Somebody's Daughter

by Marie Myung-Ok Lee

  My daughter, I want to tell you about your mother, and I want to say this prayer for you …

  She had begun this letter, and it had run to many pages, until her hand had knotted up so painfully it looked like her husband’s. At the market, she had purchased sheets of the nicest pounded mulberry-bark paper, brought those pages all the way to the lake.

  She cleared a small space in the grass, drew a ring of dirt as if she were a geomancer, and put the papers in the middle. In the background, the mountain peaks waited. She did not know the child’s name. The girl on TV had been called “Sal-Ah,” which she was sure was a mistake on the part of the translator. Kyung-sook knew in her heart, the girl’s American parents would not have given a baby a name that meant “child to buy” in their country’s tongue.

  She put a match to a corner of the papers and stood back as the flames consumed the small pile. The edges of the bark paper writhed and danced joyfully as the smoke swirled up into the sky. Soon, all that was left were a few silky ashes, which Kyung-sook rubbed into the earth with her hand. Part of the prayer for her daughter would remain in the earth, the rest gone up to Heaven.

  SARAH

  Seoul

  1993

  The time to go had crept up and pounced like a stealthy animal. We Motherland Programmers were packed and ready to leave.

  I had been tempted to stay with Doug, who had decided to extend his Korean stay for a few more months—it was easy to get English-language tutoring jobs anywhere in the city. For me, all it would take to refresh my visa for three months would be to follow him down to Pusan, hop on a ferry to Fukuoka, Japan’s closest port, and return to continue things as they had been, in Seoul, the two of us. Pudae chigae and karaoke bars, watching the lavender-pantsed men at T’apkol Park, eating samkyupsal, the three-layers-fat pork that you wrap in a lettuce leaf and stuff, whole, into your mouth.

  Yet something was pushing me away from Korea. Jun-Ho had written a hastily scrawled letter in which he said,

  Sarah, Jun-Ho Kim is here to say that I wish for you that you will make a beautiful future. I know you will come back to Korea so that our minds can meet again in happy intercourse uninterrupted. Post crypt: every Lee in Korea claims they are descended from the famous Chunju Lees. The paterfamilias could not possibly have sired so many descendants. But ask your Omoni. Who should know?

  Choi Sunsengim gave me a gift wrapped in bright purple Mylar. I didn’t open it until later, when Doug and I were killing time in the TV room.

  Underneath the wrapping was a skinny metal object, cigar-sized. Fake glass gems glued onto it. At first I thought it was a very ornate pen, but when I took off the hidden cover, I saw it contained a small blade, notched at the top, like a bowie knife.

  “That’s a strange gift to give someone,” Doug commented.

  “What?” I said. “A letter opener?”

  “You’re supposed to use it to kill yourself.”

  “Excuse?”

  “Don’t you remember it from the Cultural Treasures Museum in Taejon?”

  I had been there, another class trip. But after seeing so many gold crowns, jade chopstick holders, and replicas of the Turtle Boats, I’d become too dizzy with Korean things to remember them all.

  “This is the chastity knife. The one women wore on the blouses of their hanbok. If you were ever raped, you were supposed to kill yourself to preserve the family honor.”

  “Uh huh.” I tested the point of the blade on my finger. It made a dent, but didn’t break the skin.

  “But see, the blade is very short. You seppuku yourself, but you can’t hurt someone else with it.”

  I looked at the veins running under the thin skin of my inner wrist, the color suddenly inviting. “You sure remember a lot from that museum visit.”

  “Some things are more memorable,” he shrugged.

  I put the whatever-it-was into my bag. Its jaunty red tassel glowed in the darkness of the interior of my purse.

  Bam-BAM-BAM!

  On the TV, Sylvester Stallone, bullet bandoleers X’d over his chest.

  “Rambo says, Elephant Ice Cream is number one!”

  “Lambo,” the voiceover translated. “Numbah wang.”

  Another commercial. Meg Ryan in a white nun’s outfit, patting a horse. Hawking SEXY-MILD.

  Then the crude graphic of the spinning globe. The nightly news.

  The big story: a bank holdup. Grainy security-cam footage of a bank. The perp—identity disguised not by the usual nylon stocking or hood but by a surgical mask, as if he were a doctor running amuck—wielding a gun (although Korea has very strict gun-control laws). While the male employees cowered behind chairs, a beslippered ajuhma jumped over the counter and started wrestling with him. He awkwardly pointed the gun, seemed confused as to how to use it, then gave up and hit her on the head with it. They showed her later getting some kind of citation from the mayor of Seoul, a white bandage wrapped around half her head.

  Then, familiar music.

  Michael Jackson!

  “Michael Jackson will be in Korea with his friend, Liz Taylor!” Doug translated. He was going to be in Cheju Island, relaxing, looking to perhaps establish an Asian outpost for Neverland.

  “The Korean people have always been very gracious to me,” he said, in his wispy little-girl-man voice.

  “I heard Liz Taylor is getting married again,” said Doug, who kept up on American goings-on by going to the USIA to read People.

  “I’m hungry,” I said. “Let’s go to one of those noodle-salad places.”

  We were about to finally summon the energy to shut off the TV. But then we both recognized the word adoptee. And the word Minn-ah-soh-ta.

  Footage of a young Korean guy arriving at the waiting area at Kimp’o Airport.

  “My name is Brian Muckenhill,” he said, in a familiar Midwestern voice. He was from Blue Earth, Minnesota, population five hundred and three.

  “I’m here to try to find my birth family.”

  Shock.

  “Because of ahm,” Doug said. “Cancer of the blood. He needs a bone marrow transplant and no donors could be found in the States. A biological relative would have the best chance.”

  Thousands of Koreans had come out to help, plastering posters of his picture in the crevice of every tiny hamlet. Makeshift marrow testing centers sprang up everywhere. Entire military units came out. I strained to see the screen, as if I might see Jun-Ho within the masses, which looked so alike, short haircuts and uniforms. Like a set of toy soldiers.

  “The Koreans are impressed,” said Doug, translating a reporter’s words, “that a non-Korean family could love this boy so much, someone who is not of their own blood. So Koreans want to come out and help, to get their marrow tested and help him find his family.”

  A young woman was on the screen, eyes large as a doe’s.

  “‘He is, after all, Korean. And Koreans have to help each other.’”

  “He’s a cadet at West Point, so the U.S. government’s paying for the best treatment. But if he doesn’t get a bone marrow transplant, he’ll most likely die by the end of the year. He was a quarterback on his high school’s football team. That blond girl you just saw—that’s his girlfriend back in Blue Earth, Minnesota. Man, how come you Korean adoptees all end up in Hicksville, Minnesota?”

  “Something to do with the churches. The adoption agencies all have some kind of name like Catholic Charities or Lutheran Services,” I said, distracted. “So how about his birth family, did they find them?”

  “Mm, they went to the orphanage and searched the files, like you did, and they found a baby picture, so next they’re going to broadcast it on TV and in the newspapers.”

  I found myself unexpectedly weeping, throwing myself against him.

  “Hey, take it easy,” Doug said, but his eyes were soft.

  I wanted to claw and rend, hear the scream of fabric tearing. I stretched out the neck of Doug’s T-shirt until it hung down like loose skin. I was aware that Brian Muckenh
ill had terminal cancer, but all I could think of was that he was going to meet his birth mother—and I would never, ever know mine, never have that hand to touch. It occurred to me suddenly that I didn’t even know if my birthday was September third, the day I was found, or September second—today. Jun-Ho said that the exact time and date of one’s birth was very important in Korean astrology, that fortunetellers could tell you your entire destiny from those two pieces of information, which most people have. Christine and Ken managed to skip that thorny issue by doing the cake and presents on the anniversary of the day I arrived in Minnesota, my “Gotcha day” they called it, March 17.

  Gotcha meant nothing. A human-set date chosen by others. Not like my birth, the date and time that I, by that eternal and mysterious baby instinct, decided to leave the womb. No one should be without this knowledge. But it wasn’t forgotten, or unclaimed at the bottom of some dusty file. It was, simply, gone. Like her.

  I wanted to scream so loud that every person in Korea, in America, in the world beyond would cover their ears and grimace.

  KYUNG-SOOK

  Enduring Pine Village

  1993

  On Saturdays, when she was done with her time in the market, she went over to the church to prepare it for the next day’s service. Small Singing had left her stall with a smile because Kyung-sook had mentioned that the bone-shaped birthmark on her son’s neck was an auspicious sign.

  Shrimp Auntie works so hard, said some of the observing villagers. She takes care of a husband and a father, her business, and the church.

  Do you remember her mother? She had the best singing voice in the village. No one could sing “My Hometown” like she could—she wouldn’t leave a dry eye in the place!

  The daughter didn’t inherit any of that singing voice, now did she?

  Oh my, no. The girl was tone deaf—her singing voice was like a couple of cats screeching.

  But she was smart, I remember. Didn’t she go to college in Seoul for a while?

  Shrimp Auntie? I don’t think so. She’s just been a wife and daughter, for all I know.

  I seem to remember she left the village to go to college.

  You’re getting too old to be the village gossip—you can’t keep your facts straight. It’s a pity Cooking Oil Auntie has passed on—now, she knew what was what. You’re getting Shrimp Auntie mixed up with her childhood friend, last-one daughter of the five daughters of Kim the junkman. That girl ran off to North River County to the Yankee army base, not Seoul.

  Oh, perhaps you’re right. Aigu, but these old bones ache! But probably not as much as Shrimp Auntie’s are going to, after she spends all evening bent under those benches. Then on Sundays she plays on that Western pi-a-no so the parishioners can sing their Christo ballads—she has that much musical talent, at least.

  She loves her God, that’s why she does it.

  Kyung-sook opened the door to the church, its familiar woody, slightly musty odor rushed to greet her.

  Saturday nights she cleaned, all by herself. Her soft cloth would slide noiselessly across the pews, in perfect rhythm to her breathing. She would quietly straighten the things on the humble pulpit, all the while receiving her peace in this walking meditation.

  September third had come again. Her daughter’s coming-out-to-the-world day. This time, she did not force her mind to other things. Instead, she merely moved about in gloomy silence, shed a few bitter tears during the lull time in the market. Soon it would be Chu-sok day, the day she needed to make obeisance to her mother and her other ancestors for three generations back. She would thank her ancestors for her profitable year at the market, she would tell her mother, again, I’m sorry for what I did to your dreams of having a college-educated daughter. Please forgive me.

  Il-sik, as he did each year, would rebuke her for her adherence to these ancient rites. In his sermons he preached that the Korean people needed to move away from ancestor worship, fortunetelling by the chom chengi, shamanism, and Buddhism—these things were all sent by Satan to distract people from the True Way, Christo. Il-sik encouraged churchgoers to even physically restrain their friends and relatives when they headed out to the chom chengi or to the Buddhist temple.

  But old ways are not so easily changed. He had to know that even the most fervent churchgoers had their prophecies read, made offerings to the mountain gods “just in case.” And no one Kyung-sook knew would make a marriage match for their children without having an astrologer make sure their zodiac signs and blood types were compatible.

  For her part, honoring her ancestors through the Chu-sok rites were something she could not, would not, end. It was something she had done all her life, her mother had done it all hers, all the way back through the many generations delineated in the pages of the chuk-bok. She would again, on the preceding day, leave her market stall and spend the whole day shopping for and cooking a feast of her mother’s favorite dishes. This she would spread out in front of her esteemed mother’s burial mound, and she would implore her mother’s spirit to return and enjoy this repast made by her daughter’s hands.

  Thus, the cycle of life. She had left the village and come back, and to some eyes, it was as if she had never left—she was the same.

  But because of Il-sik, her husband, she had become a Christo-follower. Because of that other man, she had borne a child, one that she had not raised, one whose fate was—and would be—unknown to her.

  In many other ways she had come back to the village changed, and she would continue to change. All people did, like a snake that sheds its skin: at some point the new skin becomes old, the old becomes the new.

  Yet life was not a circle, as the Buddhists and Confucius thought. She would not be reborn at sixty to start a new life. No, her life was winding, winding, following the coil of a spring. At each point she was able to see behind her to what her experiences had been, but at each point, a little further up the coil, her perspective was a little bit different.

  It would be like this until she reached the end of the coil, the time when she would go up to Him, if He has deemed her faithful.

  She moved her cloth along the wood of the pews. The rough-hewn wood was slowly, slowly taking on a bit of a burnished glow, and this pleased her.

  The coming of Chu-sok would also mean the night of the fullest autumn moon. The night of the Harvest Moon Festival, where all the village women would gather for the kangkang sullae. Girls, women, and grandmothers would all join hands, they would become an expansive circle that would slowly unwind. Then, one by one, each dancer would be lifted toward the sky for her chance to sing out her story, framed in the light of a luminous moon.

  SARAH

  Seoul

  1993

  “Hello, you’ve reached the Thorsons. Sorry we can’t take your call but we’d love to talk to you, so please leave your number and have a wonderful day!” There were various noises of the bird and the cats and the dog in the background. Yip. Arf. Meow. Skrrech.

  At the beep, I informed them only of the day of my return. I didn’t want Ken and Christine and Amanda to meet me at the airport, to rush back into my life. I would make my way home, make a gradual adjustment back through the layers of my Minnesota life: English words, greenbacks, Viking-ish faces. Slowly, slowly I had to be debriefed, depressurized, to avoid a fatal case of the emotional bends.

  Doug and I rode in silence to the airport. In the rice fields on the way, bareheaded men drove motorized harvesters, spewing blizzards of straw in giant arcs toward the sun. The big yellow billboard that greeted me almost a year ago, HYUNDAI—FOR BETTER LIFE had been corrected to HYUNDAI—FOR A BETTER LIFE.

  At Kimp’o Airport, I saw some program-mates debarking from sleek black cars aptly named Princes. People kept coming out the doors endlessly: grandmas, uncles, cousins, aunts, like in the cartoons.

  The airline people said to come two hours early, and we did. There was nothing to do but wander around a huge oval-shaped, arched-ceilinged room that reminded me of a hockey arena—I almost ex
pected to hear the drone of a Zamboni.

  At the center of the room, people slumped on the plastic-and-metal chairs, KNN blaring from TV monitors above their heads. Doug returned from a gift shop with a keychain that had a bell with a drawing of Hodori, the Olympic tiger mascot on it. A smiling neonatal tiger—in a land where all the native tigers had been killed for their penises (a supposed aphrodisiac)—Hodori wore a traditional Korean cap with the long propeller-like ribbon on it. Tae Sunsengnim had worn such a hat at the music performance for her group, Sa-mul Nol-I, to which she had invited me. Even though the kaenguri position was traditionally reserved for a man, she had been the one to play the shining gong. While keeping perfect time with her chang-changing, she had spun her head around so fast that the twirling white ribbon eventually formed a perfect, breathtaking circle.

  The bell tinkled in my hand as we settled onto the uncomfortable chairs. Something smelled like old, ripe kimchi.

  The departure board trembled, like leaves catching a breeze, and the flap-flap-flap revealed a BOARDING sign next to my flight, a red light blinking urgently next to it.

  “This is it?” I said, rising.

  Doug didn’t say anything. He grabbed my bag and carried it to the line. He had assembled a collection of my favorite snacks: an ear of midget corn, ddok rice cakes, squares of roasted seaweed, and yes, o-jing-o, dried squid—I’d developed a taste for that salty, smelly, leathery stuff after all. I’d better finish everything before I landed, he advised, or customs would probably take it away. He had also written the address of his new boarding house in Seoul.

  It was at once easy and hard to think of leaving Doug. The way his eyes could look so deeply into my truest self. His angular face, with that sweet spot under his chin, the little frog’s belly of softness that perhaps only I knew about. I would miss him. But now that we’d found each other, we could go on, no matter where we were. I looked at him, my Doug, the features of his long-gone American father impudently pushing to the surface of his face.