Yes, Chef (2 page)

Before a family adopts a child, there’s a journey they go on. For my parents, it was ten long, painful years of “We want to have a baby, but we can’t.” Today, if a couple is trying to get pregnant and it’s not happening, doctors can do tests and, in most cases, offer up a relatively quick diagnosis and sometimes a measure of hope. Back then, there was just my mother sitting in the kitchen with
her
mother, wondering how she was going to become the woman she wanted to be without a child. She wanted to have a family. She was a very traditional person in that sense. When my parents adopted Anna, my mother hardly cared what race she was. Anne Marie Samuelsson, at age forty-five, was finally a mother. Anna wasn’t black or white, she was joy.

In the Samuelsson family, the adoption chain goes back even further. Right after the Second World War, my mother’s parents took a Jewish girl into their one-bedroom apartment. My mother was fifteen years old at the time and spoke fluent German. Sweden had remained neutral during the war and like many young people her age, my mother volunteered to go down to the port and work as a translator to help the thousands of Jews who were walking from Denmark to Sweden, seeking refuge. On the docks, she met a sixteen-year-old girl named Frieda. Frieda was Czechoslovakian and had been in a concentration camp. She was all alone. My mom and Frieda became friendly and one day she said to my grandfather, “Can’t we just take her? Can’t we save one person?” My grandparents didn’t have any money, but they did it, they took her in. And the happiness that Frieda brought to my mother’s life led to the happiness that Anna brought to my parents’ life, which paved the way for us.

My father wanted a son. He didn’t care what color the boy was; he just wanted a boy he could teach to hike and fish. He filled out adoption forms in triplicate and considered offers from any part of the
globe where orphaned baby boys were seeking homes: Greece, Vietnam, Korea, Russia, the continent of Africa. Anyplace that had been touched by famine or war, anyplace poor enough to part with a fatherless boy.

I’d been hospitalized in Addis Ababa for six months, but was on the mend when Anne Marie and Lennart got the call saying I might soon be up for adoption. It wasn’t just me, though: I had my four-year-old sister, who had also been hospitalized, and our Ethiopian social worker didn’t want to separate us. We had already lost our mother to disease, she told the Samuelssons; it would be best if we didn’t lose each other now.

Yes, Anne Marie and Lennart said almost instantly. Yes, why not two?

It would take nearly a year for my sister and me to make the journey from Addis Ababa to Göteborg, a blue-collar city on Sweden’s southwest coast.

O
N
T
UESDAY
, M
AY 1
, my father’s mother, Lissie, died in Smögen, a small island off the west coast of Sweden where my father and his siblings had been raised. The next morning, the old priest stood in the pulpit of the brick Lutheran church with its whitewashed walls and dark wood pews. He said the Church of Sweden liturgy and each mourner placed a flower on Lissie’s casket, which was then ferried over to the mainland to be buried in a graveyard next to her husband and four generations of Samuelssons. On Thursday, the family gathered for
gravol
, “grave beer,” and the toasts and reminiscing went on for hours.

On Friday, my parents received a phone call in the Smögen house. It was my mother’s parents. The Swedish adoption agency, unable to reach them directly, had called with news: My sister and I were on our way from Ethiopia. My parents raced back to Göteborg, stopping along the way to purchase a bunk bed and linens, and then booked round trip tickets to Stockholm—three going and five returning—for
the next day. As our parents would always say, with both grief and gratitude, never before had they seen so clearly how when one life ends, another begins.

My mother never gave birth, but as any adoptive mother knows, the journey to meet the child you hope to call your own is its own kind of labor. When Mom, Dad, and Anna arrived at the customs area, they learned that our flight had been delayed for several hours. My father, a scientist, and Anna, his shadow, sat quietly reading, while my nervous mother proceeded to unpack a picnic in the airport waiting area. A large thermos of coffee for her and Dad, a small thermos of
saft
, a sweet red-currant drink, for Anna. Then came two types of sandwiches, both on heavily margarined multigrain bread. One was made of
västerbottensost
, a hard, parmesan-like cow’s-milk cheese from the north of Sweden, and a few thin slices of green pepper. The other was stuffed with slabs of a rough, country-style liver pâté. My mother’s mother, Helga, had not only made the pâté, but topped it with slivers of homemade pickles and a smear of grainy mustard. For dessert, there was apple cake, which, my mother explained to anyone who would listen, would have been so much better with the traditional vanilla sauce topping, but since they had been in a rush, and had traveled by plane, compromises had to be made.

A dozen times a week, easily, I am stopped on the street in New York City by someone, most often a woman, who tells me that she is the mother of an adopted child. More and more over the past few years, these women have adopted their children from Ethiopia and have read about me or seen me on TV and know my story. What they want to tell me is about the moment when they met their child in person for the first time. I try to be polite, but the hard thing is that after hearing so many of their stories, each a little different, it becomes difficult for me to distinguish their story from my own. What’s real and what’s imagined? Was it my adoptive mother who cried when she first picked me up, or was it that woman I met a few weeks ago outside my restaurant? Was I the one who was handed an apple and spat it out because it was the very first time I’d eaten a piece of fruit,
or was that my sister? Was I the one who smiled shyly and sweetly, or did I hide? The stories of the adoptive parents I’ve met stay with me long after we’ve crossed paths, so for accuracy, I must depend as I always have, on my sister Linda. She was five and I was three and she remembers the moment when we met our adoptive parents with far more clarity than I ever could. Here’s how she describes it:

When our plane finally landed, our escort, Seney, got off first. She was tall, thin, with medium brown skin. Very pretty Habesha, meaning someone like us, Amhara heritage. She held you on one hip and held me tightly by the hand. I didn’t want to be there. A porter pushed a cart with our “luggage,” a suitcase for Seney and a small cloth satchel for us. Seney handed you to Anne Marie, then opened her suitcase to present our new parents with gifts, Ethiopian handmade crafts that Mom still proudly displays in her living room. Seney had no money of her own; she must have budgeted carefully the cost of getting us to the airport, and the plane tickets, making sure to have enough so that we could be fed in the airport if the Samuelssons were late. But it would not have been our people’s way to just hand these two foreigners these motherless kids. It would have been important to Seney that we come bearing more than the pale skin on our open palms
.

On their flight from Göteborg to Stockholm, my parents had chosen our Swedish names. I was born Kassahun but would be called Marcus. My sister Fantaye would become Linda. They began to call us by these names right away. My father bent down to say hello to Linda, who vanished behind the folds of Seney’s skirt.

Linda was five, old enough to have remembered everything: our village outside of Addis, our mother, the hospital where she died, and the wards where we’d competed for food, attention, and survival. Linda was silent all the way home from the airport. The only thing that gave her comfort was holding on to a small square of tattered fabric she’d brought from Ethiopia. She didn’t cry, she remembers, because tears and the vulnerability they symbolized were too rich a gift to give to Anne Marie and Lennart, the man and woman she now viewed as potential enemies. So she sat next to Anna in the backseat of our parents’ car while I sat in the front, sleeping in our new mother’s lap.

In his application, my father promised to raise his adopted children in a good family, one with a dog and a cat, “both very friendly toward children.” He described their neighborhood, Puketorp, as having about three hundred families with a surrounding forest where “we hike in the summer and ski and saucer in the winter.” He promised small lakes with crystal clear waters, perfect for skating and swimming, and a modest house with a flat lawn and an outdoor playhouse, tailor-made for “jumping and playing with balls.”

The house, neighborhood, and surroundings were all as he described, but it would take more than the comparative opulence of Göteborg to win Linda over. She trusted no one except her new sister, Anna. Linda was my protector. If our new mom reached down to pick me up without securing Linda’s permission first, Linda would pry me out of her arms and scold my mother in Amharic. When my mother tried to put me into the bathtub, a frightful contraption with a mad gush of water, the likes of which we’d never seen before, Linda would cling to me so tightly that my father would have to lift the two of us, stuck together like conjoined twins, and drop us into the tub together.

My mother learned to ask Linda’s permission each and every time she wanted to make contact with me. Mom spoke to Linda in Swedish, enunciating each word carefully and raising the volume a notch or two, as if that might help. With a mime’s gift for hand gestures and facial expressions, each day my new mother made herself more easily understood, and after many months, Linda loosened her grip.

T
HERE IS AN
E
THIOPIAN FAIRY TALE
called “The Lion’s Whiskers.” It’s the story of a woman who is in an unhappy marriage. Her husband comes home late from work every day, and some nights he does not come home at all. Distraught, the wife goes to see the village elder. He assures her that he can fix this trouble. “I will prepare a medicine that will make your husband love you with an unbounded devotion,” he says.

The woman can barely contain her excitement.
“Abba,”
she begs,
using the word for a man who is father to the entire village, “make the potion right away.”

The elder shakes his head. “I need one essential ingredient and it is not an easy one to get,” he explains. “You must provide me with a whisker plucked from a living lion.”

The woman is in love and unafraid. She says, “I will get it for you.”

It was not the elder’s wish to cause the woman any harm. On the contrary, he had lived a long time and he believed that in asking her for an ingredient that was as fantastical as fairy dust, he was letting her down easy. Some things were the way they were and always had been. Husbands got bored and sometimes came home late or not at all. Time had taught the elder that his most important job was not to mix potions but to listen. For a woman who is anxious and lonely, the reassuring counsel of an elder was its own kind of balm.

But that was not the case with this woman, for when she loved, she loved fiercely.

The next day, she took a slab of raw meat down to the river where she had, on many occasions, watched a lion take his morning drink. She was afraid, but found the courage to walk up close and throw the meat to the lion. Each morning, she returned and fed the beast, getting closer and closer to him until, one day, she was able to sit by his side and, with no danger to herself at all, pluck the whisker from the lion’s cheek. When she returned to the village elder, he was shocked that she had completed the seemingly impossible task.

“How did you do it?” he asked.

The woman explained and at the end of her story, the village elder spoke to her with deference and respect. “You have the courage, patience, and grace to befriend a lion,” he said. “You need no potion to fix your marriage.”

This is a fairy tale that all children in Ethiopia learn, but for me, it is also the story of my early days in Sweden and how my sister and I became Samuelssons. The brave woman was my mother, Anne Marie, and Linda was the lion.

M
Y LOVE FOR FOOD DID NOT COME FROM MY MOTHER
.

For my mom, putting dinner on the table was just another thing to get done in the course of a long, busy day. Cooking competed with ferrying her three kids back and forth to soccer, ice skating lessons, horseback riding, doctors’ and dentists’ appointments. Once I became old enough to test my daredevil skills (Dad wanted a boy!) on my skateboard and bike, there were regular visits to the emergency room as well.

It’s not that my mother was a
bad
cook, she simply didn’t have the time. In the late 1970s, she subscribed to a magazine that had “try it at home” recipes for the busy homemaker, slightly exotic concoctions that featured canned, frozen, and boxed ingredients. This was her
go-to source of inspiration. She made pasta as not even a prisoner would tolerate it, with tinny tomato sauce and mushy frozen peas. She served roast pork from imaginary Polynesian shores, with canned pineapple rings and homemade curry whipped cream. She experimented with something called soy sauce. She wanted us to eat well, to experience other cultures, but she also didn’t want to be tied to the stove the way her mother had been. Her mother, Helga, had worked as a maid since the age of eleven, and now, even in retirement, was unable to break the habit of cooking and serving, cooking and serving. My mother saw that and ran the other way.

What she valued in a meal was convenience. It’s funny that the one dish of hers I adored was the one that could not be rushed: cabbage rolls. I loved sitting on the counter and watching as she blanched the cabbage leaves, seasoned the ground pork with salt and pepper, then scooped the pork into the leaves, wrapping them like cigars and placing them carefully on a platter. My mother’s cabbage rolls were special because the very preparation of the dish forced her to slow down so I could enjoy her presence as much as her cooking. The literal translation for
dim sum
is “little bits of heart.” My mother’s cabbage rolls were my dim sum.