EXPECTATION

It’s late afternoon, and I’m home from the hospital, where my brother has been for the past six weeks. I’ve been trying to find a moment to open the folder my mother gave me yesterday, and now, papers, some thin and fragile like a pressed flower, some thick and washed out like a piece of old construction paper, lay strewn across the table. I should be taking better care, I think, attempting to gather them into orderly piles. I clear a larger space, adjust the light, and slide a piece of paper toward me. The typewriter ink faded: ‘Adoption Summary’, followed by my brother’s Korean name. I lean closer: ‘abandoned’, ‘infant’, ‘orphanage’. Before me are the opening lines to a story both familiar and new, profound and incomprehensible: a documented record of my brother’s first two years of life in a Korean orphanage and his adoption by our family. Papers I have never seen before. My childhood floods in on a surging tide of memory: I step into the moment, where a child-sized puffy red parka hangs on a coat hanger.

“It’ll be too big for him,” my six-year-old self declared.

“He’ll grow into it,” said my mother, her hand resting on my shoulder.

Below the parka, blue rubber boots stood next to a pair of leather shoes. I looked again around the room. On the wall, a framed poster shows tiny sailboats circling a pond while willow trees weep at the water’s edge.

“He might like a picture of a spaceship,” I said, wishing I had a picture of a spaceship.

“We’ll see,” said my mother. She opened a drawer, pulled out a pair of pyjamas covered in dinosaurs, refolded them, and tucked them back next to another perfectly folded pair. 

I had been expecting my little brother’s arrival for months. It wasn’t the usual anticipation that happens in growing families. My mother wasn’t pregnant; there was no crib, no stack of diapers. But there was an adoption agency. 

Sometimes, after coming home from my friend’s house, I would lie on the floor and wonder what it would be like to have a brother. My friend’s older brother terrorized us, chasing us up the stairs and pretending to throw our dolls out the window. Would my brother be like that? And why was it so hard to get a brother? It didn’t seem complicated for my friends, some of whom had several younger and older brothers and sisters. Had their fathers and mothers spent evenings at the dining room table filling out forms and swearing over mistakes while their cups of tea grew cold?

Part of the expecting came in the form of visits by ladies with clipboards and strong perfume.

“Do your parents ever speak to each other in loud voices?” they asked me.

“No,” I shook my head. Not my British parents.

“Are there ever people in the house you don’t like?” said one of the ladies.

“No.” Why would my parents bring people they didn’t like into our house, I wondered, staring at her. She looked away. Later, my parents sat at the dining room table nursing more tea, whispering. My dad scooped me up onto his lap.

“What do you think it will be like to have a brother?” he said.

“Fun,” I said, wondering how my mum would still have time to read to me at bedtime.

One day not long after, my dad came bursting into the kitchen waving an envelope:

“We’ve got it!”

Got what? Our small family sat at the kitchen table and opened the letter together. Inside was a sheet of paper with a small photograph attached to the top with a paper clip.

“Look!” said my dad. “He’s three years old. Look at the picture. Isn’t he lovely? Look, this is going to be your new brother!”

I looked at the photograph. A tiny boy with a large head, skinny arms and legs, and a big belly stood, arms at his side, in front of a grey wall. He wore a red quilted jacket that buttoned up and a look of resigned bewilderment on his face. I felt a rush of sadness, happiness, excitement, and worry. I wanted a sibling, or at least I thought I did, but now, I wasn’t so sure anymore. Would I be able to ride on my dad’s shoulders as much? What if he was mean to me? Would I love him? I grew quiet and looked at my mum. I had never seen her cry before.

“Don’t you worry,” said my dad. “It’s all going to be alright.”

We sat for a long time at the table, looking at the photograph.

A few months later, we made the trip to the Vancouver airport, where we met the representative from the adoption agency. She stood beside us, long grey hair caught back in a ponytail that disappeared into the folds of her long grey raincoat, ready to meet my new brother as he arrived off the plane. I peered through legs, expectation radiating out of me like rays from the sun as streams of people flowed through the arrivals gate, trying so hard to catch the first glimpse of the little face I knew from the photograph, but he didn’t come. The lady from the adoption agency disappeared and then returned with a long look.

“I called Korea. He’s too ill to travel, so they kept him off the plane,” she said, in a matter-of-fact voice, like this sort of thing always happens. The trip home was silent, streetlights flashing past my face as I stared out the window. 

Back at our house, expectation resumed, and soon, another letter came, this one informing us he would arrive on Christmas Day.

“I’m getting a little brother for Christmas,” I told my friend’s mum.

“Oh, how unusual,” she said. 

Back in Vancouver on Christmas Day, another stream of arrivals floods through the doors. Then, finally, there he was, my new brother, wearing the little red quilted jacket from his photograph. He was tiny. Held in the arms of the caregiver who had accompanied him, he looked lost. His face, pale and drawn, was covered in a rash, and one little hand grasped the sleeve of his caregiver. This I remember like it was yesterday.

On the car ride back to the ferry, in our red Ford Cortina, I sat in my usual spot in the back, and my new brother sat on a booster seat beside me. He had barely anything with him except a tiny pair of red leather shoes that my mother has kept to this day. There were also a few gifts for his new family: a fan, a paper cut-out of some Korean characters with little red tassels hanging off the corners, and a sheet of Korean phrases with their English translations. I stared at my new brother. After waiting for this moment for so long, I felt like I was watching myself from above. Everything I had known shifted slightly and made room to fit this new little person into our lives.

“Why don’t you try asking him a question?” said my mother, handing me the sheet of phrases.

I struggled through the pronunciation of several words and phrases, but I must have made some sense as each time I asked a question, my brother would shake his head. No, he wasn’t hungry; no, he wasn’t tired. Those questions were wholly inadequate for our needs and far from what I wanted to ask him: Where did you come from? Why were you left on a street corner? Did you have toys? What did you leave behind? Do you remember your mother?

 A poverty of language left us both unsatisfied. I held his hand instead, his little fingers curled around mine, and we sat in silence. 

Someone abandoned my brother as a baby on the streets of Seoul, Korea, in 1972. He had nothing. The orphanage gave him a name, a birthday, and a home. No one could tell us his family history or what his life had been like before he was found. I have spent a lifetime conjuring up possible scenarios to explain his abandonment: death of his parents, extreme poverty, an impossible situation. I like to think it was an act of love, but I have no way of knowing.

I do know that I loved him instantly. I spent hours reading to him as he learned English, and we played games of Monopoly that lasted days. He grew out of all his new clothes. We built epic forts together.

At our small rural school, however, he endured the humiliation of racism from the mouths of little boys on the playground:

“Hey Sony, Sony, Sony!” they called him.

“Idiots!” I yelled at them, my face growing hot. “You’re too stupid to get your name-calling right!”

For a time, there was peace as a normal childhood took centre stage: In the garden, my brother and a friend, saucepans on their heads and sticks in hand charging at invisible enemies; my brother and I arguing over who cheated at Monopoly.  But the ravages of infant rejection played out deep within his mind as he grew up. His capacity for affection, attachment, and belonging disappeared, while speculation and worry took their seats at the table. When our parents separated in middle school, my brother sunk back even further, pulling the curtains tight, only letting in enough light to see his way through his days. In high school, death by a thousand tiny cuts at the best of times, those little boys from the playground grew into teenagers with their inherited opinions and underdeveloped capacities for compassion, capable of a special kind of cruelty reserved for those who don’t fit the mould. Some of his teachers tried, and he excelled in school, but it wasn’t enough.

At his Grade 12 Graduation ceremony, he walked across the stage to receive his diploma.

“Woohoo! Way to go!” I yelled. A ripple of laughter moved through the crowd, but a look of pure mortification pass over my brother’s face. I instantly regretted my yell, but a part of me wanted to keep yelling, to draw attention to him as if a collective awareness could somehow bring him out of himself. Instead, my brother retreated even further, rarely emerging despite our attempts.

“It’s the rejection as an infant,” said one psychiatrist. “Creates emotional scar tissue. He might grow out of it.”

“Does he do drugs?” said another.

“Here, try this,” said yet another, handing over a handful of prescriptions. “Call me in six months.”

The years between high school and now are a series of postcard stories with long gaps between the dates: my brother at university, my brother dropping out of university, my brother getting a flashy new car and a job in Vancouver, my brother losing the car, and ending up on the downtown east side of Vancouver doing who knows what. My brother in front of a computer playing games, gambling, coding. What was he doing?  My brother back in Victoria working at a casino. My brother not working at a casino. My mum calling me, her voice cracking at the seams:

“I’m at the Doctor’s office. They say they can’t be sure he won’t hurt himself. He’s to go to the hospital. Now.”

I get in the car. At the Doctor’s office I meet my brother as he walks out. I reach out for his hand, and he holds it tight as we walk to the car. I feel like I never want to let it go.

Another psychiatrist, another prescription. A family meeting:

“Well don’t look at me!” my father says to my mother. “It can’t all be my fault!”

“And how is your arguing helping my brother?” I say. I get up and storm out.

Another postcard memory, another psychiatrist. This one names a personality disorder and asks me if I’ve heard of it. No, I haven’t. It sounds very vague anyway. What does it do? Does it mask memories? Does it inhibit relationships? Does it look like shyness? My brother has a gift for writing. He is a math whiz, a computer geek of the highest order. He belonged to MENSA as a child. He could probably outsmart ten psychiatrists at once. Oh wait, he has.

Then one day my mother called me. “Your brother is sick, but he won’t let me in to his apartment to check on him.” She sounds worried.

“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” I say. But he isn’t fine. My mother calls me again the next day.

“I think something’s terribly wrong,” she says.

At his apartment, he is barely strong enough to let us in. I call 911 within a minute of seeing him. At the ER, the doctor tells me it is touch and go. My brother vomits blood on the floor. The doctor again with a long list of medical terms. My mother and I hug each other and cry. Emergency surgery. I go to see him every day for seven weeks. Sometimes we talk, sometimes we don’t. I wrestle with the system for more mental health and physical supports. The system wins. My brother recovers his physical health, but soon, he won’t let us back into his apartment. I go home instead.

In a moment, the flood tide begins its ebb, and I, 52 years old, am back at my desk looking at the papers in front of me, wondering what happened.  

There is an address for the orphanage; a fifty-year-old description describes a street corner nearby. On my laptop, I zoom in on Google Maps as my stomach flips over. Expectation again runs high. I’m unsure what I think I might see: a little boy sitting alone in the corner? A young mother leaving her baby? If only I could go back in time. Instead, there is a concrete expanse with a few trees. Parked cars line the side of the road. A few people, their faces blurred, frozen in the act of walking by. I am seconds away from calling my brother:

“Do you want to go back to Seoul? I was thinking we could go together?” I would say. “Maybe visit the orphanage or find out more about your family?” I would probably sound excited and nervous. 

There would be silence.

My brother has never talked of going back to Korea. He doesn’t bother with expectation the way I do. What am I hoping for anyway, his family waiting at the airport with signs? Coffee with a long-lost sister-in-law? I seem to have made this about me. I text him instead.

Wanna go for coffee?

He won’t answer right away, and he’ll probably say no until I complain, and then he’ll grudgingly agree. I’ll look forward to it. I can’t expect more than that for now.

Jane Potter is a writer, researcher, and podcaster with Vancouver Opera. She received her MA in Creative and Critical Writing from The University of Gloucestershire and is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers. Most recently, ‘Expectation’, was longlisted for the 2023 CBC Non-Fiction Prize. She also runs a business with her husband, has several writing projects on the go, and two grown children off living their best lives.