Chapter Forty-Three #2
“All this time you have this idea about yourself. Like, for example, your Japanese roots, right? And then imagine you find out that actually you are not at all from Japan, but somewhere totally different, like Vietnam like me, or somewhere?”
For a brief, barely detectable moment, Sabrina noticed Kit’s lips pursed before she rearranged her face back to an expressionless state. But Sabrina couldn’t leave it alone. “How do you think you’d feel about that?”
“What do you mean?”
“How do you think you’d feel, finding out after all this time that you weren’t from Tokyo, or Japan, or whatever. What if you were from a super poor developing country, like me? What if your biological mom had nothing? Like Mimi, like my mom. What if she was desperate too?”
“Why would she have nothing? I mean, I know that she’s from Japan. It says on that document, you know? The one about her nonidentifiable traits, remember?”
Sabrina knew that wasn’t exactly what it said on the document but she couldn’t bring herself to point it out. “That’s not the point I’m trying to make.”
“What is your point?” Kit’s voice had beome sharper again. Sabrina knew that tone, and by now Sabrina knew it wasn’t her, it was never her that angered Kit. It was something inside of Kit that blew up, because she couldn’t find peace in herself, she didn’t like the sum of her parts.
“My point is, that we believe what we want to about ourselves.”
Kit rattled the ice in her cup with her straw and said, “Maybe.”
···
She had not told Kit of her plans to go to Vietnam.
She could not unsee the look of relief on Kit’s face that day when she’d realized that it was Sabrina who was, in fact, Mimi’s lost daughter.
Something between them snapped in that moment.
It wasn’t malicious. She was just happy it wasn’t her.
Because Kit was happy exactly where she was: the big house, her fancy exotic origins left unscathed.
It wasn’t personal—anybody would be horrified to know they were a baby who had been taken in an airport.
But Sabrina also saw something else in Kit’s relief, the discomfort with Ryo, as time passed.
It was all too far from her world on Gravers Lane.
There was almost too much ha-fu with Ryo, and Kit was only comfortable with the suggestion of her Japanese-ness, as long as it wasn’t too much.
Kit was a Herzog in her marrow, while Sabrina was a Chen, and now she was also a Truang.
The things that Kit feared most were getting too far away from the safety of her borders, while Sabrina’s greatest fear was losing the only mother she had known, Lee Lee. And that had already happened.
Even though the blood that ran through her was not Lee Lee’s, their bond would never be broken.
There had been too much love, in whatever form Lee Lee had chosen to show it, the long hours she worked to provide for her daughter, the stern pressure she put on her to study hard, even in the baozi she made for her.
She was always eating the bitterness to give Sabrina everything.
Lee Lee always endured. And now Sabrina had Mimi, a mother she had never known, from a place she had never been to.
She wondered what kind of mother Mimi might have been.
The only thing she remembered with total clarity after that August day in the Herzog driveway was Dave’s hand on her arm.
He was the only one who saw at that moment how her life might fall apart when she recognized herself in Mimi’s face.
He didn’t let go. He stayed with her in the hospital.
He drove her back to her house and waited in his car for her as she confronted her mother.
He took her to the detention center whenever she visited Lee Lee.
He came to the Coalition office with her when Eva Kim was working on getting her a passport and green card.
He sat with Eva Kim and pushed Sabrina to take her place in Princeton the following year.
He was the first person she called when she decided with Eva that she would visit Mimi to find out the truth about herself.
And Dave was beside her, never altering the hand of friendship he offered her, keeping all the pieces of her from shattering on the ground.
Now Sabrina stood alone. A hopefulness and wholeheartedness filled her.
She looked out over Saigon. Mimi never said Ho Chi Minh City.
She always said My Saigon. Sabrina was in the city where her birth mother had lived without her for her entire life.
She wanted to know this woman she had this invisible connection to.
This woman who loved her so much that she never gave up searching for seventeen years.
She hoped the surprise she had planned with Toan through broken messages would come off.
Sabrina’s flight had landed so late. She would call Toan in the morning.
She wanted a moment to take it all in before she opened the door to this part of herself.
She felt a tenderness for Dave—his determination to keep their friendship even when he had broken her heart.
She understood now it was just a different way to be loved.
This was the wilderness…and she felt exhilaration and fear run through her as she realized she was out there, all by herself.
Finally, she was finding her place in the world.
She took her phone out again and started to type to Dave. I’ve arrived …