Tracy O’Neill on Searching For Her Birth Mother During a Pandemic

A few years back, despite a lifelong renunciation of the urge, I surrendered to obsession with a woman. So I was beside myself. I was myself. It was no time to basket-case through life. I did. I wanted her, wanted everything, and all of her was missing.

Circa that revelatory, sad-sack time, I left S, the man everyone thought I’d get around to marrying. I skipped out on my beloved Brooklyn for a job in Poughkeepsie, did not see friends, then—once COVID-19 spiked—saw for nearly every waking hour a one-bedroom apartment of drop-ceiling tiles where I taught over Zoom.

Time itself felt “dark with something more than night,” as Ray Chandler might have written, or maybe I just over-identified with the theorist Lauren Berlant’s sentence: “The crisis is of what to do when one’s long habit of doing the work of being oneself no longer works.” In fact, myself was no longer recognizable, or I was a dunce, or else I contained multitudes—was, in other words, both a dunce and someone unrecognizable to herself.

But suppose I had an interest in getting my story straight. I could level with myself. On paper, I was thirty-three, adopted, Korean-born, New England-bred. Profession: writer. And because no one made a living writing anymore, profession: professor. My net worth was, roughly, dog. I had not evaded taxes, but I had evaded children. There were consolations in my back pocket, most notably that prior to this period in 2020, during which much of what I did resembled impotent riot, I had been many selves besides a person who wanted this missing woman.

I had been a wannabe Olympian and a minor child actor. I had been a zealot for friendship, hedonist for ideas, and bartender to men baroque in their disappointments who, ordering Tecate, would say dumb things like “Take me to Tijuana, baby.” I had been a kid in a household where bras were referred to as “over-the-shoulder boulder-holders,” then eventually someone who detained herself theorizing on the meaning of this missing woman before making any sudden moves, which meant I had also become someone who agonized over tardy recognitions, forgot to eat, and paced.

Therefore! my own raving mind thought.

In conclusion!

Why should I not also be a person who found a woman named Cho Kee Yeon?

I did not know how to “process,” as psychotherapeutic professionals say, but I did know my own loitering mental process was to blame for rude timing; now I had to locate my woman in a pandemic that had miniaturized life by way of lockdowns and social distancing protocols.

What, then, was next: I filed missing person paperwork. Shot emails to agencies that tracked down the sort of errant woman I was after. COVID did not generate prime conditions to find missing persons. Such-and-such department was temporarily closed—unless it was going to remain closed forever. So-and-so who might have further information was out of office for the foreseeable future—unless the future remained as unforeseeable as it had been in the run-up to 2020 when it was abruptly postulated that your best friend’s breath could kill you.

During the time in question, detectives I consulted enjoyed precisely enough courage to name a sum without warranty, grandstand on realism, then augur failure in a tone implying me foolish. I, too, could see I looked foolish, but I was less concerned with foolishness than with sensible waits that never ended. So in November 2020—having lost my deference to thankless patience and appropriate pauses between emails—I did what I estimated anyone in my position would do. I left a message for a PI who claimed he’d paid for his Corvette with the proceeds of training Contras.

His name was Joe Adams. He’d once infiltrated a white supremacist doomsday cult. A .25-caliber pistol was, to him, an offensive little-shit firearm. Reputedly, he did not kill people out of anger, save that one time. He’d once caught someone on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. We shared an aesthetic in sports cars.

According to my notes, Joe Adams had operated in several countries, including South Korea. And according to my own misguided ardor for the idea that you did not know what was impossible unless you tried everything, I had to do something.

Had to, though I’d few facts on my missing person, save that at thirty-eight she had a bad eye for love. All I knew was she fell for a man so far, she lent the shirt off her back to keep them skin to skin. I mean he was married, and not to her. Anyone could see how easy it would be to go missing in that kind of love.

This is where I confess that when I began my investigation, the case had been cold over thirty years. But I had a clincher for Joe Adams. I did. Namely: my life depended on this missing person. I mean she had been one of my mothers.

“You know,” Joe Adams said when he returned my call on the first of December, “I almost went to jail once for what I did, trying to find someone.”

“If I’m hearing you correctly,” I said, “sounds like you’re my guy.”

*

In the months leading up to my first call to Joe Adams, the line I fed myself was that I was fine. When I remembered to, I hammed up my own impression of “fine.” To friends, I declared I was only late to the party—as usual—on my own rotten mommy issues. Privately, I held on to the wisdom of a friend who, as he told it, recovered from his quickly enough when a therapist shrieked, “If I hear one more word about that woman!”

As it happened, no one would have exercised that particular form of therapeutic disgust on me because, prior to 2020, I had uttered few words about “that woman” who didn’t raise me at all. I had for many years suspected that my life paradoxically was conditional on and had little to do with her, but I could not summon what the logical stakes of apprehending her were. My stance was that when I determined the name for the feeling I had about Cho Kee Yeon—if ever I did then I’d know how to act, and it would be a garden-variety matter of execution.

It was only in the spring of 2020 that I’d read an article reporting that a sixty-three-year-old man died of COVID in a locked Korean ward with no known friends or family—no one to be contacted about the matter of his ashes. The paper referred to his death as “lonely,” and it was observed, not without poetry, that the dead man, weighing ninety pounds, “barely took up any space in this world.”

That last phrase did it. That phrase got it through my own thick skull that my woman could be dead or dying alone, no one to contact about the matter of her ashes.

As it turned out, I could not stomach the image of an orphaned old woman. My regret moved forward and backward, inside out. I’m saying the new nausea tripped a wire organizing my life. I’d come up with a particular O’Neill ethos in which family was formed not by nature but by the fact that you wanted enough to be family at all. That ethos had allowed me to be—despite material evidence to the contrary—“Irish American” and for me to recklessly hang on to  “wanting enough to” as the primary feature of my identity. Wanting enough to be fine, I was.

But in 2020, I forgot that I was quote, unquote fine. Then, I decided I was again. An old, blackballed suspicion that life turned on chance’s autocracy returned. Apropos of zip, you could wake up in another world, country, house.

During dark hours, I’d startle from sleep, as though a fool had flipped on a lamp, believing that light would reveal the forgotten thing. Where does a woman go on her own? I wondered. What’s her story?

*

Therefore, ergo, next, I was in a hurry to catch up to the past when I first got Joe Adams on the phone. To do: Set down yesterday’s cold coffee. Unlock cabinet. From a green folder came a collection of documents, its skinny prose cataloging the details I had and implying those I did not.

“I’m gonna stop you right there,” Joe said.

At some point, I’d sat down. Now, I thought to stand up, as though then Joe Adams wouldn’t walk off the job before it had begun.

“I want you to have my full attention,” Joe Adams said, “but I’m currently in the attic of my home, recovering Christmas tree decorations.”

There had been no picture in my mind for the voice on the other end of the line. Now came a vision: Here was a man in a navy work shirt, resting a cardboard box of artificial branches and sleigh bells against a banister, a doorway framing him by a half-moon picture window. The box would sit on his hip. The phone would be at his ear. He would say—

“So what we do is can you call me back this afternoon?”

“We can do that,” I said. “By the way, she would be seventy-two or seventy-three.”

“Better hurry up.”

No explanation was required. Find that mother, I knew Joe Adams meant, before she gets dead.

__________________________________

Adapted excerpt from Woman of Interest by Tracy O’Neill. Reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2024.