Somebody's Daughter

by Marie Myung-Ok Lee

  “You wanna me to go to A-me-ri-ca?” she said experimentally.

  “I love you, Karen,” he said. “You must see that Korea isn’t big enough for your dreams—your music.”

  “My music?”

  “Yes, your music, your country’s music. Your people have let themselves be swept up by Western capitalist values, letting valuable traditions languish and die. I see it everywhere: people would rather listen to some third-hand recording of Beethoven instead of merely stepping outside and experiencing true Korean music, the kind that has sustained your people through the ages.”

  He leaned over to Kyung-sook and took her hand.

  “I want to give you everything America has to offer, Karen,” he said. “I know what your life was like, I lived out in the country. I could hardly believe the primitive conditions.”

  He laughed a rough laugh.

  “The shit and piss from the outhouse went right into the pig’s trough,” he said, with evident disbelief. “And one morning when I’d gotten up early, I saw the country mother collect the chamber pots and then pour their contents into the ash-house—and then use the ashes for fertilizer in the vegetable garden! Can you believe it, Karen?”

  Kyung-sook was puzzled.

  “We Korean, we dunna waste,” she said. Anyone fortunate enough to own a pig let it eat waste, everyone else used the night soil for fertilizer—some enterprising farmers even put lean-to privies right in their fields to beg for more from the passersby.

  She said to the man, “How else you gonna get plant and piggie to grow big?”

  He shook his head and muttered something about how whenever he—and no one else—used the outhouse, the pig would get excited and run over, grunting and squealing, and the villagers would gather and laugh at the spectacle.

  “In America, it’ll be so different. You’ll have sanitary flush toilets, you’ll be able to take a bath every day, not just once a week at the bathhouse. You’ll have TV, telephones, vaccines, you’ll be able to drive a car, even.”

  A car? She didn’t know anyone who’d even ridden in, much less driven, one. But the man had brought her bananas, gold for her teeth, delicious, rubbery chewing gum that he called Wiggly.

  “Most importantly, in America, it’s a democracy, not a military dictatorship. The president doesn’t order the police to shoot people on the streets. We have honest elections, women have equal rights. We call it ‘women’s lib.’”

  “Womens-u rib,” she repeated, hardly understanding his excited chatter.

  “We’re going to have to work on your pronunciation,” he said. “Women’s l-l-lib.”

  Kyung-sook sighed. This man, in all his time here, knew little Korean other than give me this and I know. Sometimes, he called her his “yobo,” as if they were married, or his “saek-ssi lady,” obviously not knowing he was just redundantly calling her “lady-lady.”

  “And my name isn’t Da-bid, it’s Dav-v-vid.” He crunched down on his lower lip with his teeth and instructed Kyung-sook to do the same.

  “Vee,” he said.

  “Bee,” she repeated.

  “I want you to be able to say the name of your future husband,” he said. He took Kyung-sook into his arms and kissed her, pushing his tongue into her mouth, crushing her onto the yo. In the back of her throat, Kyung-sook tasted the man’s peculiar smell that rose off him like vapor—it reminded her of stagnant water, that kind lotuses and the giant red carp grew well in.

  “Da-bid, Da-bid,” she whispered.

  The next day Kyung-sook told the foreigner she would go back to America with him.

  “Groovy,” he said. He told her to wait while he went out. He returned smiling, his hands hidden behind his back. He teased her, making her guess which hand held the surprise. She tapped his left arm, then his right arm. Both wrong, it seemed.

  Finally, he presented her with a closed fist, which he opened with excruciating slowness. Resting on his dry palm was a jade ring, moss green and dark all the way through. It wasn’t the translucent almost-white of their country’s fine jade, but she smiled and let him put it on her finger. It was a sign of his promise.

  The next time she looked through his pictures, she found, with much satisfaction, that the photo of the woman with the slate eyes was gone.

  SARAH

  Seoul

  1993

  The day had finally come. Onward, to the Gilded Lego City of Yoido.

  I felt jittery, my eyelids scratchy as if I hadn’t slept—I hadn’t. Yesterday, I’d actually gone out and bought makeup, hair spray. My hair turning out “right” suddenly became one of the most important things in my life. But how could it be otherwise when there was a chance that my Korean mother might see me for the first time?

  I chose to wear, with no lost irony, the purple sundress Christine had forced me to buy for this trip. The dress was totally her style, very Talbot’s, not mine, which ran toward Salvation Army and Ragstock. I had almost thrown it away—no way I was going to let Christine dress me in her image over here—and now here I was, decked out in purple since everything else I had was jeans, too slangy and American. I wished I had a Korean dress.

  “You look great,” Doug said, taking my hand as we leaned into the street, searching for cabs. We were nervous about traffic. Seoul these days was a maze of concrete barriers and construction signs. All roads eventually led to a clogged artery of cars inching around an Ozymandias-esque ruin of concrete, metal, and raw earth, as the old was razed for new buildings and bridges, or additional subway lines, which, when completed, would do nothing to alleviate traffic because the accelerating prosperity would make drivers out of people who, ten, fifteen years ago, could scarcely have dreamed of owning a car.

  On that first Yoido day, Jun-Ho had pointed to a sign on the side of the road, one with movable text and numbers.

  “It is the number of traffic deaths on top, the ones who have hurt on the bottom. Today: 25 deaths. 132 hurts—in Seoul, only.”

  Back then, I had thought of my parents in that group, the scary-sounding word, sa-mang. Death. But in a day, everything had changed.

  Doug eschewed various hatchback taxis until a silver-and-blue “88” cab—one manufactured for the Olympics, specifically for the larger frames of foreigners—appeared. He opened the door for me, climbed in front with the driver, and told him where we needed to go.

  I remembered seeing Sejong Broadcasting on my trip with Jun-Ho, but of course I didn’t say so. Inside, the building looked unnaturally clean, as if it had been boiled recently, its chrome-paneled elevators sleek and sterile as surgical instruments. The people walking around seemed to shop at the same store: identical navy blue suits and crisp white shirts, men and women. This whole place was a country apart from the grimy, recalcitrant elevators of our school building, the janitor-ajuhshis doing the Third-World squat in the halls, smoking their unfiltered cigarettes, spitting oysters of mucus to the floor. The unreality of Yoido’s interiors as well as exteriors did not disappoint. From some futuristic antenna on top of the building, my image was going to float in particles through the air to nest into people’s TV sets all over Korea.

  As we stepped from the elevator, a man in a navy suit greeted us, clipboard in hand. He repeatedly apologized for his “poorly” English as he led us to the room where the other guests were waiting: an elderly man with white dandelion fuzz for hair, a quintessential overpermed ajuhma who was kneading some Kleenex into a paste. I was handed a scalding Dixie cup of coffee, which I sipped reflexively, the superheated sugar becoming napalm in my mouth.

  The man with the clipboard came back to me.

  “Name?” he said, pen poised expectantly as I coughed.

  “Sa-rah Thor-son,” I finally choked out.

  “Korean name?”

  “Lee Soon-Min.” My throat felt strafed. “But that’s not my real name. That’s the name they gave me at the orphanage.”

  He looked at me, puzzled. Doug hesitated a second, then stepped in with Korean.


  “Oh. Oh,” the man said. “Just minute, moment.” He scurried away and was replaced by a young woman with a cookie-round face and tortoiseshell glasses.

  The woman extended her hand Western-style.

  “My name is Kyunghee Noh. I am a producer here. I will act as a translator for the show.”

  “Hello,” I said, taking her hand. “Have you ever been to America? Your English is very good.”

  “No, I have never left Korea,” she said, bowing slightly in thanks. “But I enjoy studying languages.”

  Kyunghee Noh proceeded to ask me the rest of the questions. Whom (yes, she said “whom”) I was looking for, and why? What could I tell them about the situation to help someone find me? I gave her every detail, which I’d written in advance.

  When we were done, she showed me her clipboard, awash in Korean characters, as if I could read it. “When you are on TV, you will speak Sarah’s story again, and I’ll translate what you say.”

  “Actually, could my friend translate for me?” I gestured toward Doug. “He knows the whole story already, inside and out.”

  Kyunghee Noh looked at me as if I’d just slapped her across the face.

  “I am sorry,” she said, recovering her professional smile. “I am the translator. You see, it is already here, on my paper.”

  Rules are rules, I supposed, but my story was like a newborn infant, all untried limbs and floppy head. I wanted someone I trusted to take it from me, to release it to millions of strangers. I felt a sudden resentment toward Doug’s choice of wardrobe for my Most Important day: battered T-shirt and jeans with a hole in the knee, the strange military star-pin. Maybe they couldn’t let him on TV dressed like that.

  From the green-papered waiting room, the other guests got up and left. They reappeared, miniaturized, on the TV mounted in the corner, like in a hospital room. I didn’t pay any attention—I didn’t have any to spare. I was concentrating on stopping the deluge of sweat pouring out of the pores of my face and armpits. I kept all nonessential physical activity to an absolute zero, but still, I could feel the dampness spreading.

  The navy-suited man came back to the room and gestured to me with a downward dig of his hand as if he were paddling in water. I was hustled to the entrance of the sound stage. A green light went on, someone gave me a parting push.

  “Sal-Ah Dorson!”

  They played tinkly calliope music, as if I were a circus elephant. Everyone applauded.

  After being in the dim greenroom, the sudden barrage of stage lights blinded me. I groped my way to the podium, gripping it for support, but it was a cheap veneer one, and it almost toppled over. The ajuhmas in the audience tittered appreciatively.

  “Hallow,” said the host, his shellacked Elvis pompadour seeming to rise up like a wave and try to reach me. “Hallow. Anyonghasayo?”

  “Anyong-ha-say-yo,” I replied.

  He said something else in Korean, his eyes sparkling behind the windows of his thick rectangular glasses, each a separate TV screen.

  He repeated his question—it was likely he was making a joke at my expense, so I just said I don’t know in Korean.

  Peals of laughter, like shattering glass.

  Later, Doug told me the host was asking me if I spoke Korean, a phrase I had encountered at least eighteen thousand and twenty times before.

  Do you speak Korean? I don’t know. I was such an idiot. I would have asked for a do-over, but this was, of course, live TV.

  Kyunghee Noh came out and stood next to me.

  “Tell your story.”

  I looked at the paper in my hand and read. A few times I waited, thinking that she was going to translate what I’d said, but she merely nodded, so I went on.

  After I finished, she read from her clipboard in a continuous Korean. I could see a few of the ladies in the audience dabbing at their eyes with paisley handkerchiefs.

  Then the silence settled over everything, like dust.

  KYUNG-SOOK

  Seoul

  1972

  The man David put a hand on her hip.

  “You’re losing your slender figure to all this American food, aren’t you?” he admonished. “We’re going to have to put you back on a Korean diet, with all its funny vegetables and seaweed and soybean curd now, aren’t we?”

  Kyung-sook did all his cooking. The first day, she had brought gulbi fish and hot peppers to make stew, but he told her to use the supplies he had already purchased on the black market: different kinds of cheez-u, red-and-white cans filled with some kind of sand-colored goo (he claimed it was soup), MAXWELL HOUSE, and the precious spicy-pink meat, SPAM.

  One day, he declared he was sick of rice. He told Kyung-sook to make him some mac-a-loni. She boiled it as he took a nap. When she’d finished, she didn’t know what to do—the mac-a-loni was quite bland, and he was still snoring away.

  She tried sprinkling some sugar on it, as she had seen him do on his food in the morning. Quite a bit better. It would be even tastier with a splash of soy sauce and a drop of rich sesame oil, but he didn’t seem to like Korean tastes all that much, so instead she poured a can of PET milk into it, until it was nice and soupy.

  “What are you doing?” he yelled, making her jump back. His black yun-tan hair was all disheveled around his face.

  “Make dinner?” she ventured, in a small voice.

  “Je-sus,” he said. “You don’t put sugar on pasta, you put cheese and tomato sauce.”

  He had been referring to the can with strange red fruit with the hat on—the toh-mah-toh—the shit-smelling cheez-u from the green cylinder.

  “Okay, you didn’t know,” he said, finally, patting Kyung-sook on the arm, the same way her father patted their long-haired ox.

  Kyung-sook took the bowl; she would eat her own creation, then.

  “No, don’t,” he said. “You put so much sugar in it, you’re going to get fat.”

  He made another dish of the pasta, showing Kyung-sook how to put the red fruit and cheez-u on top of it, and she had to admit it was actually sort of tasty that way, if you held your nose when the cheez-u smell was too much.

  When she began to clean up, he instructed her to throw away the leftover bowl of mac-a-loni. Staring into the garbage pail, she remembered the winter when they ran out of food, and how Hye-ja, the one who was scorned by the housewives because she worked at the Yankee army base, had lugged a full bucket of American garbage all the way back to the village. The bucket had been filled with egg-shells, bones, moldy food, some kind of dark, acrid sand that Kyung-sook now knew was coffee grounds, and even an army boot. Hye-ja had boiled the whole thing in the town plaza. Even the housewives had stepped forward, tongues silent, stomachs empty, and had greedily, gratefully drunk up their portion of the “piggie stew.”

  “Just dump it, Karen.”

  She hesitated a moment, then did what he asked. The song in her head played again. A-me-ri-ca!

  SARAH

  Seoul

  1993

  I could actually see the dark eye of the camera coming closer as it zoomed in for the misery shot. Sweat sprouted from my pores as if I were a saturated sponge being squeezed, I had Nixonesque stains under my arms. My muscles ached. I needed to move, but of course, I couldn’t leave the podium. I settled on letting my tongue explore the coffee-scorch blister on my soft palate. It was meaty and soft, like the inside of a grape.

  The hosts stood in front of me, all I could see was their backs. They said something to the audience.

  “Aigu!” someone exclaimed. Kyunghee Noh whispered to me, “No callers. I am sorry.”

  How could this have happened?

  I was glued to the stage in shock, but the two feminine bouncers came to pry me off, while the host chatted jocularly with the audience and got them to laugh again.

  Doug took my hand as I numbly entered the greenroom.

  “You did great,” he said. “You were wonderful.”

  “Lot of good that did.”

  “But they didn’t mention
the ddong,” Doug said, his free fist balling up. “They omitted that whole thing.”

  “But why—” I sat down, the full weight of events falling like scales on my shoulders.

  The short man came back to usher us out. Doug immediately launched into a tirade. The man stepped back cautiously away from him, mumbling something, and scurried away again.

  “He’s just a flunky,” Doug muttered. “I told them to get whoever’s in charge if they don’t want their greenroom trashed.”

  Kyunghee Noh appeared. I stifled the urge to fit my hands around her neck, begin beating her with her own clipboard.

  “Mr. Lee says you have some problem?”

  “Yes, we have a fucking problem,” I said. “How could you leave out the part about how I was found with excrement smeared all over me?”

  Kyunghee Noh frowned.

  “Of course we can not say such a thing even if you will be telling it like that.”

  “What?”

  “We have a policy for our show, standards. What you said about the ddong, there are many people who will be thinking it is disgusting.”

  My mouth opened in disbelief. I was aware that Korean women were expected to never let their teeth or the inside of their mouths show, and here I was letting myself look like Mr. Ed. Kyunghee Noh seemed to note this, and added, “If you want disgusting, you watch the American Armed Forces channel.”

  I sputtered. “But it’s the truth. This happened to me. ME. Some Korean person did that to me. A Korean, like the people who watch your show. A Korean left me there, covered in shit! Do you think it was easy for me to tell you this?”

  Kyunghee Noh bit her lip, her eyes skittering back and forth as if she was reading something in front of her. “I am sorry. I can not explain well in English. How to say it, our show watchers are looking for happy stories, that is why they watch. You do not watch a TV story on animals if you do not have interests in animals, yes?”