“What are you looking at?” I snapped.
“You look Korean,” he said. “But you sound exactly like a white person trying to speak Korean—it’s the weirdest thing.” His face was handsome in its own way: long, angular, hairless as a pear. I already disliked him.
“You’re a Twinkie,” he concluded. “Yellow on the outside, white on the inside.”
“Ber-nie,” Jeannie giggled. “That’s so mean.”
I rolled my eyes. He didn’t know the first thing about me: in a taxonomy of Hostess junk-food cakes, I went beyond Twinkie, I was a Sno-ball, the coconut treat that’s white to the core.
Some time after Rev. Jansen’s mini-sermon on whose daughter I was, I became the Fabulous Sarah Thorson, the daughter with Ken’s seaglass-blue eyes, Christine’s creamy complexion, pale cornsilk hair.
But are you saying that you truly believe you have blond hair and blue eyes—despite what the mirror tells you? An unbelieving shrink, from when I was ten. Is that why you keep trying out for The Sound of Music every year even though you must know they would never give the part to someone who looks like you?
How could it be otherwise? With the arrival of Amanda (who eventually landed the part of Gretl, the youngest Von Trapp daughter), our family became the living embodiment of the Scandinavian phenotype. I wanted to be included.
True, an accidental pass by a mirror, a store window, the bright-polished side of a toaster might yield a glimpse of a girl with black, straight hair, eyes the shape and color of apple seeds, a light spray of chocolate-chip colored moles across her left cheek. But those fleeting images I disowned. That girl’s Asian face was recognizable yet strange, like seeing your name writ large in an unfamiliar hand.
The lovely, fragmentary Fabulous Sarah Thorson was the one who explained away the dissonance of family pictures: Who—or what—was that dark stain in the middle of this American family?
Not the Fabulous Sarah Thorson: she comes from sturdy Norwegian- and Swedish- and German-American stock. Her speech is punctuated with Norwegianisms like uff-da!, and her Nana, who looks just like Grandma Moses, was born in Norway. At Christmastime the Fabulous Sarah Thorson stuffs herself with Swedish potato lefse and spritz cookies, even chokes down rubbery bits of lye-pickled Norwegian lutefisk herring, which will make her father, Ken, happy, for he is the Son of Thor.
I claimed stomachaches on school picture day. Christine despaired at the crooked parts in my hair, green balls of snot hanging from my nose. No matter what high gloss she could buff me to in the mornings, I acquired my own patina of gleet and ooze by afternoon.
“Sarah, don’t you ever look in a mirror?” she would sigh, scouring my face with a spat-on hankie as I sat in the back of the car on the way to yet another classical music concert or Ibsen play at the Guthrie Theater. Even now, when I sit in the back seat of a car, that maternal musk revisits me, that same intoxicating Joy-parfum-lipstick-wax-Mommy-breath-Johnson’s-baby-powder concoction I once discovered inside the bundles she mummified in yards of toilet paper, those white pillows hiding mysterious, rusty stains.
Yet, why did the spit-hankie never touch Amanda? Amanda with her blond curls neatly barretted off her face, scuffless Mary Janes; in the summer, she ran free under the radiant sun while Christine smeared me with a zinc-oxide sunblock the color of chalk. It was only those young summers when we rented that cabin out at Sand Lake that Christine let me enjoy the unadulterated kiss of the sun. That was back when Nana was still alive, when we still lived in that tiny house in Bliss Court, and when Amanda was still part of some cosmological future Ken and Christine couldn’t even (pun intended) conceive of. By the time we moved to Inwood Knoll, within the environs of the Eden’s Prairie Country Club, my hue had become her obsession. Thus the summers in whiteface, designated a nonsinging minstrel, the most useless kind.
But the Fabulous Sarah Thorson, I knew, tans a honey-gold, which makes her look even blonder, her seaglass eyes paler. I depended on her to get through the day. That time I had almost lost her made me realize that.
The last day of school in fifth grade. Our teacher had covered the back wall in brown kraft paper and told us to make a mural of our ideal summer vacation.
I drew myself as a stick figure, fishing rod in hand, sitting atop a crate (THIS END UP pointing down—humor where I lacked artistic talent). I was drawing in our Sand Lake cabin, when Merlin Gustafson muscled me aside.
“You need ching-chong eyes,” he declared. He reached a sweaty arm across me and rubbed a black crayon over my figure’s dot-eyes until they became a pair of heavy, horizontal lines.
Then, his encore: he pulled the corners of his eyes until the lids became razor slits, pulled until they turned inside out, displaying pink, moist undersides.
The Fabulous Sarah Thorson, exploding: blue eyes, creamy white skin, golden hair. Protoplasm splattering everywhere.
The bell rang. While my classmates streamed out into the larger world, I ran into the girls’ room, sitting fully clothed on the toilet, trying to shut out the voices.
Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees.
Ching-chong Chinaman
Ah-so.
Returning to the classroom, I dug through the Crayola box until I found the color I wanted: a deep, oceanic blue. Then I redrew my eyes as larger orbs, Merlin’s horizontal lines the circles’ diameter; when finished, my picture had eyes bigger than everyone else’s, a drugged, dilated-pupil look that satisfied me.
In Korea, however, everything has reversed. This morning, in a crowd of people hurrying to class, I happened to glance at the giant mirror posted at the entrance of the school. For a giddy, vertiginous second, I didn’t know who I was looking for, or who I would find. I had somehow smoothly joined this black-haired, dark-eyed crowd.
“So, iss dat why you never told us your last name?” asked Helmut, who came from Munich. The first day, the three students of authentic Korean stock had proudly rattled off their Korean names, surnames placed first in the traditional style: Lee Jae-Kwan (Bernie), Lee Jiyoung (Jeannie), and Kim Bum-Sik (Helmut). I just said, “I’m Sarah,” a habit acquired after hearing “Thorson, that’s a funny name for an Oriental,” ad nauseum.
“Hey Twinkie, do you even know your Korean family name?” Bernie, working my nerves. “All Koreans should know their family names and their ancestral clans.”
“My clan, I-ssi, is the Chunju Lees,” Jeannie broke in, giving Bernie a significant look. If there was an “in” clan, that, apparently, was the one. Almost a quarter of Koreans shared the name Lee, but these particular Lees could claim lineage reaching back to the beloved King Sejong, the inventor of the Korean alphabet, whose picture graced the ten-thousand-won bill. Apparently, for each family there was some kind of official document, a family register that recorded all the births and deaths and marriages starting from when the first Koreans climbed out of the Primordial Ooze.
“Mein klan is the Cheju-do Kims,” added Helmut.
Bernie looked at me with a cranky, hungry expression, as if suffering from some male version of PMS.
“Why are you even here?” he said. “It’s not like you’re going to go home and start talking in Korean to your pah-rents.”
“You don’t own Korea,” I said, scratching my nose with an upraised middle finger.
“Ooh, I’m scared of you,” he said. “Sunsengnim!”
“Lee Jae-Kwan-ssi?”
He spoke quickly in Korean, the only words I recognized were my name and “bad.” He was obviously tattling that I had flipped him the bird; however, in his re-creation of my crime, he raised a fist—thumb poking out between the first two fingers. Exactly the gesture I had made to the old crone that day I tried to buy some steamed bread.
Choi Sunsengnim looked in shock from the thumb to me and said, “Oh moh! Sarah-ssi, please! We must show respect in our classroom.”
“Bernie is the one who started the whole thing—” My voice involuntarily thinned to a whine. “He—”
“Please, Sarah-ssi. Of all th
e students, you have the most to learn. As I was about to be saying, you must have extra conversation practice. A friend of my brother’s wants to make his English better, so you two can do a language exchange. His name is Kim Jun-Ho, and he’s a student here at Chosun University, although right now he’s doing his mandatory military service.”
I opened my mouth to protest. This was the beginner’s class, for Christ’s sake, the class for people who don’t know any Korean. But even the nun, from Paris, had studied Chinese from when she had been a missionary in Hunan province. A goodly number of Korean words were based on Chinese ones, so she already had a solid vocabulary. She, for instance, didn’t have any trouble remembering the word for “car”: cha-dong-cha was “moves-by-itself-vehicle” in both Chinese and Korean.
Choi Sunsengnim handed me a telephone number. She would brook no objections.
“I will wait to hear from him, Jun-Ho Kim, how it was,” she said.
“Let’s get pudae chigae for lunch,” Bernie said, after class. Everyone else, nun included, seemed to think that was a splendid idea. No one turned to me and said, “Sarah, what are you doing for lunch? Want to come along?”
Sarah the misfit, even in her native country. How had it come to this, I wondered, that in the space of a single generation, I had become some kind of Darwinian reject, a fish with lungs, a duck-billed platypus. I wasn’t Korean-hyphen-anything, for what was Korean in me had become vestigial, useless. But at the same time, ching-chong eyes prevented me from claiming any kind of race solidarity with the nun—or with my so-called family, back in Minnesota.
All I knew was that if someone were to invite me, I would gladly eat poo day chee-gay, even if it was literally made out of poo, I would allow Bernie Lee to classify me as any preservative-and-lard-filled cake he wanted to, just so long as I wouldn’t have to eat yet another meal standing awkward and abandoned at the 7-Eleven counter.
The four clattered out without me.
KYUNG-SOOK
Enduring Pine Village
1993
Enduring Pine Village was Kyung-sook’s official ancestral village, but more tellingly, because she still lived there, had lived there basically all her life, it was also her ko-hyang, her hometown. The best way to know a stranger, any fool knows, is to know their hometown.
Enduring Pine Village was situated within the southern tail of the sacred Diamond mountains, almost within sight of the border with North Korea. It was a place of wildrushing beauty intertwined with a melancholy history, just like in the sentimental song:
I remember my old hometown,
a mountain valley where the flowers bloom:
peach blossoms, apricot blossoms, and baby azaleas,
what a colorful place it was …
Back in the Chosun dynasty, a geomancer had decreed that a new village should be erected “where the mountain peaks resemble a horse’s ears, and where the valley is encircled by ancestor pines.”
The horse-ear formation was found next to a grove of long-needle pines, the kind that bore the pale nuts revered as a delicacy and whose parasol-like shape was a staple of classical paintings. The elders noted this auspicious sign and made sure that the first structure built in this new settlement was a shrine for San-shin, the Mountain God who had so generously inspired the geomancer.
The town became known as Enduring Pine Village for its abundance of long-needle pines, blue-green pines, and the stately white-bark fir. Farmers marveled at how rice planted in the mountain soil seemed to mature overnight. Pregnant women received the ultimate blessing from the Birth Goddess: sewn bundles of bright red chili peppers hung from almost every family’s gate announcing the good news—sons.
And because the village happened to be situated at almost the exact midpoint between the capital to the south and the northern provinces, naturally travelers stopped at the village to meet and trade, and soon there was a booming business for Enduring Pine Village’s wine houses, which became famous for the pungent local mac’oli rice wine as well as the most beautiful, most witty kisaeng hostesses in all of Korea.
The spirits continued to offer their protections even during the terrible Japanese colonial period. No villagers lost their homes. No women—kisaeng or otherwise—were taken to the rape camps set up for the Japanese soldiers.
Even on the fateful March First, 1919, when villagers pulled out their taegukis, the forbidden national flags, and cried “Korea will live a thousand years!,” the Japanese did not retaliate with bayonets and murder as they did in other parts of Korea. When the Americans dropped their light-flashing weapons in Hirossi-ma and Naga-sagi, ending the war and the occupation, thousands of Korean slaves in Japanese munitions factories cried black tears and died in misery far from home, but none from Enduring Pine Village, such was its auspicious nature.
The villagers wondered later, of course, about the turn of Fortune’s wheel. Had they grown too complacent, full stomachs forgetting what it is like to be hungry? During the colonial period, everything Korean was forbidden, but villagers had gone into their homes and done their rites to the Korean gods in secret and at great risk. Now, as free men, the younger magistrates had been known to neglect San-shin’s shrine, especially during the period they were preoccupied with maneuvering Enduring Pine Village to become the county seat. Further, these same upstart magistrates, seduced by promises of education and Western-style medicine, welcomed the white missionaries, who openly declared their hatred of Korean gods; before anything else, the first thing the whitemen did to “help” the villagers was to destroy San-shin’s shrine.
Starting on 6.25, bombs fell from the sky. The North Korean soldiers seized Enduring Pine Village’s males—young and old—for their army, killing anyone who resisted, including sobbing mothers and grandmothers.
South Korean forces recaptured the village, but then the Communists took it again. The villagers were forced to flee once, twice, three times. During the Armistice, the Red soldiers retreated north through the village. What people came back to: at the village’s east end, the Shim family—father, mother, sons, daughters, the lastborn five-year-old twin sons—were found floating in macabre poses, rag dolls flung against a wall. The elder Shim, hedging his bets, had assisted both the Communists and the ROK governments—depending on which flag flew from the pole in front of town hall—so no one was sure who had tied them to a fence and shot them. More corpses unburied themselves from a hasty grave behind the high school. Starving soldiers had even broken into the mission and murdered two of the white nuns.
War changes everything. Many others never returned—killed, frozen, or starved to death. Neighbors settled feuds by turning people in as Red sympathizers, real or not. Of the ancestral yangban families, only a handful remained. Enduring Pine Village’s new inhabitants were refugees from the north or carpetbaggers—scoundrels and opportunists, or those with something to hide. No one knew, for instance, where Cooking Oil Auntie’s family had come from. They had appeared at the village gates almost a decade after the 6.25 War, speaking with a strange, harsh accent even though they insisted, somewhat haughtily, that they were from Seoul.
What did the future hold? The rice production had dwindled so much that during droughts, rice had to be imported from other parts of Korea. Every year, the soil grew poorer, more oily chemicals needed to be applied to the fields (and washed out into the rivers during the monsoon rains).
A few years before, Korea’s president, himself from a rice-growing village, came up with an idea to preserve Enduring Pine Village, like its neighbor, River Circle Village, as a tourist site, where the increasingly urban population might come to watch rice being grown the traditional way. The government had gone so far as to spread asphalt, six lanes wide, over still-arable land, to accommodate the tour buses and cars. But then a new president came into office, and the plans were scrapped. The expanse of asphalt sat abandoned, an immovable black sea on the southern end of the village.
Nowadays, many of the farmers left their farms and instead bo
arded a bus on the Days of Moon that took them to the battery factory in the new Satellite Suburb Village of Ho-Chun, where they would work for the week and return home on the weekends, carrying their chemical-saturated workclothes in drawstring sacks, their fingertips burnt clean of prints by the corrosives they handled.
As a child, Kyung-sook had been regaled with tales of the majestic courts, the educated literati of the old Chosun dynasty. She knew that her great-grandfather was buried in a special site at the foot of the sacred Horse Ear Mountain. She had been shown his headstone, a pagoda-like chinsa ornament marking his scholar-official credentials, the biography of his life—his schooling, his passing the Civil Service Exam, his government rank—all displayed in the gray stone.
This place was much more than just a random rice-farming hamlet, Kyung-sook’s parents told her, it was once an important trade and governmental center. But stories of the past meant little to Kyung-sook.
“I saw the Five-daughter Kim Granny coming out of the rice cake shop,” Cooking Oil Auntie remarked, sticking her head into Kyung-sook’s stall.
Kyung-sook, small rake in hand, continued smoothing the mountain of salted shrimp before her. The tiny, curled bodies pressed against the lip of the barrel.
“Oh, goodness, I just ran in here without even a ‘good morning,’ didn’t I?”
“Suit yourself,” Kyung-sook said.
“Well, ‘Good morning, Shrimp Auntie.’ There. Anyway, you’re not my superior in age are you? We can skip the formalities, don’t you think?”
Cooking Oil Auntie settled her wide ongdongi onto the upturned apple crate Kyung-sook used for a seat.
“Now, did you hear me? The Five-daughter Kim Granny was buying ceremonial rice cakes.”
“What’s so odd about that? She was just over at the fishmonger’s saying it’s time for the yearly chesa.”
“Oh, yes, Kim Granny makes a lot of noise about the ancestor offerings, but everyone knows the cakes are an appeasement for the last-one’s spirit.”
Somebody's Daughter Page 3