“I’ll tell you the story, dear audience,” said the translator. “This girl, Sal-Ah, doesn’t know anything about her Korean truemother or truefather. Her white American parents adopted her even though of course there was no blood connection—isn’t that a nice Western custom? She has come to Korea and is studying in the Kyopos-come-back-to-Korea program at Chosun University. Her adoption records say she was abandoned on—”
“Welcome, please enter!” boomed Cooking Oil Auntie. Kim Grandmother, one of the maids at the wealthy Merchant Pak’s house poked her head into the stall like an inquisitive turtle.
“… She was raised in the care of the Little Angels orphanage until she was adopted. Truemother, if you are out there and want to atone for your deed, or if there are any other family members, or anyone knows anything about this girl, please be so kind as to call us now at the station. 02-332-8175.”
Cooking Oil Auntie inserted a cork in the bottle of rich, brown sesame oil and sent Kim Grandmother on her way.
“Did you catch when that girl was, um, left behind?” Kyung-sook asked.
“Unh? No. But she looks like she’s in her early-adult season, doesn’t she? That would make it sixties? seventies when she was dumped? Sounds about right: that was the time when women were starting to work in the factories with men—and of course, getting in trouble. Remember how that police box in North River Village added that window you could push a baby through if you wanted to throw it away?”
“Well, I’m not sure all the babies were ‘thrown away,’” Kyung-sook said, that horrid word sharp on her lips. “I’m sure there were reasons.”
“Reasons, sure. These mothers all have their reasons. Like the mothers who abandoned their kids right after the 6.25 War. Some of those kids wandering the streets were true orphans, of course. But the biggest bunch of them were mixed-blood U.N.-soldier spawn—I saw that on the Evening Garden news program. I guess their mothers found it pretty convenient to just ditch ’em and start fresh, huh?”
Kyung-sook thought of the proverb, “If you keep your mouth closed, you cannot bite yourself,” and she did just that. She kept her eyes on the TV screen.
In the TV studio in Seoul, there was silence. A silence that filtered all the way to Enduring Pine Village, to Cooking Oil Auntie’s stall. Kyung-sook couldn’t even hear a cock crow in the market.
Who could break such a silence?
“Aigu, nobody’s calling for that sorry child.” Cooking Oil Auntie began to polish her blue-green oil bottles, the same beautiful color as the flies that buzzed around the dungheap. Kyung-sook felt the heat from the roasting sesame seeds searing her face.
The camera didn’t move from the girl’s face.
The male announcer walked in front of the camera.
“We’re sorry, folks, but no one called for this lost American girl. Maybe the caller is just too shy. At the bottom of our screen we’re going to run our studio number again. This girl is going to stay in Korea for the rest of the summer, so if you know anything, be sure to give us a call. Once again, it’s 02-332-8175. And keep watching The Search for Missing Persons especially to see if the woman from Mokp’o who called today is really Mrs. Choi’s sister! If so, that means we have two sisters from the North separated by two wars finally reunited here in the South—it promises to be a very touching reunion. So stay tuned and kamsamnida ladies and gentlemen till next week!”
“That poor kid,” Cooking Oil Auntie muttered as she flipped off the set. “Talk about children who suffer for the sins of their parents. How could a human mother fling her child to the four winds like that? A half-nigger GI baby I could see, maybe. But a beautiful Korean girl like that? I don’t care what the circumstances might have been—if she were my child, I would have become a beggar, done anything to raise her. You do that for your own child.”
She looked at Kyung-sook for confirmation. Kyung-sook was looking the other way. The girl on the screen, she looked to be of pure Korean blood. But was it possible? The foreigner-man, after all, had been tall and he’d had his yun-tan coal-black hair.
“Those women, especially those so-called ‘modern women’—their attitudes threaten our whole society!” Cooking Oil Auntie went on. “They should have abortions instead of heaping so much shame on us as a nation—it makes us look so backward, having Korean kids raised by foreigners. Part of the fault is that it’s too easy—they can just pretend to forget the kid on a park bench, as if a child were a package of green onions—”
“That girl probably would have had a terrible life growing up in Korea!” Kyung-sook suddenly exclaimed. All the blood in her body seemed to have found its way into her face, which threatened to burst like a child’s cheap rubber ball. “You shouldn’t make judgments on situations you know nothing about!”
“The same could be said for you,” Cooking Oil Auntie said, slowly scanning Kyung-sook’s face. “I at least know what it’s like to have a child, don’t I?”
Kyung-sook rose quickly from where she’d been sitting. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep the tears inside. Her mouth filled with a warm taste of iron.
Cooking Oil Auntie paused.
“Look here, Sister, it took me many years to have my son, I know too well the pain of being barren—it was even worse than having my husband die on me.”
Kyung-sook still didn’t say anything.
“If it helps, I’ve heard that wanton women get pregnant much more easily than dutiful wives like you, or me with my one son. Maybe there’s something to that—the merciful Lord Buddha will reward us with a hundred male children and fifty daughters in our next lives.”
Kyung-sook spun on her heel, grinding a small hole in the dirt floor.
Cooking Oil Auntie didn’t call after her.
SARAH
Seoul
1993
The phone call was for me.
“Miss Sarah Thorson? This is Noh Kyunghee.”
A rustling of paper.
No Kyung Hee? Korean names, endless combinations of strange syllables. Kyung/Mi/Jae/Ho/Jun/Ok. Did I know her?
“Uh, hi.”
“How are you?”
“Fine. Uh, do I know you?”
“Sejong Broadcasting.”
The Search for Missing Persons. Kyunghee Noh.
“We had a call for you arrive this afternoon.”
“For me?” Was I hearing right? “From who, whom?”
“From a lady who says she’s your mother.”
SARAH
Seoul
1993
The woman’s name was Mrs. Lee. Lee Ok-Bong. My mother. She lived here, in Seoul. All this time. And now I had her number.
When I informed Doug of the news, he shouted, lifted me off my feet and spun me around like the Tilt-a-Whirl at the State Fair.
“She finally called the station,” I gasped, giddy, a whole new world of possibility spiraling out before me.
But then I didn’t call her. I woke up the next morning, a leaden lump in my stomach.
What if I’m not ready? How will my knowing her change me forever?
Doug seemed almost irked by my sudden recalcitrance. He practically tore the number out of my hands, spoke tersely to whoever answered, and set up a meeting. We were going to meet at the Little Angels Orphanage, Doug’s idea. Kyunghee Noh had been pushing for an on-air meeting at the station—she was sorely disappointed with me, she said.
KYUNG-SOOK
Enduring Pine Village
1993
“What is this number?” Il-sik said to his wife. Kyung-sook looked to see a tiny scrap of paper held in his good hand. Had it fallen out of her skirt pocket when she was bending over the wash?
“Oh, it is nothing.” She took it back from him. “Cooking Oil Auntie told me about a supplier in Seoul who could get me the storage tins for the shrimp paste more cheaply—no one on this earth knows more about saving money than she.”
“Are you all right?” he asked. “It seems like you’ve been very tired lately.”
Kyung-sook looked at her husband. His right hand, less like a hand than a crabbed piece of old gingerroot.
“I tire in the dog days of summer, that’s all,” Kyung-sook told her husband. “All day in the market listening to those squawking customers and then coming home to take care of Father, changing his diaper like he’s a baby.”
“You are a filial daughter, your father is very fortunate,” he said.
“I am fortunate in marrying you—I have no in-laws who would forbid me to do this,” she said.
“You know, you have some white hairs now,” her husband said.
Kyung-sook patted her hair. She never looked in the mirror anymore, she could tie the strands into a married-woman’s bun without one.
No one wants to grow old, Kyung-sook thought. When she was a child, her maternal grandmother and grandfather had seemed of a completely different, if friendly, species. They had skin like rice paper that had gotten wet and dried again. Their voices were tentative and quavery, like someone who had once been sure of himself but had now grown to doubting.
She was beginning to see the same lines on her face, hear her own voice sounding strange to her ears. But was that so bad?
She gave her husband a caress in the privacy of their inner room. She thought with affection how they had eschewed both a folk wedding and a Western-style one at the wedding hall, instead opting for a simple ceremony under the watchful eyes of Christo and the rough-hewn beams of the church. That is what Il-sik had suggested, and Kyung-sook was so grateful to him. When he reached for her in the dark, she did not see his disfigured hand, nor did she see his wrinkles. In fact, their bodies fit together as nicely as the yin-yang symbol on their country’s flag. She was disappointed on the nights he didn’t touch her.
“That’s the way we will be, then, two old mandarin ducks,” she said quietly. “Hae-ro, swimming in slow circles, old together.”
In her pocket, she could feel the number, the weightless scrip of it. She wondered if anyone else had called for the girl. She didn’t know why she hadn’t just done so right away to find that most likely she was wrong, and could put her mind at ease. But Cooking Oil Auntie had made her so upset, she couldn’t think. And then she had returned home to Il-sik and realized she had more to consider than just her ease of mind—there was also her husband and the entire life she had built up for herself, hanging on that slimmest thread of possibility. What was the right thing to do?
SARAH
Seoul
1993
What a sense of déjà vu, the Little Angels hot inner office.
“Hello, it is nice to see you,” Miss Park greeted.
“You have a lot of babies here.” Doug peered through the office’s window at the rows of cribs, lined up like shoeboxes. “Do you get a new delivery every day?”
“I am fine, and you?”
“Great, thanks.” He turned to me.
“You amaze me, Sarah, how you managed to find this place and get your file without help, without anyone translating for you. I guess if you set your mind to something, nothing can stop you.”
“Well, I—”
The door to the office opened. An ajuhshi in a chartreuse polo shirt walked in, leading a doughy woman with short, permed hair that was a matte, shoe-polish black.
I couldn’t speak, something welled up inside me.
“Agi-yah?” she said, looking at me.
I was frozen. The ajuhshi pointed at me and muttered. I stared at the freckles on this woman’s face, the color of bruise spots on apples. I had moles, brown moles, soft as gumdrops—but no freckles. What did this mean?
Miss Park said something to them in Korean, and they sat down. The woman kept staring at me.
A slim teenage girl walked into the room. She put her Louis Vuitton bag down on the table.
“Sorry,” she said to us. “I got hung up in traffic and the battery in my cell phone died.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Julie Koh. My mom’s HeeJung Koh, the director of Little Angels. I’m here to translate.”
I was about to say that I had brought Doug to translate, but then I decided that would be rude, she’d come all this way. Doug hadn’t said a word in Korean yet, anyway.
“Your English—” I began. I didn’t know how to put it—I hated it when ignoramuses in Eden’s Prairie praised me for speaking English so well.
“It sounds so perfectly American, your accent,” I said.
“Oh, I go to the Seoul Foreign High School where it’s all expat kids, and only a few Koreans, like me and my sister.” She checked her watch, a Swatch. “And we watch Armed Forces TV all the time. I love All My Children.”
Miss Park said, “We, chuhh, start?”
The woman was indeed “Mrs. Lee.” The ajuhshi was Mr. Lee, her brother—my uncle. They both lived in Seoul. Mrs. Lee asked me again, “Agi-yah?” which Julie translated as Are you my baby?
I said I was the girl she saw on TV.
She came over to me, began thumping my back and wailing.
I hugged her. Something about her felt right; Christine was all corners and angles, honed by hours and hours of tennis and feel-the-burn Jane Fonda leg lifts. But this woman was all loose, warm flesh that seemed to envelop me. I started to cry, too.
Someone tugged on my arm. Miss Park. She handed us both some Kleenex she whisked from a shiny, satin-quilted box. She took one for herself and turned away and discreetly dabbed at her eyes.
“Okay,” Julie said to me. “I’m sure you have some questions for her.”
“I want to know why,” I said. “Julie, could you ask her why she gave me up?”
Mrs. Lee, still sniffling, babbled back.
“She says she had to give you up when her husband died suddenly, just after you were born,” Julie said.
Mrs. Lee looked at me searchingly—I didn’t know what kind of expression I had on my face—and added more words. Dae-hak, you-hak, words that had to do with school.
“She didn’t think she could give you any kind of life, being poor and without a husband. She wanted you to go to college, study abroad.”
She couldn’t keep me, just because she was poor and single?
“More questions?” Julie said, eyebrows raised.
I blinked.
“I was covered with ddong,” I said to Julie. “Ask her about that, ask her why she did that.”
Julie stopped, shocked.
“It’s in my orphanage records.”
Mrs. Lee sucked at her teeth. When Julie translated my question, she seemed taken aback. It took her a few seconds to answer.
“It was such a long time ago, she doesn’t remember, she said she’s blocking a lot out. She must not have had time to clean you up properly. She says she’s sorry.”
My big, burning question gone, just like that.
I didn’t know what to do now. I was with the woman who gave birth to me, but the urge to cry out “Um-ma!” didn’t happen. She was a woman with a bad dye job, a thick waist, polyester pants. Her brother had shifty, nervous eyes and slicked-down hair, which made him look like a weasel. I wanted to automatically feel love for these people, my blood family, but I didn’t feel anything except numb.
Miss Park spoke up in Korean.
“Don’t be too hard on your mother, is what Miss Park said. I know it might be difficult to understand as Americans—” Julie looked significantly first at Doug, then me. “But bringing a child you can’t care for to a police station, or to Little Angels is a caring act. It’s not abandonment. These mothers do it so the baby can have a better life.”
I was thinking of a story I’d read in the paper last summer, of a girl on Long Island who had given birth in a public restroom at her prom, cut the umbilical cord on a metal toilet paper dispenser, thrown the kid in the trash to die—then went back out onto the dance floor. Or the Hmong girl in Minneapolis, only nineteen and already a mother of five, who somehow left three of the children out in the car on a subzero night. Two froze
to death, the third lost all the fingers on her left hand. Suddenly, the Korean way seemed more humane, enlightened, civilized.
Korea is a Third-World country.
“This is a lot for me,” I murmured. “Maybe we should meet again, alone.”
Mrs. Lee liked this suggestion. She smiled at me enthusiastically, crescents of gold in her teeth smiling along with her.
“She says she’d like to spend some time with you, also. She wants to invite you to her house.”
I nodded, getting up. Doug followed.
I wasn’t sure how to say goodbye to her, so I sort of half-bowed and mumbled an-yong-ha-say-yo, which I realized, too late, was “hello” and not “goodbye.” Mrs. Lee waved at me.
“Bye-bye!” she said.
SARAH
Seoul
1993
When I had received the materials for the Motherland Program, I had eagerly flipped through the pages explaining the language and cultural programs, the instructions on what to bring. Then I got to the last page, which said:
A physical examination proving good health is mandatory for all Motherland Program applicants. Please have your doctor fill out and sign the attached form.
I didn’t want to have to see our family doctor, Dr. Solvaag, the creepy guy with too-warm fingers, the one Ken and Christine always chatted up at the Eden’s Prairie Country Club parties. Then I realized, I’m almost twenty years old. I can have my own doctor. I searched in the phone book, called the first GP listed. Dr. Susan Aas.
When I got to the office, a receptionist had handed me the forms on a clipboard that said PROZAC on it, a pen thoughtfully velcroed to the top.
Name. Address. Social Security. Insurance. Whom to contact in an emergency. Occupation.
Do you exercise regularly? Have you ever had the following (Please check yes or no):
Alcoholism. Cancer (check type). Cataracts. Heart Disease. High Blood Pressure. Kidney Disease. Surgery Requiring Hospitalization. Urinary Tract Problems.
No and no and no and no. I had felt like a conscientious student who has prepared well for a test.
Somebody's Daughter Page 23
