Somebody's Daughter

by Marie Myung-Ok Lee

  KYUNG-SOOK

  Enduring Pine Village

  1993

  Kyung-sook had been selling various kinds of shrimp at the market for almost twenty years. Her days had a reassuring sameness to them: up before dawn to prepare Il-sik’s breakfast rice, warm and fresh, then attending to her father. Then to her market stall when the sky had lightened enough for her to see the wares she was arranging. After that, she would wait for her customers.

  Under normal circumstances, Kyung-sook liked the late-morning at the market the best. At that time, the housewives would be out in force, strolling past the piles of winter melons, platters of glistening headcheese, bundles of wild leeks, and comic jumble of plumbing joints and implements. Sometimes, more for fun than for a need to attract customers, Kyung-sook would stand outside her stall and join the other merchants in trying to entice the passersby.

  “Salted shrimp—best quality!” she might yell.

  Today, however, she was distracted, could barely measure out the right amounts of dried shrimp, shrimp paste, give back the proper small-money. Her thoughts would not stay in the present, but instead kept circling back through the years, over and over, the way a tongue goes back again and again to prod a painful tooth—to see that it still hurts.

  Images passed through her head: The Month of Steady Rains. Herself, as a twelve-year-old girl. Hauling tools and bundles of seedlings to the fields at first light. The knotted red string stretched across the rows. Spending hours, days lined up with the other workers, bent over sickle-shaped, transplanting endless rice sproutlets into the mud. The stories told, songs sung to make the work go faster. The leeches were the worst thing. People with relatives in Seoul begged them to send their old nylon stockings so the planters could wade in the mud protected from these vicious biting creatures. But Kyung-sook, like Yongsu, had no rich relatives. Once, Kyung-sook had seen a huge leech swim up to her and then disappear into her heel. Yongsu, her own legs covered with black lumps, pulled Kyung-sook to dry ground, put her foot in her lap, then dug deep with her fingernails, bringing bubbles of blood to the surface of Kyung-sook’s skin, until she extracted the leech—like pulling a swath of shiny black fabric through a woman’s ring—from an impossibly small hole in Kyung-sook’s foot. Then, while Kyung-sook lay back in a faint, she threw the bloated creature on the ground and stamped on it.

  The tiny rivulets of memories eddied together and began to flow as a river of time, gathering strength from its banks. The top reflected the clear, pure emerald green of a field of rice plants growing toward the sun. Underneath was contained the sand, the silt, the riverweeds, the occasional flashes of brightness from tumbling stones.

  A line of women dancing and singing under a harvest moon. A bitter winter when all the oxen died. Gathering the rubbery stamens of the Chinese-lantern flowers to make gum to snap between the teeth. The clack-clack of the taffy-maker’s shears, children running into the dusty lane.

  A flute at the bottom of a rice chest. A death. A disappearance. A lost child.

  “Hello, Shrimp Auntie?” Small Singing stood just outside the square tins that marked the entrance to Kyung-sook’s stall.

  “Good morning, Gentle Customer,” Kyung-sook said, shaking her head to dispel its ghosts. “Please come in.”

  “Actually, I’m looking for Cooking Oil Auntie—she wasn’t at her stall.”

  “Well, she was here earlier, but not now. Wait, there—” Kyung-sook could see Cooking Oil Auntie’s gourd-shaped form moving amongst the stacks of blue-green bottles.

  “Oh, good. Madam Mother-in-Law is having special guests this afternoon, so she sent me for some dark sesame oil.” In her right hand, Small Singing held a yellow rope of gulbi fish, eyes still bright and shiny as if they were still swimming in the ocean. With the left, she hoisted her other package, her infant, further on her back. He made bubbling noises and smiled an insipid pangool smile at Kyung-sook.

  “Well, Cooking Oil Auntie makes the real thing. There’s nothing like it, especially compared to that cheap perilla oil they try to pass off as sesame oil these days. The oil extracted from sesame leaves doesn’t taste half as rich as the oil squeezed from roasted, high quality seeds, don’t you think?”

  Small Singing huffed a bit.

  “Yes, that’s true,” she said. “Sorry to have disturbed your lunch. Goodbye.”

  Kyung-sook poked at the Chinese black noodles she had ordered for an early lunch. Usually she ate Korean hotpot or seaweed rice, but today she wanted jia-jia myun. She thought with a small laugh how she used to think Chinese food came from heaven. Now it was cheap stuff even the market-lady could order for lunch. How things had changed.

  She put her chopsticks down, knowing she wasn’t going to eat just yet. The current of memory carried her along, further, further. This time, she didn’t resist.

  SARAH

  Seoul

  1993

  The watchman downstairs grunted and motioned me over. The respectful term to address a man his age would be ajuhshi, the male counterpart to ajuhma. He was known among Motherland Programmers as the Stamp ajuhshi because of his eccentric love of philately—he could spend hours gazing at our mail with its foreign stamps.

  He handed me a DHL package, which I brought into my room. The return address was Lund, Markey & Bjornstrom, Ken’s firm. The looped script on the label was Christine’s. CONTENTS: Care Package. Inside, a novelty photo frame (the four of us as a Time magazine “Family of the Year”), gummy candies in the shape of Minnesota, fancy French lace cookies fractured in transit, a tiny plum-colored Lancôme lipstick, free with a fifty-dollar purchase. The letter inside was dated the day before I left.

  That was so Christine, always planning ahead.

  You have to have a plan, she had told me, when I dropped The Bomb. You can’t just go there with no plan.

  “There” was Korea. And operating with no plan was precisely the point.

  My not-quite year of college had brought no answers other than that I definitely didn’t want to become an occupational therapist. Fittingly, it was en route to the registrar’s office to submit my withdrawal that I passed the International Studies department’s bulletin board.

  JUNIOR YEAR IN GENEVA. POLISH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CRACOW. EL CENTRO BILINGUE IN BEAUTIFUL SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE. Further down, the magic board was shingled with even more opportunities:

  LEARN GERMAN, SPANISH, NORWEGIAN, FINNISH, SWEDISH WITHOUT LEAVING MINNESOTA AT THE CONCORDIA LANGUAGE VILLAGE. YEAR ABROAD IN BRITAIN. NYU IN PARIS. SEMESTER AT SEA.

  I dumped an assortment of the brochures—France, Mexico, and Poland—into my bag. Then I saw STUDY AND TOUR KOREA WITH THE MOTHERLAND PROGRAM. The brochure was fronted with a picture of a man in a smiling wooden mask that looked like the comedy half of comedy and tragedy. He was clad in flowing white pajamas and doing a dance against a backdrop of mountains. The mountains had caught my eye. Gray, granitic mountains, like the Rockies. I didn’t get it. Rice paddies, temples, people wearing white pajamas and masks, all right. But where did the mountains come from?

  I dumped it in my bag, along with SEMESTER AT SEA.

  The Registrar accepted my resignation with equanimity. She even gave me a friendly and bored wave as I left, as if to reassure me that what I was doing was perfectly within the natural order of things. Christine would be a different story. She wouldn’t be happy for the distinction among her friends as the mother of Eden’s Prairie High School Class of ’91’s first college dropout.

  In the parking lot of the U, I reached into my purse, fished among the brochures without looking.

  What say ye gods? Pull.

  Korea.

  At my dorm, I grabbed my taciturn roommate’s Magic 8-Ball.

  The Future Looks Promising.

  Korea instead of sunny Mexico or the Semester at Sea? I could hear the rolling of the cosmic dice.

  All Signs Point to Yes.

  When I arrived home, my Ford Escort squeezed to bursting with my things, Christine’s eyes bugg
ed out of her head.

  Ken, at least, remembered to give me a welcoming hug. He turned to Christine and I heard him whisper, “Let’s sit down and hear what she has to say.”

  At the kitchen table, the two of them sat on one side, facing me.

  “I just couldn’t take it anymore,” I said. “My supervisor, Peggy, said that in the OT program, people either burn out the first year or they go on. I burned out. I couldn’t take it, all those people and their injuries.”

  Christine didn’t say anything. Ken’s mustache twitched. I know that they both still harbored the ridiculous fantasy that I’d become a doctor just because some teacher once told them I had an aptitude for chemistry. With my grades, the biggest favor I could do mankind would be to do something else, anything else. I didn’t tell them that for the first day of my OT practicum, when faced with a man whose skin had been burned to a shell of beef jerky, I had run away, knowing that I would vomit on his hospital-issued slippy-grip socks if I stayed.

  “So what do you plan to do?” Ken asked quietly.

  “Well, I—”

  Amanda came into the kitchen, a good ten minutes after she’d been summoned. She displaced Christine’s twin Persian cats off a chair, sat, and buried her face in her arms to signify her undying support and interest in my life.

  “So, Sarah, what do you plan to do?” Ken repeated.

  Amanda glanced my way, rankled that she was being forced to attend yet another family meeting about me, the prodigal daughter who’d irreparably ruined basically all potential avenues of rebellion for her—anything she did would inevitably be psychologized as merely copycatting. From the living room, Hubert, Christine’s macaw, screamed.

  “I’d like to take my graduation trip, go abroad and learn a foreign language at this language institute.”

  Christine and Ken looked bewildered for a second; they were obviously expecting I was going to announce I was joining the Branch Davidians, or something.

  “So you’d be, in a sense, still going to school?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said truthfully. “The Institute gladly provides college credits.” Amanda pretended to snore.

  “And,” I embellished, “the registrar at the U said I can always resume right where I left off, no penalties.” I had no idea if this was true.

  “A year abroad,” Ken mused, stroking his mustache. “Now, that’s the kind of mature thinking we were hoping we could get out of you. I always wished I’d taken some time to go off backpacking in Europe or something, myself, instead of rushing life so much.”

  He passed Christine one of his fuzzy-lipped see-sweetheart? smiles. She reciprocated with an icy glare. I was aware that she often blamed their bout with infertility on Ken’s hemming and hawing over having children while her twenties spooled away. Her thirties brought years of painful fertility treatments and bloody miscarriages before she gave up and decided to adopt. Then she got pregnant just months after I arrived.

  “So, Sarry, where are you hankering on going?” Ken asked. They both leaned forward, straining to hear, as if they were only going to be told once. Amanda rolled her eyes.

  “Korea,” I said.

  No one moved. The air crackled. We’d suddenly been turned into a glassed-in diorama at the Natural History Museum.

  AMERICAN (?) FAMILY, circa 1990.

  Ken and Christine, frozen. The air was so iced over I could almost see the hairline fractures. Amanda was the one who moved, her head rising off the notches of her arms to regard me with shock and disgust, and behind it, a kind of unhinged admiration. Christine made a vaguely keening noise before she grabbed the treasonous brochure out of my hands. In the background, there was another sound, even higher. It was the screaming sound of cloth being rent, of the shoddily woven fabric of our family coming apart more easily than anyone ever imagined.

  SARAH

  Seoul

  1993

  I was surprised to find Doug Henderson waiting for me, just outside the classroom door. We walked to the restaurant in silence, a pattern we would repeat many times.

  We sat at the same battered plastic table, ordered something called kalguksoo, safe, white noodles.

  In class today, Doug had known the word t’angol son-nim, “regular customer,” a word that Bernie Lee hadn’t even known. This had sent Bernie spinning into a terrible mood.

  “So how’d you learn Korean so well?” I asked, emboldened.

  “My mother,” he replied, just as it hit me. “She’s Korean.”

  His hangdog eyes were the color of weak coffee, an acceptable Korean shade, but they were round as marbles, so the Korean in them was lost. His cheekbones—two swelling cliffs near his eyes—seemed somewhat Asian, but they were negated by an aggressive, pointed nose. His skin, the pale alabaster that I knew Koreans consider “good,” the way blacks determine “good” hair, was all thrown off by his copper hair. Clearly, the American Doug had been formed first, and the Korean genes had had to scramble to fill in wherever they could at the end.

  But now that I knew this about him, I was a little spooked.

  “So you grew up in Korea?” I asked him.

  “Till third grade. I grew up in a camptown near a U.S. army base.”

  I noted that star, which he was wearing again today on the neck of his T-shirt.

  “So you came to the States after your dad’s tour in Korea ended?”

  “It was a little more complicated than that, but yeah. How about you? You were born here?”

  I nodded without elaborating.

  The waitress, bumping up the narrow aisle, knocked over our container of metal chopsticks and spoons, spilling them onto the concrete floor in a chorus of chimes. She paused to pick each one off the filthy floor and put it back into the container.

  With a sigh of “Ai-gu,” she plunked the container back on our table, midway between Doug and me, in its former place. She walked away. Earlier, I had caught a glimpse of a waitress busily dumping diners’ remains of the ubiquitous little side-dishes—kimchi, little dried minnows, seaweed dredged in salt—back into a communal pot that then went into the refrigerator for reuse. I had decided that what I’d been seeing was a mirage, a misreading of the situation that was a product of my paranoid Western imagination that immediately assumed that everything in the Orient was dirty.

  “You’re not hungry?”

  “Um, my stomach’s a little upset all of a sudden.”

  He laughed. “How can your stomach be upset? Korean food is the only thing that will settle my stomach.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Before we left, Doug returned with more Lotte gum. These came with a suspicious picture of a flower on the label, but they had a sweet coffee flavor that lasted about three chews before the whole thing became a tasteless wad. Outside, the peony globes were covered with ants, like moving black sprinkles on spumoni ice cream cones.

  “Would you like to take a walk?” he said, when we were back on campus.

  “Um, sure.” I was realizing I hadn’t done much exploring beyond the Language Institute, the 7-Eleven, and the Balzac coffeehouse. I kept forgetting that our school was just one tiny building occupying a corner of a huge university filled with Korean students.

  Some of the Chosun Daehakyo students were passing us now. The girls walking arm-in-arm in tight jeans and platform shoes, the guys in sweater vests, hair greased back à la Ken’s high school pictures, some also arm-in-arm.

  We veered to a path that led behind a dingy building, test tubes crusted with frosty white precipitates airing out in the open windows. The dirt path ascended directly up a mountain—a random peak erupting in the middle of campus. In a few minutes of upward hiking, I could smell pine. I could also see smog padding the city below.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Yak-Su,” Doug said.

  A noise, like the cackling of chickens. From behind us, a dozen octogenarian Korean men and women gained on us. They were clad in some serious Sound of Music hiking gear—Tyrolean hats, wool pants
held up with suspenders, knee socks with alpine patterns, hiking boots, gnarled-wood walking sticks. They were all carrying empty plastic jugs.

  “They’re going to Yak-Su, too,” Doug said, as the group, amazingly, pistoned past us up the steepening slope, their happy chatter unabated. Soon, they disappeared beyond a bend in the trail.

  Doug stopped where the trail continued up to the summit and another trail broke off to the left. He pointed to the sign.

  Two simple syllables, no diphthongs, even. Yak and Su. and .

  “Oh, Yak-Su,” I said. “We’re here.”

  He nodded, then started down the left-hand trail, which ended abruptly at a lone metal pipe emerging from a rock. It was dribbling water into a rusty drain; a middle-aged Korean woman squatted like a frog next to it, alternately filling up a pink plastic dipper and drinking from it. By her feet sat a plastic jug, filled to the brim with water.

  “The Stamp ajuhshi told me this is some of the best yak-su in the city.”

  “Oh, um, really?” I said, suddenly realizing that yak-su was a thing, not a place.

  “You’ve never had yak-su?” I shook my head. From his voice, I felt as if I should have, or at the very least, should know what it was. I just stared ahead blankly.

  “You know, ‘medicine water,’ the spring water that flows off the mountain.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  The woman placed the huge water-filled jug on her head and began to amble down the slope, even singing as she went. Doug bent down by the dribbly stream, his body folding quite naturally into the lady’s same squat. He picked up the pink dipper, which she’d left on top of a rock.

  “You’re not going to drink from that, are you?”

  He looked at me, then laughed. “Of course I am. We’re all Korean. We can share germs.”

  “But—”