All You Can Ever Know

Of course the other kids would be curious about my birth family. Of course they would want to solve the mystery I, too, obsessed over

Are you black?”

And wouldn’t it be wonderful to go to sleep one night and wake up an entirely different person, one who would be loved and welcomed everywhere? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to look at your face in the mirror and know you would always belong?

“You’re so ugly, your own parents didn’t even want you!”23
It was the first time anyone had ever used my adoption as an insult, and it would have been shocking and painful enough without the eyes, the broken singsong chant. He screwed up his face into a squint, asking how I could see. “Me Chinee, me can’t see!”
Was “Chinee” supposed to be a nickname?

How come you don’t look like them?”

Don’t you want to meet your real parents?”

If I were a heroine in a fairy tale, I often thought, and a fairy godmother offered to grant me wishes, I would ask for peaches-and-cream skin, eyes like deep blue pools, hair like spun gold instead of blackest ink. I knew I would be worthy of it all. There was nothing I wouldn’t trade for that kind of magic, that kind of beauty. If you were pretty, if you were normal, if you were white, then the good things everyone saw on the outside would match the goodness you knew existed on the inside.

We had been family once, and now we would be again. We were sisters, at last, because we had decided we should be.

No one could be a bad parent in all the ways it was possible to be bad.

told her I would need to look it up to be able to fully understand and explain it to her, and she exclaimed, almost scandalized, “But you’re a grown-up! You’ve had your whole life to learn everything!”