A job would be easy to come by for a hard worker such as herself, she thought, as she headed toward the city’s center.
In the neighborhood by the Myung-Dong cathedral, she stopped in a Korean dress store that had a headless mannequin wearing a hanbok out front. She politely inquired about a job as a shop-girl. The owner shook her head.
She stopped next at a bookstore, the Chosun, named promisingly after one of the great old dynasties of Korea.
“I’m a hard worker,” she told the owner, who was sitting amidst a pile of yellowed books, some with the covers torn off. A musty-pleasant smell, like sniffing in the corner of an antique chest, pervaded the entire place.
“I’m a college student and I know my han-mun Chinese characters well,” she added. “I could help you with cataloging your titles.”
The man looked at her with rheumy, mucus-beaded eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t afford employees.”
“I could work for very little.”
“No one wants to read the classic texts anymore,” he said, as if talking to a third person in the room. “You used to need to know a thousand han-mun characters just to read a newspaper decently. Now we have to carry those things—”
He gestured toward a stack of cheaply bound books by the door. Goodbye, Weapons, it said in Korean, written by someone named Ehl-nest Hae-ming-wae.
“—and I can barely make my key money even carrying those. The newest Western translations are what people want to read.”
Kyung-sook decided she wouldn’t want to listen to the man complain all day, anyway. She liked books, but she could do almost anything.
Closer to the City Hall area, she came upon a row of Western dress shops.
She went into the one that said live fashion in English. A few store signs here and there appeared this way, so she was glad she had learned her English letters in school.
The first thing she noticed when she entered was how clean and uncluttered the store was, not like a Korean dress shop. There were only a few dresses displayed, not packed as many to a rack as possible. There was soft Western music playing in the background, a tune so engaging, it would make you want to hum.
“What do you want?”
Kyung-sook was shocked at the saleswoman’s tone, her use of the intimate style of Korean.
“Well—,” Kyung-sook began.
“You obviously can’t afford these clothes.” The woman set her jaw. “Please leave—we can’t abide loiterers. And man-chi-jima!—don’t touch!”
Kyung-sook tried to shake off her disappointment as she left, walking past all the dress shops. Their hard, glass façades all seemed to shout at her, “Don’t touch!”
She wandered down an alley. It was a thread-alley, winding around and around until she found herself in an older section, not unlike Imo’s neighborhood, where the houses had cracked roof tiles and red chili peppers or squash slices drying on straw mats right out in the dusty street.
After Kyung-sook had passed the same street a few times, a well-dressed woman who had been watching her wander about, suddenly stepped from the shadows of a doorway and approached her, asking her if she was looking for work.
“How did you know?” Kyung-sook asked, astonished.
She smiled. “I must be a fortuneteller, yes?” She said she was out seeking likely candidates for a position in her coffee shop as a “coffee lady.”
Kyung-sook was intrigued. This woman in her vivid green-and-pink hanbok seemed to be rising like a phoenix out of this drab neighborhood. How difficult could work in a coffee shop be? She followed the woman down yet another thread-alley past Heavenly Real Estate and South Mountain Tailors, past a row of closed, gated homes, to the Spring Fragrance Coffee Shop. On the wooden door, a handlettered sign read “closed.”
The coffee ladies worked for tips, the woman said, ushering Kyung-sook into the one-room shop. A few round tables crowded haphazardly in a corner, some with their legs pointing toward the ceiling. On the walls hung some old-time Korean paintings and gourd dippers; an electric gramophone sat in the corner.
The proprietress brushed by Kyung-sook to retrieve a pitcher that said “coffee.” She poured some brownish liquid into a china cup that had a handle on one side, like an ear, and as she set the cup in front of Kyung-sook, she gave off a powerful, but pleasant scent, like flowers and ginger. Kyung-sook was excited: she had heard of coffee, but like most people in the village, had never had a chance to sample this exotic Western beverage.
The proprietress perched decorously on a stool, her shoulders forward, as well-bred ladies were taught to do.
“As I said, it’s just tips, but most of the enterprising ladies I employ earn quite a nice living,” she went on. And this was what most young women on their own in Seoul were looking to do, wasn’t it?
Kyung-sook nodded eagerly.
All the job entailed was getting men to buy cups of the house’s coffee. Each cup sold meant a few won for the coffee lady, but the real money came from the tips they received from their customers. Of course, if Kyung-sook was going to work there, the proprietress said, she might want to get a loan from her to go out and buy some jazzier clothes, and some makeup.
“You could start this very afternoon if you like,” she offered. “I’ll put your clothes and makeup on your tab.”
Kyung-sook nodded vigorously again.
“But why,” she wanted to know, “would the men pay tips for coffee?” She was disappointed to find that the coffee tasted like brine-water, nothing special at all.
“Don’t be coy,” the woman said impatiently. “Do you think men come into these places to overpay for coffee that’s mostly burnt barley? The smart regulars skip the coffee and just get their feel before they have to go back to work.”
“Feel?” Kyung-sook ventured.
“Where in the world are you from?” The proprietress’s face suddenly bent into an unbecoming sneer. “Hm, I should have known from your country-clod accent and awful clothes. This is a coffee shop, yes? Men come here to relax and have a nice conversation with a nice lady and feel her nice breasts, her titties, if you will. And no dating customers—we want steady customers, but not that steady.”
Kyung-sook’s mouth fell open, like a fish. She had never heard such language coming from the mouth of someone who spoke in such a respectable Seoul accent.
The woman was staring at her with cold eyes. Her lipstick looked as if she had spread red chili paste on her mouth.
“So do you want to start this afternoon, or not?”
Kyung-sook didn’t know what to do. She had a strange urge to cry out, “Mother!” Without thinking, she grabbed her bundle and ran for the door, wondering why she hadn’t noticed that although the shop was romantically named “Spring Fragrance,” all the windows were completely covered in black paper and the entrance was hidden several paces off the thoroughfare.
“Hey, you owe me fifty won for that cup of coffee!” the woman roared, the intricate tasseled ornament on her silk jacket swinging wildly as she leaned out the doorway. “Come back here you devil-bitch! Thief!”
Kyung-sook ran and ran, veering up a different alley, then another, until she had run up the summit of a hill. There, she stopped, panting. Was anyone pursuing her?
She was in front of a decrepit dumpling shop in an alley that smelled of old grease and bean curds. In the hills a short distance beyond lay a shantytown. Amidst the mud shacks were a few opulent creations made of cardboard and flattened soda cans that glittered in the light, the cans no doubt scavenged somehow from the Yankee army base.
NOODLES + DUMPLINGS said the crudely handpainted sign propped outside the door of the shop.
A toadlike woman emerged and dumped some gray water into the dirt. Kyung-sook glanced over her shoulder, quietly asked the woman if, perhaps, they needed a serving girl.
The toadlike woman’s answer surprised her.
“C’mon in—our regular girl ran off with some fuckin’ bastard hoodlum this v
ery morning.” The woman identified herself as both the cook and the owner of the establishment. In her accent, a North Korean dialect was still perceptible.
Kyung-sook followed the woman into the restaurant, throwing one last, worried glance over her shoulder. She certainly hoped the coffee-shop owner had given up on her pursuit.
“Hm, but you sure you can do this work?” The cook-owner stopped to scrutinize Kyung-sook, reached out a water-wrinkled finger and poked her, as if testing a fish for freshness. “You look a little frail, your hands look like the hands of a schoolgirl.”
“I am a girl from the country,” she reassured her, exaggerating her country accent a little. “I have spent many seasons planting rice.” Her hands had stayed soft and white because for the last year she had mostly studied while her mother’s hands were exposed to the sun and wind and water.
“I admit, I went to high school,” she told the cook-owner. “But I am also a hard worker.”
“All right, Professor. We’ll soon enough see what strength you’ve got in those limbs.”
She motioned for Kyung-sook to follow her into the back room where she returned to a basin of uncooked rice on the floor. She squatted next to the bowl, a rosary of farts trailing out from between her thick thighs. Kyung-sook immediately bent down and helped her clean the rice, picking out pebbles, bits of straw, small black rice bugs, a few mouse droppings. The cook-owner poured a pitcher of water into the rice, swirling it around with her hand. The water became cloudy as the powdery talc rose to the top, her hand disappeared into the grains of rice the way Kyung-sook’s feet used to disappear into the mud of the rice field.
When the water finally ran clear, the cook-owner rose and dumped the whole load of wet rice into the iron cooker.
Then she handed Kyung-sook a tray filled with heavy stone bowls. “Get ready to sling some fuckin’ dumpling soup!” she yelled, her hot breath filling the air like boiling soy sauce.
By the end of the day, Kyung-sook couldn’t even lift her hand to scratch her nose, her arms hung like weights. As the cook-owner banged the restaurant’s sliding doors shut, Kyung-sook approached her and shyly asked her if she might have a place to stay, perhaps in the back of the restaurant.
“Yah! This is a restaurant, not a damned hotel,” the cook-owner grumbled.
“I don’t have anywhere to go,” Kyung-sook’s voice was barely a whisper.
The cook-owner sucked air.
“Great, I get rid of one headache and I promptly get another, curse you fuckin’ gods and ancestors!”
“I’ll have to sleep out on the street if you don’t let me stay here in the restaurant.”
“The police will arrest you if they find you on the street after curfew, especially these days—don’t you know anything?” the cook-owner said irritably. She glanced at Kyung-sook’s fingers, bruised from banging on the serving trays.
“Please,” Kyung-sook said. “I beg you … Teacher’s Wife.”
From the look on the cook-owner’s face, Kyung-sook knew that no one had ever addressed her by such a respectful title before.
“Well, lessee. On the other hand, I suppose if you slept in the storage space, you might drive the mice out.”
In the closet in the very back of the restaurant, there was barely enough room to unroll a sleeping mat amid the bags of rice and flour and rock salt, but this was exactly the kind of thing Kyung-sook was hoping to find. It was quiet, and she could play her flute as much as she wanted. During the day she could palm a few dumplings or fingerfuls of rice when the cook-owner wasn’t looking, perhaps take a few spoonfuls of anchovy broth off the tops of customers’ soups, and thus save up for her career.
That night as she lay down in her new space, Kyung-sook found a needle of regret working its way into her heart. She was troubled by thoughts of her imo: she had spent weeks eating her imo’s paltry food, sharing her threadbare bedding, and she had left her without a word of thanks, only a note saying she had returned to the village.
Perhaps if she had gotten to know her imo better, she could have explained to her about her plans and dreams, her hopes of becoming a famous musician. Maybe Imo, who had herself gone away from the village in order to pursue her destiny, would understand. Kyung-sook fingered her flute. She loved the way the wood warmed under her hand, until the instrument was like a living thing unto itself. She consoled herself with the thought she would indeed see her imo again someday. But right now, she had her year laid out before her, like empty bowls waiting to be filled.
SARAH
Seoul
1993
Doug said, “It’s going to be a bit tricky, getting in there.”
“In where?”
“Libertytown.”
I looked to his face to see if an invitation was there. His eyes had that curious, blank look like those abandoned houses with boarded-up windows.
“My friend at Yongsan said he could help.”
“Clever idea, going to him. Someone already in the army.” I kept my voice noncommittal.
“He gave me this—and some other stuff.” Doug showed me a military ID. His friend had blond hair. And glasses.
“At least your friend isn’t black.”
“It’ll be dark when we go, also.”
“We?”
“Don’t you want to come?”
“Of course!” I found myself grinning, like I’d passed some kind of test.
“The best cover for you would be pretending to be my prostitute girlfriend.”
“You’re not serious,” I said.
You probably would have become a prostitute if you’d stayed there.
“You don’t have to go.” The boarded-up look again.
I just needed to ignore the irony, I decided, treat this more like Halloween. Doug was right, of course: a Korean girl from a suburb of Minneapolis was going to be a lot harder to explain than a Korean ho from a nearby village. From my wardrobe I fetched a skirt whose waistband I could hike up, plus a CALVIN KLEEN tank top, purchased from a street vendor.
“After lunch,” Doug said. “We’ll go to the bus station together.”
The bus seats were capped with white covers, like dentist’s chairs. People continued to clamber on and on. The combined exhalations of the passengers swirled a reek of digested kimchi into the air. A stumpy ajuhma boarded the bus carrying a bunch of dried squid impaled on a wooden pole. The squid were football-sized, squashed flat enough to fold and mail. A dozen hands extended chunwons, and soon there was a stuffy, fishy smell added to everything else, even as the loop of a recording told us in a breathy woman’s voice (as Doug translated):
For the comfort of your fellow passengers, please do not bring strong-smelling food on the bus.
The bus lumbered into the street like a large animal waking. I pressed my face against the window. The Seoul bus station, not unlike the bus station in Minneapolis, was situated in a not-so-nice neighborhood. My eyes took in the buckling tin-roofed shops, people squatting in the shade of the few urban trees, slices of zucchini drying on rooftops, thousand-year-old men with wispy snow-capped beards spitting into the gutter.
This was the real Korea, devoid of white people, or even Korean Americans like Bernie Lee. She could very well be out here, I thought, in front of my face.
After unsnarling ourselves from Seoul traffic, almost like a dream, we were on the highway, open spaces rolling out before us. A few tiny shacks dotted the landscape, as if planted there by the hands of giants, but it was mostly rice fields. The fortresslike mountains around Seoul gave way to gentle hills, rock peaks softening to the shape of a woman lying on her side.
I turned from the window to say something to Doug, but he was asleep, oblivious to the roar of the bus’s engine, the gay chatter in the seats around us. He seemed to be lost in that magical deep-sleep of childhood.
I rooted in the 7-Eleven bag, pulled out a crunky chocolate bar, a cartoon of a smiling, big-lipped African with a bone through his nose on the wrapper. I wished I could nap,
too, but I’ve never been able to. I’m not a good sleeper at night, either.
Back when I shared a room with Amanda, I always marveled at her ability to drop off to sleep the minute her head hit the pillow.
On TV commercials for Nytol, the wild-eyed insomniac was always a man or a lady, never a child. Children always slept peacefully, effortlessly. Some nights I managed to push myself down into a shallow dozing, barely skimming the tops of my dreams. But what I yearned for was to tumble into a thicket of logy black sleep, the kind where Amanda would sigh and giggle and snore and fart with abandon.
So while Amanda snuggled safe and secure at the foot of the Thorson family tree, I stared into the blackness for hours until I swear I could see atom particles bouncing to and fro.
Why am I I? I wondered, over and over, a fist of unease knuckling my stomach.
Until the morning light, when it was time to get up, wash, don the Fabulous Sarah Thorson face. At least during the day I had a role to play, and I knew the lines. At night, it was all chaos. Especially after I turned thirteen and started having The Dream, the one with her in it. After that, I wanted to sleep, and sleep deep, more than ever. This desperation, of course, kept me awake, a water-stiffened rope that kept me firmly moored on this side of consciousness.
We were approaching a town. Motorcyclists clad in plastic slippers passed us on the shoulder, stacks of toilet paper rolls on the back of their bikes towering over them like cresting waves. Power Bongo pickups, the size of riding lawn mowers, transported even more magnificent loads of cabbages, TVs, bed frames, and cardboard boxes held to the back by faith and straining black bungee cords.
I was wondering if I was going to have to wake Doug, but his eyes snapped open when the driver called our stop. He leaned over me and gazed out the window at the same scenes, in the dying light. If we stayed on the bus, we could go all the way up to the mountain seacoast resort of Sorak-san, which, by some whim of geography, was situated slightly north of the thirty-eighth parallel and therefore technically in North Korea. I guess that most of the Diamond Mountains, a chain of peaks that were sacred to Koreans, were in North Korea, but this tail end had somehow been left in the South, and the South Koreans had developed it as a national park. Jeannie had been there and described it as incredibly touristy—souvenir and ice-cream vendors no matter how high up the mountain you climbed—but also vaguely ominous, with heavily armed soldiers patrolling the fenced-off beaches, the tall machine-gun-equipped towers from which grim soldiers watched the expanse of sea for telltale traces of an encroaching North Korean submarine.
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