The story begins with an omission. Or maybe, a matricide. Writer and professor Tracy O’Neill had never considered finding her birth mother, who gave her up for adoption in Korea, until the pandemic, when “the crisis of what to do when one’s long habit of doing the work of being oneself no longer works.” She broke up with her longtime partner, moving from New York City to Poughkeepsie for a position as an assistant professor. Her Irish American parents in Massachusetts had always omitted her birth mother from the story of their life, an erasure that she equated with a figurative murder. Their unwillingness to speak of this birth mother effectively expunged her from O’Neill’s history. Written as a cross between a detective story and autotheory — a literary genre with roots in feminism that integrates autobiography and critical theory — O’Neill’s memoir, Woman of Interest, tracks this pursuit of the blank: the void-as-mother.
O’Neill had believed that people needed worthy and timely reasons for endeavors of this magnitude. Fear that her birth mother was suffering alone or even dead from the virus proved a reason both timely and worthy enough for pursuing answers. Or maybe, O’Neill wonders, it was just “a near-idiopathic impulse to find a stranger who might be an apologist for her own unchained life or in hiding, a sad figure in an alley or, sadder still, dead.”
The adoption documents she discovered during college in a box in her parents’ bedroom provided facts about her birth mother, whom she comes to call her eomma, that contradicted what she’d been told by her parents: Cho Kee Yeon was supposedly 5-foot-7 and gave birth to O’Neill in Seoul. The biodata in the discovered documents state, rather: 5-foot-3; gave birth in Daejeon. A different version of her name, Cho Kyu Yeon, later surfaces. A number, a city, a name. The birth mother continues to mutate. Do these details matter, if at all, in the story of a life?
Holes are a trope in the genre of adoptee literature: missing or forged documents, unreliable narrators, lies. O’Neill’s account of the missing birth mother, a subject the O’Neill family banished from their world frame, is more about the space of what’s missing than what can be read: “Only years later did it occur to me that we O’Neills had constructed an avant-garde story, like a book in which a designated letter never appears.” She references here a detective novel that functions as an intertextual kin to her own story, Georges Perec’s La Disparition, the lipogrammatic novel published in English as The Void, written under the Oulipian constraint wherein the letter “e” never appears (is missing). Like Perec’s novel, O’Neill’s search for meaning makes text material: “Because I was someone who, seeking insight into detective work, would read the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s writing on a Poe mystery — itself an interpretation of Freudian repetition compulsion — then ludicrously think it a clue to my own story.” As any good writer does, she conflates life with literature. The idea that there is a missing letter in our lives, the discovery of which will render us whole, is a psychoanalytic cautionary tale presaged by the nature of a void. The obscure object of desire endlessly eludes capture, creating the lack that fuels us as desiring subjects into the repetition-compulsion loop. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The O’Neills’ refusal to incorporate the birth mother into the story of their lives may have been in service of the idea that there can only be one mother. The adoptive mother cannot share a role with a birth mother, lest a hierarchy or competition for legitimacy form. Repression reigns queen on both sides of the familial divide. “‘I’m the mother,’ my [adoptive] mother said. ‘Me.’” Fear of the adoptive mother allowing the birth mother into the story can invite the possibility of O’Neill finding the latter and replacing the former. Best not to acknowledge that Cho exists. In this way, making up one’s own history can be mistaken for freedom.
With the encouragement of Joe Adams — a supposed former CIA operative turned private investigator whom she consults — and the connective digital tissue of a DNA test result, O’Neill messages with Chloe, who then puts her in contact with Phillip, her third cousin’s father, who was born in Korea and now lives in the U.S., and then she buys a ticket to Seoul in December 2021. Phillip, who speaks both Korean and English, affirms O’Neill’s relation to his family based on a photo of her “Cho face” and connects her to a cousin abroad. She will have to quarantine for 10 days while she awaits the promise of a sister, two brothers, and her septuagenarian eomma, who is indeed alive. “This is just the beginning to your another world,” Phillip declares in the extralingual parlance of ESL. He warns her, “Your mom’s personality is not that great” and “even though she kind of acts like she needs money, don’t give her anything.” From quarantine at her cousin Wonyi’s house in Korea, O’Neill — when she is not being interrogated about her marital status (unwed women in Asian families, beware) — begins collecting wayward fragments of her woman of interest.
Holes are a trope in the genre of adoptee literature: missing or forged documents, unreliable narrators, lies.
Some of what she learns from her familial sources in Korea may be hearsay. Cho, a scammer and shark, has a habit of borrowing money from people and never paying them back. She is a millionaire, a chicken farmer, a real estate mogul, a cleaner at a hospital. When pregnant with O’Neill, she thought she had a miscarriage, which may have been induced, but the adoption agency took advantage of her by stealing her actually alive baby. The baby was born by induction at seven months. Cho was paid $35,000 by the father’s wife to abort the seven-month-old fetus. The birth father kicked Cho in the stomach. He had been a rich, handsome farmer with a ginseng business and owned a hotel when he was alive. There were four different fathers for her four children. No, there were two. Cho was divorced. She was widowed. She is so ugly after getting cheap plastic surgery that she won’t come to Daejeon to see O’Neill. Then Cho arrives, and she is not ugly. O’Neill’s birth name was Seon Ah, but first, it had been Yu Min, the same name Cho gives to her beloved dog, whom she pushes around in a pram.
If these tangled narrative strands work against the search for a coherent origin story, then it is only the beginning. Into the void it goes.
“In the absence of fact, I cultivated theories,” O’Neill writes. “Theories having to do with Lacan’s exquisite renderings of what he called a ‘dead chain of desire,’ or what those outside psychoanalytic circles understand as something like you can’t get what you want—your all-fulfilling mom—but you take what you can get, and you still want more.” Herein lies the energetic jet fuel of all-consuming jouissance. The void, however, prevails, no matter how much you throw into it.
After all the hearsay, O’Neill finally meets her woman of interest, who comes to see her at Wonyi’s. The ensuing days together are spent eating tteok, persimmon, and tubes of ginseng honey while bidirectionally translating through apps on her and her eomma’s phones (“the whole shaky enterprise relied on the dubious graces of machine learning”), the result of which often reads like a poem:
I’m sorry I am didn’t die I didn’t know I’m sorry sorry face they took I didn’t know but I am love oh my god forgive my mother
The fragments of possible history that O’Neill has collected from her family are suspended in the space between not knowing what’s true and the difficulty of metabolizing this deluge of information. The conversation via a rogue phone interpreter, whom she hires for the initial meeting with her eomma, yields the same results as her attempts to sort the information she’s collected: confusion, mistranslation, and contradicting lies presented as facts. The interpreter refuses to ask O’Neill’s question: Why does Cho insist that she believed she’d had a miscarriage and then prayed for her daughter and wondered where she was? The logic of believing the baby is dead and then wishing she’s okay doesn’t add up. According to what can be discerned from the birth documents that state O’Neill was born by induction at seven months — plus her eomma’s declaration that she’d believed she had a miscarriage and what O’Neill had been told about her birth father’s attempt at a fatal kick to commit feticide — she is not only a prodigal daughter but also one who has twice survived murder attempts and has thus risen. But one cannot demand answers from people who refuse to be forthcoming and insist on telling lies. O’Neill’s inquiries are effectively stonewalled by both the interpreter and her eomma. There is nothing she can do. Cho’s primary concern, on the other hand, is whether or not O’Neill is going to get married.
The long-awaited appearance of Cho doesn’t bring any more clarity to the endeavor. “She wore a gray sweater on which red, white, and blue rhinestones spelled NISSY NISSY HEARTTHROB, and she had almost no eyebrows to speak of. Sporadic hairs startled off thick tattooed stripes, ancient pigment fading milky gray…” and elsewhere, “the slapdash titivations of her eyes, her crayon-red hair.” If this is what a mother looks like, then what conclusions can be made about the search for identity? Cho is so fond of her NISSY sweater that she wears it four times in a row. The psychological implications of the sweater lie somewhere between ESL, mistranslation, nonsense, poetry, and the cut-up, where meaning is inconclusive and pushes up against surrealist potential. This insistence upon repetition and the refusal to make sense is remarkable, even if she is herself unaware of these psychological implications. For the purposes of O’Neill’s search for her own origin story, the sweater is an imagistic symbol of how the search for an unambiguous narrative evades the borders of language and signification and, therefore, the borders of what comprises a self.
No coherent story can be told about this mother, who had an affair with a married man (confirmed by O’Neill’s Korean family) and maybe gave the baby up for adoption to save face — or for reasons more lucrative or unknown. She lives alone in an apartment so sparse it is uncertain whether she really lives there at all. In her bedroom: only a twin mattress, a basket of mysterious blackened sticks. She steals a gift given to O’Neill by her cousin and cancels her taxi to the airport as a means of entrapment. She offers to pay $10,000 for a matchmaker so that O’Neill can find a husband to marry. The sense of danger abounds, embodied by this strange and unintelligible eomma. “The truth was that if I cared to hold her to a single authentic identity, I couldn’t,” O’Neill writes. “There was no one real Cho Kyu Yeon.”
Repression reigns queen on both sides of the familial divide.
For those of us who have known our mothers our entire lives, the tension between the desire to know and the impossibility of knowing them in the ways that we are so desperate to often proves to be unresolvable. Perhaps this is a condensed version of the lessons some daughters learn over the span of a lifetime — faced with unanswerable questions about who our mothers are and how we came to be, we must come to accept the unknowable and live alongside the blanks. What’s hidden, what’s been lied about, and the contradictions between what some people claim and what others refute cannot always be assimilated into a unified whole. The language barrier between Cho’s Korean and O’Neill’s English further compounds the gap of comprehension.
Sitting next to her eomma watching Doll Singles, a second-
chance dating show starring divorcées, O’Neill recalls her reading of “the feminist Sara Ahmed that to be a willful subject is to refuse to be willing to live the right life. To be willful is to be seen as a perversion. It is not to strive toward the ready-to-wear good life… It is to wander… I had always liked willful subjects like my eomma.” A willful subject herself, she does not live what Cho calls a normal life — in other words, she is not married, without children, a woman of letters who insists upon being a menace and flees from the eomma whom she sought to find.
An early return ticket to New York after little more than two weeks in Korea. A tussle at separation. Her eomma clutches her pant legs in despair at her leaving, slaps the taxi windows, sobbing, runs after the getaway car. Back home in New York, O’Neill resumes the everyday maintenance of a messy life, which felt to me, the reader, like a relief.
In the end, the search for home alights on an assertion of the self in the final pages of the book. O’Neill declares what she knows about herself: Among other things, she is someone who obsesses over what the story form says — that is, she’s a writer, a seeker who knows better than to believe that resolution is possible. The focus shifts from the obscure object of desire to what the experimental text with its incomprehensible void is telling us: that it is impossible to resurrect the dead to acquire the keystone of identity in the search for oneself. But one must try in order to acquire the experience of knowing. “Absence persists — I must endure it,” Roland Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse. O’Neill understands that “Sometimes it is not what I say but that I say.” To speak is to seek and to (hopefully, eventually) hear oneself and want anew.
Perec’s novel, after all, doesn’t need to recover the letter “e” to become whole or write itself into consummation. With O’Neill’s woman of interest still missing, she reframes her focus. A woman of interest can be many women, can be oneself. She can be what the mother reflects in the daughter, the latter of whom is, in a sense, the origin — not the mother. “I mean that the search is not always the search you think it is, that the search for her is a search for home, a search for a center beyond random conditions,” she writes. “… I no longer expected remembering Cho Kyu Yeon to define the shape of my story.” The answers and solutions people hope to find in others often prove to be false leads. What O’Neill is searching for is perhaps what has been there all along: not to fill in the story’s omission but rather to understand the entirety of the text that she has been writing her whole life.
O’Neill knows that living alongside the absence doesn’t mean that she is alone. There are still literature and ideas; the hard work of writing and eternally rewriting; the road from speaking desire to discerning desire to shifting desire; and the enterprise of making a home to return to, a home she makes for herself, not ones that have been made for her. Home includes her beloved dog, Cowboy, and the family that she has created in her community of friends in Brooklyn, Berlin, Portland, Milwaukee, and Los Angeles. Home is all over.
Dead mothers cannot be resurrected to explain who they really are and why they did what they did to you. Phillip recounts to O’Neill the story of her beginnings and attempted feticide: “But then you lived. And your mom and aunt think, ‘Okay, wow, this is strong baby,’” the uncle said. “‘This baby wants to live.’”
“Risen daughter, indeed,” O’Neill writes.
Perhaps dead mothers cannot rise, but daughters can.
Sarah Wang is a writer, editor, and professor of creative writing. She is finishing a novel about hair transplants, botched plastic surgery, prisons, and reality television.
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