Almost everyone on my adoptive father’s side of the family, except my adoptive father, was burdened with some variation of a mental illness, usually a complicated one like schizophrenia, although the truth was I had endless patience for those with this particular mental situation, mostly because the majority of the troubled youth under my care and protection exhibited early signs of this terrifying and debilitating disease, I saw it in their eyes, I saw the schizophrenia in their pupils.
Sometimes I noticed when I took them off the facility grounds, their eyes scanned the streets of Manhattan as if some key to unlock the mysteries of the universe were to be discovered amidst the endless piles of garbage bags and garbage-people and it seemed to me nothing less than one of the first signs of schizophrenia, irrationality and madness at its finest, although of course I didn’t think they needed to be locked up, as I was an active and vocal opponent of mass incarceration and the school-to-prison pipeline, I went to protests and rallies and enjoyed screaming angrily at people with others, but when I saw my troubled people staring distantly at the garbage piles, searching, searching, I concluded perhaps they should be locked up for the rest of their lives, then something would happen, one of the schizophrenic troubled people would do something nice, and I would reverse my position, I went back and forth over the matter and never came up with a definitive answer, either way, I waffled a great deal, but in the end anyone would say I tolerated their schizophrenia, I didn’t really mind it.
The keys to the universe aren’t in the garbage! I screamed at them in an attempt to jolt them out of their dangerous and delusional fantasies and then I offered them a thin glass pipe filled with potent marijuana.
I had always promoted early intervention at my workplace; I was a proponent of special medical intervention when it came to my troubled young people, intervention mostly through the administration of marijuana, which was illegal, but I felt it was my ethical duty to give it to them. It calms them down, as I had explained to my coworkers, it helps them focus on real things, they smoke it and they mellow.
My coworkers shut up about the matter as long as I provided them with their own personal bags of marijuana. Of course since it was as integral to the facility as the paper products for the toilets, I bought the drugs with the credit card used to purchase the paper products. Everyone who took care of the troubled young people loved marijuana; the functioning of the facility continued smoothly with this improvement made.
The most recent photo of my adoptive brother I came across was a picture of a birthday dinner, probably his last or the year before. It was from the time during which he attempted to grow a mustache. He was sitting at a restaurant table, a heavily frosted birthday cake in front of him, the candles flickering under his eyes. He was smiling stiffly for the camera. Was this before or after he received the discounted book about cars? His eyes looked so tired, he appeared to be exhausted by living, my poor dear hermit. The act was wearing thin! He wore a light blue polo, the same shirt he wore every day of his life, the shirt he probably wore even the day he committed suicide. It was possible. It was the style of shirt he wore to Catholic elementary school and beyond, thick and starchy, ordered in bulk quantities from a Lands’ End catalog. I stared at his photo; he didn’t even look that Korean, he looked Chinese, and every time we went to a Chinese restaurant, the waitress would ask if he was Chinese, but I would never be asked, because it was very obvious to everyone that I was Korean or possibly Tibetan. Growing up, we both admitted to one another that we wanted to be white. As little children we were told that if we prayed to Jesus Christ, if we spoke to Jesus Christ as if he were our friend, if we told him the deepest desires in our hearts, he would answer our prayers and grant us our wishes, as long as we believed in him with a pure abiding faith.
I want to be white, he said to me once.
I want to be white, too, I said to him.
Sometimes at night I pray to God that I will wake up and be white, he said.
I too have spent nights in prayer to our lord Jesus Christ that I would become white, I said.
We were nothing less than disappointed about being Asian and very ungrateful about being brought into this country, a country neither of us had asked to come into, and neither of us identified as Asian, we never checked the Asian box. If someone asked us our nationality, we usually said, adopted.
He was alone in the photo from his birthday. I imagined my adoptive parents sitting across from him at a restaurant. My adoptive mother would ask him to smile for a picture. I saw my adoptive brother order a bowl of plain rice, nothing added, no salt or butter or soy. After the meal, my adoptive father would pay the check but not without first inspecting each item on the check carefully, even requesting that the server bring back the menu to check the bill. Actually, now that I thought about it, a night like that would cause anyone to want to commit suicide!