The Chinese-Swedish Sister I Replaced
Why my father couldn't let her go
Hello everyone!
It’s been awhile since I posted a Legacy piece. Part of that is busyness— launching a new ghostwriting project, planning to lead a Foreword writing retreat in France next month, and tending to the new MFA Lore section of this newsletter for writers. But another important change has involved my plan for the memoir I’m writing about my Chinese-American father’s buried secrets.
After struggling for years to construct a single frame for this multifaceted family story, I’ve realized that it needs to be a collection of linked essays. The silliness of this is that I’ve been chunking the book into essays and testing them here on Substack and on Medium for years! So now, as I review these previously published essays, the challenge is to figure out which of them should stand as is, and which need to be developed further to fully make sense and to work together like a well-oiled machine.
First up, one of the stories that will be a cornerstone of the collection, about the foster sister I never knew.
Thanks for reading, subscribing, and sharing your thoughts, always!
Aimee
For Josie & my father
I was born three years after my parents gave my foster sister back. As far as my mother was concerned, I replaced her. My father, I’m not so sure. Josie would have been about six by then. My brother, Marc, was seven. I grew up without knowing the first thing about Josie’s existence.
Only as an adult did I trip across the one photograph that my parents seemed to possess of her. There, tucked into some ancient album, appeared a small blond stranger stepping down Fifth Avenue between my equally small older brother and our fashionable mother. Easter, 1949, the caption read. My mother wore a pillbox hat, black gloves, and a fox stole with its jaws biting its tail to loop it around her shoulder. I recognized the fox, which still hung in the coat closet. I recognized my brother and mother, though I’d never known them so young. But who was that other toddler?
“That’s Josie,” my mother informed me. “She was our foster child.”
“We had a foster child?” Every word of that sentence sounded improbable.
I’d always thought of foster parents as souls of generosity, caring people who volunteered at school events, played ball with their kids, and turned up with casseroles at community potlucks. However off base that stereotype might be, it in no way described the parents I knew, who much preferred gala events and cocktail receptions at the United Nations, where my father worked, to anything directly involved with children. I can’t even recall my mother reading to me as a kid. And my father’s commute — over an hour each way from our home in suburban Connecticut — removed him from my foster parent projection almost entirely. But then again, the photo was taken when my parents still lived in Manhattan.
“How long?” I pressed my mother, who was gazing at the photograph with an expression I couldn’t fathom. A certain strain around the eyes, tenderness around the mouth.
She inhaled deeply, suppressing whatever thoughts had formed. “I think it was about two years.”
“Two years?” I bit back the obvious question.
My mother could take offense at the subtlest shift in voice, and her blowback would send me reeling. So instead of asking how she could have simply erased this child of two years, I invited her to tell me the story.
Mom’s initial version went something like this: Josephine Wing was half-Chinese and half-Swedish. In 1948, her alcoholic mother, the Swede, and her ineffectual Chinese father surrendered Josie and her older brother to Sheltering Arms Family Services. My brother’s pediatrician, Dr. Hedwig Koernich (who also took care of the Kennedy children, my mother made sure to add), was on the board of Sheltering Arms. When the Wing siblings arrived, Dr. Koernich immediately thought of my Shanghai-born Chinese father and my Wisconsin white mother, mostly because of their races but also because they had a little boy about the same age as Josie.
“But you didn’t take Josie’s brother?”
My mother dismissed the thought with a roll of her hand. “Josie hated him.”
Josie wasn’t even two years old. I hardly think she had any say in the matter, but my mother’s deflection didn’t surprise me. She’d never take on more than she could handle.
“Two years is a long time,” I said. “What happened? Why didn’t you keep her?”
“Oh, we wanted to.” My mother’s eyes welled up. “I had miscarriage after miscarriage, and I desperately wanted to adopt Josie. Her creep of a mother refused.”
“You know what happened to her?”
“No.”
“Did you ever try to find out?”
“We had no right to. Besides, what would have been the point?”
When I asked my father what he remembered about Josie, he just shook his head.
In the absence of any pictures of my father with Josie, I imagined them in their apartment on 92nd Street, meeting over what passed for breakfast, the same way he and I used to meet when I was growing up.
1948. My dad 36 years old. Early morning, before he goes to work, dressed in suit and tie, polished black Oxfords tightly laced. He’s lived in America since he came to California for college, but his first 19 years were spent pivoting between his Chinese father’s expectations and his American mother’s demands. His father was a government official, a Chinese scholar and classical poet. His mother, an American wife who lived in China for two decades and never learned the language. Dad split the difference by following the lead of the British who ruled his school and pretty much everything else in Shanghai. That included acquiring a taste for English muffins like the one he’s now toasting and layering with butter and marmalade. Josie hugs the doorway, watching, silent and alert.
My mother, never an early riser, would be sleeping. My brother? Playing with toy cars, no doubt. Models would become his hobby, then rebuilding engines, then buying and selling rehabilitated getaways. So it’s only Josie in the kitchen with Dad this morning as the sun slides in, painting the linoleum orange.
He gives her a piece of his muffin, and she stuffs it into her mouth but chews it very slowly, never taking her eyes off him. Sticky hands now. Bare feet and smocked pink flannel nightgown. Such a funny little thing, Dad thinks. Those blue-black eyes and Dutch boy hair, yet strangers never doubt you’re mine.
Over the years, my mother will say that Josie worshiped Marc. My brother says he doesn’t have any memories of her, but the resurfaced story got to him, and he named his third daughter after her.
That naming spurred my mother to give a richer, darker account of Josie’s delivery to Sheltering Arms. The Wings had evidently planned to move from New York to Florida, transporting their children and all their worldly goods in a beat-up station wagon. Neighbors called the cops when they spotted the parents loading Josie and her brother into a pasteboard box tied with twine to the top of the car.
Was the mother on a bender? Was her coward of a husband just following orders? Or was this his idea of saving space and avoiding the headache of his wife’s complaints about the kids on their long drive south? Maybe the whole thing was one sudden impulse.
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