The Children Money Can Buy by Anne Moody

Author:Anne Moody [Moody, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2017-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

18

A Sister’s Journey of the Heart

And here are Caitlin’s comments on the trip to Korea . . . and on her little sister. This article was published in the Seattle Times in 2003.

Coming Home: A Sister’s Journey of the Heart

By Caitlin Moody

Hey, you. Hey, Joss, Jawz, Jossie, Joey, JoJo. Jocelyn Okyung Moody. Hey, pal. Jocelyn. The young one. The third one. The last one. After Erin, after Caitlin, there is Jocelyn. Okyung. The infant you. The Korean you. The you with a mysterious biology. Was your mother athletic, too? Did her eyes weigh with the same intensity? Or your father? Are those his broad feet? His thick, straight hair, whispering red in the summer, blue-black in the snow? Who gave you the dimple? The petite nose and tiny moles you so lament? Moody. A last name. A family name. Your family name. Not to mention a certain trait in each of us. The talking you, the hearing you, the reading, writing, singing you. Your humor and your laughter. Your poetry. Your temper, or at least the resulting flow of curse words. It’s your “I love you.”

Just like mine, your first word was “Mom.” I taught you the alphabet on the same scratched, green easel during lesson after lesson of “school.” In our living room. In our pajamas. You sitting like an eager puppy, brown toes tucked under your new big-girl pants. “A, B, C, G, L-M-N-O-P.” Tripping over the same letters I frustrated Erin with so many times when I was the student. Different from the arrangements of lines, curves, dots and strokes they taught us, or tried to teach us, every summer at Korean Culture Camp.

Before you could speak, Erin and I were singing “Old MacDonald” in Korean, dancing in hanboks, and holding colorful fans. Looking at the camp pictures now, two white and fleshy faces pop out from the sea of smooth tan—a hundred Korean adoptees smiling back at the camera. We didn’t notice then, never felt strange. Not at five or at eight. Did you ever notice it at that age?

I still think it’s a little ironic you went to camp only a few times yourself. By the time you were old enough, I guess Mom had decided we’d all been sufficiently “cultured.” Or maybe she was just tired of the long trip into Seattle. Either way, you seemed to be more than well-adjusted. We talked so often and so positively about Korea and adoption, you had taken to asking Erin and me about our birth mothers. Entirely confused by our answers, you would search us for the joke and then feign an understanding. It was evident from your look that you felt terribly sorry for us, either for being so ignorant or for truly missing such a crucial part of life. Sure we had Mom, but no birth mom? We even looked the same. How boring.

Mom may have been right about the TV. It did make us fight sometimes. But it did worse things than that.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.