Somebody's Daughter

by Marie Myung-Ok Lee

  I sat, watching him.

  “You’ve got a slot, two weeks from Tuesday. Sejong Broadcasting is in Yoido, which is this little island on the Han River where all the TV stations are.”

  I sat in shock.

  I’ve been to Yoido already, I almost said.

  “It might take an hour to get there by cab if there’s traffic. So get ready to take a little trip after lunch two weeks from Thursday. I’ll go with you—if you want me to.”

  “Of course I want you to. Thank you so much,” I said.

  Then I started crying. I could feel his hand, warm and reassuring, on my back.

  KYUNG-SOOK

  Seoul

  1972

  Yun-tan, he never stopped talking about America. Soon the word itself, A-me-ri-ca, played like a song inside Kyung-sook’s head.

  The other day, when Kyung-sook had gone to his flat, he had had a present waiting.

  Bananas!

  Kyung-sook didn’t think she could accept such a costly gift. Just the other day, he had taken her to a Western restaurant where she had eaten breaded pork cutlets and corn salad for the first time—she had never had anything so delicious before. The man told her the bananas were for her. After she recovered from her shock and disbelief, she carefully wrapped the golden curves in her wrapping cloth to take back to share with the cook-owner and Sunhee. The man David, he just laughed at her, saying that in America one could eat bananas all day if you wanted, like a monkey.

  “Wah!” said the cook-owner, back at the restaurant. “I’ve never even seen a banana before.”

  The three of them stared at the fruit as if it were made of pure gold. When they finally ventured to try it, they carefully shaved tiny, sweet bits off one banana, left the rest on top of the little table by the counter as a luxurious decoration. After a few days, however, they turned brown and rotted, spreading a sickly-sweet smell through the restaurant.

  “You need to consider your happiness for a change,” the foreigner–man said. “I know that in Korea, women sacrifice as daughters, then as wives, then as mothers. They never have anything to call their own.”

  Kyung-sook was irritated with the man’s tone—he seemed to say that he understood her country the best, and that she needed him to explain it to her. Still, she couldn’t help recalling Bong-soon, the girl named after the pink balsam-flower, who was the prettiest, most sought-after girl in the village. Even after bearing her husband Hyung three sons and taking meticulous care of his elderly parents, Hyung had gotten the wind in his blood and had taken a mistress—one that he married shortly after Bong-soon killed herself by filling her apron with stones and wading into the Glass River. She had barely reached thirty.

  Kyung-sook spit out the sticky squash candy she had been chewing. Stuck inside it was one of the lead fillings from her teeth. The man looked into her mouth with alarm.

  “I’ll take you to the clinic at HanYong University.”

  The famous HanYong University had been founded by an American missionary family, the Overtons, so the school was particularly prized by Koreans. It was one of the most difficult ones to gain entrance to, second only to Seoul National University.

  Kyung-sook found herself among the stately stone buildings, square courtyards, groomed topiaries, the dignified statues of various Overtons that stood erect as if overseeing the flowering rose gardens.

  “The architecture is modeled after Harvard, a famous university in America—they even imported this ivy that’s growing on the walls,” the man said, then added, “Harvard, that is where I’ll be going to graduate school.”

  Of course all Koreans knew about Harvard, the school that was famous even in A-me-ri-ca, land of famous schools.

  “How you know so much about this HanYong University?” Kyung-sook asked.

  “The descendants of the first Overtons still live in Korea. Hargrave Overton had a party for all the Peace Corps workers before we were sent to our various postings,” he said. “He had his family there—he has a beautiful Korean wife and three children, one of them an adopted orphan. And you know what’s funny? None of the kids—not even the Korean orphan—speaks a word of Korean!”

  “Not a one word?” asked Kyung-sook.

  “You’re always teasing me about not learning much Korean,” he said, pinching Kyung-sook’s arm playfully. “Okay, I still haven’t picked up hangul, your Korean alphabet, which you claim your wonderful King Sejong devised so that it can be learned in an hour. But you know, Overton said that old-time missionaries used to call Korean ‘the devil’s language.’”

  “Why?”

  “Because the devil purposely made the language so hard to learn in order to keep the missionaries from Christianizing people. Overton himself comes from a family that’s been in Korea for three generations, but he doesn’t speak any Korean himself, either. He sends his kids to the Seoul Foreign School, where they only speak English.”

  “But what about mother, you said he Korean lady?”

  “Yeah, she.”

  “But—” Kyung-sook said. “To children? How she speak to children?”

  “Well, she speaks a little English, although it’s not as good as yours. She’ll just have to learn it better if she wants to communicate with her children and husband.”

  David led Kyung-sook to a large white building. The university’s hospital—fully Western, he said. “If you want to get that stuff with the needles or the burning herbs treatment, you have to go somewhere else.”

  Inside the building was a place called the Foreigner’s Clinic. It was spacious and orderly, not at all like a Korean clinic, which was usually as noisy and raucous as an open-air market. Here, Westerners sat quietly, neatly lined up in chairs, while Western doctors strode the halls looking extraordinarily tall.

  At the dental hall, a Korean nurse in a white uniform and a stiff, starched hat curved like a paper lantern greeted Kyung-sook so politely, she was taken aback; as a waitress, she was used to people using familiar language with her. David showed the nurse a blue book with a gold eagle stamped on the cover. She nodded and asked them to wait.

  Kyung-sook needed to use the bathroom, and she was impressed that there was actually one right inside the building. However, she was dismayed to see the Western toilet.

  It was built like those chairs that Westerners were so fond of. Westerners seemed to like to inhabit that strange middle space between sitting and standing—but what a waste of the ondol-heat from the floor! And now, this pyonso, she couldn’t think of a more repulsive contraption. She made sure to keep her ongdongi from touching it, but because the seat was too high to let her squat, her urine sprayed everywhere.

  So strange! she thought to herself. At least there was paper for wiping, right there. She gathered up an extra wad of it and stuck it in her pocket, for later.

  She and the man were ushered into a stark, white room. She was told to sit in a chair that looked like it was made to hold a giant. A man with gold-red hair covering his exposed forearms like fur looked into Kyung-sook’s mouth. She was scared when he started up a machine that gave off an awful whine, but the Korean nurse told her not to worry. Before she knew it, the hole was filled. Not like last time when the tooth-doctor spent almost an hour clumsily chipping at the tooth, spilling bits of metal in her mouth. The Western doctor handed her a mirror. She was surprised to see that she had a gold—not lead—filling. Kyung-sook smiled at David the foreigner, wishing she could smile wider, so that everyone could see the glitter.

  All this fuss the foreigner-man, Yun-tan, had done—all for her.

  A-me-ri-ca, the song played, over and over.

  SARAH

  Seoul

  1993

  Later in the week, it began to rain. And rain. Every morning the Seoul sky groaned gray and swollen, seeming to release its liquid burden in exhaustion. Six-inch-long earthworms slithered out, then drowned, bloated and pale, on the sidewalk. Rivers of dirty water slid down the hill by the Residence, carrying twigs and garbage and once,
a child’s plastic shoe. The mornings were damp and clammy, the small respite of noon sun was followed by an afternoon downpour. Garish orange squash blossoms appeared everywhere, the thick, trumpet-like blooms drooping heavy with collected rainwater.

  Doug was right. I didn’t have to ask when the chang-ma, the monsoon season, started.

  One week, rain poured straight from the sky without rest. We were wet all the time, the Residence’s halls became cluttered with umbrellas, damp pairs of shoes. Sopping socks draped like Dali watches over every available piece of furniture. The girls went to the HYUNDAI Department Store and bought colorful rubber boots.

  “It’s like living at the bottom of a fucking toilet,” Bernie Lee grumbled, as the very existence of the sun became an unsubstantiated rumor. “The sky is vomiting water.”

  I enjoyed the steady patter of fat drops, the dust-colored light that made two o’ clock in the afternoon seem like evening. The chang-ma drove me inside, the perfect place for me to wait. For her. I used that time to dream about meeting my mother. How she would have blacker-than-black hair like mine. And she would wear it youthfully long, so when she bent over to kiss me, it would brush my face.

  Her hands, elegant and agile. Every morning of her pregnancy she would have tapped out a little welcoming tattoo, a reveille to me, her pressing fingers a kind of embrace.

  I would have kicked back. Perhaps she laughed when I did this.

  She would have a soft voice. Not like Christine’s, which tended to get tense and shrill as if she didn’t believe people were listening to her. No, my real mother’s voice would be soft, so soft that people would pause, incline their heads toward her, because they wanted to hear what she had to say.

  I had begun seeing flashes of her, her face this time. Sometimes in that precarious space between sleep and waking. Or her profile might materialize in the steam floating off my rice, sketched in a bowl of noodles. Once, when I was playing the changgo drums, her whole self appeared, floating. But she only appeared on the edges of things, like those floaters that exist in the vitreous fluid of your eyeballs; when I tried to look at her dead-on, she’d vanish.

  “Who do you think my mother was?” I asked Doug after we made love in my room, his hand clamped tightly over my mouth to keep me quiet. “You know. When she had me.”

  He thought for a moment.

  “You can’t take too much stock in these things, but you don’t have the face or the coloring of a peasant,” he said. “My guess is that your mother could have been a college student who’d had a fling, or a high-class hooker who chews flower-gum.”

  “Very funny.”

  “How about your birth father? It could have been he who abandoned you. In Korea, the fathers get custody. Maybe he was divorced and wanted to get remarried. It also could have been a case of a poor couple with too many mouths to feed.”

  I knew this was just a game, a create-your-own-identity game. But lately I’d been playing it solitaire for hours, meandering on journeys all over the known universe, but ultimately going nowhere, caught on the endless surface of a Möbius loop.

  “Have you ever thought about your birth father?” he repeated.

  “No.” He seemed shocked, so I explained: “With my mother, well, I started dreaming about her when I was thirteen. If I shut my eyes quickly I can just catch a glimpse of her inside my eyelids, or sometimes I see this shadow just as I’m falling asleep. Even though I’ve never gotten a good look at her face, she has a presence. Not so with my birth father.”

  Maybe that was just the way of fathers: one’s language was the mother tongue, one’s country the motherland. Take Ken. In the realm of our family, he was the marginal figure forever in the penumbral shadow of Christine. Christine was the one who decided what we had for supper, where we went on vacation, and generally any and all decisions regarding The House and The Children.

  So to Amanda and me, Ken remained two-dimensional: law-school diploma, meal ticket, a portrait on the wall. He didn’t protest his secondary status, on the contrary he accepted it, maybe even enjoyed being free of those messy emotional encumbrances that sometimes caused dishes to be broken, doors slammed, children to be told they might have become prostitutes in an alternative life. And, like the portrait on the wall—the one that had eyes that moved only when certain people were looking at it—Ken had his own ways of getting things across, of letting his daughters know he loved and cared for them.

  “A week to go, until the show,” I reminded him.

  “The Search for Missing Persons will begin,” he agreed.

  KYUNG-SOOK

  Seoul

  1972

  “How do you like it, Karen?” David the foreigner asked eagerly. He called her “Karen” because, he complained, “Kyung-sook” was too hard to remember.

  She nodded vigorously, politely. “Is very good.”

  “In America, you could have pizza every day if you wanted,” he told her. “There’s a pizza place on practically every block.”

  This pi-ja might be more palatable, she thought, if she could add a pinch of sugar and a goodly amount of sweet-hot red pepper paste, maybe some fish or kimchi. And if she could scrape off the cheez-u.

  It was amazing to her that Koreans paid handsome sums of money to eat this kind of food. Some Western foods, like the fried pork cutlets, were perhaps more delicious than Korean foods. But Westerners seemed to assume their things would always be better, more civilized, and Koreans seemed to silently agree by slavishly copying their ways. Take this pi-ja for instance. That stuff they called cheez-u that they were so proud of smelled like human shit—no other way to describe it. And then, you ate the pi-ja with your hands. Sunhee had whispered to her that she heard that Westerners indulged in a puzzling practice of sitting in their own dirty bathwater.

  Was that why the foreigner-man always smelled a bit rancid, as if he’d washed with water only and not soap? Not scrubbed the old layers of skin off with a pumice? When Kyung-sook was a child, her mother considered her clean only once pea-sized balls of flesh rolled off her arms and legs in profusion.

  Kyung-sook put those thoughts out of her mind as she forced herself to eat the rest of the pi-ja. She wondered if she was going to be in Seoul or back in the village by the next Harvest Moon Festival. Or, was it even possible, she might even be in A-me-ri-ca?

  She thought about autumn, the season that traditionally made Koreans melancholy—the leaves dying, the cold winter coming. But autumn was one of Kyung-sook’s favorite seasons. To her, it was the time for the leaves to hold nothing back and bask in their blazing glory, for the moon to grow so fat and bright the sky could barely contain it. The drummers in their flowing white, red, and blue clothes would dance up and down the dirt paths, pounding out the familiar rhythms that would set blood jumping, giving strength to the farmers to cut, bundle, and thresh their harvest.

  The autumn was still far off.

  The next day Kyung-sook complained about her stomach. The pi-ja seemed to be liquefying and flowing out of her. She collapsed at the restaurant, sending trays and dishes flying. Sunhee helped her up, dragged her to the kitchen, where the cook-owner waited with a sharp sewing needle in hand.

  “They say that if one of the body’s heavenly gates gets jammed up, you have to break it open,” she said. She grabbed Kyung-sook’s thumb in a viselike grip, wrapped the knuckle tight with a string, and then plunged the needle deep into the bulging spot right above the moon of the nail. Kyung-sook screamed as blood spurted everywhere.

  “See, the blood is dark, corrupted,” said the cook-owner with satisfaction. “Once it flows out, it’ll clear up the congestion in your innards.”

  Now Kyung-sook’s thumb throbbed, as well as her stomach.

  At around dinnertime, David the foreigner came to the restaurant. He looked at Kyung-sook’s wan face and said she should stay with him because she was sick. Kyung-sook agreed; she couldn’t imagine laying her aching bones on the cold cement floor of the storeroom, even though the cook-owner
tsked loudly when she saw the two of them leaving together, and Sunhee said incredulously, “Oh-moh—you’re going to go stay the night with Mr. Fish?”

  Kyung-sook was too weak to reply.

  At his flat, David had her lie on his yo in the warmest part of the room. He told her he was going to make juk, the rice gruel Koreans eat for upset stomachs. He said he had watched his “country mother” make it many times.

  Kyung-sook, despite her queasiness, was amused. No one besides her mother and Imo had ever prepared food for her before. So even though he forgot to wash the rice, resulting in lumpy yet watery mush—“not quite rice, not quite gruel” as the saying went—she ate it as enthusiastically as her upset stomach would allow.

  When Kyung-sook felt better, he entertained her with photos of his family. Mixed in with these photos was one of a woman with hair the color of barley straw, her eyes the strange, immovable gray of slate. This photo he did not explain, sliding it quickly back into the pile.

  “Who is that lady?” Kyung-sook asked.

  “No one important.”

  “But her picture with picture of family.”

  He sighed melodramatically.

  “If you must know, she was my first love.”

  First love!

  Kyung-sook did not feel jil-tu, jealousy. Instead she felt charmed that someone else had loved this David man before her. When he left to use the outhouse, she flipped the picture over.

  To David,

  Friends always,

  Annie Borchard, Wilton High Class of ’68

  What a strong sentiment, Kyung-sook thought. Friends. Always!

  He showed her the rest of the pictures: his family posed against a background of a blue ocean with white sailboats—it looked like a painting. He said the place was called “Cape Cod.” Kyung-sook replied that she thought it was strange to name such a beautiful place after a fish.

  He laughed.

  “It’s so wonderful to see things fresh through your eyes,” he said.

  Kyung-sook sat up. Her stomach lurched, although she didn’t know if it was from being sick or from being anxious. Thoughts of her future increasingly filled her with dread. When the man left Korea, could she try to return to college? Should she go back to the village? Keep working at the dumpling house? This foreigner had brought so many strange colors and sounds and sensations into her life, she feared that when he left, everything would become unbearably dreary.