Somebody's Daughter

by Marie Myung-Ok Lee

  “I love you,” he said. “And I will see you again.”

  I laughed, wondering how he could think otherwise.

  I showed the attendant my ticket, my passport with the eagle stamped on it in gold. She gave it a cursory glance, then handed it back, put her hand out for the 10,000 “departure tax.”

  Then there was only Doug’s hand on my arm holding me to this place. In just a step, Korea would be receding to that place where my Korean mother was, the place just inside my eyelids, on the cusp of a dream, where we could not speak or touch.

  I moved. His hand fell away.

  I looked back into the waiting area, past Doug’s shoulders. The fantasy image I’d had of my mother—the long black hair, rosy lips, slender hands—those varied pieces flattened out and joined together to form a paper doll, its edges curling as the form caught an invisible breeze and went twirling, twirling, up to the high, domed ceiling of the airport, then out into the sky beyond.

  “Um-ma, anyong-hi kae say yo,” I said. Stay in peace.

  “Goodbye, Sarah.”

  I waved one more time to Doug, then entered the long tunnel. Because it curved, ten steps in I saw only wall when I looked back. In front of me, a large Caucasian man, a jarhead, toted an overstuffed Adidas bag, the counterfeit logo looking like marijuana leaves.

  “Never coming back!” he said, to no one in particular. “Never coming back to this stinking country. The U.S. Army can fuck this country!”

  In the plane, the stewardess spoke to me in Korean, asking me if I wanted something to drink.

  “Neh,” I said. “Coke-ah col-ah chu sae yo.” She didn’t blink, poured me a Pepsi from its red-white-and-blue can.

  The guy across the aisle looked familiar, Korean American. Military crewcut, slightly pale, thin, a Confederate-gray uniform banded in black.

  “Excuse me,” I found myself saying. “What’s the uniform?”

  He looked over at me.

  “West Point.”

  I stared at the ice in his Coke. Where had I seen him before? I needed to say something more to him, before the hole of cordiality closed and we became strangers once again.

  “What were you in Korea for?” he said, instead.

  “To learn Korean on the Motherland Program.”

  “And where are you going?”

  “Minneapolis.”

  He smiled.

  “You’re adopted, aren’t you?”

  I sat bolt upright, sloshing some of my drink. He laughed. “I can always tell. I am, too.”

  A heavyish blond woman strode up the aisle, smiled at me, then carefully navigated herself through the narrow airspace between the young man’s lap and the seatback, to dock in the middle seat.

  “My mother,” he said, and I saw the pieces of the puzzle falling together.

  “Gretchen Muckenhill,” the woman said. Now seated, she leaned over him to shake my hand. Our fingers could barely meet over the distance.

  “An adoptee, too, Mom,” the guy said.

  Mrs. Muckenhill’s face softened, like warmed wax. “And what are you doing in Korea, all by yourself?”

  “Studying Korean,” I said. I remained quiet a few seconds more, then asked the young man, “Did you find your family?”

  He laughed. “Wow, your Korean must be great if you can understand Korean TV,” he said. Then he shook his head. “No, we had some leads, that was it. There was someone who thought she recognized my baby picture, but no dice. But geez, we met so many nice people while we were here.”

  His mother nodded in agreement. “Oh, for sure. The Koreans are the most warmhearted, generous people, really. So many people gave blood. Such a shame there wasn’t a match in all that.”

  Now he was going to die, wasn’t he?

  “I’ll get my marrow tested, if it will help,” I said. I stared at him. There was always the chance, I supposed, that we were related. Maybe my birth mother’s sister also had a pregnancy she didn’t tell anyone about, and then this guy and I were cousins. Maybe I was related to any of a zillion Koreans I saw. Maybe I had been related to Doug, whom I had slept with. Or Jun-Ho.

  “That’d be great,” the guy said. “I’ll give you the number of the Cammy Lee Foundation, a marrow registry for Asian Americans, where you can get it done.”

  There were no outward signs of the cancer cells ravaging his body. Except for his thinness, which wasn’t exceptional, he looked untouched by disease. I wondered how many cancer cells, lurking in secret, somatic places, would mutate and divide on this twenty-hour flight home.

  In Seattle, at Customs, someone must have broken a jar of kimchi, because the kimchi smell was oddly worse than it had been at the airport in Korea. I imagined the smell swimming through my hair, dusting my skin like DDT.

  I noticed that Brian, the West Pointer could not lift more than a small flight bag. The thick wool of his uniform made up for the heft he must no longer have. His mother stacked their bags onto one of the few luggage carts around.

  She said uff-da! as she pushed hard to get the cart rolling. I followed behind, somewhat less burdened because Doug had helped me ship my heaviest things home.

  In front of me, two Korean ladies had two very sticky and very unhappy babies between them. One of the babies had hair that stood straight up, making him look cartoonishly frightened, the other had downy black fuzz that circled a bald spot at the top of her head like a monk’s tonsure. The women were loaded with multitiered luggage, tipping on flimsy wheels, and an overstuffed diaper bag.

  I ended up in line behind them. I tried to amuse the babies by making faces as we waited. The tonsure-headed baby rewarded me with a gummy, drooly smile.

  One of the ladies smiled at me in weary gratitude.

  “Beautiful baby,” I said.

  “Oh, they’re not ours,” said the woman, who was short and chubby and had an easygoing smile. “These little ones are going to meet their new families. We’re just their escorts.”

  “We get to fly at a discount this way,” said her companion, who had a stronger Korean accent. She was wearing a sleeveless shirt and I could see the scar from a vaccination, big and round as a mushroom cap, on her upper arm. “Say, are you Korean?”

  I pretended to need something from deep within my bag. I didn’t want to explain to them that I was one of those babies, grown up.

  Then my hand touched o-jing-o, smooth and dry and somehow set free from its plastic wrapper. I had completely forgotten about the food: ear o’ corn, ddok, seaweed. Suddenly, I wanted to cache it away, to have something of Korea when I was back on American soil. Now I needed a plan, an excuse for why I checked “no” on the box that asked if I was bringing any food or food products, fruit, soil, etc. into the country.

  The low-tide odor of the o-jing-o was starting to seep out of my carryon.

  A yellow light went on, urging me to step forward. A man with hard, buckshot eyes faced me. His expression suggested that he was looking for ways to keep me out of his country.

  I handed him my American passport and my form.

  “That your real name, Sarah Thorson?”

  “Yes,” I sighed.

  “What were you in Korea for?”

  “To learn Korean.”

  Tendrils of squid-smell were gently swirling around us.

  He hoisted my Samsonite onto a stainless steel table like they have at the vet’s. He asked me to unbelt it and open it. I sighed, again.

  He pawed through my clothes, fingers probing my underwear and the presents I’d brought back: a silk tie and an OB beer (“Korea Best Beer”) T-shirt for Ken, a lacquered box for Amanda, a very well done fake Chanel bag for Christine, and some traditional Korean green tea that I’d gone all the way to the Buddhist neighborhood of Insa-Dong to get. It was a special, uncured kind of tea, the leaves loose in a decorative wooden box, which, I noticed for the first time, said GLEEN TEA.

  “What’s this?”

  The man pulled out Choi Sunsengnim’s present, exposed the blade.


  “A souvenir letter opener.”

  “It’s a knife. You could hurt someone with this, young lady,” the man said.

  “Not you,” I mumbled.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said it’s just a souvenir.”

  “There’s a prohibition against bringing weapons into the country,” he said.

  I thought of it as a letter opener, but Doug proclaimed it a knife, as did this man. A chastity knife. I was reminded of one of the cultural field trips I didn’t go on, the Puyo Festival in July: it celebrated the three thousand court ladies in ancient times who committed mass suicide rather than face the penises of oncoming Mongol and Shilla armies. Not unlike ancient Rome’s Lucretia, raped, then driven to burying a sword in her viscera to “preserve” her honor. Women’s lives cut short because of things men did, or even just threatened to do.

  “Okay, keep it then.” There was something fitting to all this. Let me leave this totem behind.

  He dropped it in a plastic Ziploc bag, as if it were already evidence for a murder case. He closed my bag and waved me on.

  I hoisted my carryon onto my shoulder. Now I smelled like an open tin of sardines. I walked away, careful not to look back, careful to hide my smile.

  We landed, finally, in Minneapolis. Outside the window, planes waited patiently as livestock at their jetways; other jetways gaped empty as loneliness. The gray of the airport matched the smudged color of the clouds, floating brains in a washed-out sky. The exact scene from the day I left.

  Had I actually left and come back? Or had I nodded off and begun dreaming, my Korean trip yet to begin?

  The pilot cut the engines. Everyone rose at once, as if to give him a standing ovation.

  “Good luck.” The guy, Brian. His mother began to gather their bags.

  “I’ll go to the marrow center,” I promised, touching the slip of paper in my pocket. Something jingled from inside. It was the Hodori keychain.

  Brian nodded, smiled, but he looked incredibly tired, as if it took all his strength to lift the corners of his mouth. I was at once sorry I had imagined the cancerous cells in his body dividing and dividing as we flew, as if I might have inadvertently caused it to happen.

  Outside, the glare of camera lights. WCCO. WMIN. The Pride of the Northland. Balloons, signs, open-mouthed Minnesota grins and whoops. People in Vikes shirts. All for Brian, I imagined.

  Or maybe those babies. Twenty years ago, I was aware, Ken and Christine had movie camera’ed every minute of my “birth”—my passing from the womb of my Northwest Orient flight, through the tubular jetway, into the cold, bright blaze of the terminal.

  Dazed and seeing spots, I stepped into the gate area.

  To my left, a blond woman, tanned legs in pink shorts, held the tonsure-monk-baby in her arms. The short Korean woman was nowhere to be found.

  I had this thought that the new adoptive mother might look up and see me, that we might exchange secret smiles as I passed. But no, she was gazing at her baby, to the exclusion of everything else in the world. New baby, new life.

  But what was this baby’s life going to be? Was she going to grow up psychically untethered as I had, a tiny, brave astronaut floating in that airless void of uncertainty? To become an adult and not be able to know what parts were biological legacies, what was the result of habit and environment, what part of the self sang as pure, free improvisation?

  But we humans are resilient. We’re programmed to be able to pick things out of the rubble and make something new, aren’t we? Something possibly beautiful and lasting. Or edible. Pudae chigae, for example.

  Baby-girl, I wish you luck, I whispered as I passed. You’re going to need it.

  “Sarah!”

  The famille Thorson: mother, father, and biological daughter—shared genetic clay—were waiting, leaning on the gate’s railing.

  For the better part of a year, I had been among “my people.” Suddenly, this trio of Caucasian faces.

  This family has nothing to do with me.

  They are just some random, suburban Minnesota family.

  WELCOME HOME, SARAH! said the posterboard sign Amanda was holding. It had a Korean flag drawn on one side, the Stars and Stripes on the other. How irretrievably corny: Korean, yet American.

  “You’re here,” I called.

  “Of course, silly,” Christine called back. “We wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  She detached herself from the crowd to take a picture with her expensive autofocus camera. Amanda was smiling at me, waving, as she clutched the sign with her other hand. Ken looked, somehow, proud. His lawyerly eyes were watery, his mustache trembled.

  My legs suddenly became ionized. I walked faster, faster, closing the distance between us.

  Author’s Note

  I started writing the Sarah stories in 1992 and amassed a good number of them, but no matter what I did, the stories didn’t gel as either a collection or a novel. Slowly, I began to realize that another voice was struggling to be heard: Sarah’s birth mother. I ignored this call for quite a while, because I knew inevitably that I’d need to go to Korea. And beyond the usual hassles of planning and funding such a trip, finding a place to live, etc., I’d also somehow have to find some birth mothers, get them to agree to talk to me about the most traumatic experience in their lives, and I’d have to learn Korean well enough to talk to them! At the time I also had many urgent things occupying my mind: I was getting married, and my mother-in-law-to-be was dying of cancer.

  But the voice kept calling to me. Without much hope, I applied for a Fulbright Fellowship, calling my project Silent Mothers: The Story of Korean Birthmothers. Practically on the eve on my wedding, I found out that I had actually won it—funding plus other support for a year in Korea. My husband encouraged me to go, even if it meant we’d spend our first year of marriage apart. Three weeks later, I was in Seoul with little more than my Fulbright credentials (which gave me access to the U.S. Army bases) and some leads from my friends Brian Boyd and Mrs. Hyun-Sook Han, which eventually led me to Mrs. Sang-Soon Han and the Ae Ran Won home for women.

  Doing research for a fictional work is always tricky—what to leave as the real fact, what to fictionalize? For this project in particular, taking oral histories of the various birth mothers who agreed to be interviewed was both inspiring and heartbreaking. None of the birth mothers who spoke to me imposed restrictions on what I could ask, and they all freely offered so many brave and unsparing glimpses into their hearts (one woman even let me read her diary) that I can never thank them enough for this gift. They all said—independently—that part of their motivation for agreeing to speak with me, despite the stigma and secrecy that still exists, was that they hoped some fragment of their love would pass into the book and be understood by their birth children.

  The deepest hearts of these mothers, then, inhabits this book, and I send these women my everlasting love, gratitude, and admiration. Everything else is fiction. Kyung-sook is entirely my creation, as is Enduring Pine Village.

  So many people and institutions aided in the writing of this book that inevitably I’m going to forget to thank some very important people—and I apologize in advance.

  For financial support and research opportunities, I want to thank the J. William Fulbright Foundation, Yale University, Brown University, the Hedgebrook Writers’ Colony, and the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. The O. Henry prize panel gave me a lift by bestowing an honorable mention for one of Somebody’s Daughter’s original seed stories when I needed it most.

  Thank you to early readers Edward Bok Lee, Dean Jacoby, Michelle Lee, Ed Hardy, and especially Professor Heinz Insu Fenkl—mentor, oppa, all-around great guy. I am also thankful to Brian Boyd, Mrs. Hyun-Sook Han, Mrs. Sang-Soon Han, and of course, my mother, for opening doors for me in Korea, and to Professor Ok-Ju Lee of Seoul Women’s University for taking excellent care of me while I was there.

  The Sinunus—Karen, Mike, Chris, and Matt—for giving me a beautiful space
in which I wrote the final pieces of this book. Quang Bao and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop have always been there for me whenever I needed a shoulder, or a little shove.

  Thanks to the awesome folks at Beacon, Helene Atwan, my editor extraordinaire, and the rest of Team Beacon: Kathy Daneman, Tom Hallock, Joy Kim, Pamela MacColl, Lisa Sacks, Christopher Vyce, and all the hard-working sales reps. Lots of love to Charlotte Sheedy and Carolyn Kim—thanks for keeping the faith over the long haul.

  Thanks always to my family, Lees and Jacobys, to Karl, my first and last reader, partner in crime, keeper of my heart.

  Beacon Press

  25 Beacon Street

  Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892

  www.beacon.org

  Beacon Press books are published under

  the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist

  Association of Congregations.

  © 2005 by Marie Myung-Ok Lee

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  09 08 07 06 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is printed on acid-free paper that

  meets the uncoated paper ansiniso

  specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.

  Text design by Bob Kosturko

  Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lee, Marie Myung-Ok.

  Somebody’s Daughter / Marie Myung-Ok Lee.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Adopted and raised by Scandinavian-American parents in Minnesota,

  a Korean teenager returns to her native country to find her mother.

  eISBN: 978-0-8070-9722-9

  ISBN: 978-0-8070-8389-5 (pbk.: acid-free paper)

  [1. Mothers—Fiction. 2. Adoption—Fiction. 3. Korea—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.L5139So 2005

  [Fic]—dc22 2004025757

  Portions of this novel have appeared in slightly

  different form in: The American Voice, no. 39,

  1996; American Eyes (Henry Holt, 1994);