I was aware I refused to eat when I first came to America. But was that my fault? I was eighteen months old.
You don’t know what it is you have, don’t you know what your life would have been over there? You should be grateful.
Sundays. In Korea, that’s the day families emerged from their homes. Saturday, still a workday, but Sundays, mother and fathers, sometimes grandmothers and grandfathers, accompanied children to parks, to Lotte World’s skating rink and Bavarian Village, to museums. Sometimes they even outfitted themselves in identical clothes, say red-and-blue polo shirts, like some traveling athletic team. My greedy eyes would devour them.
The Motherland Programmers would also regroup. One girl always greeted a sun-browned uncle who drove a “Power Bongo” pickup truck filled with turnips or potatoes. Bernie Lee met a white-gloved chauffeur, one who had been known to wait for him for hours, wiping nonexistent specks of dust off the sleek black car with a feather brush. Sometimes even mothers and fathers visiting from the States arrived.
In the evening, everyone returned, logy from huge meals, toting shopping bags stuffed with persimmons, fried honey cookies, rice cakes, and boxes of canned fruit drinks with names like SacSac. As they said goodbye to family, ballasted by edible tokens of care and affection, I watched them, chin on my fists, elbows sore from being pressed into the windowsill for hours.
I realized then that I had been misguided in my envy of the people in Eden’s Prairie, thinking it was merely their whiteness I wanted. No, it was their knowing their place in the world, a complacency the Motherland Program students shared. In Korea, Bernie Lee became Lee Jae-Kwan. Then he could return to America and Princeton and being Bernie, for he had parents whose faces mapped where he had come from, his life made perfect sense. So, too, the lives of Jeannie from Illinois, Helmut, the Gallic nun. They all carried with them the solid stones of their past in one hand, and bright, shiny futures in the other. For me, everything was vapor. I had to take it on faith that my past even existed.
“What about your Korean family?” Doug said. “You must have had relatives, an extended family, siblings maybe.”
“I don’t know.”
“Your adoptive parents never told you anything?”
“I don’t think they know much more than that, either.”
“Well, now that you’re in Korea, don’t you want to find out?”
You’re afraid to face your feelings of being different, said the social worker (the self-righteous one, for whom I decided that “MSW” stood for Minority Savior Woman). And then you lash out at those around you, making quite a mess for everybody.
Sparing Christine and Ken’s feelings had never been foremost on my mind. I called them “Ken” and “Christine” (over their howls of protest) to show them I didn’t fully consider them to be my “real” parents. But I couldn’t fathom taking that next step, to consider being part of a Korean family.
And really, I needed to be pragmatic: knowing the past wasn’t going to change the present. Some undiscovered nugget wasn’t going to suddenly make me wake up white, or in a different house, in a different country. I would still be Sarah Ruth Thorson, American citizen, of 27 Inwood Knoll, U of M dropout.
“You were born here,” Doug said. “In Korea. Your story begins here, not in America.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.” Someone else’s voice. Sounding snappish, juvenile.
I looked down at my hands. Not the white, slender, cerulean-blue-veined hands I used to see. But ochre-tinted, almost tanned, the yellowish cast making the veins look slightly green, blue-green like the salty sea.
His words had cracked something open. All my stated reasons for being in Korea scudded away, clouds unveiling a full moon of certainty. I had known all this time, hadn’t I, the same way I had seen the sign on a calendar and known somehow that it was the Chinese sign for moon. Bright, spare, unmistakable.
“Maybe I do want to try to find out what happened.”
Me, Korean, for almost two years plus the nine months I was carried by my Korean mother. That made years of a history complete and separate from what I eventually became with Christine and Ken Thorson in Eden’s Prairie, Minnesota.
“I especially want to find my mother.” I was suddenly breathless. “I mean, I want to find out more about her.” Had I ever consciously thought about her, talked of her, since that day I wondered if I’d see her in Heaven, or Hell?
But I was talking about her now. Christine and Ken, an ocean away, couldn’t hear my treasonous words—nor I theirs. Amanda couldn’t say, as she had that day, in awe and wonder, Sarah, you’re fucking disowning us! Thanks a lot!
“Oh my God,” I said. I looked at my watch. “I forgot that I was supposed to meet this guy, Jun-Ho, for our language exchange.”
KYUNG-SOOK
Enduring Pine Village
1962
At last, the river of memory came to the flute, the taegum, which was where the story really began.
Kyung-sook was thirteen when she had found it lying at the bottom of an unused rice chest in the storeroom. Seeing this unexpected object, wrapped in brilliant, if crumbling, silk amidst a latticework of cobwebs and stray grains of rice, she had naturally picked it up, that knobby length of bamboo that felt strangely familiar in her hands. On a whim, she put it to her lips. And this is when her destiny changed.
Until then, she had merely lived her life, accepting its joys and hardships like a ship tossed about on a vast sea. She had never had, until that chance find, something to live for, a certain direction she wanted to follow. Now, all the necessary parts of her life—eating, sleeping, studying—became mere pauses before she would steal away again to the Three Peaks Lake to play this flute, eventually learning how to capture the quivering sounds of the wind and water, notes that filled her more deeply than any food.
At those times, in the place where the pines gave way to summergreen oaks and wild pear trees, Kyung-sook would feel she had held the flute in her fingers for only a minute—but then she would notice that the sun, which had been high over the three peaks in the mountain when she started, would be beginning its slow, somnolent descent over her westward shoulder. When she returned home, looking tired, her parents would beam at her and say, “Look at our Kyung-sook-ah, studying so diligently, a true Bae descendant.”
Occasionally some grandmothers wandering for ginseng in the fall or tender fern bracken in the spring would be attracted by the sounds and they would stop to listen.
This music, that beautiful vibrating sorrow, is the pulse of us, they would say. We have seen two wars, so much destruction. Yet, we are still here, Korea is still here, and we hope some day we will be allowed north to visit the sacred Mount Paekdu, the way our people used to when our beloved country was one land. Oh, the beauty and sorrow of our han. You have somehow managed to capture this at such a tender age.
Her audiences showed their appreciation by leaving her with mung-bean pancakes, fruit, or rice balls from the grannies’ own lunches as they walked away, sighing about what a shame it was that there weren’t more young people who appreciated folk music nowadays.
One day, a woman appeared on the ridge. She stayed a distance away, listening, but then, when Kyung-sook was finished, approached her.
It was her mother.
Kyung-sook gulped, moved to hide her schoolbooks, which were scattered disrespectfully nearby in the goose-grass.
But her mother didn’t scold her. Instead she set down the bundle of wild onion she carried on her head.
Music exists for the Huhr clan, she said, referring to her maiden family. It is in our blood.
It must be true, Kyung-sook thought. At every Autumn Harvest Moon Festival, people begged Kyung-sook’s mother to sing. And when the women assembled for the kangkang sullae dance, it was her mother’s true soprano that broke the first verse of the dance.
That taegum belonged to a great-great-great grandfather, Kyung-sook’s mother said, looking at the ancient instrument. She d
id not ask Kyung-sook where she had found it, only settled herself more comfortably on the grass.
Back in the Chosun Dynasty, when the arts and letters flourished, this man was a court musician, so renowned for his music that whenever he played, people from all over the province would travel to hear him, she went on.
The musician’s wife, however, had never heard her husband play a note. The man even practiced in a special insulated room that the governor had made, just for him.
When the wife complained that every peasant in the province had heard him play, and she had not, he answered, “Woman, how can I let you hear me play? You know that music is of a woman’s world—are not the kisaeng all given musical training? I am your husband. I cannot have you see me that way.”
The wife consoled herself by reminding herself that a musician made a good husband. He didn’t drink because alcohol might interfere with the exquisite sensitivity of his lips; he didn’t chase women because music was his only love.
Yet, every time her husband performed for an audience, she would hear about the heartbreaking music he produced, how even the rigidly classical songs rendered by his flute could make the strongest man break down and bawl shamelessly for his mother.
One day it was announced that an envoy from Japan would be visiting the Highest Order of the Provincial Authorities. The elders would be arranging different performances at court. Not least would be the woman’s musician husband.
I simply must hear him, this once, she told herself. I’ll just stay in the shadows, he won’t even know I’m there.
The woman waited until her husband left that night, and then she stole away to the great hall. She was awed by the architecture, the silk tapestries that hung from the walls. She delighted in watching the court musicians play the traditional instruments: the silk-stringed kayageum harp, the tiny p’iri flute, the paired-string violin.
Her husband, last. He came out in a red robe decorated with gold leaf and a black scholar’s hat. The wife had never seen him look so impressive, so imposing before. When some inner voice told him he was ready, he lifted the flute to his lips and began to play.
The woman cried, and cried openly. She was not particularly educated, but she had never heard such beautiful music in her life—autumn leaves falling into a rushing river, a maiden’s longing for her lover across the Milky Way—and it was her husband who was creating it! She was so moved she stumbled out of her place in the shadows. When she realized her mistake, she slipped back in without him seeing. But really, she thought, why shouldn’t everyone in the village see how proud she was of her husband?
That night, her husband, for the first time ever in his life, brought his beloved taegum home. He wrapped it in silks and carefully stored it away. The wife wanted so badly to talk about the music he had played, but she had to pinch herself, remind herself that no, she had not been away from the house.
The next day, when she went out to the well to get water for the morning meal, she found him. He was in his workaday white ramie clothes. Hanging from a branch of the sturdy pine tree just outside the door. The woman dropped her water crock, and, apparently raving mad, dove into the well, killing herself, too.
The children left behind were their ancestors, Kyung-sook’s mother explained. They had passed the flute down from generation to generation, every one of the Huhrs too afraid of the musician’s ghost to throw it away.
I won’t scold you for digging into the chest, her mother said, but now you know about the curse that goes along with the Huhr clan’s gift for music. I myself had been told many times I could become a famous p’ansori singer. But I thought to myself, where would that leave my family if I had to take to the road and travel? Each person in the family has a job to do. You, too, must put that taegum back where you found it, forget about it, and focus only on your studies.
Kyung-sook said she would. But at the very core of her being there was a tiny ember, growing ever brighter without her even giving it breath to fan it.
SARAH
Seoul
1993
I wasn’t sure if Jun-Ho Kim would still be at the Balzac, forty-five minutes after the appointed time, but he was there at the glass-topped table, a smile on his face. I apologized, and apologized again, not quite wanting to admit that I had simply forgotten. He didn’t press me for an explanation, instead, he seemed impressed that I was wheezing and gasping, clearly having run all the way over there.
After I sat down and gulped some water, he started our session by telling me that he had only three more weeks available for our meetings. His battalion was moving out to an army base called Camp Ozark in one of the northern provinces, and he was going to be a KATUSA—Korean Augmentation to the U.S. Army—working and living alongside American troops for his military duty. Since all young men had to go into the military for two years, the KATUSA program was considered to be a plush assignment—better food, a chance to improve one’s English, a chance to wallow in beloved American pop culture—instead of living in a Quonset hut in the middle of some potato patch out in the country, where your superiors could beat you on a whim. You had to have connections or be very, very smart to be a KATUSA. I think Jun-Ho was the latter. His father was a low-level salaryman accountant, he’d told me.
I was happy for him, but even more, relieved for me. The end was in sight. I managed to gamely stumble on in Korean until it was time to switch.
“What is the interest in your life?” Jun-Ho asked.
“I’m going to try to find out about my mother—my Korean mother,” I announced, feeling a bit of the giddy boldness of revealing secrets to a stranger on a train. In three weeks, I’d never see him again.
“But you said your Korean mother is dead?”
“She is. But I’ve decided to find out about her, who she was—about how I came to be adopted, see if maybe I can find some family.”
“How are you going to do this, this research?”
“I’m not sure yet, but I know the name of the orphanage.” I had once seen it on a mailing, even though normally Christine spirited such things into the garbage, right away. The adoption agency had been announcing a fundraiser for the “Little Angels Orphanage”—could someone come up with a more awful, euphemistic name? I remembered thinking.
“Then call on me if you have need for helps,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
Jun-Ho’s face closed on itself, folding like those little pleated leather coin purses that you squeeze to open. “It isn’t, I will keep it in my mind? I think you will need a possessive article.”
“No.” I was suddenly conscious that while he had always meticulously corrected my Korean, I’d been letting his most egregious mistakes parade on by. I parsed the sentence on an imaginary blackboard:
I’ll keep it in mind.
I’ll keep it in my mind.
It revealed nothing except that the English language could be utterly illogical and ridiculous.
“I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s just ‘I’ll keep it in mind.’”
He reached into his breast pocket and removed a small notebook. The pages, spiral-bound cards, neonatal kitten cartoons and photo-stickers of Meg Ryan on the cover—very seventh-grade-girl locker interior.
“I will … keep … it … in … mind,” he wrote, letters slightly curvy and broken, as if he were writing in Cyrillic. I felt like advising him to ditch the Hello Kitty before going to Camp Ozark with the American yahoos, but I couldn’t find the right words to explain why.
“I’ll never learn English,” he said with a chuckle, snapping the notebook shut. “It’s too hard.”
When the hour was over, I tried to pay, but Jun-Ho made a gentle scolding noise in the back of his throat.
“In Korea, the man always pay,” he said. “The world belongs to man, so man must pay.”
Korea is a man’s world—that’s what Bernie Lee said, gleefully, every time he described to us how his new girlfriend Mi-Sun—a genui
ne Korean-Korean—delivered home-cooked meals to the dorm, shined his sneakers with white shoe polish, did his laundry by hand.
“Okay, go ahead and pay,” I said to Jun-Ho. “After all, Korea is a man’s world.”
“Korea is a man swirled?” Hello Kitty reappeared. “Is that a common expression in America?”
He didn’t understand why I was laughing.
SARAH
Seoul
1993
It was as simple as that.
114, Directory Assistance, called by Doug, a number found for the Little Angels Orphanage.
The number, the secret code, the magic combination to the lockbox of my past. But for two days I stared at that slip of paper pinned on my room’s bulletin board, paralyzed.
This was ridiculous. Gathering handfuls of silver won pieces, I went downstairs to the pay phone.
A woman’s disembodied voice.
“Agichunsakoahwonimnida.” I reflexively hung up.
More coins, dialed again.
“Agichunsakoahwonimnida.” The same woman.
Panic seized me. Why hadn’t she said hello the way we learned it in class, yo-bow-say-yo? Why didn’t the Korean I heard ever leap and sing, kkang-chung, kkang-chung, like the song about the mountain rabbit?
A dwindling pile of won pieces.
“Agichunsakoahwonimnida!”
How was I supposed to answer that?
A pause.
The line, dead.
I clutched the phone. I needed to talk. The last of the won fed into the pay phone’s maw.
“Agichunsakoahwonimnida!!”
“My name is Sarah Thorson,” I choked. “I’m from America. I was adopted from the Little Angels Orphanage. I want to find out about my birth family, especially my mother. This is the Little Angels Orphanage, isn’t it?”
She responded in loud Korean, irate words that drove away any clinging bits of the language in my head. I couldn’t even remember how to say, Is there anyone who can speak English? or Please help me. I could only wait for her to finish saying what she was going to say. When she did, she hung up.
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