Somebody's Daughter

by Marie Myung-Ok Lee

  The next day, the cat was prowling the storeroom as usual, pink teats poking out of her belly-fur like soft squash candy. The kittens and the rice sack were gone. Sunhee asked where the babies had gone. The cook-owner, for some reason, looked at Kyung-sook, not Sunhee, when she replied, smiling a strange smile: “I think Kitty ate them for dinner. Yum. Yum.”

  Sunhee sighed. “Is that the kind of gross humor you northerners are so proud of?” She grabbed her tray, mumbling how at least at the sieve factory, she didn’t have to talk to people while she worked.

  Kyung-sook bent to look more closely at the cat as it slunk around the bags of rice. At the corner of its mouth, it indeed had a smudge of blood.

  SARAH

  Seoul

  1993

  Doug flipped on the TV.

  The dusty console sparked to life in the dorm’s TV room. Bouncing breasts and buttocks. Women and men running on a beach. It was Baywatch—the last person had left the TV on AFKN, the Armed Forces Korea Network, which made sure that the American servicemen and women didn’t have to miss a single episode due to their military duty. Doug turned to Channel 12, SBC, Sejong Broadcasting. A mélange of tearful faces embracing. A smiling cartoon phone ringing. Game-show music. People talking in Korean.

  Cut to a commercial. “Lotte custard-filled cakes—so good they’ll make your ancestors come back from the dead!”

  A bang of cymbals, cheery game-show music resuming.

  “Anyonghashimnikka yorubun, anyonghashimnikka!”

  A middle-aged man with thick square glasses and an Elvis pompadour emerged with a willowy young woman. They waved to the audience as confetti rained down.

  An ajuhma and a woman in her twenties waited at side-by-side podiums. Both of them looked grim, despite the bouncy music, smiling hosts, cheering audience.

  The young woman was looking for her childhood piano teacher. She had hated taking lessons, she said, as the hosts listened and murmured well-timed, sympathetic neh nehs, but she had loved her teacher for continuing to teach her for free after her father had deserted the family in favor of a “small wife,” a mistress. She and her mother had fallen into destitution, but the fact that she was still taking piano lessons, a vestige of their former middle-class life, had kept her despairing mother from committing suicide. Her mother had rallied, begun selling nylon stockings at the pedestrian overpass near a famous women’s university. By being a fixture there—rain or shine—she had been able to amass enough money to send her daughter to that very college on scholarship. In the rush of college life, however, the young woman had lost touch with the teacher.

  “Please, if you’re out there, Seo Yoon-Ju Sunsengnim, let me hear from you. I so wish to thank you for all you’ve done for me and my mother.”

  Instead of cutting to the phones, though, the hosts turned, smiling, to the ajuhma, leaving the young woman crying into a hankie.

  The ajuhma wanted to find her sister, who had eloped against their parents’ wishes years ago.

  Sis, I miss you. All is forgiven. She started to cry.

  The cameras cut to a phone. Nothing moved except a small ticker at the bottom that broadcasted the phone number.

  Ring!

  The first call was for the young woman! A disembodied voice said yobosayo? then broke the news that the piano teacher had been killed with her husband and son in an auto accident. The studio filled with the sound of the woman’s wails as two pastel-suited women materialized out of nowhere and discreetly led her off the stage.

  Our Madam Auntie, she’s received several callers as well, the host said, a bit too cheerily.

  One caller asked, “Does your sister have a crimson butterfly-shaped birthmark on her arm that also grows a small patch of hair?”

  The woman blinked, disoriented, as if she was coming out of a coma.

  “‘Yes,’ she’s saying,” said Doug. “Her sister has such a birthmark—her childhood nickname was nabi, butterfly. The lady is telling her she thinks her sister lives in her apartment building in Taegu. The lady says she’s going to give her sister’s number to her.”

  The audience clapped wildly. The ajuhma, howling into her hankie, mumbling “Nabi-yah, nabi-yah,” was also led off the stage.

  “There’s more,” Doug said. “The grande finale.”

  Two little boys in identical bowl haircuts were ushered onto the stage. They looked to be about ten and four. The older one put a hand on his brother’s thin shoulder when the hosts drew close. The smaller boy shrank, like a smaller fish hoping not to be noticed by a larger, hungry one.

  The stiletto-heeled hostess looked into the camera.

  “Aren’t they cute?” she said, as if she were selling them. “Whose heart wouldn’t be crying for two such lovely little boys?”

  “This is a weird one,” said Doug. “They’re from Kyong San Province—their accents are so thick I can barely understand. Their uncle brought them to Seoul to visit a distant relative but he never showed up to bring them back.”

  Doug craned his neck forward, frowning in concentration.

  “I guess when the relative called the parents, she was told they’d moved—”

  “Let me guess, no forwarding address?”

  “No forwarding address,” Doug spat back at me, almost snarling. I looked at him, surprised.

  “What’s the matter?” I said. “That’s what happened, wasn’t it? They moved—poof!—without a trace.”

  He nodded, mute with anger. What I had done, I couldn’t guess. Was I too flip and hurt some hidden, vulnerable part of him? Did I interrupt him? Something else? He was still so much a puzzle to me, a Rubik’s cube of endless facets, that to manage one side’s solid comfortable color would leave the others hopelessly parti-colored and obscured. Irritation, petulance papered over darker mysteries. Only when we were having sex were things simple and defined.

  “So what’s going on?” I prodded, as distraction. “On the show.”

  We waited, along with the two little boys, to see if the phones would ring. The cameras closed in on the boys’ humiliated, miserable faces, revealing the incompetent asymmetricality of their haircuts, the ill-fitting clothes that were obviously not theirs. Then, mercifully, the cameras pulled away to show the audience, mostly grannies with tight, kinky perms and cardigans that bagged at the wrists.

  “They have a caller.”

  A woman’s voice, tears almost visible.

  “Um-ma yah,” she said, shrieking as if she’d been poked with an electric cattle prod.

  As if simultaneously prodded, the boys started to cry, “Um-ma! Um-ma!” The audience cheered.

  “It’s their mother, isn’t it? Um-ma sounds like the way a cow would say ‘mommy.’”

  “She said she’s their mother.”

  The disembodied voice heaved, sobs keening like a whale.

  “What else is she saying?”

  “She said they had to leave the boys because they were in financial trouble. Their turn came up in the local rotating credit pool, and they lost all the money in some real estate swindle—some ten million won. They couldn’t pay it back, so they ran away.”

  “Bet there are some other people who’d also love to get back in touch with them. Ring-ring.”

  Doug laughed.

  “She says she’s going to find a way for them to meet. As you can probably hear, she feels terrible. The kids are all saying, ‘Mommy, come get us. Cousin’s wife isn’t feeding us.’”

  I sat up. “It’s a sign,” I said. “Those kids found their mother. Let’s do it.”

  “You want to?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, it’s worth a try. The fact that you were covered in ddong would be hard for someone to forget, I think.”

  “Do we have to bring that up?” I said. “I mean, what if Choi Sunsengnim watches that show? Or Bernie—I’ll die.”

  “Sarah, why the hell do you care so much what other people think? Bernie Lee is dirt. Choi Sunsengnim is your teacher. This is your life. If they
don’t like it, tell them to go fuck themselves.”

  “Okay, okay. Let’s concentrate on getting me on that show.”

  “Well, it’s over.”

  Indeed, the opening scenes of some soap opera were on the screen.

  “Next week, I’ll watch the show again and jot down the number.”

  Next week! Impatience rose up like a wave, then subsided. Doug moved closer to kiss me. His thin lips felt surprising full on my mouth.

  The door to the TV room swung open, knocking aside the flimsy metal chairs we’d set against it. Bernie Lee walked in, eating sloppily from a box of Captain Crunch that must have been sent from home. He observed the two of us and eyed me smugly. He was probably thinking that now that Jun-Ho was gone, I had a new lover already, slut that I was.

  He headed back out the door, spilling tiny, hard nuggets of the cereal.

  “Twiggi,” he said to Doug, not me, before he left.

  “What’s ‘twiggy’?” I asked Doug. “Korean for ‘you-are-sleeping-with-a-ho’?”

  Doug shook his head. He was biting his lip.

  “Mongrel,” he said, letting go of my hand.

  KYUNG-SOOK

  Seoul

  1972

  No matter how much the foreigner ate, he stayed thin. The rims around his eyes were pinkish, like a rabbit’s, the rest of his skin transparent like skimmed milk.

  “The sun could shine right through that big-nose,” the cook-owner muttered. “Those foreign bastards sure have a nice life. But with that life comes softness. He can’t even eat a chili pepper without screaming—what does that mean about his pepper, hm?”

  The man had come to their dumpy little restaurant again and again. He grew tired of the water-dumplings and noodles and then gamely agreed to try whatever food the cook-owner would make him, even though it would often make him gasp and sweat with the heat or pucker with the salt.

  He also had extremely strange eating habits. He never drank his soup, even when the cook-owner subjected him to two-day-old dumplings, dried-out pasty things that would surely clog in his throat like cotton balls.

  “I want water, wa-ter, w-a-t-e-r!” he howled to Kyung-sook after eating some hot radish kimchi.

  “Mul,” she said back to him. “Korean word for water.”

  “Mooly, whatever!” he said, clutching his throat.

  Kyung-sook brought him his water, flavored with burnt barley so he would know it had been recently boiled.

  “I want water, not scalding hot tea,” he groaned, but he gulped two, three, four cups of the liquid and asked for more. Korean people would never waste so much stomach-space on fluid at a meal. Sunhee giggled and called him mul-gogi, “Fish,” or mul-gogi-ssi, “Mr. Fish.”

  Today, Mr. Fish had managed to communicate to them that it was his birthday. At the market that day, one of the cook-owner’s anchovy suppliers had added a nice bag of pundaegi, silkworm larvae, as a reward for her loyalty and also because it was silk-making season, and so the brownish wads, shaken from their precious cocoons, were quite abundant. To celebrate Mr. Fish’s birthday, the cook-owner prepared a gigantic plate of them doused in sweet sauce. As Kyung-sook served him, a few of the fat pundaegi levitated off the plate like bees before a flowering bush, but no one seemed to notice. The man, perhaps knowing that they expected him to find the food strange, bent his head toward the overflowing plate and quickly ate it all, the sight of his pink tongue lapping like a dog’s astonishing and disgusting them, making Old Bachelor Choi’s dentures flop into his soup once more.

  “Cook-owner says he make you real birth-day food next time,” Kyung-sook told him. She couldn’t help being a little pleased at how her high school English was coming back to her. “He make miyuk-guk, seaweed soups.”

  “Me-YUCK-GOOK. Oh, goody,” the man said in a sarcastic voice. Kyung-sook didn’t understand sarcasm.

  “What is it?” she asked, instead, pointing to the black hourglass case.

  “I’ll show you,” the man said. He opened it and took out a Western guitar. It was made of a beautiful, whorled wood that reminded her of her taegum—which she had not played in ages, her fingers bent with fatigue after a day’s worth of serving.

  The man sat back casually, extending his legs as if he were in the comfort of his own house’s living room. He plucked the strings of the beautifully curved instrument. The notes came out soft, much more liquid and melodious than the tones of a Korean harp.

  “You like?” he asked. Kyung-sook nodded.

  “Then let me take you out to a restaurant for a change. And you can hear some more.”

  Kyung-sook wasn’t fully sure she understood the man’s words, but she did want to hear more music.

  “Tomorrow,” Mr. Fish said, giving her that same frank look as he left.

  SARAH

  Seoul

  1993

  “Your hands seem to be made for playing the taegum,” Tae Sunsengnim remarked. “I have no idea why you can’t play it, then.”

  Instead of glissandos and silvery notes, the flute hissed at me when I picked it up, or even looked at it. It also required reading music, adding another set of foreign sticks and signs to my already bursting brain even though Jeannie from Korean class had kindly shown me a mnemonic to help me remember the notes: E/very G/ood B/oy D/eserves F/udge.

  “Your turn,” said the Other Jeannie, the Julliard know-it-all I’d dubbed “Evil Genie.” Our group was trying the last instrument, the changgo hourglass drum. So far, no one had been able to play that drum well enough to be considered for the upcoming talent show.

  Tae Sunsengnim sighed in despair, seeing that it was my turn. She picked up the kaenguri and started bashing out the beat on its polished brass surface.

  Chang-chang-ch-ch-ch-CHANG!

  I had the drum strapped on by a cotton sling, not unlike the ones New-Agey people carried babies in. The drum was balanced on the point of my right hip, I had the two different drumsticks—one like a chopstick, the other with a ball at the end. You were supposed to sway the top half of your body back and forth while you hit both sides of the changgo, sometimes hitting as if you were playing a snare, and sometimes hitting the two sides separately, sometimes switching lightning-fast between the two. While all this was going on, your feet were supposed to move at a slower beat.

  I decided the best chance I had was to just play, not think. Bang! Bang! Thump! Whump! Tok! I let my arms fly away like birds.

  “Hm,” Tae Sunsengnim said, lowering the gong to watch me bang away. “Not bad.”

  KYUNG-SOOK

  Seoul

  1972

  Before that day, she had never eaten going-out food in her life, unless you counted the time she and her friends had spent all day plucking chickens for Widower Rhee, and then had gone to the market and gorged themselves on bowls of steaming fish-cake soup and sweet-bean-filled goldfish bread.

  But to go someplace to eat when you had perfectly good food at home seemed unthinkable—an option only for the rich, the fat people who weren’t satisfied with nourishing Korean food but who also had to acquaint their lips with the foods of France or China. The food in their restaurant was not so much going-out food as it was sustenance for old bachelors who had no one to cook for them, the occasional student, the hurried businessman looking to put something in his stomach before a night of drinking. Dumplings and noodles, rice, and only two or three side dishes. It was never anything special.

  But the foreigner had come to take Kyung-sook away from the restaurant.

  “Go, go,” the cook-owner had urged her. “I’ll do the serving for a few hours, no sweat. Go stuff your belly till it explodes.”

  Kyung-sook had felt shy, and slightly absurd, but the two of them made their way through the alleys to the main street. Kyung-sook rarely ventured this far from the restaurant: only if she had to run to the market when they were low on this or that vegetable or if they needed more roasted barley. But each time she had been in such a hurry, she had never really looked at what wa
s going on in the street.

  Today she saw the street through a foreigner’s eyes. The gorgeous colors of a silk store. The legless man wheeling himself belly-first on a rusty-wheeled plank as he held a cup out for coins (and the foreigner even dug out some ten-won pieces and gently placed them in the man’s cup; she had never known someone who would treat a stranger—a beggar, no less—with such respect). She noted the dinginess and promise of the closed door of a teahouse, felt the regretful han of a man sitting next to his bucket of squirming eels as he sang.

  I loved her so much

  that when she left me

  I spread azalea petals

  on her leaving path

  “Do you like Chinese food?”

  They were standing in front of a Chinese restaurant. Its façade was painted a gaudy red and gold, various Chinese signs for health, happiness, and prosperity circling the door. Kyung-sook had heard the word “food” and guessed he was asking for approval, so she nodded.

  It seemed strange that a foreigner could teach her so much about her own country, but he did. For one, who would have known that going outside to eat could be so pleasant? Or that Chinese food prepared by Korean hands could be so delicious? The foreigner knew just the things to order, saying the dishes’ names to the waitress in a way that Kyung-sook knew he had sampled them before and found them to his liking.

  Chinese food, she found, had a subtle, slightly sweet flavor so unlike the garlic-red-pepper-ginger heat of Korean cooking. He had ordered some black noodles called jia-jia-myun, a dish called Seven Tastes: rice mixed with bits of vegetables and seafood, glowing like treasures. The man even spooned tiny shrimp, pink and curled like a baby’s finger, right into Kyung-sook’s mouth. She was shocked by his audacity, but still, she obediently opened her mouth for a sliver of meat which he said was Peking dalk, but its meltingly silken taste told her it wasn’t chicken, but some other kind of marvelous meat.