At age 27, I Found Out I was Adopted

I learned some great lessons about love, lies, racism, and genetics.

I walked into my mom’s trailer on a cold day, just before Christmas in 1995. She said, “Sit down. I need to tell you something.” As I nervously sat in an old recliner, she calmly said, “I’m not your mom. I’m your adopted mom. You got another mom out there somewhere.”

Well, Merry fucking Christmas.

I felt like I was going to have an anxiety attack. My heart was beating fast as hell. My stomach felt queasy. I was dizzy.

I was hit with a torrent of mixed emotions. Shock. Anger. Sadness. And an odd sense of curious excitement.

I knew why she told me now — when I was 27 years old.

She was dying.

Just 3 months earlier, we learned she had cirrhosis of the liver, a fatal condition caused by a previous hepatitis C infection.

Death has a way of making people come full circle. It makes many people right the wrongs they committed, make peace with the world, and clear the web of lies they wove into other peoples’ lives.

Stuck between two worlds

My mom slowly told me about my dark, twisted, and beautiful origin story. She said my biological mom (“bio mom”) was a 19 year old, white Mormon woman named Diana, who was staying in a motel my adopted mom was managing.

I later learned my bio mom was a rebel. Hmmm….maybe this explains why I’ve been a rebel most of my life.

She broke away from the strict confines of the Mormon church and arrived at the perfect place for people who were disenchanted with religion, society, and oppressive systems: California in the late 1960s. She met a hip, second-generation Japanese guy named Bobby. They fell in love and became inseparable. One thing led to another and she got pregnant.

She freaked the fuck out and returned home to Washington.

Her parents were horrified. Her dad hated Japanese people. He fought against them in World War II. Having sex out of wedlock with a Japanese man was an unspeakable “sin” in the Mormon church. Becoming pregnant was even worse.

Conversely, my dad’s parents were American citizens that were incarcerated in an internment camp during World War II, during which time they lost almost all of their money and property. My Japanese grandfather definitely didn’t like white people.

I was stuck between 2 different worlds — worlds that were still fighting with each other long after the actual war was over. And I wasn’t even out of the womb yet.

Bio mom’s mom gave her 2 options: get an abortion or put me up for adoption.

She decided to give me to the manager at the motel she was staying at in California. The manager and her husband became my adopted parents.

The problem with lying

My mom was 56 years old when she adopted me when I was one day old. It was an incredible act of love. Most 56 year old women are thinking about retiring in 7 to 10 years.

I always felt like something “wasn’t quite right.” People would oftentimes refer to my mom and dad as my grandma and grandpa if they didn’t know they were my parents. I was half-Japanese and they were clearly white. My mom always said she was part native American.

Looking back at my baby pictures, I can see I had strong Japanese features, and I definitely didn’t look native American back then. Only later in life did those Japanese features fade.

There’s an odd brain glitch called the illusory truth effect, which makes us believe things because we’re constantly exposed to them. So when my parents constantly told me I was part native American, I believed them, even when my eyes told me something different.

The longer we’re exposed to lies, the more we believe them.

My mom lied about her age. She couldn’t tell people her true age or many of them wouldn’t believe she was my “real” mom. The lies expanded. When you keep lying, you have to lie even more later to support the growing web of lies and keep the false narrative going.

When I was 10, a girl named Cindy, who lived at our motel, ran up to me with some shocking news. While eavesdropping on a conversation between my mom and her mom, she overheard my mom say I was adopted. I immediately confronted my mom with this revelation. She fervently denied it and called Cindy a liar. Cindy’s mom gave her a hard spanking — for telling the truth.

Ironically, my mom and dad always told me lying was one of the worst things in the world and I should always tell the truth.

Nature and nurture

A month after my mom told me I was adopted, I got a postcard in the mail from none other than my bio mom. She asked me if I wanted information about my “birth mother.” I responded with an emphatic “yes.”

This is one of the strangest parts of this saga.

I figured my mom was in touch with bio mom and simply told her something like, “I told him he’s adopted. You can contact him now.” I later found out my mom hadn’t spoken to bio mom in 23 years. Bio mom’s contact with me in January of 1996–one month after I found out I was adopted — was a total coincidence.

She found my address at my adopted mom’s house on this new thing called the internet. Bio mom, who was back in good graces with the Mormon church, said it was God’s work.

After some lengthy mail correspondence, I met bio mom in June of 1996. When we first hugged each other, it wasn’t that earth-shattering, mind-blowing emotional experience you see on daytime TV talk shows. It was a little exciting, but generally anti-climactic.

I learned I had 4 half-brothers and 2 half-sisters, who I met in the summer of 1996. I didn’t look like any of them, but I did have a slight resemblance to Jeff, the brother who was next-oldest to me.

I did notice something very intriguing. Although we were very different from each other, me and all of my siblings had a strong intellectual curiosity. We had very analytical minds and loved those logic puzzles. Almost all of us would go on to graduate from college with Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees.

This was interesting because virtually no one in my adopted family graduated from college. None of them leaned toward the intellectual side. They loved playing cards, smoking cigarettes, gossiping, drinking, watching TV, sports, and outdoor activities. While they played cards, I was reading, taking things apart, and trying to figure out how the world worked.

My intellectual curiosity and analytical personality was definitely something I got from bio mom.

Now for another big twist.

Bio mom told me that after she got pregnant with me in 1967, she left my biological dad without telling him she was pregnant.

After meeting me, she contacted my dad and told him, “Hey Bobby. It’s been a long time. When I left you in 1967, I forgot to tell you something. I was pregnant. You have a son. His name is Charles. Here’s his phone number.”

Dad

My biological dad (“bio dad”) called me in the fall of 1996 and was just as bewildered as I was. Realizing you have a son you never knew about is an enormous shock for any man. I told him I got arrested the prior year and was almost certainly going to prison.

I flew to Hawaii just before Thanksgiving of 1996. I met Bobby Amemiya, my bio dad, and my younger half-brother.

This meeting also wasn’t one of those earth-shattering, cry-on-each-other’s-shoulders events. I didn’t look like either of them. My brother, who was half-white, had stronger Asian features than I did.

It was really interesting to learn that, like me, my dad also used and sold illegal drugs. He was also a rebel who hated authority in his younger years.

Do you see the pattern?

His drug abuse and unstable, violent lifestyle destroyed many of his past relationships. Fortunately, bio dad got clean and sober. He later began working for the Hawaii prison system as an anger management and substance abuse counselor.

In 2000, I met many more people on the Japanese side of my family: my grandmother, 6 cousins, 3 uncles, and one aunt. I formed a strong bond with quite a few members of this side of the family.

Lessons learned

My mom didn’t tell me I was adopted because she loved me so much. We all know love can be blind, but this experience taught me that love can also be selfish. She raised me since I was one day old. She made big sacrifices to give me the best life possible, even under extremely challenging circumstances.

For decades, she believed she was my only mom. The only woman worthy of carrying that sacred title.

Until death showed her a new perspective.

This experience also showed the horrific damage that racism causes. Strangely, even though my biological grandparents suffered from racism, my biological parents were able to set aside their differences and biases. And I was the product of that unlikely union.

I learned that our lives and destinies are a complex amalgamation of our genes, our environments, and how those 2 disparate things interact with each other to make us who we uniquely are.

I still stay in touch with as many of my biological family members as I can. We’re all living busy lives, but we take the time to keep in touch and see each other once in a while — to appreciate each other and continue to marvel at how we were united by fate.