within the firm's scheme of things. I no longer saw honor or prestige in being a big-firm lawyer. Instead, I saw indentured servitude compounded by racial tokenism. I was a token who had overstepped the confines of the place to which I had been relegated. I decided to bide my time, learn the profession, then leave to set up my own practice. Meanwhile, I resolved not to deny myself any opportunities to overstep the offensive boundaries they had drawn around me. Around that time I shed whatever residual delusions I may have had about being essentially a white guy in an Asian guy's skin.

     Mass-tort depositions and court appearances were cattle calls of mostly young big-firm litigators-in-training. By gender we were divided almost equally between male and female. We were often thrown together for hours on end, with many opportunities for banter, coffee breaks and plain lounging around. We were mindful of professional ethical constraints against the appearance of conflicts of interest. Yet, at least among defense lawyers, the potential for actual conflict was minimal. Romances did blossom and affairs were carried on beneath a thin veil of professional distance. I was no exception. The only difference was that I attracted more attention than everyone else. 

     A big-firm lawyer, no matter how seemingly insignificant in professional stature or standing, is never out of the view or earshot of someone connected to your firm. In addition to hundreds of lawyers, a big firm employs three times that number in secretaries, paralegals, investigators, document processors, accountants and other support staff. Even a whitebread big-firm lawyer will be spotted if he is doing anything interesting in a public place, no matter how secluded- or intimate-seeming. That goes double for an Asian big-firm lawyer. If that Asian big-firm lawyer does something interesting with another big-firm lawyer over a period of several weeks, they may as well go on the six-o-clock news. But at the time, I was oblivious of this variant of the six-degrees-of-separation rule.

     Claudia was representing a co-defendant manufacturer in a mass-tort. I had noticed her at several depositions and appearances. So did everyone else, I am sure. She was beautiful. My interest in her was piqued because she looked Asian, at least part Asian, with glossy black hair, distinctive cheekbones and full lips. She added to the interest by rarely speaking. I was determined to find an opportunity to talk to her but was entirely lacking in confidence that she would find me interesting. She was wrapped in an aura of aloof self-sufficiency, the kind rarely seen in young big-firm lawyers.

     My opportunity didn't come until several weeks after I had begun mooning about her. I sensed zero interest from her, though she did catch me looking at her a couple times at depositions. For one deposition I decided to leave my car parked at the office and enjoy the fine spring weather by walking the dozen or so blocks. By the time the deposition let out in the late afternoon, a thunderstorm had rolled in, forcing several of us to call for taxies. As I dashed out from the shelter of the lobby toward mine, she ran alongside and got in with me -- something I would never have tried with her.

     "You're over at Blankety-Blank & Blank, aren't you?" she said, naming my firm. All of us had exchanged business cards at the first deposition, but I was flattered she had bothered to remember. Of course I knew very well where she worked -- another major downtown firm that happened to be located less than a block from mine.

     Normally, the taxi ride would have taken a few minutes. In storm-snarled traffic, we were together long enough for us to have a real conversation. Rather than regal and mysterious, she turned out to be shy and a little subversive, qualities that I found even more appealing. She had attended college near mine. We spent most of the ride giggling about the quirks and pretensions of the other lawyers on the case. The opportunity was too good to waste. When we were nearly at her firm, I steeled myself and asked her if she'd like to have dinner.

     She shook her head. When I persisted, she looked me in the eye and said, "I can't have dinner with you, Gus." Then she added, "Especially you."

     "What's the matter, don't you believe in dating inside the race?" I was offended.

     Her eyes widened. "You're Cherokee too?" she asked.

     I had been so sure that she was half Asian, I was flabbergasted. She turned out to be a quarter Cherokee on her father's side.

     "What do you mean by "especially" me?" I demanded.

     "Better you don't know," she said and started to get out of the taxi. Out of desperation, I grabbed her by the wrist. "How about a drink. Just one drink. After that you can treat me like a stranger."

     There was a long tortured moment of indecision before she looked shyly at me and nodded. Our first beers unleashed a torrent of emotions that had been damned up behind her aloof, mysterious manners. I learned that she was trapped in an unhappy relationship with another lawyer who was almost ten years her senior. She wanted to leave him but was afraid of his reaction. He was possessive, jealous, childish and self-destructive, she said. She had tried leaving him a few years earlier but had returned after he threatened to commit suicide. She felt responsible for him. The one thing she never told me was that her husband was a partner at my firm -- not that it would have changed anything. By then, I no love for the grey ogres who ran the firm.

     It took less than three weeks for word of our affair to reach the firm. I learned later that another associate at my firm had spotted us in a back corner of a little suburban bistro we had chosen for being so out of the way. Word had spread so quickly that by lunch the next day, I and Claudia's husband were the only people at the firm who didn't know what the buzz was about. I found out before he did when the managing partner called me into his office the next morning. 

     "Care to explain what you were doing with Blankety's wife in that restaurant the other night?"

     "Having dinner." I had been caught off guard, but had enough sense to know that the managing partner wouldn't believe me if I told him that I hadn't known to whom Claudia was married. You don't become a respected tax attorney by being gullible.
     My cavalier response made the flinty little man narrow his magnified eyes, but he kept his cool. "Do you even care that your career at the firm and in the profession is hanging by a thread?"

     I shrugged. I was beyond caring what he thought, just mildly curious how he would go about trying to dispose of me. I had already made up my mind to leave the firm as soon as I was ready. I had no intention of going out of my way to make it any easier for him to bully me.

     The managing partner seemed to boil over with repressed anger, if not hatred. "You'll hear from us real soon. Meanwhile you are not to see that woman again. Understood?"

     I got up and left without responding. The next two weeks were a blur. I had a scene with Claudia about having kept me in the dark. A few days later she resigned from her firm and went to stay at her parents' house. Claudia's husband took a sudden leave of absence. I entered into a work-for-office-space-and-referrals arrangement with a small plaintiff's firm and gave my old firm two weeks notice. Then I went home to break the news to my parents.

     My father was deeply worried. "If you want to play with the big boys, you have to play by their rules."

     "They have two sets of rules, Dad, one for themselves and one for me. I just can't live like that."

     My father didn't say anything for a long time. I know that he and my mother wanted to ask whether it had anything to do with my race. I am glad they didn't, because my answer would have made them unhappy.

     "I just hope you know what you're doing," my father said at last.

     "You raised me to be my own man. I can take care of myself."

     My mother gave me a smile. She knew I was as tough as nails. It was something she had always bragged about to everyone. She also knew I was more sensitive than I let on to anyone but her. The three of us shared a long hug before I went up to bed.

     My new life as a solo practitioner was liberating and eye-opening. I came to see that there was a big, red-blooded world outside of the cold narrow corridors to which big-firm lawyers are confined. There were life-and-death conflicts involving real people in real distress -- a far cry from dry, antiseptic litigation involving giant corporations trying to cover their gargantuan, overrepresented asses.

     Many of my new clients were minorities and struggling immigrants leading hazardous lives in which injury and abuse were commonplace. My own experiences as a minority helped me feel their plight. My experiences as a white boy and a big-firm lawyer helped me to be effective against the big firms on the other side. I especially treasured cases involving Asian immigrants, people who faced the same racial prejudice I had experienced and continued to experience as a plaintiff's lawyer pitted against the establishment.

     Ironically, it was only after leaving the secure bosom of the white establishment and struggling daily against the deep currents of racism in our society that I could appreciate the love and devotion of my parents in adopting and raising an Asian orphan as their own. They had shut out the harsh realities of the world, giving me time and space in which to grow and ultimately find my identity as an Asian American man.