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