A is for Amy, adoption, advertisement, adverse, adornment, adulation,
adolescent, adaptation, addiction, admission, adult, advocate, A.D.
“What are you reading for school?”
“Ugh, I am reading the Scarlet Letter!”
“Oh, I loved that book. It was one of my favorites. What do you
think?”
My son, 16 going on 17 reads a passage describing a side
character, to prove how unnecessarily overly descriptive Hawthorn was. “Why?
Why is this even in here?” he exclaims. “This contributes nothing to the
story.” This is our conversation on the morning drive to school.
“Of course, it does. It is not all, about plot.” I argue.
“Character development through description not action was the literary style.
It is a type of writing I love.” The passage sounded lovely, familiar, like an
old friend.
“It is torture. In the category of Jules Verne.” Jules Verne, read more than three years ago
by my son, has become the metric for antiquated, long-winded fiction in family
lore.
I could not believe it was that bad. After 38 years I opened
the Scarlet Letter again.
“If you want to know me, who I was at your age..” I told my
son after reading the first 70 pages, “I was Hester. I was Pearl. I was
Hawthorn, still am.”
All of it familiar, the taste of isolation, self-abnegation,
criminality, forbidden love, unwanted pregnancy, a societal exclusion; marked,
ridiculed, labeled a lesson in sin and judged.
By crafting a critique of his Puritanical ancestry and
society rife with hypocritical sin, Hawthorne offered this Korean American
adoptee raised in a suburb of Long Island, a vessel that fit seamlessly. Excised
from Korea, stuck in a family and society with the mark of Amy meaning love; a
love stained and cursed as was Hester’s. Further lit up by my race, a neon sign
in a sea of white a reminder of difference, disgrace, origin, ancestry and
again abandonment, I was a child of sin. My birth mother’s sin; was it love,
poverty, rape, self-preservation? Did she even consent? And, colored as she was
and me by association, by an assignment of prostitution. I bore that too,
internally like tea leaves waiting for inevitability. All this then, compounded by the evangelical
zeal that facilitated my exile, brought for god, for a community to be groomed
for an apocalypse that would never come, had already happened. Adoptees,
orphans; the spoils of war, living in the aftermath of the “Forgotten war,” a war Koreans
forbidden from one another cannot forget.
Hester’s lineage never carried the brunt of colonialism, a
colonist herself. Hawthorn needed her to be rooted in the community, to show
how easily it turned upon itself. To turn on an outsider is too easy. It takes as little effort as liking apples
one day and deciding the next they are rotten.
But Hawthorn saw New England, even as we can see the US
today. Religious extremists, power hungry, greedy, characters and caricatures alike
need only change clothes to fit with the times.
Hester returned to her home on the edge of society becoming
an ear, an advocate opening her space to women with a familiar need. Pearl, we
infer is living in another country, perhaps that of her ancestors, flourishing
and becoming a mother herself.
The paths from childhood to adulthood, innocence to
experience, infamy and self-recrimination to advocacy, erasure to reclamation,
these are the roads I have walked. Rereading my adolescence reminds me of how much
I knew then and the lifetime it has taken to process that knowledge. How many
circles have I walked bearing my scarlet A? Like Hester, I am neither shamed
nor proud, but more able, acceptant and now an advocate for adoptees, women,
and children. This is not destiny, but one of many found in my tea leaves.
Thank you, Hawthorn. Thank you, my dear son, for reminding
me, who I was, who I am, and who I am still working to be and not to be.
A.D.
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