Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: She doesn't belong to me, I told him, And I
Speaker 2: don't belong to her. I know that, so at s
Speaker 2: and Nogo. According to the papers, she worked at a cafe.
Speaker 2: I said, I'll fly there and then I'll.
Speaker 3: See her from across the street.
Speaker 2: Many in my position hoped to learn that they had
Speaker 2: been wanted by their mothers, which I considered materially insignificant information.
Speaker 2: But I wanted to know her, or at least know
Speaker 2: what it felt like to be near this woman. If
Speaker 2: it came to it, I'd settle for being near at
Speaker 2: a distance.
Speaker 4: That's Tracy O'Neill, writer, assistant professor of English at Vassar College,
Speaker 4: an author of the recent memoir Woman of Interest. Tracy's
Speaker 4: story is, in a way about storytelling itself, the narratives
Speaker 4: we supply to fill in the blanks in our lives
Speaker 4: when we're missing the foundation, the bedrock of our own origins.
Speaker 4: It's also a story about determination, courage, and the intense
Speaker 4: desire to know the truth, even when that truth may
Speaker 4: be hard to hear. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is
Speaker 4: Family Secrets, the secrets that are kept from us the
Speaker 4: secrets we keep from others and the secrets we keep
Speaker 4: from ourselves.
Speaker 2: He grew up in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Some of
Speaker 2: my earliest memories were going to my extended family's houses.
Speaker 2: I would go to my auntie's house for Thanksgiving, and
Speaker 2: her husband was Italian American, so every year she would
Speaker 2: prepare like meat balls withsania seedy sauce. Then we would
Speaker 2: have salad and rolls, and then we would have the
Speaker 2: whole Thanksgiving dinner and then later desserts. On Christmas, we
Speaker 2: would go to my uncle's house and every year he
Speaker 2: would dress up like Santa Claus and come down the
Speaker 2: stairs and get up and usually end up doing things
Speaker 2: like distributing cans of like nuts or bottles of perkium
Speaker 2: to his siblings. And he was my godfather, so he
Speaker 2: would often also give me, say a barbie or.
Speaker 3: Something like that. So that was my father's side.
Speaker 2: My mother's side was a little bit rougher, So we
Speaker 2: would go there and it's like there would always be
Speaker 2: people drinking cold cups of coffee that had been out
Speaker 2: all day. It was sort of endless coffee, endless cigarettes,
Speaker 2: endless donuts from Mike's donut Shop, which is a sort
Speaker 2: of Boston institution, and it was me and my parents
Speaker 2: and then eventually my brother. Each side of my family
Speaker 2: there were many aunts, many uncles, cousins. Both my mother
Speaker 2: and my father are from families in which there were
Speaker 2: six children.
Speaker 3: My father's side.
Speaker 2: Was Irish American. My mother's side was a little bit
Speaker 2: more mixed. I think at some point, when I was
Speaker 2: maybe in elementary school, she started learning more, but what
Speaker 2: she always said was that her family was.
Speaker 3: French and Irish.
Speaker 2: My mother is somebody who always really really wanted to
Speaker 2: be a moment. She loved kids, she loved doing sort
Speaker 2: of childlike things, and you know, in large part when
Speaker 2: she was growing up, I think that she took care
Speaker 2: of the people around her a great deal, including her siblings,
Speaker 2: and that continued even into adulthood. If somebody in the
Speaker 2: family was in trouble, she was definitely going to be
Speaker 2: the person who wanted to go help out. I mean,
Speaker 2: I remember, even you know, when I was a kid,
Speaker 2: one of my aunts was often pretty broke and going
Speaker 2: through something, and we would drive down to Everett where
Speaker 2: she lived, and my brother and I would wait in
Speaker 2: the car and they would go into the grocery store.
Speaker 3: They'd go into the market basket and then they would both.
Speaker 2: Come out, each with a full grocery car that my
Speaker 2: mother had purchased for her sister.
Speaker 4: Tracy was a opted from South Korea and was being
Speaker 4: raised as an O'Neill. When she was five, her parents
Speaker 4: adopted her brother, So their adoptions weren't exactly secrets. Their
Speaker 4: biological beginnings weren't exactly disclosed either.
Speaker 2: In terms of thinking about, you know, who's the real mother, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I think that she did genuinely feel that she was.
Speaker 3: And also I wouldn't necessarily dispute that. I do think
Speaker 3: that it.
Speaker 2: Was probably a role that she really hoped to preserve
Speaker 2: and protect, and in some part of her mind sure
Speaker 2: that my mother knew that she did not give birth
Speaker 2: to me, she did not give birth to my brother,
Speaker 2: and she had not given birth period, and I think
Speaker 2: that can be really, really.
Speaker 3: Difficult for a lot of women.
Speaker 2: So in some ways, I think she probably felt that
Speaker 2: she needed to really protect that as the mother, But
Speaker 2: also I think she wanted me and my brother to
Speaker 2: know that we did have real parents.
Speaker 3: I felt that.
Speaker 2: Perhaps there was a sense of fear that my mother
Speaker 2: had about if I were to look for my biological
Speaker 2: mother or have the curiosity to or the desire to,
Speaker 2: and what that would mean about our relationship. I guess
Speaker 2: that the tension in some ways is that you want
Speaker 2: to do right by the people who you love. But
Speaker 2: of course there is also in this case a real
Speaker 2: physical difference. So although I completely was on board with
Speaker 2: the sense that family is a habit that you create
Speaker 2: and it's showing up every day, I also understood that
Speaker 2: there was a difference in some capacity between my parents
Speaker 2: and I.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's beautifully put in. Also, the idea that family
Speaker 4: as a habit, I think, is such a such an
Speaker 4: important one. As you were growing up, was there a
Speaker 4: longing in you or did that materialize later.
Speaker 2: I think that occasionally I had a curiosity about it,
Speaker 2: and it wasn't that I necessarily had something specific that
Speaker 2: I wanted to know, but I wanted to see, you know,
Speaker 2: what this person's life was like. I wanted to know
Speaker 2: who this person was, what this person's interests were, so
Speaker 2: on and so forth. And I also think, but to
Speaker 2: some extent, it's also just about being able to conceive
Speaker 2: of control in your life. So I think from a
Speaker 2: very young age I was aware of a certain randomness
Speaker 2: and arbitrary most to life, because of course I didn't
Speaker 2: know that I had been born in one place and
Speaker 2: in one family and ended up in another.
Speaker 4: What had you been told when you were a kid
Speaker 4: about your birth circumstances.
Speaker 2: I had been told that my birth mother could not
Speaker 2: keep me. It wasn't specified what those reasons were, but
Speaker 2: it was positioned somewhat as.
Speaker 3: An issue of me need.
Speaker 2: I also had been told that I had been born
Speaker 2: in soul, and I was told a height, which was
Speaker 2: actually primarily because when I was a kid, I was
Speaker 2: at one point an aspirational child dancer, actress model, and
Speaker 2: so the height had been dropped as a way of
Speaker 2: offering hope that I might get taller, like tall enough
Speaker 2: to be a viable model, which of course I was
Speaker 2: never going to be. When I was a kid, my
Speaker 2: mother had put me into dance classes. I don't think
Speaker 2: that my mother knew exactly what she was getting into
Speaker 2: at the time, but it was a real sort of
Speaker 2: paget bar. So essentially I started taking these tap dancing lessons,
Speaker 2: and pretty soon, you know, it was being suggested that
Speaker 2: I participate in pageants. So a couple of years after that,
Speaker 2: my first job in a way was doing like commercials
Speaker 2: and catalogs modeling. You know, when I was maybe like
Speaker 2: seven six seven years old, I stopped dancing and acting.
Speaker 2: Around the time that I middle school. We moved to
Speaker 2: New Hampshire, and I got very into figure skating. For
Speaker 2: a while, I was obsessed, and then when I was
Speaker 2: a teenager, I ructured a couple of vertebrae, so I stopped,
Speaker 2: and in a way, I'd never really thought that much
Speaker 2: about what it would be to go to college or
Speaker 2: live in adult life. There was really only one thing
Speaker 2: that I wanted to do, and that was skate. So
Speaker 2: I sort of very quickly tried to suddenly become a student.
Speaker 2: And I really didn't start to understand what it meant
Speaker 2: to be a student until I was probably almost done
Speaker 2: with college. When I was nineteen, I really wanted to
Speaker 2: go study abroad.
Speaker 3: I wanted to go study in Italy, and.
Speaker 2: You know, I'd never been anywhere outside of the US
Speaker 2: before except for when I was born. So you know,
Speaker 2: I got home that summer and I had already gotten
Speaker 2: into the program, but I needed to make money, and
Speaker 2: so I was going around trying to apply to all
Speaker 2: of these jobs, like basically any place that was within
Speaker 2: like let's say forty minutes the house that I grew
Speaker 2: up in, I would go and I would apply for
Speaker 2: a job, and I wasn't getting any traction. And so
Speaker 2: after a few weeks, the one place that I could
Speaker 2: get a job was this strip club in Billiards Hall
Speaker 2: called Mark Show Place, which was in Bedford, Newhampshire. So
Speaker 2: I went there and essentially I asked for a job,
Speaker 2: and you know, I exist and looked enough like a woman,
Speaker 2: I guess that they were willing to hire me.
Speaker 3: So I started bartending there.
Speaker 2: So at some point my father asked me about my
Speaker 2: new job, and I said that I was working at
Speaker 2: a place called March Showplace. What I hadn't really anticipated
Speaker 2: was that he was going to think that it was
Speaker 2: really great that his daughter got this job and start
Speaker 2: telling people at work that his daughter got this job. Essentially,
Speaker 2: he found out for his coworkers that it was a
Speaker 2: strip club.
Speaker 3: So one night he and my mother showed up and they.
Speaker 2: Were incredibly distraught and you know, they wanted me to leave.
Speaker 3: There was a pretty big scene.
Speaker 2: The owners of the club called for security and in
Speaker 2: the moment the options were essentially that I could leave
Speaker 2: with them or I could stay and continue working, and
Speaker 2: I decided to stay and keep working because it was
Speaker 2: the only way that I was going to get to
Speaker 2: go study in Italy. So I graduated and I moved
Speaker 2: to New York City because my best friend, who's like
Speaker 2: my brother Ali from college, was.
Speaker 3: Moving to New York City and.
Speaker 2: He was basically right about everything and the most fun
Speaker 2: smart person.
Speaker 3: I came to the city.
Speaker 2: On the Chinatown bus, which, as I think a lot
Speaker 2: of people probably know, was apt to burst into flames
Speaker 2: on any given ride, but also cost like ten or
Speaker 2: fifteen dollars at the time, So I basically just got
Speaker 2: on the bus with my suitcase. I had like six
Speaker 2: hundred dollars in my pocket, and that was.
Speaker 4: It will be better back in a moment with more
Speaker 4: family secrets. Tracy spends her first years in the city
Speaker 4: tending bar and figuring out what she wants to do
Speaker 4: with her life. She becomes serious about writing, goes to
Speaker 4: grad school, and continues to bartend as she also starts
Speaker 4: her academic career. Then the pandemic hits, which of course
Speaker 4: changed many of our lives, both in dramatic ways and
Speaker 4: as subtle ones. In Tracy's case, her curiosity about her
Speaker 4: birth mother, which has ebbed and flowed over the years,
Speaker 4: comes into focus.
Speaker 2: So this was the spring of twenty twenty and I
Speaker 2: was reading the news, and I remember that this article
Speaker 2: came up. It was in the South China Morning Post,
Speaker 2: and it was about a man in South Korea, and
Speaker 2: this older man had died in a locked covid ward.
Speaker 2: There were details in it like that he was only
Speaker 2: ninety pounds and that there was nobody to contact about
Speaker 2: his body when he died, And there was something about
Speaker 2: the image of this rail older person alone dying that
Speaker 2: really it was too much for me to bear. So
Speaker 2: at that point I felt that there was no longer
Speaker 2: an option, and I was going to need to go
Speaker 2: find the mother who gave birth to me, because she
Speaker 2: too could be like this man dying alone.
Speaker 4: What's so amazing about that story is that I think
Speaker 4: so often someone embarking on a search like this is
Speaker 4: embarking for their own emotional reasons or to fulfill something
Speaker 4: for themselves, And in your case, the impetus turns that
Speaker 4: on its head a bit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that there were reasons in
Speaker 2: both directions. So on the one hand, there was the
Speaker 2: fear that I would never get to meet this person if,
Speaker 2: in fact they, let's say, died of COVID at that
Speaker 2: particular moment in time. So there is the question of
Speaker 2: a lost opportunity for myself. But there also seemed to
Speaker 2: me something very sad there, because I had sort of
Speaker 2: spent a great deal of my life thinking about how
Speaker 2: this woman who gave birth to me had chosen a
Speaker 2: particular path for herself, and that path was not necessarily
Speaker 2: the path that most women followed. In some ways, I
Speaker 2: had imagined that this person had maybe you, decided against
Speaker 2: having a child and could still be somebody who had no.
Speaker 3: Child, no family, no spouse.
Speaker 2: And I was sort of interested in this person for
Speaker 2: making that choice. But I also could see how that
Speaker 2: could be a terribly sad and frightening place to be
Speaker 2: in at that moment in history.
Speaker 4: As is the case with many adoptees and other people
Speaker 4: who don't have much, if any information about their origins,
Speaker 4: Tracy constructs narratives that live alongside the narratives that are
Speaker 4: constructed for her. So in this moment, her narrative becomes
Speaker 4: perhaps this is my birth mother's story. This thought, which
Speaker 4: takes root during the pandemic, also comes at a time
Speaker 4: of tremendous change in Tracy's life. She ends a long relationship,
Speaker 4: is offered a job teaching at Vassar College, and moves
Speaker 4: from her beloved Brooklyn to Poughkeepsie, New York. It was
Speaker 4: in this perfect storm that she begins to actively look
Speaker 4: for her birth mother.
Speaker 3: I had sent.
Speaker 5: Out some emails to various agencies that do things like
Speaker 5: try to locate the parents of adopted children.
Speaker 2: There's one agency in Korea that is specifically doing that work,
Speaker 2: but I also reached out to different groups, and then
Speaker 2: I started reaching out to private investigators. At the time,
Speaker 2: because COVID was ravaging the world, many agencies were essentially
Speaker 2: not running, or even if they weren't, referring to themselves
Speaker 2: as not running. People were out of office, people were
Speaker 2: at home, so on, so forth. And it occurred to
Speaker 2: me at a certain point that perhaps the people who
Speaker 2: might still be working were private detectives. So I spoke
Speaker 2: to several private investigators, and most of them felt that
Speaker 2: I simply didn't have enough information to run with, or
Speaker 2: they would say something along the lines of that they
Speaker 2: could do a search, but there were no guarantees or
Speaker 2: they would say if they spoke about the process that
Speaker 2: they were going to follow, I would realize that they
Speaker 2: were essentially just going to do what the agencies did,
Speaker 2: which was running a few things in a database. Then,
Speaker 2: after several unsuccessful conversations with private investigators, I found a
Speaker 2: guy named Joe Adams, and Joe, from what I could
Speaker 2: tell on the internet, worked in several different countries. I
Speaker 2: believed that the website that I found him on was
Speaker 2: called something like International Private Investigators dot com.
Speaker 3: And so I called.
Speaker 2: And I left him a message, and.
Speaker 3: Pretty soon after that he called me back.
Speaker 2: And at the time I was so dejected. Most of
Speaker 2: the world was pretty shy down at the time, and
Speaker 2: I was essentially living in pajamas and drinking coffee.
Speaker 3: And like smoking cigarettes for breakfast.
Speaker 2: But the morning that Joe called, it felt like suddenly
Speaker 2: I had life in my body again. So Joe called,
Speaker 2: and unlike the previous investigators, he felt like I did
Speaker 2: have a great deal of information, or at least that's
Speaker 2: what he expressed to me. And so pretty soon we
Speaker 2: were talking on the phone pretty regularly. And I'll say
Speaker 2: that Joe is also just really fun. Joe's kind of
Speaker 2: a peach. He's just fun to talk to, and he
Speaker 2: gave me a great deal of time, even though in
Speaker 2: fact no matter he had changed hands whatsoever. So he
Speaker 2: said that he was going to maybe reach out to
Speaker 2: a fat lazy bomb in Tampa to get some connections
Speaker 2: to feed on the ground in Korea.
Speaker 3: The fat lazy Bomb in Tampa was his.
Speaker 2: Brother, And what I hadn't known when I first called
Speaker 2: him was that not only was Joe a private investigator,
Speaker 2: he also had been an operator for the CIA.
Speaker 3: So his grand strategy was that we needed.
Speaker 2: To make contacts at the embassy because essentially, the spies
Speaker 2: at the embassy were going to know who could be
Speaker 2: trusted in Korea to do more investigatory work, whereas we
Speaker 2: would not know who was good there. At the time,
Speaker 2: it didn't really make sense to try to get a
Speaker 2: private investigator in Korea because private investigation itself had only
Speaker 2: just become legal, and there had been several fairly publicized
Speaker 2: cases of people who were positioning themselves as private investigators,
Speaker 2: stealing people's identity and so forth. So the notion that
Speaker 2: we should try to find somebody trustworthy there made sense
Speaker 2: to me.
Speaker 4: At the time, Joe may have a grand strategy, but
Speaker 4: not so much in the way of follow through. He
Speaker 4: just kind of vanishes. But Tracy's determined to continue the
Speaker 4: investigatory work on her own. Joe had suggested that she
Speaker 4: try to locate people who had worked at the agency
Speaker 4: that facilitated her adoption. This is how she finds a
Speaker 4: social worker named Marty Cardona who lives nearby in New York.
Speaker 2: I called her up and she said she was willing
Speaker 2: to meet me, so I drove up to go talk
Speaker 2: to her. At the time, I had just been in
Speaker 2: this car accident and I hadn't replaced my car yet,
Speaker 2: and so I basically bought this car and then hadn't
Speaker 2: really driven it.
Speaker 3: And then I drove in this I wouldn't say snowstorm,
Speaker 3: but I drove through some snow.
Speaker 2: That was rather intimidating at the time, but maybe I'm
Speaker 2: diseasily intimidated to a panera bread and we sat down
Speaker 2: and talked. So at the time I was looking for
Speaker 2: something really specific. I had gone with a mission, and
Speaker 2: my mission was that I was going to see if
Speaker 2: she could help me obtain the resident ID number for
Speaker 2: my birth mother, because with the resident ID number and
Speaker 2: some other information. You can usually find an address on
Speaker 2: someone in Korea, so Marty didn't have that member. What
Speaker 2: she did have for me was essentially a story. So
Speaker 2: the story was about her own daughter, and so Marty
Speaker 2: was a social worker, but she had also adopted a
Speaker 2: couple of children, and her daughter, Julie, had wanted to find.
Speaker 3: Her birth mother.
Speaker 2: You unlike me, Julie figured that out at a pretty
Speaker 2: young age though, when she was maybe twelve or thirteen,
Speaker 2: she and Marty went to Korea and they went to
Speaker 2: have dinner with Julie's birth mother, and so Julie essentially
Speaker 2: sat down and lived at her mother for the first
Speaker 2: time since she had and a baby really and said,
Speaker 2: I've thought of you every.
Speaker 3: Day of my life. And so.
Speaker 2: When Marty told me this, she shook her head. It
Speaker 2: was the sort of rueful gesture, I guess, and she
Speaker 2: knew her daughter really well worse. And so the way
Speaker 2: that she put it was that he knew that Julie
Speaker 2: had said that she thought of her mother every day
Speaker 2: of her life, and what she needed in that moment
Speaker 2: was for her mother to say that back to her. Instead,
Speaker 2: what her mother said Julie again only maybe twelve or
Speaker 2: thirteen years old. Was everything turned out as it should have.
Speaker 3: You grew up in America.
Speaker 2: You're healthy, you're strong, everything turned out as it should be.
Speaker 2: So that was pretty devastating for Julie at the time.
Speaker 2: But then many years passed and at some point Julie's
Speaker 2: mother wanted to see her, and so she wrote Julia
Speaker 2: a letter and she asked if she could come to America,
Speaker 2: and she said, I know that I wasn't there for
Speaker 2: you when I should have been, but please let me
Speaker 2: see you.
Speaker 3: I'll do anything.
Speaker 2: I'll even stand behind a plant if you want me to.
Speaker 2: I won't tell anyone who I am.
Speaker 3: I just want to see you.
Speaker 2: But at that point, Julie had already been hurt for
Speaker 2: many years, and she was an adult now, and she
Speaker 2: decided that she did not want to see her mother.
Speaker 2: So Marty told me that story essentially as a sort
Speaker 2: of warning. You know, she wanted me to know that
Speaker 2: sometimes people think that they want to know and it
Speaker 2: ends up being really painful.
Speaker 4: This heartbreaking story does not dissuade or deter Tracy from
Speaker 4: her search. She does not do one, but six DNA
Speaker 4: tests in pursuit of answers. Nothing is yielding results. There
Speaker 4: certainly are no close relations coming up. But finally, on
Speaker 4: the sixth test, there's a faint hint of possibility, a
Speaker 4: man named Philip, who is her third cousin's father. Pretty distant,
Speaker 4: but still a possible gateway into the truth of her maternity.
Speaker 2: I had been operating on the premise that if I
Speaker 2: found a location on my birth mother and she was alive,
Speaker 2: and that if I went to see her, then I
Speaker 2: would talk to my parents about it. But in some capacity,
Speaker 2: it didn't feel particularly like there was anything to say
Speaker 2: before I knew whether that would happen, because nothing.
Speaker 3: Was materially changing. I had an.
Speaker 2: Interest in meeting this person, but I don't know it
Speaker 2: just it didn't seem like there.
Speaker 3: Was much to say. I also never I didn't know
Speaker 3: if I.
Speaker 2: Was going to find her, but I also didn't know
Speaker 2: if she was dead or alive.
Speaker 4: So you do have the conversation with your mom. Anything
Speaker 4: about that conversation and what that felt like, I dreaded it.
Speaker 2: I think that no matter whether or not I felt
Speaker 2: that it was fair to want to meet my birth mother,
Speaker 2: I had always had a sense that this was something
Speaker 2: that would be extremely painful for.
Speaker 3: The mother who raised me to experience.
Speaker 2: She didn't say to me ever, that she feared it,
Speaker 2: but I guess that I would say.
Speaker 3: I know her pretty well.
Speaker 2: Too, So I called her and I told her about it,
Speaker 2: and you know, I could tell that she was really
Speaker 2: trying to.
Speaker 3: Not show how she felt.
Speaker 2: I'm sure she had a lot of feelings about it,
Speaker 2: but didn't necessarily voice any disapproval or anything like that.
Speaker 2: But I could hear that she, like me, was trying
Speaker 2: to control her voice.
Speaker 3: And also, unlike me, you know, she was crying a
Speaker 3: little bit.
Speaker 4: We'll be right back, and so Tracy is off to Korea.
Speaker 4: It's December twenty twenty one, and pandemic travel restrictions are
Speaker 4: still pretty draconian, especially in Korea, where the omicron variant
Speaker 4: is quickly spreading. She's prepared to quarantine in a government
Speaker 4: facility before going to find her family, but Philip has
Speaker 4: urged her to tell the people at the airport her story.
Speaker 4: He even suggests shed cry on command, thinking a display
Speaker 4: of tears might help her get out of the quarantine period.
Speaker 4: Tracy thinks all of this sounds implausible and ridiculous, but
Speaker 4: she tries it. She can't quite conjure tears, but storytelling
Speaker 4: narrative is indeed on her side here.
Speaker 2: When I got to the airport and I was being checked,
Speaker 2: I did explain my story, and there was a great
Speaker 2: deal of miscommunication at the time, but I ended up
Speaker 2: being allowed to then, instead of quarantine, go to a
Speaker 2: cousin's house.
Speaker 3: I had never met this cousin before.
Speaker 2: Her name was Wanie and she was in her early fifties.
Speaker 2: So I then needed to get from the airport to
Speaker 2: her house. So I rolled up in the cab to
Speaker 2: this very large apartment complex and we stopped and I
Speaker 2: opened the door, and the first thing that happened was
Speaker 2: that this.
Speaker 3: Older woman who was.
Speaker 2: Shaking and weeping, grabbed me and started holding me, and
Speaker 2: she was crying and saying things, and I had no
Speaker 2: idea what she was saying because she was speaking Korean.
Speaker 2: At first, I didn't even understand if this was my
Speaker 2: birth mother or not. As it happened, it was my
Speaker 2: aunt young Lap.
Speaker 3: And there was a crowd of people around. One of
Speaker 3: them was my cousin Juanyi.
Speaker 2: Whose house I was going to stay at. One was
Speaker 2: her husband, Jeriyang. There was my older sister and Juan,
Speaker 2: and there was my older brother in Chian, but I
Speaker 2: actually didn't know that he was my brother at the
Speaker 2: time either, and so I was sort of brought inside.
Speaker 3: Before even all of the introductions were done.
Speaker 2: We went up many flights they're an elevator to the apartment,
Speaker 2: and then Wantie, my cousin, asked me if I wanted
Speaker 2: to eat something, and we sort of fat around the
Speaker 2: table somewhat awkwardly while I sort of like held slices
Speaker 2: of apple.
Speaker 4: To go back to the whole idea of narratives, the
Speaker 4: narratives that you had, you know that sort of propelled
Speaker 4: this journey was maybe my biological mother never had any children,
Speaker 4: maybe she's alone, maybe she's even going to die alone.
Speaker 4: And then you discover that she indeed has a number
Speaker 4: of children, and that you have biological siblings.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So right before where I arrived in Korea, Philip told
Speaker 2: me that my birth mother had three children with three
Speaker 2: different men. And there were the two older in one
Speaker 2: and in him, who were fifteen and seventeen years older.
Speaker 3: Than I was.
Speaker 2: And then there was a younger brother, young Ben, who
Speaker 2: was like three or four years younger than me. And
Speaker 2: for some reason Philip couldn't remember how much younger, But
Speaker 2: the first night that I arrived in Korea, two of
Speaker 2: the siblings were there, the older two the younger one,
Speaker 2: Young Ben was not.
Speaker 4: Tracy enters a veritable sea of stories about her birth mother,
Speaker 4: a riot of narratives in a language she doesn't know.
Speaker 4: Even though she's now in Korea and closer to meeting
Speaker 4: her birth mother than ever before, the truth of her
Speaker 4: birth mother's story and therefore her own origin story, continues
Speaker 4: to be elusive.
Speaker 2: So when I went to Korea, I didn't speak Korean,
Speaker 2: and I.
Speaker 3: Still don't, so most of the communication with.
Speaker 2: My Korean family was done by using language translation apps
Speaker 2: on smartphones. It was really bizarre because I would say
Speaker 2: something and then Google Translate would repeat what I said
Speaker 2: in another language, and then whoever I was talking to
Speaker 2: would say their piece, and then their translation app would.
Speaker 3: Say something back. But the translations were not always great.
Speaker 2: Even so, I was able to at a certain point
Speaker 2: understand a story that was being offered to me because
Speaker 2: one day my cousin Juani, who did speak so English
Speaker 2: limited English, very carefully wrote down.
Speaker 3: A narrative for me.
Speaker 2: She wrote me a letter essentially, and in this letter,
Speaker 2: She said that my birth mother and my birth father
Speaker 2: had been having an affair, and at a certain point
Speaker 2: my mother got pregnant. When she told my father, there
Speaker 2: was an issue because my father already.
Speaker 3: Had a family and so did she.
Speaker 2: According to Wannie, my father's wife found out that my
Speaker 2: mother was pregnant and demanded that my mother get an abortion.
Speaker 2: But later my mother simply thought that she had a
Speaker 2: miscarriage and didn't know that she had given birth to
Speaker 2: me at all.
Speaker 4: What were you making of that?
Speaker 3: I thought it was crazy.
Speaker 2: I think that I would have felt that it was
Speaker 2: crazy no matter the context. But for some reason, especially
Speaker 2: reading the letter in these incredibly precise letters in my
Speaker 2: cousin's handwriting, I found utterly ridiculous, and so I confronted
Speaker 2: her about it, and we talked about it, but of
Speaker 2: course there was the language barrier, so we ended up
Speaker 2: almost playing something like miscarriage charades, because I needed to
Speaker 2: try to act out the differences to her between birth,
Speaker 2: a miscarriage, a still birth, really any way that a
Speaker 2: human could have us out of a vagata, And I
Speaker 2: was asking her many questions about it, and she insisted
Speaker 2: that my mother did not know that I had been
Speaker 2: born and really did think.
Speaker 3: That it was a miscarriage. And she said that it was.
Speaker 2: Possible because Berth is crazy. There's a lot of pain.
Speaker 2: Maybe you get an epidural and so the drugs make
Speaker 2: you even crazier. And she said to me, essentially, look
Speaker 2: are you a mother? And I said now, and she said, well,
Speaker 2: Benny wouldn't understand.
Speaker 4: All of this is confusing and exhausting. In fact, Tracy
Speaker 4: is utterly exhausted. Getting it the truth is practically an
Speaker 4: Olympian effort. She's sifting through a language barrier and multiple
Speaker 4: agendas about Juan Yee. She writes, she can't breathe without lying.
Speaker 4: And still a week has passed and Tracy hasn't yet
Speaker 4: met her mother.
Speaker 2: About a week after I had been at Wannie's in Dejon,
Speaker 2: my mother took a bus from Sul and she came
Speaker 2: with the aunt who i'd met before, young Monk.
Speaker 3: So I was waiting for her.
Speaker 2: With Janie around the table, and then Janie's.
Speaker 3: Dogs started barking. And when they began barking, I.
Speaker 2: Knew that that was because somebody was at the door,
Speaker 2: and that somebody was going to be.
Speaker 3: Mayoma, the woman who gave birth to me.
Speaker 2: So she came in and she was wearing a long
Speaker 2: block down coat. Her hair had been dyed a almost
Speaker 2: frayon red, and she started moving toward me, and she
Speaker 2: was clapping her hands and saying Tracy, Tracy and Tracia.
Speaker 2: And she got closer to me, and I was standing.
Speaker 2: I don't know, maybe I was loving toward her too,
Speaker 2: I'm not really sure. But then she sort of almost
Speaker 2: launched herself at me, and he was holding me and
Speaker 2: she was crying, and we sort of stood there for
Speaker 2: a while together and then said my name again, almost
Speaker 2: like a question, and I said, yes, we've met once before.
Speaker 3: It was sort of surreal.
Speaker 2: There's this moment that has been something that has been
Speaker 2: on your mind for so long, and then she was there.
Speaker 2: And of course she's essentially registering to me as just
Speaker 2: a stranger, and she was just a stranger, but there's
Speaker 2: also a deep desire to recognize something. So I think
Speaker 2: I was searching in a way in the moment for
Speaker 2: something familiar.
Speaker 4: And in that case, you have an actual interpreter. You know,
Speaker 4: no more Google Translate. You're gonna actually have an actual interpreter,
Speaker 4: and it's a chance for you to really ask questions
Speaker 4: and get answers in real time, but the interpreter won't interpret.
Speaker 2: We sat down at a table and I called a service,
Speaker 2: an interpreter service, and I put the phone on speaker
Speaker 2: phone between us, so that this interpreter could tell me
Speaker 2: what my Allah was saying, and so that he could
Speaker 2: tell her what I was saying and what happened. So
Speaker 2: I didn't really get to begin with a question. As
Speaker 2: soon as we sat down, she starts ar did batting, essentially,
Speaker 2: and she spoke for something like twenty minutes straight.
Speaker 3: And essentially she repeated the.
Speaker 2: Story that Juani had shared with me, that she hadn't
Speaker 2: known that she had given birth, and she was saying
Speaker 2: she was sorry.
Speaker 3: But there were some conflicting details. So, for example, while
Speaker 3: she did say that she didn't know that she had given.
Speaker 2: Birth to me and she thought it was a miscarriage,
Speaker 2: but she also said that she thought of me every
Speaker 2: day of her life and prayed for me and prayed
Speaker 2: that I was okay.
Speaker 4: And then you asked her if she believed in God
Speaker 4: at one.
Speaker 3: Point, yes, and she that she did not believe in God.
Speaker 4: Right, just so many layers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you fire the interpreter, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Because he refusing to interpret. He won't tell her what
Speaker 4: you're saying, and he won't tell you what she's saying.
Speaker 4: There's like some version of she's your mother, she loves you.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So I asked him to ask her why she was
Speaker 2: praying for me and praying that I was okay if
Speaker 2: she didn't think that I had ever been born, And
Speaker 2: he said to me, what matters here is that your
Speaker 2: mother loves you. And I ended up having an argument
Speaker 2: with the interpreter, and finally we got.
Speaker 3: Off the phone. By the time that I went within one.
Speaker 2: My sister the Soul to see my mother, I had
Speaker 2: heard several things. I had heard that my mother was
Speaker 2: a law shark. I had been told that she stole money.
Speaker 2: I had been told if my mother asked me for money,
Speaker 2: not to give it to her. I'd been told that
Speaker 2: she would act like she needed it and she didn't.
Speaker 2: I'd been told that she stole money from my sister.
Speaker 2: Had been told that the way that she and my
Speaker 2: father met was that he launed him money when she
Speaker 2: was a lawn shark and he.
Speaker 3: Refused to give it back.
Speaker 2: I had been told that his wife said that if
Speaker 2: my mother had an abortion, she would give some of
Speaker 2: the money back that he of my mother and I.
Speaker 3: Had been told that.
Speaker 2: Eventually, my mother decided to induce labor two months early
Speaker 2: because that would be the closest she could come to
Speaker 2: getting an abortion at the time.
Speaker 3: She couldn't find a late term abortionist. But there was
Speaker 3: a chance that the baby.
Speaker 2: Would not survive and that that would be enough to
Speaker 2: appease my father's wife.
Speaker 3: So she decided to do it.
Speaker 2: And in this way I was able to recover something
Speaker 2: like thirty five thousand dollars. So we went to Seoul
Speaker 2: and we arrived at my mother's apartment, and my mother
Speaker 2: lived high rise and so it's a big building and
Speaker 2: it's she essentially lived above a luxury.
Speaker 3: In your mind at that.
Speaker 4: Time, with all of those stories that you had no
Speaker 4: way of knowing what percentage if any of them were true,
Speaker 4: where was your head at that point? I mean, you know,
Speaker 4: you were exhausted, you stopped eating, you at one point
Speaker 4: right that you were drowning in her. You know, a
Speaker 4: biological parent is certainly not everything, but it is a
Speaker 4: powerful idea. It's a powerful thing. And you know, what
Speaker 4: you end up finding out is that this morass is
Speaker 4: part of how you actually are here, you know of
Speaker 4: your existence, and you also wrote at one point her
Speaker 4: narrative was an ocean. I wasn't going to.
Speaker 1: Escape from it.
Speaker 4: So that sense of just like profound. I don't know
Speaker 4: whether you felt trapped or whether you felt claustrophobic, but like,
Speaker 4: during this visit with your oma, she asks for your
Speaker 4: assurance that you won't abandon her, which is just, you know,
Speaker 4: kind of an astonishing irony.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So she asked me to promise that I wouldn't
Speaker 2: abandon her, and at the time, I said, Okay, I
Speaker 2: won't and I really wanted to be there for her.
Speaker 2: In some way that's what she wanted, and I'm not
Speaker 2: really sure why, but there was such an immense desperation
Speaker 2: and sense of need when she said it to me.
Speaker 2: At the same time, I was starting to feel pretty crazy.
Speaker 2: I hadn't really been going outside for most of this
Speaker 2: time because I was supposed to be self isolating at
Speaker 2: my cousin, and I wasn't necessarily eating all the time.
Speaker 2: Early in the visit I had eaten more, but as
Speaker 2: time went on, it was like I couldn't done anything,
Speaker 2: and so I was sort of moving around almost dizzy
Speaker 2: all the time.
Speaker 3: With her sleeping right.
Speaker 2: And it's almost like I felt as though that entire
Speaker 2: time I was wrapped in this really surreal, screwed up womb,
Speaker 2: and I couldn't get out of it. And because I
Speaker 2: couldn't get out of it, I could no longer even
Speaker 2: tell exactly what was real anymore.
Speaker 4: Tracy stays in Korea for thirteen days, five of these
Speaker 4: in the presence of her oma. She's meant to stay longer,
Speaker 4: but she cuts her trips short. She just needs to go,
Speaker 4: she really does.
Speaker 2: When I decided to go, Essentially what happened is I
Speaker 2: had gone when my Alma and her little dog that
Speaker 2: she gave the name that she had intended to give
Speaker 2: me on a little trip to one of my aunt's houses.
Speaker 2: And so with me and Almah and a couple aunts
Speaker 2: and an uncle, and the aunts were so nice to me.
Speaker 2: They made mandu, these very large dumplings. They ordered this
Speaker 2: pork belly to eat. And at some point when I
Speaker 2: was there, I said to my mother, so when will
Speaker 2: I meet my brother down Ben come.
Speaker 3: Ben was the younger brother.
Speaker 2: And one of the uncles who had gone on some
Speaker 2: business trips to the United States, and therefore spoke more
Speaker 2: English was sort of translating, and he said to me,
Speaker 2: your mother says you're not going to meet him, you understand,
Speaker 2: And I said, I know that she's saying that I'm
Speaker 2: not going to meet him, because I could see she
Speaker 2: was shaking her head and saying honey yo, which is
Speaker 2: like no.
Speaker 3: So she was saying honeyo an yow, honey yow.
Speaker 2: I said, but why, And he said, you're not going
Speaker 2: to meet count Ben because you don't know about you.
Speaker 2: So I realized in that moment that there was not
Speaker 2: really going to be a real reckoning with either like
Speaker 2: my relationship to this person or the stories that she
Speaker 2: had told me, and that she essentially was ashamed because
Speaker 2: I had been the child that she had out of
Speaker 2: this affair, and you know, it had been pretty bad
Speaker 2: and she had to leave town, but.
Speaker 3: She had started over again, comforter the word.
Speaker 2: She remarried, she had another child, she did separate from
Speaker 2: that house spend. But I'd lived a very different life
Speaker 2: in which she ended up doing very well. In fact,
Speaker 2: she claimed that after everything that had happened with my father,
Speaker 2: she went from being totally impoverished to becoming a millionaire.
Speaker 2: So the life that she had had, you know, with
Speaker 2: Young Bin and as Kiang. Ben's mother was very different
Speaker 2: and there was nothing to feel ashamed about there, and she,
Speaker 2: I think, wanted to sort of protect that story, protect
Speaker 2: that part of her life where she didn't have to
Speaker 2: feel ashamed and where perhaps she had a child who
Speaker 2: maybe thought of her as a really great lom. But
Speaker 2: I just could see that even though I understood that
Speaker 2: there wasn't really a place for me there, and there
Speaker 2: was something somewhat unbearable about the way in which my
Speaker 2: mother would sort of vacillate between being desperately needy, you know,
Speaker 2: asking me not to abandon her, becoming frenetic if I
Speaker 2: wanted to leave the house, and then essentially wanting to
Speaker 2: pretend that I didn't exist.
Speaker 4: You head home early, and she's literally holding onto the
Speaker 4: side of the taxi as you're pulling away.
Speaker 2: I came back to New York City after the trip,
Speaker 2: and I wanted to write about the experience, Partially, I
Speaker 2: think because the story had changed so many times, and
Speaker 2: I at least wanted to be able to remember how
Speaker 2: the story was told to me in the moments at
Speaker 2: which I realized things weren't true.
Speaker 3: But also because even after I.
Speaker 2: Left, I felt like I still didn't understand who this
Speaker 2: person who had given birth to me was, and I
Speaker 2: think I hoped that somehow, in writing about it, it
Speaker 2: was going to become clearer to me. So I was
Speaker 2: still teaching, you know, seeing frogs, and life kind of
Speaker 2: continued in the messy way that life does.
Speaker 3: Broke up with another boyfriend.
Speaker 2: You know, I don't know if this is a sort
Speaker 2: of advanced mode of repression or something, but I was
Speaker 2: sort of sick for a long time in a weird way,
Speaker 2: which is essentially that I just I couldn't stop falling
Speaker 2: asleep for a long time. I think I was just
Speaker 2: trying to get through a day write down what had happened.
Speaker 2: And then eventually I went on a trip to see
Speaker 2: my very close friend Ali in Berlin.
Speaker 3: And you know, I refer.
Speaker 2: To him as my brother, and I have since we
Speaker 2: were in college together, and even though we don't see
Speaker 2: each other all the time, we do talk almost every day.
Speaker 2: So you know, I went to Berlin just did regular
Speaker 2: things with him, like making coughing, walking his dog TV,
Speaker 2: going to the little dive bar that he had been
Speaker 2: going to for years, Mini bar Sown, and so forth,
Speaker 2: and in a lot of ways. I think the thing
Speaker 2: that ended up recovering me or helping me to start
Speaker 2: feeling like myself again was just having this time with
Speaker 2: this person who I chose it as my family.
Speaker 3: That's beautiful. Are you glad that?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 4: Glad is perhaps the wrong word, But in a universe
Speaker 4: where you had never made this trip, and you had
Speaker 4: never met Oma, and you had never found all this out,
Speaker 4: is one preferable to the other.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, in a way I would say that
Speaker 2: I still don't know, but I'm glad that I went,
Speaker 2: and I'm glad that I met this person. I'm glad
Speaker 2: that I experienced her. I mean, of course, when I
Speaker 2: was born, I'm sure there was someumb experiencing of her,
Speaker 2: but that is before my conscious mind.
Speaker 3: Had no memory of that.
Speaker 2: And you know, I think that I'm just somebody who.
Speaker 3: Wants to live.
Speaker 4: Here's Tracy reading one last passage from Woman of Interest.
Speaker 2: This might have been the moment I understood the inimitable
Speaker 2: bond of mothers and children.
Speaker 3: I didn't.
Speaker 2: I held this woman like a metal music stand wrapped
Speaker 2: in a packing blanket. Her ammoniac smile fastened over me
Speaker 2: like an assaulting myt and I did feel as though
Speaker 2: I might cry, but not anymore than I'm watching a
Speaker 2: conventional movie that went.
Speaker 3: Through the cheap blows.
Speaker 2: I let my Ama Babel and hold Babel, and hold,
Speaker 2: and with dumb hope, I held on longer, as though
Speaker 2: then the ineffable would come, a recognition of some unimpeachable link,
Speaker 2: shared compulsion to want more or else, a love prior.
Speaker 3: To election in a world of hard.
Speaker 2: Choices, I held her. I did, though there was no
Speaker 2: way out of the truth. I was nothing but a
Speaker 2: stone colds cardboard cut out of stranger come to town
Speaker 2: in the iron clench of a shuddering old woman.
Speaker 3: With a red dye job.
Speaker 2: She'd missed a handfull of t hair at the back
Speaker 2: of her head. I kneweds Tracia, Tracia, he whispered, like
Speaker 2: a question. Nay, I said, we've met once before.
Speaker 3: Then, for the second time in my life, she let
Speaker 3: me go.
Speaker 4: Mollie's Acre is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is
Speaker 4: the executive producer. If you have a family Secret, you'd
Speaker 4: like Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio Pere. On
Speaker 4: an upcoming episode, our number is one eight eight eight
Speaker 4: Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find
Speaker 4: me on Instagram at Danny Rider, and if you'd like
Speaker 4: to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
Speaker 4: check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.