“At home, don’t you all eat from the same bowl? You see at the restaurant how the ajuhmas put our leftover kimchi and stuff from the tables back into the pot, right?”
I wish he hadn’t told me that.
He took a draught and then handed me the dipper.
“I think I’ll pass—I’m not that thirsty,” I said, my tongue folding like cardboard in my mouth.
He shrugged. “Use your hands if you don’t want to use the cup. I mean, we came all this way. And hurry, the hiking club will be coming back—they’ll be here all day filling up their jugs.”
As if on cue, a yell of “yaw-HO!” drifted from down the summit. Where did those old people get their energy? Maybe there really was medicine in the water …
I stuck my index finger in the stream, which was freezing. The water looked clear, but I knew that didn’t mean anything. At the Motherland Program orientation, they had warned us about the water. More than half the country’s people lived in Seoul, we were told, so the overtaxed, outdated water system was teeming with bacteria. They told us to buy the two-liter jugs of purified water and keep them in our rooms, even for brushing our teeth.
Don’t drink water in restaurants unless you know for sure it’s been boiled. Don’t drink anything with ice in it, don’t eat ice cream from a street vendor, no raw fruits or vegetables that aren’t peeled, don’t eat at a neng myun restaurant unless you know for sure it’s clean.
“In July, watch out for chang-ma, too,” Bernie Lee had added. “When it comes, don’t open your mouth or let it fall on your head or you’ll go bald.”
Everyone had laughed in recognition and appreciation, except for me, who didn’t know what chang-ma was. I worried that it was some kind of malignant animal that fell from the sky—a rain of Wizard-of-Oz monkeys that pulled out your hair. Only later would I find out that it was the monsoon rains that came in the summer. The black exhaust from the belching buses, the industrial smokestacks, all this stuff that gave Seoul its odd, sulfurous light was sent back to earth in this impure rain.
Who knew where this yak-su water was coming from, how much acid rain it had absorbed? Upstream, there could be any number of animals adding fecal matter and E. coli bacteria. And what about the microbial dangers, parasites? Amoebic dysentery? Even the thought of allowing benign but wiggling organisms—hydras, paramecia—into my digestive system made me feel woozy.
The voices drew closer.
“Man-sei!”
“Yaw-HO!”
I cupped my palms and drank. The cold water thundered down to my stomach, my fillings jackhammered into my jaw. I opened my mouth to gasp, and an aaahhhh sound—the same one Ken makes when he drinks a cold beer in August—emerged. I plunged in again, drinking until I thought my stomach would burst. The taste was pure, primordial, as if I was resting my tongue on a cool, clean slab of granite.
Further up the mountain, we sat at a bench, a split log.
A gazebo-like wood structure was perched on a cliff a few hundred feet above us. I saw no paths leading up to it. Painted in muted greens and browns, it looked like a part of the mountain itself. I wanted to ask Doug Henderson if he knew what it was, but then decided I wanted to preserve my cover as a “normal” Korean for a little longer.
A warm breeze blew across us.
“So if you were born here, what’s the deal with your Korean?” he said.
“What do you mean, ‘what’s the deal’?”
“You sound like you’re completely unfamiliar with it.”
I thought I had been getting better. The last time Jun-Ho and I had met, he had complimented me on my pronunciation. I had had a wild thought of henceforth telling people my name was Sarah Kim and trying to “pass.” But reality was intruding.
“I’m adopted,” I snarled. “It wasn’t my decision to grow up in a white family in the fucking Midwest.”
Doug fumbled in his little rucksack, so I couldn’t see the reaction on his face—shock, pity, recognition? He handed me a mok kehndi. Mok kehndi, “voice candy,” were basically just cough drops, but I loved their sticky, weedy taste. Doug ate them constantly, he said, because the pollution made his throat scratchy. They were only a chunwon, a dollar plus change, for a whole green tin decorated with pictures of Korean medicinal herbs. I took the candy as an apology.
A shrill cawing from above us made me jump. I expected something big and black, Poe-ish, but a dove-sized bird, blue and white colors clean as a school mascot’s, landed at our feet.
“Do you know what that is?” Doug asked.
“A bird.”
“It’s a kach’i. They’re a sign of imminent good fortune.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I suppose my mother must have told me.”
“It’s funny.” The last vestiges of my anger melted away with the mok kehndi. “I never cared about Korea before. When I was in high school, they had these summer camps for adoptees to learn about Korean culture, but I never considered going. I mean, what did Korea have to do with me and my life? But now I kind of wish I’d gone, learned at least a little about Korea.”
“It’s not too late to learn,” he said. “That’s why you came on the Motherland Program, right?”
“I’m not sure why I came. Semester at Sea was a close second.”
“Well, here, I can teach you a song about the kach’i. No, wait, that’s just for the Lunar New Year. How about ‘San Toki’?”
“What’s that?”
“The little mountain rabbit song. Every single Korean kid knows it.”
San to-ki, To-ki ya,
O-di ro ka nyu nya?
Kkang chung kkang chung kkang kkang chung
ko geh ro …
The third time, he asked me to join in. I tried, then stopped.
“What’s up, don’t you like the song?”
“I don’t know what I’m singing.”
“San is mountain and toki is rabbit.”
“To-ki,” I repeated.
“O-di ro ka nyu nya is ‘where are you going.’”
I repeated.
“Yeah. And kkang-chung, kkang-chung is the sound of the rabbit hopping.”
“Gang-chung.”
“Kkang-chung,” he said. “Put a little more emphasis on the first ‘kk’ sound.”
“Ggang-chung,” I gagged.
“Better.”
He started again. Into my head came a picture of a rabbit hopping.
We sang together, softly at first, but then louder, finally with gusto, as if “Little Mountain Rabbit” were a sea chantey. The Sound of Music hikers stopped on their way to the yak-su to observe us, puzzled by two adults braying out a children’s song. One of the old men, however, clapped approvingly when we finished.
O-di ro ka nyu nya?
I sat back on the rough-hewn bench, savored the breeze. So this was springtime in Korea, a place that was both polluted and beautiful, with the smells of industrial pollution mixing with that of a living earth warming, of flowers and fertile insects. I looked past the smog to the overhead sky: intense, Windex-blue, once again almost close and solid enough to touch. The sight of it set off an intense feeling of longing—but for what, I didn’t know.
I glanced over at Doug Henderson, planning to make conversation to fill up the empty spaces. His face was also tipped up toward the wispy clouds. He was singing, silently, to himself and suddenly I knew he was no longer here, but somewhere far, far away. Had he, too, come to Korea to search for something? Was he like me and perhaps didn’t even know what that something was and was hoping that in time, it would make itself clear?
KYUNG-SOOK
Enduring Pine Village
1993
The river of memory flowed on. Its sights and sounds became particularly vivid to Kyung-sook in the quiet of the late afternoon, when a kind of calm settled over the market. By then, the most serious customers had come and gone, so the merchants, stomachs heavy from their lunch of cold noodles or dried-cabbage-leaf stew, stretched out for a nap. Coo
king Oil Auntie snored from a bench in front of her black-and-white TV. The medicine seller ducked behind a row of bottles in which obscenely forked ginseng roots floated in amber liquid. Others lay on stacks of burlap packing bags or nested in a pile of coats they were selling. Even the market’s chickens and cats scrounging in the garbage seemed to stop for a nap.
Except for Kyung-sook.
Even as a child, you hardly ever slept, her mother had told her once. When we brought you to the fields, you sang with the birds, all day. That’s why your milk-name was Chatterbox, my daughter.
She should have been a son.
There had been a son, born a year before the 6.25 War. Her parents had named him Jae-song, Having All the Brilliant Stars in the Sky. So overjoyed by his birth, they didn’t even give him a milk-name, like Dog Shit, which would have hidden from the gods how very precious he was to them.
When the family had fled south, away from the onrushing North Korean soldiers, they, with a group of refugees from another mountain village, had had to ford the Glass River at night. It was rumored that the area was infiltrated with enemy soldiers.
Someone had procured a makeshift raft, and a dozen people clambered onto the listing platform, two men in the back carefully poling it through the water.
Halfway across, Having All the Brilliant Stars in the Sky began to cry.
Kyung-sook’s mother attempted to give him her breast, but as she fumbled at the tie of her top-blouse, hands snatched the child away from her.
You want to get us all killed?
Keep the baby quiet!
Kyung-sook’s mother had wanted to scream Where is my baby?, but there was no sound in the moonless night except for the slup-slup of the river against the banks.
A flash of light on the other side, a sharp report.
Soldiers were indeed there.
Someone shoved the child back into the mother’s arms when the raft hit the opposite bank, the people scattering into the night amid gunshots.
Kyung-sook’s parents hid among the trees as shadows of soldiers came within meters of them. Kyung-sook’s mother kept her hand tightly over the child’s mouth.
We can’t all die this way, like dogs, she vowed.
Only later, under the safety and light of a refugee camp, did she see that Having All the Brilliant Stars in the Sky had been smothered. By her hand, or by another’s on the raft, she would never know.
“Madame Shrimp Auntie, my mother has sent me to pick up half a kun of shrimp paste!”
A little girl in pigtails stiff as calligraphy brushes stood at the entrance of the stall.
“Come on in, Child,” Kyung-sook said, getting up from her crate. She shook out the folds in her apron. “My aren’t you chak-hae, a good girl, helping your mother with the errands?”
The girl bowed modestly, and Kyung-sook took advantage of her averted eyes. The girl’s hair was dark as night, making the white sliver of a part look all the more tender and sweet. Her hands were grubby, but well formed, each fingernail an exact miniature of an adult’s.
Kyung-sook measured out the shrimp paste, making sure to add in a little extra, and gave it to the little girl. Then she glanced at her unfinished lunch.
“Here, why don’t you take this?” she said, palming her red-bean bun. She expected the girl to take an impulsive bite out of the sweet, as children were wont to do, but this girl received it respectfully with two hands, then placed it in her pojagi, which already had a bundle of Chinese chives sticking out of it. From a hidden pocket, the girl took out some crumpled bills and smoothed them before handing them to Kyung-sook.
“You’re not hungry?” Kyung-sook asked, disappointed. The girl’s clothes, she noticed, were slightly worn, but bleached clean and ironed. The bits of colored yarn tied to the ends of her braids attested to someone’s love and care.
“I want to share it with my mother and my little brother,” she said. “They like bread.”
Kyung-sook smiled and bent down to the girl’s eye-level.
“You’re a good girl who’ll have lots of good fortune, I can tell,” she said. “I could have become a face reader if I didn’t become a shrimp seller, you know—my readings are quite accurate.”
The girl lifted her head, and her eyes met with Kyung-sook’s for the barest second. A tiny, pleased smile played at the corners of her mouth before she again bowed modestly.
White-hot lightning shot through Kyung-sook’s body, igniting her to the roots of her hair, making her jerk upright. She caught her breath. She fought to control her expression.
“I must go now,” said the girl.
“Hm, oh yes, go along, Dear,” Kyung-sook said, barely daring to breathe.
What was this feeling?
The girl bowed and said, “Goodbye, Shrimp Auntie,” and Kyung-sook replied, as she did to all her customers, “Come again, would you?”
But behind her smile, her face still felt tight and hot. For the briefest moment, she found herself thinking what she would never let herself think before:
That girl could have been mine.
SARAH
Seoul
1993
“So how’s your yuhja chingu?” Jeannie said to Bernie. Sneeringly.
The new daytime drama, The Ill-Gup Class.
It seemed just yesterday that the studio audience had been left with the image of the two of them, bottle of soju in hand, going off into the neon sunset, to one of the “love hotels” near campus.
“She’s more than a chingu,” Bernie replied, with a sneer of his own. “She’s my ae in, my love thang.”
“Yeah, right,” Jeannie muttered. “She’s obviously just trying to get a free ticket to the States, just like those skanky yang kongju who hook up with the GIs.”
“Hey, watch it. Don’t you know that the majority of the Koreans in the States can trace their way back to some Korean whore who hooked up with a GI, Miss High and Mighty?”
“So how fitting for you!” she spat back.
“My dad came over through the special provisions made for professionals, since he was a surgeon. You told me your dad has a chang-sa—a grocery, wasn’t it?”
“That doesn’t mean shit,” Jeannie said. “He has an advanced degree in chemistry.”
“But if he’s stuck running a grocery, that sounds like a green card problem to me.” Bernie began humming that horrible Phil Collins song, “It’s No Fun Being an Illegal Alien.” Jeannie turned livid.
“Hey, soldier-boy.” Bernie, bored with Jeannie for the time being, looked toward Doug. Doug didn’t move.
Bernie said something to him in his quick, fluid Korean.
Doug replied in equally rapid Korean.
Now Bernie looked frustrated.
Thankfully, just then, Choi Sunsengnim burst in, overloaded with books.
She wearily dropped her load on the desk, mumbled something about the traffic, and started to take attendance.
We were all here, for a change.
At lunch at the dingy restaurant (ironically named Mujigae, “rainbow”), we saw the rest of our class again. Bernie gave Doug the finger, American-style.
“Don’t pay any attention to Bernie,” I told Doug. “Did you hear him tell Helmut his haircut made him look like a Hitler Youth?”
“Oh, I can handle guys like him,” Doug said. “I met a dozen Bernies in college. That was the first place I tried to ‘come out’ as a Korean, at the Korean club.”
“Your college had a Korean club?”
“Yeah, but they wouldn’t let me in it. The guy who ran it was this asshole, Pil-baek Bang. This guy drove a Mercedes, wore a suit and tie to class. First meeting, he says to me, ‘Why are you here?’ I said, ‘Because I’m Korean.’ And you know what he said to me?”
I shook my head.
“He said the club wasn’t for the half-breed sons of Western princesses.”
“Western princess?”
“Yeah. Yang kongju, a Korean woman who’s hooked up with an American GI. It’s a syn
onym for prostitute.”
“Um,” I said.
“In a way he hit the nail right on the head. My mother was a bargirl at a bar that serviced American GIs, and I am half white.”
“So … Um.”
“But unlike some bargirls, after Umma met Hank, my dad, she had sex with him exclusively—and they did marry.”
I blinked. So casual, as if he were discussing something suitably public—a stock trade, maybe—not a trade in his mother’s body.
“What led her to that, um, life?” I ventured.
You probably would have become a prostitute if you’d stayed in Korea.
He shrugged. “She was a peasant. She was really smart, but being the fifth daughter of the village junkman who called his kids One, Two, Three, Four, and Five and who liked his rice wine a little too much, being sent to school wasn’t an option. Working the bar scene was.”
“Oh.”
“So how old were you when you were adopted?”
“Eighteen months, I think.”
“Were you born in Seoul?”
“I guess. That’s where my parents lived.”
“What happened to your Korean parents—do you remember them at all?”
“They died in a car accident. I don’t have any memories of Korea at all.”
“Tell me about being an adopted Korean, then. What’s that like?”
My metal chopsticks scraped against the stainless steel bowl, my rice a half-eaten, ruined sphere. Why had no one ever bothered to ask me that, until this guy Doug, two steps away from being a complete stranger? Why was my being in the Thorson family presumed, assumed normal, and anything else was not?
“What’s there to tell?” I chewed and chewed until the rice disintegrated to liquid, my jaws clenching.
Sundays were our “family day.” We went to church together, we hunkered down at home for a big midday meal, before which we said long graces about how grateful we were. Grateful that Ken made tons of money so we could have our nouveaux-Victorian palace in this place that had no sidewalks. Grateful that Christine could buy all this food at Lund’s. Grateful. Full of grate. I hated that word.
Don’t talk to your mother like that! Don’t you know that when you first came, she stayed up all night, night after night, trying to feed you? You might have died, otherwise.
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