“Next time, we’ll have pork chops,” he said, as they finished with tea, fragrant and slightly bitter, the same amber color of his eyes. The man seemed so worldly, although Kyung-sook was a little taken aback when he left his chopsticks sticking up in his half-eaten bowl of rice—didn’t he know that would attract the dead?
The man took out a thick wad of won to pay. His dress and bearing was that of a poor student, yet he had paid for a meal she hadn’t even had the capacity to dream about. So perhaps it was true that everyone in America was fabulously rich. That money practically grew on trees and all one had to do was pluck it where it hung on low branches, not even having to strain, the way one did for persimmons, which stayed coyly out of reach.
“We’re not done yet with our date,” he said to her. She didn’t understand what he said, so she just smiled, remembering to cover her mouth.
He took her to a teahouse, the Moon River. He must have been a regular customer there because the teahouse auntie barely gave him a glance, and the old men at a table did not break their concentration from the grid of their paduk game when the foreigner walked in.
“Shall I play you a real song this time?” he asked, as he unsnapped the latches on the hourglass case.
He didn’t wait for her reply, just cradled the instrument in his lap and began to play, a melody that unspooled, fluid and supple, like a bolt of fine silk dropped to the ground.
Kyung-sook’s heart seized. How could she have foreseen such beautiful music entering her life?
SARAH
Seoul
1993
“You know, Sarah, with practice, you have the potential to excel at playing the changgo,” Tae Sunsengnim told me after the next class.
With practice, I could do the same with sex, Doug told me, the next time we went to a yuhgwon together.
So Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I took an extra hour to play the changgo under Tae Sunsengnim’s instructions. The other days, under Doug’s, I practiced making love.
I practiced so much, my fingers blistered from holding the drumsticks in my sweaty fingers, the drum wore a hole in the skin of my hip.
Doug’s supply of rubbers ran out and he had to buy some Korean ones. He went to a pharmacy, a yak-guk, and came back with a handful, which he spilled onto the yuhgwon’s bedding like coins.
When he was a little kid, he and his friends would find used rubbers crushed in the dirt street, and they would blow them up to make funny, cucumber-shaped balloons. That is, until some old ajuhshi informed them as to a condom’s real function.
Once, when we had been making love for a long time, something funny started up within me. At first it felt like I had to pee. Then it grew to something more. I grabbed Doug’s backside and ground myself into him, and I started yowling, a long screech. In its own terrible way it felt good to just let myself scream.
But I couldn’t help thinking of Bernie Lee’s words, how my birth mother must have been a whore to have had me. Or Christine’s words, about the future awaiting me, had I stayed Korean-Korean. Prostitute. Juicy Girl.
“Do you think I’m a slut?” I asked Doug, after a session that had been so energetic and noisy that the yuhgwon ajuhma had banged on the door and told us we were disturbing the other patrons. “Bernie Lee said only whores give their kids up for adoption.”
Doug looked pained.
“I hope you don’t ever take seriously anything Bernie Lee has to say—didn’t we have this discussion already?”
“I know. But the one time my adoptive mother got really mad at me, she said that if they hadn’t adopted me, I would probably have become a prostitute, because people without family in Korea are rejected by society, it’s that whole bloodline thing. I guess boys become street cleaners and girls become streetwalkers.”
Doug snorted. “No one should say that to a child.”
“But maybe my birth mother was a prostitute—maybe that’s why they made up the story about the car accident.”
“It doesn’t matter who your mother was—or is,” Doug said. “What matters is who you are.”
“That’s the trouble,” I said. “I don’t know who I am. I don’t know who I should be.”
“Well, you’re making it worse by letting other people tell you, especially when they don’t know shit.”
I felt suddenly empty, scooped out, as if I were hungry, but I knew that wasn’t it. I’d gone from the mind-exploding heights of orgasm to being depressed at the sight of our drab rented room, slightly nauseated by the earthy, fishy after-aroma of our lovemaking. And for some reason, I was depressed by Doug’s face, his round brown eyes, his sharp nose. I squinted hard to try to construct a face for him that was holistically Korean—slanted eyes, high cheekbones, black straight hair—but I failed.
Doug caressed my hair, leaned in to kiss my ear. His breath stank faintly of kimchi.
I don’t know why I felt like crying. Maybe it was because I had a premonition that our Missing Persons project was a pipe dream, that I was never going to find out anything more about me or my mother. I was running in circles again, and eventually I’d just go home to Minnesota, to Christine and Ken and all the malarkey of my life there.
“Did you call Missing Persons?” I asked. Doug looked like he was about to fall asleep, an “88” cigarette still burning between his fingers.
“Yeah. They don’t handle requests during the live show. I’m supposed to talk to someone in their office this week, or next.”
I sighed.
The air was dense with humidity, like a synthetic fiber blanket pressing over us. This room didn’t have a window, so I couldn’t tell if outside it was rainy or clear. The smell of cheap fillers in Doug’s cigarette burned in my nose.
What was going to happen, tomorrow and the next day? I wondered. And would I be able to stand it?
KYUNG-SOOK
Seoul
1972
So many sad Korean ballads were about chut sarang, “first love.” Kyung-sook wondered if she would recognize such a thing.
A number of unmarried young men, mostly day laborers and low-level clerks, frequented the restaurant. In between bursts of bitter complaining about a government and a society that made no place for hard-working men as themselves, they called her and Sunhee all sorts of vile names like nymphomaniac and bitch, saying that any woman who worked in a place where they had contact with men obviously had questionable morals.
The next morning, however, these same men would slink back, inquiring meekly if the cook-owner might be able to make them a little bit of hangover soup, to take the edge off.
Men like that were pathetic. They inflated themselves with rage and drink, but the next morning would whine that the tails on the soybean sprouts had been pinched off, so that it wouldn’t make a proper post-drunk soup.
Maybe her first love had already passed, she thought.
How about her friend Min-Ki? She and he used to play together at the edges of the rice fields until they were seven, when Confucian custom made them separate into their spheres of male and female. From time to time they managed to steal away and meet at a secluded spot on the banks of the Glass River.
One time they had rendezvoused after Min-Ki had returned from a trip with his uncle to Seoul. As they idly sucked on wild cherries and shared a pine-needle cake Min-Ki had stolen from his house, he had excitedly told her about the Western movies he had seen.
“There is a place they call a kuk-jang, a dark place where you actually sit on Western chairs, and you watch these moving pictures of people who walk and talk—a movie, it’s called,” he said, going on to explain that you could eat snacks while you watched, and a man, a pyon-sa storyteller, stood in front of the screen and explained what was going on. Sometimes, he told jokes, too.
“In the movie, the American man and woman, they went like this.” Min-Ki added, grabbing Kyung-sook by the ears and pulling their heads together. He sucked on her lips like a calf at its mother’s teat. Kyung-sook remembered that his mouth
had been warm and slippery and tasted spicy and bitter like herbs.
“They call it a kiss-u.” He let go of her ears.
“Kiss-u?”
“Yeah, kiss-u. Doesn’t it feel weird? The Western man and woman in the movies did this forever!”
“Really? Westerners do that?” She had never seen her mother and father—or any man or woman—do this. It was both horrid and exciting at the same time.
Min-Ki, in any event, had married early, for he was a first son and had a duty to produce an heir as quickly as possible. Kyung-sook wondered if he did the kiss-u with his wife.
Now, this foreigner-man was inflicting a kiss-u on her. It tasted of rust, of the time when she had swallowed a one-won coin as a toddler.
Today, she had actually gone back to his flat, a small room in a boarding house. Kyung-sook had wilted a little under the stare from the landlady, who was out in the courtyard hanging up laundry, but then Kyung-sook thought to herself, why did she care? It wasn’t Enduring Pine Village, where news of her behavior would be sure to reach her parents, to the village elders. She stared back a little rudely at the woman, giddy with her newfound freedom.
“Come in, come in,” the man said, sliding open his door. She and Sunhee now called him Yun-tan as well as Mr. Fish, because his black hair reminded them of the yun-tan cooking coal. Kyung-sook waited for him to take his shoes off and leave them on the concrete steps, but he didn’t. He went right into the room without taking off his dirty shoes! She kicked hers off and followed him.
Yun-tan asked her to play her taegum. She sat cross-legged on the floor (even though it must have been dirty with him wearing his shoes inside!) and she played a short san-jo for him. He watched her as she played, his eyes all moony.
“That’s so beautiful,” he said, and he took out his guitar. As Kyung-sook continued to play, he strummed along with her.
Then he put his guitar down and gave her that kiss-u. He also pawed at her body in a way that didn’t seem too decent, but she didn’t know what to do—maybe it was normal and customary in his culture. She wanted to show the man that she was a sophisticated woman, not some silly serving girl, so she pretended she had done all these things before.
“I told you to go stuff yourself with the foreigner’s money,” the cook-owner scolded, when she returned. “But don’t be such a brazen hussy. Remember the old saying: You let your tail get too long, it’s gonna get stepped on.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Kyung-sook said, noting that her elongated countrified vowels were now bending into the sharper corners of Seoul dialect, and this pleased her.
SARAH
Seoul
1993
The note in my box contained only a beeper number. I’d never used a beeper before; they were supposed to be for doctors and drug dealers, but here in Korea, they were as common as rice.
I dialed the ten-digit number. Someone’s mechanized voice speaking in Korean. I was about to hang up when a different voice said, “Hallo Sarah, this is your friend Jun-Ho Kim. Jim Kim. I am hoping we can meet while I am here in Seoul.”
We ended up spending a Sunday together at the Great East Gate Stadium watching a pro baseball game, Hyundai vs. Lucky-Goldstar. Unlike the pro basketball teams, which consisted almost exclusively of white and black players recruited from the States, the baseball teams were all Korean.
I had to laugh: in Korean baseball, a lot of bowing went on—greeting bows from the players to the fans, contrite bows after a strikeout, players bowing to the coach, coach bowing to the fans, and the pitcher actually bowed in apology when he beaned the batter. In the background, flat-chested cheerleaders in short skirts attempted to shake their booties, accompanied by a people on the sidelines beating changgo drums.
Soon the fans, bored by a no-hit game, started throwing empty Pocari Sweat cans and pieces of dried squid, all of which landed harmlessly on the field. They hadn’t yet learned the American custom of throwing full beer bottles.
The game ended with no runs scored. The teams lined up and bowed to each other, bowed to each other’s coaches, bowed to the fans.
Afterward, Jun-Ho and I strolled around the food carts on the street and stopped for some Korean sushi and shrimp chips.
“So how do you like being a KATUSA, meeting Americans?” I asked.
Jun-Ho grinned, a sardonic twist I hadn’t seen before.
“Americans, they are funny. They are always yelling and shouting and laughing, so happy.”
“Americans are a happy bunch,” I agreed. “Yee-hah.”
“We Koreans look at them and think, how can America have such a great army? There is no discipline!”
Jun-Ho frowned.
“These guys, they talk to me so fast in their fucking English and then they curse and call me fucking stupid when I not understand. Of course none of them know any motherfucking Korean, not one word, and we are here, in Korea, no?”
“Jun-Ho,” I said. “I haven’t heard that kind of language since I left the navy.”
“Excuse?”
“Oh, I make joke. I’m sorry—I didn’t know you were having such a hard time.”
“Those soldiers, they are not trying any Korean foods, not even plain noodles. At messy hall, there is only fucks, so I’m always getting stuffs on my shit.”
Those long lists of arcane words—curator, crepuscular, urinary sphincter. I longed to hear them.
“See, I never use fuck before,” Jun-Ho said, holding his fist as if he’s grasping a garden trowel. “So the food drops down onto my shit.” He tented his shirt out.
I laughed.
He joined me. He went on to tell me he was going on a Meg Ryan boycott because she had been caught on Letterman saying derogatory things about Korea.
“She said to that man, ‘Well, if Chinese or Japanese or whatever are so dumb they buy things just because my picture is on them, then that’s their problem not mine.’ And she make complaints that our country—she don’t even know which one she is in!—smells bad. That i-nyun so stupid she don’t realize we can see American TV over here!”
“So what happened, did the Koreans cancel her SEXY-MILD contract?”
“Of course Koreans angry—Koreans make an idol of Meg Ryan. She realize this, realize she is going to lose bunches of monies, so she sent a very apologetic video, saying she was just kidding, what she said, that she knew all the time she was in Korea.”
I sighed, wondering how many things I bought just because some celebrity told me to.
“And thank you for telling me about ‘fag,’” Jun-Ho went on. “I looked in another dictionary, and this one says ‘cigarette.’ I was so confused. Now, why are American soldiers so stupid to be calling me that? Everyone knows there are no homosexuals in Korea.”
“Don’t ever say ‘fag’ out loud,” I said. “Someone is definitely going to take it the wrong way. And that other expression you asked me about, it’s ‘nip it in the bud,’ not ‘nip it in the butt’—maybe you should just skip saying it altogether, it’s kind of old-fashioned.”
He sighed. “I know my family is going to be angry, but I quit KATUSA program.”
“Quit?”
“I thought being with Americans, it would be like being with you, but that was not so. Anyway, the Americans and Koreans, we kind of keep to ourselves, uri kiri, our own two groups, so I’m not learning that much Englishes anyway. I applied for transfer and was granted. I am coming back to Seoul to be in the riot police.”
“Riot police?”
“Yes, we keep order when there is, say, a demo.”
“Demo?” Demo records?
“Demo. Students with signs, making noise?”
“Oh, a demonstration.” I remembered seeing a bunch of men in Darth-Vaderish helmets carrying shields and clubs massed along the main gate of Chosun University one day—apparently Chosun Daehakyo was famous for having political firebrands for students, government officials were always urging the professors to give out more homework to keep them b
usy. But that time I had seen the demo, the police had just stood there, and I hadn’t seen them on campus since.
Jun-Ho ate even that last little end-piece of Korean sushi with a toothpick, his little finger delicately raised as if we were at high tea at the Waldorf.
He checked his watch and said he needed to get back to see his parents around dinnertime. It was three o’clock.
“Will I be able to see you again before I leave?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I will be in my military duty for the next six months, no exits.”
“So this is our last meeting, this one day?”
He nodded. “My furlough is only three days, and my parents, I have a lot to do for respects for them.”
I was suddenly touched to know that he was spending his limited time with me.
“What would you like to do now?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” I couldn’t think, it was so crowded—people from the baseball game, shoppers, vendors. The sidewalk was narrow and people were shoving us aside like rag dolls, the bent-over senior citizens the most insistent.
Maybe I’ve finally become part of the many-legged Seoul organism, I was thinking, with equal parts resignation and amusement. Before, I used to shudder when a stranger in a crowd would touch me, as if my body was merely an extension of their own. Now I just took it in stride, being tossed about like anyone else, occasionally pushing back and being amazed that no one even glanced back, much less stopped and yelled, “You want a piece of me!?”
With Jun-Ho, in his green-speckled army uniform—a very common sight in Seoul—no one even seemed to notice we were speaking English.
“Is there a yuhgwon around here?” I asked him, suddenly.
His eyes opened wide.
“Excuse?”
I repeated myself.
“There is always yuhgwon around,” he said. He was staring at me, as if I were changing shape before his eyes.
“Let’s find one then.” Old buddy, old pal. There was something about the thought of being with someone who was of my race, a mirror image of me, that had gripped me just then—and it was rapidly being translated into sexual desire.
Somebody's Daughter Page 16
