I smiled. Jun-Ho was always mixing up the gender pronouns, a small but significant thing that still eluded him.
“Okay, then it says ‘child was adopted at eighteen months by Christine and Kenneth Dor-son of Minnesota, the United States of America.’”
He took out the second page.
“Here is a copy of your passport,” he said, handing it to me. “You were a nice-looking baby. Cute.”
I grasped the page. It was a bad Xerox, all shadows. The child in the picture had a tragic expression, like she was posing for a WANTED poster. That was me?
Lee, Soon-Min, it said in English letters under the Korean. The Republic of Korea.
“My Korean name is Lee Soon-Min,” I said in wonder.
“Unh,” he said, taking the page. He put it back in the folder and closed it.
“Is that all there is?” I said.
He nodded.
“Are you sure? It seemed like there was a lot of writing on that first page—at least four paragraphs.” I looked him in the eye. He flinched, ever so slightly. I stared at him until he opened the folder again.
“‘A name of Lee Soon-Min was bequeathed,’” he added. “They made a passport for you, and you got your special-entry status to America.”
“Wait.” The air was suddenly electric. “They gave me a name?”
“They gave it to you for your passport.” Jun-Ho was sweating. “That is the system of doing so.”
“What do you mean?”
Miss Park stared at me.
“Also, why did I go home with a foster mother—didn’t my parents have any relatives?”
I tore the page out of his hands, but again, it was a maze of symbols that I couldn’t wring the meanings from.
“Jun-Ho,” I said, voice now dwindling to a whisper. “Truth, please.”
“You were named Lee Soon-Min and sent to America,” he said. “What of it is giving you confusion?”
“I was named Lee Soon-Min? I didn’t have a name before that, is that what you’re saying?”
“The orphanage did not know if you had a name.”
“But why not? It doesn’t make sense.”
Jun-Ho paused. I could tell he was itching to light up a cigarette, but he could hardly do it in this place of babies. He twitched instead, waggled the booted foot perched on his knee.
“I won’t leave until you tell me.”
To make my point, I folded my arms like Sitting Bull.
Jun-Ho looked back at me, then back down at his boots. He looked, only, sad.
“There is another paragraph here. But if I read, it will cause you much hurt.”
“Hurt?”
“Injury,” he clarified. “The heart inside the chest will become sore.”
The folder was open, like butterfly wings. I couldn’t believe that I could just reach out and touch the mysterious framework of my Korean life.
“It’s okay, whatever’s in there,” I said. “I just need to know. How would you feel if you didn’t know? I’m Korean but I can’t speak Korean. I was supposed to grow up in Korea, like you. I need to know why I didn’t.”
Jun-Ho took a deep breath. The folder trembled slightly in his hand, as if a breeze were passing through the silent air of the office.
“‘The baby has no known family,’” he read. “‘She was brought to the orphanage on September 3 as a girl infant who had been left on the steps of the Hoei-Dong Fire Station. There was not any kind of note left with her and she was officially declared abandoned and fit for adoption.’”
Oh my God. He looked up at me with worry, but I raggedly choked out that I needed him to go on.
“‘The baby appears to have been born in a toilet or some kind of commode. The umbilical cord was still attached, and he was covered in feces …’”
The tears began to fall. I had no hope of stopping them.
“‘We cleaned the feces off.’”
Ddong. It was becoming clear. A baby arrived covered in ddong. Not a baby who was part of someone’s family. No, a baby that someone had shit out and didn’t even bother cleaning up while leaving it like a terrible prank at the door of a fire station.
That baby was me. The cord that had connected me to my mother had been cut carelessly, left to dangle. My Korean mother had cut me off and run. She hadn’t wanted me.
And September 3, my birthday. Mom and Dad Thorson said that I had been a child who was loved, whose birthday was celebrated with candles and cake and presents and whatever else Koreans did to mark that important day.
My fist had found its way in my mouth. I was biting down on my knuckles, sobs wracking my body in waves. Miss Park came forward, murmuring comfort, patting my arm. Jun-Ho had already circled an awkward arm around me as I cried into his shirt. The three of us remained in this makeshift huddle for what seemed liked hours.
“Let’s go,” Jun-Ho said gently. “Ka-yo.” He led me outside where a pale blue cab happened to be parked. As I groped my way into the back, Jun-Ho placed his palm between my forehead and the too-low steel rim of the door just in time. He barked directions to the driver, a large, oily man who looked back at me, my tears and some stray hairs clogging my mouth. Jun-Ho barked something else, and he started the car.
“Where are we going?” I surprised myself by speaking in Korean.
“Home,” he said, in Korean. “Back to where we came from.” He reached behind me to a gaudily beaded box that contained—what else?—tissues, and handed me a bouquet of them.
I turned my face to the window.
On the street, the rows of tiny shops were pressed together so tightly they looked like one continuous, rickety storefront, except for the different signs in Korean writing. I leaned my head against the scratched plexiglass of the window as the car jerkily accelerated. Watching the signs blur, I could feel something of my old self being left behind, like when you’re dancing, and the music abruptly changes; you’re left abandoned, half-aware in this temporal space, sprawling valiantly, stubbornly, to something that now only exists somewhere in your imagination.
PART II
KYUNG-SOOK
Enduring Pine Village
1972
They unrolled the scroll of names ever so slowly.
“Goddam pompous officials,” someone muttered, as the crowd pressed closer. The two men in shiny Western-style suits seemed not to hear. With each hand’s-width of the paper they exposed, a shout of joy or a sob of disappointment could be heard. The two men with fancily oiled hair kept to their own rhythm, neither speeding up nor slowing down for the hundreds of names.
The results of the college entrance exam.
For months before the exam, her mother had stayed up with her, every night, pinching the tails off soy sprouts or sewing up the covers on the just-washed sleeping pads. Whenever Kyung-sook’s head began to nod, her mother would bring her a bitter-smelling herbal elixir. Sometimes, she just pulled her daughter’s hair.
“A person who sleeps more than four hours a night has no hope of passing the entrance exam!” She oftentimes shouted this famous proverb in Kyung-sook’s ear.
The year before, a boy who had once been a beggar had achieved the highest scores on the entrance exam to Seoul National University, the best college in the land. Kyung-sook’s mother had taken it as an example that even if you started with nothing, with enough studying, one could accomplish everything.
Even restore their family’s yangban honor.
Kyung-sook’s mother prayed every day. Once, she went up to the mountains and came back scratched and black-and-blue, with leaves and twigs caught in her hair. She mumbled that she had become possessed by a spirit while praying. Her husband quickly shushed her and brought her inside the house.
The spirit had told Kyung-sook’s mother to keep Kyung-sook from eating slippery things, especially seaweed soup, lest her mind “slip” on the exam, and every morning, a dish of the day’s first pure water from the well needed to be placed outside the door to remind the gods to make Kyung-soo
k’s mind similarly lucid.
On the testing day, Kyung-sook’s mother had waited outside the school all day, counting out prayers on her Buddhist rosary with one hand, pressing pieces of taffy onto the bars of the school gate with the other.
“I went to the market and bought the best kind of yut they had to entice the benevolent spirits,” she recounted proudly to the neighbors.
Other mothers affixed pieces of taffy on the gate, too, to help the answers “stick” in their children’s heads. But Kyung-sook’s mother was extra-vigilant and made sure that a piece of hers was always on top of everyone else’s.
The name Bae Kyung-sook came into view.
Her mother went home and immediately prepared a thanksgiving offering to the Grandfather Spirit and to a special spirit she called The Lonely Saint.
“It is all arranged: we will be sending you to Seoul,” Kyung-sook’s father said.
“Yes, to live with your imo,” her mother confirmed. “Imo has agreed to take you in. Now, don’t let her be filling your head with her absurd notions about Christo. Your job is to study as hard as you can so you can return as soon as possible and get married.”
Married!
“Of course,” her mother said, noting Kyung-sook’s puzzled look. “We need to marry you off. Having ‘college graduate’ on your side will put you in an entirely different class with the matchmaker, as it should, considering our lineage.”
Kyung-sook couldn’t question her elders, but she didn’t understand. Why bother to go to college when in the end it would all be the same again? The former beggar boy at Seoul National University would probably become an important judge, a member of Parliament. But what would happen to her—become someone’s wife and mother, no different from the most illiterate woman in the village? Why be shown all the wonders that lay beyond the fields of rice only to have to return as a country wife? It would be like showing a hungry child a sweet, then giving her a bowl of stones.
I will find a way, Kyung-sook decided. I will become a famous musician—so famous that people will beg me to perform in front of important dignitaries, maybe even abroad. So famous that I will be able to support my parents in their old age.
The day Kyung-sook left, meager belongings stuffed in her travel bag, she walked stiffly and slowly.
Ah, my daughter is sad to leave her home village, Kyung-sook’s mother thought. It was just like in the sad song, “Arirang”: … before you walk ten li away from me, your foot will ache …
Kyung-sook bowed deeply to her parents before she boarded the train. In her bag were some clothes, a few new pairs of underwear, money for tuition and books.
Kyung-sook sat in her seat on the train, looked out the window at her parents, who waited, still as statues, as the train began to pull away.
They kept waiting, waiting, growing smaller and smaller until they were just two small shapes in the past.
Kyung-sook let her shoulders slouch a bit. From under her skirt she pulled out the flute and sighed.
SARAH
Seoul
1993
The phone lines from Korea to America run from continent to continent. Through all those miles of dark ocean—how? Did a plane fly its many hours, unspooling gossamer filament as it went? Did people have to work underwater, inch by laborious inch, in diving suits and anonymous masks? The cables certainly can’t be buried—the ocean would be much too deep in places for that. So does it just hang, a clothesline in Atlantis, draped with its seaweed laundry?
I considered this as I stood in front of the phone, contemplating how a phone call needed to be made. There were pay phones all over the Residence, but the lobby had a special one where you could just press the button of your carrier, AT&T, Sprint, MCI, and you would be connected to an international operator who would answer the phone in good old American English, hello?
A transpacific call to Minnesota needed to be made.
All this time, there had been a reason. Some small piece of my brain had scavenged this truth, doggedly preserved it, perhaps sent it wraithlike into my subconscious: your Korean mother is still on this earth.
That’s why for all those years I had refused, on pain of death, to say I-love-you to anyone, least of all Christine and Ken. It had been diagnosed as abnormal, a sickness, a “bonding disorder,” “attachment disorder,” by their hired guns: psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers. Normal kids tell their parents they love them, they said. My failure to meant there was something wrong with me.
No, the fault lay within the system.
No divine destiny, no master plan. Not even a heavenly homicide to explain things. Only a conspiracy of adults bending my hapless life into a mold of their own pleasing.
What right does anyone have to do this?
Now that I know the truth, I must tell them, Christine and Ken, have them know that I know. Catch them flat-footed, and see what their pathetic excuses are.
The air had grown uncomfortably warm in the booth, there was a line, three people long, the first person tapping her foot impatiently.
I pushed open the folding doors and stepped out, gasping, as the other girl stepped in. She didn’t shut the door, probably to clear the funky air. As I walked away I heard her tell the operator the number, and seconds later, she said, “Hello, Mommy, Umma? Na ya,” in a voice that broke my heart.
I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of this earlier: I would find her first. When I called Ken and Christine, I would push the receiver toward her, urge her to speak.
It would take them a moment to figure this out.
We can’t understand a thing this woman is saying, Christine would complain. She must be speaking in Korean.
Korean, yes. Speaking. Alive.
That’s my mother, I would tell them. I found my mother here in Korea. A living ghost.
SARAH
Seoul
1993
“Don’t forget, this afternoon you start your elective classes,” Choi Sunsengnim reminded us.
“Sarah-ssi,” she said to me. “Please see me after class.”
I walked out with Doug, then remembered. I sent him on to the Rainbow, went back into the school. Choi Sunsengnim was sitting at her desk in front of a styrofoam takeout container of kimbap—American cheese, SPAM, Korean pickles, and rice wrapped into seaweed rolls that she was poking with a toothpick. She was going to teach the advanced newspaper-reading class in the afternoon.
“Sunsengnim?” I said.
She tucked a half-chewed bolus of kimbap into her cheek when she saw me.
“There will be no pronunciation class,” she told me.
“No class?” I said, slightly relieved.
“There are not enough students who have an interest. You should choose between tae kwon do, ceramics, and traditional music.”
I sighed. I didn’t have any particular interest in any of these. All I knew was that Bernie Lee was taking tae kwon do, so I told Sunsengnim I’d take music.
“I think you will learn a lot,” she said, and she instructed me to show up at the rec room of the Residence at one o’clock.
“However,” she went on. “I have regrets that there aren’t enough students for the parum class.”
“Neigh,” I agreed. Choi Sunsengnim sighed.
KYUNG-SOOK
Seoul
1972
Arriving at her imo’s, Kyung-sook realized that if you wanted to live in Seoul, you had to learn how to make yourself small. The city was all buildings and people and roads packed together, especially in this rundown section of the city by the old Japanese neighborhood. Imo lived in the room in the back of her store, Arirang. In this one room sat a butane burner, a one-person rice table, bedding folded in the corner. A single pot and a stirring spoon hung from nails on the wall. Imo owned only two pants-and-blouse outfits, one she was wearing, the other soaking in a bucket, waiting to be washed.
What took up the most room was another low table on which sat a picture of a bearded whiteman with long yellow
hair—Yesu Christo—and a string of magic Christo beads that Imo would stroke long into the night, her body swaying, rocking, sometimes crying as she did so.
During the day, Imo sat on a worn cushion behind the store’s small counter, reading her red-covered Christo book, the gilt long worn off by her faithful fingers. At night, she ate the barest meal of rice and kimchi behind the rice-paper door—but she was ever willing to slide it open and tend to anyone who came in saying, “Anybody here?” A few cents gained from some gum or soap powder would mean a few more cents for the church’s coffer, no matter what it meant to Kyung-sook’s sleep.
As Kyung-sook’s mother had predicted, Imo immediately nagged Kyung-sook to abandon Korean gods and follow Christo. An unusually bright look passed through Imo’s face as she explained how this man Christo was a king, so powerful that even after he was executed, he came back to life and was waiting for his followers in Heaven.
Kyung-sook wondered why the white people would want to kill their god in the first place, as she fought drowsiness to listen to Imo. Finally, a customer banged on the door. While Imo tended to him, Kyung-sook snuggled deeper into the bedcovers hoping for some sleep until the next interruption.
SARAH
Seoul
1993
“I thought Choi Sunseng wanted you to take pronunciation,” Jeannie said when she saw me enter the rec room. I noted how she’d cheekily left off the honorific “nim” in Sunsengnim.
“She did. But the class was cancelled—lack of interest.”
A tall and lanky woman walked into the room.
“Hello, class,” she said in a barely accented English. Her name was Tae Sunsengnim, our music teacher.
“I’m a graduate student here at Chosun,” she said. “I went to the conservatory at Oberlin College for violin, but then I decided I wanted to study Korean folk music instead.”
She unzipped some nylon bags and took out an hourglass-shaped drum, a tom-tom-shaped drum, a mini-gong the size of a saucepan lid, and a wooden flute.
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