Somebody's Daughter

by Marie Myung-Ok Lee

  Praise for Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s Somebody’s Daughter

  Somebody’s Daughter is that rare book, that rare page-turner, the one you cannot put down, the one you will suspend washing the laundry for or cooking breakfast for. It is the novel you will open and read in one urgent breath as you take in the storyteller’s compelling tale of lives felt long after the book’s end as you turn off the light to sleep.

  LOIS-ANN YAMANAKA,

  author of Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers

  In a time when Asian adoptions are more and more commonplace, Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s Somebody’s Daughter hits an important and unique chord: the POV of the adopted child, now grown up and searching for her lost roots. Lee manages to be both comic and frank in this story of one girl’s journey back to Korea, and her lost mother’s own journey toward redemption.

  ANN HOOD, author of

  The Ornithologist’s Guide to Life

  Lee’s story of one young woman’s search for self in Korea will resonate equally with both adult and young adult readers—a remarkable achievement.

  MICHAEL CART,

  author of Necessary Noise

  In this moving portrayal of an adopted girl’s search for her biological mother, Marie Lee gives voice and validation to a segment of the Korean American community that has been overlooked too long and too often. Somebody’s Daughter is a gift for those forgotten, for the thousands of Korean children adopted by white parents, for those who search and yearn for a sense of home and self.

  NORA OKJA KELLER,

  author of Comfort Woman and Fox Girl

  With a pen dipped in deepest longing and grief, Marie Myung-Ok Lee has written an affecting novel of an adoption.

  JACQUELINE MITCHARD,

  author of The Deep End of the Ocean

  Sumptuous and emotionally stunning … Once you begin this novel, you won’t be able to put it down, infused as it is with our fragile sense of self, the search for natural parents to anchor one’s identity, and Lee’s elegant, imagistically sinuous prose that continually stabs the heart.

  SAM COALE,

  Providence Journal

  Be prepared to put yourself in the adoptee’s frame of mind. It is written from our viewpoint, and it’s a keeper.

  EUN MI YOUNG,

  Adoptive Families

  Her colorful characters crackle and pop off the page … A grown-up gem of a novel where joy mingles with sorrow, and heartbreak is laced with hope.

  ALLISON BLOCK,

  Booklist, starred review

  Also by Marie Myung-Ok Lee

  Finding My Voice

  Saying Goodbye

  Necessary Roughness

  To Grace Koom-soon Lee and in memory of Dr. William Chae-sik Lee

  and to

  Jason,

  whose courage inspires me, every day

  “If I bear witness of myself, ye will say my witness is not true.”

  —JOHN 5:31

  How can you claim to know the taste of watermelon

  when you have only licked the rind? —KOREAN PROVERB

  Prologue

  The dream unfolds as it always does, light goes to black, then back to color again. The last sensation from the awake-world is my limbs seizing like a jerked marionette as I pass into the deepest stages of sleep.

  But this time, the dream is different.

  This time, I’m dreaming I’m her.

  She is sitting in a slow-moving trainlike vehicle, maybe the Small World ride at Disneyland. Her neck is craning like crazy; she’s going to meet someone, but is seized by a sudden anxiousness that she’s gotten the time or location wrong.

  Another train is going the other way. In it are two girls, who catch her eye and wave.

  “I’m Sarah,” says one, in a Barbie-doll voice.

  “So am I,” says the other. The two are holding hands, looking like paper-doll cutouts.

  She turns to face them. “You can’t both be Sarah.”

  “Why not?” says the Barbie-doll voice.

  “After all, we’ve got two mothers,” says the other.

  “You’ve only got one mother, ONE,” she says. She decides she will break the chain of their hands and then everything will be logical again.

  The trains jerk, beginning to pull them in opposite directions. She jumps off to pursue them. But try as she might, the girls’ train pulls away too fast.

  First one, then the other laughs, all mouth and teeth.

  GET BACK ON THE RIDE, YOU!

  I wake with a gasp. When I was little, I once did jump off one of the rides at Disneyland—I wanted to go live with the Pirates of the Caribbean. My friend Ashley beside me had been scared of them, but not me. I knew I’d be happy with those pirates, daggers in teeth, skin stained the same walnut brown I turned in the summer.

  It takes me a second to recall the larger contours of my dream. When I remember that she was in it, I moan. Why didn’t I think to look in a mirror? In the other dreams, her face is always hidden in shadow.

  The tears come, another gasp escapes like steam. This chance to see what she looked like, gone. I stopper my mouth with a pillow, praying Christine won’t wake and come running, face earnest and dutiful as a volunteer firefighter, hands soft, murmuring words of comfort. You had a bad dream, sweetie?

  I can’t bear to have her touch me.

  Where she is, it’s day, not night, she’s just woken from her afternoon nap.

  Usually she sleeps light as a cat, whiskers alert to catch the slightest change in the air. But this time, her limbs had felt pinned as if by stone or thick ropes. Someone might have even said, “Chuh-gi, excuse me, but I really would like to make a purchase—ahem,” and she wouldn’t have been able to move a muscle.

  While her body lay helpless, some other part of her had flown like a blown leaf all over the known world. From Korea to America, perhaps even beyond. So far, in fact, that when she wakes, she finds herself surprised that she is, well, herself.

  She is reminded (though she is Christian) of the beautiful Buddhist koan: Am I a person dreaming I’m a butterfly—or am I a butterfly dreaming I’m a person?

  PART I

  SARAH

  Minneapolis

  1993

  When I was eight, they told me that my mother’s death was preordained. She had been murdered.

  One Sunday after service, our minister, Reverend Jansen of the Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd, bent down in a cloud of Aqua Velva to explain. We had been learning in Sunday school about Heaven and Hell, and in the middle of class I had fallen into a panic, wondering how I would recognize my Korean mother when I saw her in Heaven—or in Hell, if perhaps she and I both sinned too much.

  Not to worry, I was told.

  “God called your Korean parents home so that you could become the daughter of your mother and father,” he said, his eyes sliding sidewise, for just a second. His breath smelled vaguely of toast.

  “It was all part of His plan—you see how much your mommy and daddy love you? When the time comes, if you’re a very good girl, you, your mommy, daddy, and your sister, Amanda—the whole Thorson family—will be in Heaven together, thanks to the Lord’s wonderful and mysterious ways.”

  “That’s why we named you Sarah,” Christine and Ken added. “Because it means ‘God’s precious treasure.’”

  God kills, I thought then. The same God who brought us Christmas and the Easter Bunny—he murdered my mother.

  Shortly after that Sunday, I brought up my Korean mother again, asking about the car accident, how it had happened, exactly—was it like Phil Haag’s father, who fell asleep at the wheel? Or like our plumber’s teenage son who drove into a semi head-on?

  “Sarah,” Christine said patiently, looking u
p from the chopping board, where she was slicing carrot discs for pot roast. “We really knew nothing about her. I’m your mommy. Let’s not talk about this any more, it makes me sad.” She made little crying motions, pretending to wipe away tears, the same thing she did when I was bad, to show how I had disappointed her.

  I had grown up in a house in which Korea had always been the oddly charged word, never to be mentioned in connection to me, the same way we never said “Uncle Henry” and “alcoholic” in the same sentence. It was almost as if Ken and Christine thought I needed to be protected from it, the way small children need to be protected from boors itching to tell them that Santa Claus is not real. The ban on Korea extended even to the aforementioned Uncle Henry, who was then deprived of his war stories at our Memorial Day weekend cookouts. Although he proudly wore his felt VFW hat with its flurry of pins, including ones from his tour “overseas,” Christine or Ken would quietly slip him some of his favorite Pabst or Schlitz, and in return he’d set up residence in the lawn chair at the far corner of our yard, away from everyone.

  Somewhere back in the fuzzy clot of my teens (now, I’m at the worldly-wise age of almost-twenty), the ’88 Summer Olympics were held in Seoul. We couldn’t buck the Thorson family tradition of watching absolutely everything (that winter we’d raptly watched curling, for God’s sakes!). But I was aware that pains were taken to modulate voices, vocal cords twisted to an excruciating, studied casualness until Korea came out Korea, exactly the same way we’d say “Russia” or “Carl Lewis” or “Flo-Jo.”

  Then Bryant Gumbel invaded our living room with his special segment on how Korea, one of the four “Little Tiger” economic miracle countries, was so enterprising that it had even made an export product out of its babies. Since the Korean War, more than a hundred thousand children, Made-in-Korea stamped on their foreheads, had left the country, their adoption fees fattening the government coffers.

  Top that, Singapore! Gumbel’s cheery smirk seemed to say.

  “Well, Sarah’s really American, not Kor—,” Amanda had begun, until the look on Christine’s face—despairing, fierce—stopped her.

  We invent what becomes us.

  SARAH

  Seoul

  1993

  The plane had finally approached Kimp’o Airport three bad movies and five shrink-wrapped meals after I’d left Minneapolis. The video monitors had shown a graphic rendering of our progress, a cartoon of our plane inching its way over the Pacific Ocean toward the Korean peninsula. As we descended toward Seoul, the white cartoon-plane veered from its arcing trajectory to fly directly over some dot in the Sea of Japan called Tokdo. The Korean people on board cheered.

  The twinkly-eyed senior across the aisle turned and smiled. He and his wife, matching canvas Elderhostel totes, clutched gnarled hands over the shared armrest, fingers tangling like brush.

  “Glad to be home, eh?”

  It took me a second to realize he was talking to me. Another second to step back and see me as he did: Korean girl returning to Korea.

  I wiped at the corners of my eyes, fuzzed by no sleep.

  “Oh yah, you betcha,” I said, in my purest Minnesota-nice accent. His wife, whose name would just have to be Effie or Jean, leaned forward out of her husband’s shadow to beam at me.

  “We can still turn around and just go back home—Daddy and I don’t care about cancellation fees.” Christine’s last words to me at the mouth of the jetway. “Sarah, you don’t have to do this to yourself.”

  She made it sound like I was off to get a tribal tattoo, or maybe to go do that Sioux sun dance where you pierce your breast with a sharp spike attached by rope to a pole and dance around the pole in the hot sun for days, waiting for a vision.

  “I’m just taking my slightly belated graduation trip,” I’d said. In the waning days of my senior year, I’d been promised “a trip anywhere you like” if I could get myself off the Hold list and back into that stream of graduating seniors.

  An extra credit report on plate tectonics (Earth Sciences), plus a record one week of resisting the urge to bolt while sitting in every class except maybe Chemistry, earned me my prize.

  However, somehow, that subsequent summer oozed through my fingers, and I was still snoozing in my bikini when dead leaves and Ken and Christine’s insistence that I take a try at college came raining down on me. I lasted not quite a year as a Golden Gopher at the U of MN, Duluth. I never knew the shores of Lake Superior could be so cold.

  So here I was, taking my trip just a little bit late. It was just that no one expected me to choose Korea as my final destination.

  My watch proclaimed it almost midnight, but a blinding sun was battering to be let in under the ovalette window shades, my tongue stung from the sugar-greased pastries and rank orange juice the stewardesses had foisted on us.

  In the airport, the silver-topped heads of the Elderhostel couple acted as a beacon as I followed them to Immigration and waited behind them in the line marked FOREIGNERS. They seemed to know what they were doing. In line, the woman showed her husband something in Fodor’s Asia. At the baggage claim, my things were among the last to arrive, and Effie and Burt, as I’d named them, went on without me. After that, the only Caucasian people I saw were a few shorn soldiers in camouflage fatigues and black boots that always looked too big.

  The last set of opaque electronic doors spit me out, then hermetically sealed behind me. I found myself in an arrival area filled with clots of identically black-haired people leaning over metal barricades, as if at a parade. Grannies, children, every age in between. TV monitors placed overhead about every six feet—the scene of me standing bewildered multiplied about eight hundred times—occupied the attention of the people on the fringes of the crowd. It appeared that some dignitary, or maybe a movie star, would be coming through. But if I could read Korean, I would have seen the signs plastered throughout: Because of the increasingly hazardous congestion at our beloved country’s national airport, please send only ONE family member to drop off or pick up the traveler. In actuality, the government had already secretly broken ground for an additional airport on the other side of Seoul, acknowledging how obdurate and unbreakable, the Korean custom of deploying the entire extended family to greet or send off a sojourning family member.

  The travelers behind me grunted their impatience and so I moved on. At the taxi stand, the snoozing driver didn’t respond when I tapped on the window. I opened the back door, feeling like I was breaking into his house. But he didn’t object, he readily accepted the Korean directions the school had provided. He lit a new cigarette, jerked the stick shift, and we began to make our way down a drive snaking between two giant Coca-Cola and Samsung billboards, neon looking wan and strange in the light of day.

  We were bound for open fields framed by a sky that seemed to go on forever. Low flames blackened the fields of dead stubble to our left. On the right, three solitary figures inhabited the landscape: a man guiding a primitive plow being pulled through the dirt by two women straining under ropes, towels and pink plastic sun visors wrapped around their heads. Behind them, a yellow billboard rose out of the earth: HYUNDAI—FOR BETTER LIFE.

  As if entering Oz, the fields gave way to tile-roofed storefronts, clusters of office-type buildings, then glass-and-steel skyscrapers. A shiny Kia car dealership, a Printemps department store. A giant pagoda-like gate commanded its own concrete island as six lanes of traffic flowed around it (Seoul once was a gated city, like Troy). Taxis and sleek black cars, billiard-ball-striped buses jostled us for space. On the sidewalks, men in suits, women in designer outfits carried fancy ruffled umbrellas to shade their faces from the sun. How could this be? My teachers always said that Korea, despite parts of it being gussied up for the Olympics, was a poor country, one where people only had small fistfuls of rice to eat, where they ate dogs and cats.

  And what about Nana, goading Amanda and me into eating mushy Brussels sprouts?

  “Remember the starving children in KOREA.”

 
Or had it been, “Remember the starving children in INDIA”? Both?

  A multistory Pizza Hut whizzed by.

  The driver shot through a majestic stone arch that said CHOSUN UNIVERSITY chiseled in English, somehow managing not to run down any of the students placed like obstacles in the street. We passed Gothic stone buildings, drove through what looked like a miniature forest, looped up a long driveway, then came to a stop in front of a building that looked like a Howard Johnson’s: efficient, cagelike.

  INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS RESIDENCE, it said, in English.

  The driver dug some wax out of his ears with a pinkie, pointed at the meter with that same digit. 23,000.

  Then he left me there. I made my way into the International Students Residence, my luggage wheels squeaking and echoing in what I feared was a dark and empty building.

  It had seemed, on the face of it, a clever plan to arrive a few days before the Motherland Program officially started (March 1, also the beginning of the Korean school year). The brochure had said the Residence would be open as much as five days before. But I was, indeed, the lone occupant of that dank building, save for the five-foot watchman who skulked around the halls like some Asian Quasimodo. From time to time, he experimentally lobbed some Korean my way, then muttered something like aiiieesshh when I didn’t reply.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that most of my program-mates were already here in Korea, some had even come a full month early. But unlike me, they had Korean parents who had molded their young bodies with Korean hands, so that their hearts had a space for this place. They knew how to bow correctly, the polite way to receive a gift. They also had relatives who took them in, gave them comfortable places to sleep, and filled their plates at every opportunity.

  I had gone a small ways into the neighborhood beyond the school’s back gate searching for food. But each time, confronted with the sprawling signs, the hard, sticklike letters, my courage failed me. The days ticked off, one by one, until the third day had passed with nothing to eat but a single bag of airline peanuts.