A Letter to Caitlin

Earlier this fall, I participated
for the first time in a Poynter seminar entitled “Writing About Race.”
My teaching role in the seminar was a small one; for most of the week,
I sat at a table with 17 journalists and talked, debated, laughed and
cried about issues that, quite literally, go to the heart of who we
are. They gave me reasons and courage to confront questions that I
often find it easier to avoid; I know that many of them also confronted
some of their own difficult questions.

This is my
essay. It is a letter to my daughter, Caitlin. She told me she thought
I should publish it because someone might benefit from reading it.

September 23, 2005

Dear Caitlin,

I think we need to talk.

Actually,
I think I need to talk, because this week I’ve realized that for all
that we have shared during our 19 years together — the hundreds of
afternoons on the soccer field, the nights on the computer doing
research papers, the hours of telephone conversations since you went
away to college — we haven’t talked very much about what we don’t
share.

We haven’t talked much about race, Cait. Your race. My
race. You’ve become so much of my life that I almost never think about
the fact that we’re different. But we are — and I need to talk with
you about what difference that makes.

It’s been 20 years now,
but I still remember the meetings with case workers from Catholic
Social Services, and their questions about why your Mom and I wanted to
adopt a baby from Korea. And I remember saying that we simply wanted to
adopt a child, that we were not worried about creating an interracial
family, and that I even wanted to believe that families like ours might
help other people get over their hang-ups about racial differences.

Today I realize that my answer overlooked someone important, Cait. It overlooked you.

I wanted to adopt a child; I wasn’t worried about our differences; I hoped other people could change.

But what about you? What do you want, Caitlin? What do you need?

Talk with me.

* * *

You were too young to remember the lady in the Italian Bakery.

You
and I were on one of our mid-week excursions to South Philadelphia, to
wander though the vegetable stalls, buy some fresh pasta and share a
bag of cheese fries. One of the guys in The Philadelphia Inquirer
composing room had told me about a bakery on Federal Street that sold
great Italian bread. And so, we made that our last stop. You were old
enough to walk, about 18 months old, but I was carrying you as we
walked into the empty store and took that first, cholesterol-packed,
deep breath.

With no customers inside, nothing obscured our view
of the éclairs and pastries and piles of Italian cookies displayed
under the glass counters. But only a moment passed before a woman
emerged from a back room to greet us. She was older, her gray hair
pulled tightly back into a bun, and just tall enough to preside over
her store from behind those glass counters.

While I don’t remember her greeting, I do recall that she walked right up to us and her eyes went directly to you.

Then to me.

Then to you again.

And back to me.

“She looks like her mother,” she said.

“She looks like her father, too,” I smiled, and before the woman had a chance to ask what I meant, I added: “She’s adopted.”

“Oh,
that’s wonderful,” the woman said — probably in an attempt to repair
any possible damage to our budding business relationship. You didn’t
seem troubled by the exchange, Cait, especially when the woman
disappeared behind the glass display case and returned with a chocolate
cookie. You wore it home.

For
years, I have told that story and people usually laugh in the way we do
about the embarrassing little moments of life. Maybe that’s how it
should be. Today, though, it is a story that reminds me that you and I
are different, Cait, and that people notice. They notice and they make
assumptions. And they act upon those assumptions in all kind of ways —
some good, some benign, some hurtful.

In the part of southwest
Baltimore where I grew up, Cait, white people lived south of Frederick
Avenue and black people lived north of it, just as they had since your
grandmother was a little girl. Some black children crossed Frederick
Avenue and came into our neighborhood to attend the public elementary
school; and after a shopping center opened, running south from
Frederick Avenue into our neighborhood, blacks and whites shopped side
by side in the Murphy’s Five and Dime, stood in the same check-out
lines at the A&P, and ate at the same lunch counter in the White
Coffee Pot. At my first job, while I was in high school, I sold clothes
— double-breasted suits, pastel-colored shirts and wide, patterned
ties — to black men and white men at Dudley’s Father & Son.

All
of the interaction, however, did little to change the essence of
black-white relationships; it certainly did not change many people’s
assumptions about each other. And after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
was assassinated on that Thursday night in 1968, we watched the black
smoke rise for three days in the skies north of Frederick Avenue.

Thinking
back, Cait, I can remember pretty vividly how I felt during the years
when newspaper headlines and TV images evolved from freedom marches in
the South to the thousands gathered on a Saturday at the Lincoln
Memorial to the raised black fists of two athletes standing defiantly
on an Olympic stage. I was in high school during the mid-1960s, Cait,
and I remember feeling that the fight for equal rights was a righteous
one, that all people should have the same rights and privileges that I
had. I got goose bumps listening to Dr. King as his voice soared and
dipped and soared again, and, at least figuratively, I believed I was
walking arm-in-arm with Black America.

But as the months and
years passed, I remember feeling increasingly confused and disappointed
as the black voices grew more militant. Not only were they attacking
those whites who were denying them the vote, denying them jobs, denying
them access to entire neighborhoods, I heard their anger turn on all
white people, including me.

How could blacks be angry with me?

Early
one morning, I walked up to Frederick Avenue to catch the Number 8 bus
that goes downtown. Standing outside a neighborhood tavern, across the
street from another endless row of Baltimore brick row houses, I saw an
older black man walking toward me. He was limping a little, head down,
maybe mumbling to himself. When I saw that his path was likely to bump
me, I edged a bit to my right and offered a quick, “How’re you doing?”

He spit his reply. It landed at my feet.

As
the man passed, never breaking stride, I shrunk. The stares of all of
those brick row houses across the street, all of those houses north of
Frederick Avenue, were fixed on me as I waited on the bus stop. They
were angry with me.

* * *

This week, Cait, I think I remembered
something that time and my insecurities had obscured: There is a
difference between empathy and shared experience.

As much as I
love you, I can never share your experience of being Asian. And as much
as you love me, you will never share my experience of being white.

Before
this week, I realize, that reality scared me. It dissuaded me from
talking with you about our differences, because I saw it as something
that separates us — and I don’t want anything to come between us.

At
times this week, I thought the fact that I will never share the
experience of being Black or Asian or Latino or Native stood like a
great canyon between me and the people of color in my life. And I began
to worry that maybe the canyon could exist one day between you and me,
too.

Today, I’m not worried so much anymore.

Today, I’ve stopped running from the differences I cannot change.

Today,
I want to embrace them. I want to learn as much as I can about your
experience of being Asian — not in order to share it, because I simply
cannot do that — but to better understand it, in the hope that I might
better understand you.

You, the daughter I love so much.

I
know there are those who will continue to see my inability to share
their experience as a reason to distrust me, to keep me at a distance,
to remain angry with me. So be it. I will try not to feed their anger.

But I have so much I want to know about you, Cait.

I
want to hear about what it’s been like to grow up Asian in a white
culture, with white parents and a white brother, going to a largely
white school, playing on white sports teams, worshipping in a white
church, pledging a white sorority.

I want to hear about the
moments when your Korean heritage makes you feel proud; about the times
when your difference makes you feel special.

I want to hear whether you ever feel compelled to deny an important part of yourself.

I want to hear how you are, Caitlin Kim; who you are, Kim Young Ok.

I
cannot share your experience, Caitlin, but I can try to understand it
and to empathize. We cannot walk the same journey, but the more I
understand you, the closer I can walk alongside you, arm-in-arm, trying
to be the father you need me to be.

Talk to me, daughter. I love you very much.

Dad