It was a family decision to give me up for adoption. By that, I mean everyone’s decision except my mother’s. But the decision to steal me out in the middle of the night? That was all her.
I was misdiagnosed with cerebral palsy, a common reason, in 1980s China, for a child to be surrendered under the one-child policy. A sick girl didn’t count. Try again.
When the police captured my thieving mother, they asked why she’d risked everything for a child like me.
She won’t make it to college.
She can never take care of you.
She is stupid, they told her.
“Watch us,” she answered, one hand holding me, the other pressing her thumb into a guilty verdict.
The red ink marked her fingerprint and sealed our promise to each other.
25 years later, I became the first in my family to finish college and the only one to go abroad in pursuit of higher education.
But it also meant spending over a decade apart from my mother. This time, separated by more than just the tall walls of an orphanage, but a vast ocean dividing continents.
When I told people I came to the United States to study medicine, they said:
You won’t get into medical school on a visa.
Even if you did, no one gives international students any scholarships.
Don’t be stupid.
“Watch me,” I said in my mother’s voice.
The red ink of her fingerprint burned through my blood, announcing my place in a world that didn’t know the daughter of a thiefing mother. Yet.
The rest of the story is a cliché: I graduated from Dartmouth and finished residency at Mayo. I became a doctor and a writer. I write about medical and social justice. I care for communities pushed to the margins: immigrants, Indigenous people, and survivors of systems that try to erase them. Together, we press our feet into the ground and say: no one is illegal on stolen land.
And my mother?
She lives with me now.
When the neighbors came to sing Christmas carols, she fed them homemade noodles. When the repairmen finished their work, she packed them dumplings for lunch. By day, she strolls our small town and charms strangers into friends. By night, she sits in the outdoor hot tub she definitely didn’t want (definitely), and counts reasons she must feed everyone she’s ever met.
“Oh— how’s THAT going?” people ask when I tell them my parents live with me.
“You have no idea what it means to me,” I answer.
Happy Mother’s Day!
This video is from a live storytelling event in New York City, co-hosted by The Nocturnists and Bellevue Literary Review. It’s the funny version of my mother’s thieving legend. You can read a comic version of the full story here, created with the brilliant comic activist Pan Cooke. And maybe, just maybe, a graphic memoir in the making.
Until then,
Here’s to the thieves of life, who love us more fiercely than rules will ever allow.
Share this post