At lunch, I asked Doug if he could call for me.
“No,” he said to my surprise.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want such a huge responsibility. If you want to do it right, get a Korean native speaker. Why not ask Choi Sunsengnim?”
I cringed, picturing Choi Sunsengnim, fingers rifling through the helpless pages of my history, how she’d exclaim oh-moh! if she found something juicy.
“But Doug, I’m sure you’d do fine—you’re the best speaker in the class.”
“Sarah, I’m a Korean kindergartner who swears really really well. I don’t know the word for ‘adoptee’. I only knew ‘orphanage’ because my mother used to threaten to put me in one, when I got on her nerves.”
“You could use the dictionary.”
“A reminder, I can’t read—that’s why I was kicked out of Level Three. I wouldn’t be able to write down what the orphanage people are going to say—I’d miscommunicate things. I’m sorry. I do want to help you.”
“Do you?” Besides that day he taught me the song about the mountain rabbit, Doug would never practice Korean with me even when I risked embarrassment by venturing something in my horrible Korean first: when he showed up to class one morning with a ripped hole in his pants, I looked at his bloodied, exposed knee and said, “Uh-tuh-kae?”—how? He told me in English about going up to T’apkol Park at daybreak to catch a glimpse of the elderly men doing calisthenics together, of tripping on some stone steps. In contrast, when I had said, almost unthinkingly, to Bernie when he held the classroom’s door open for me: komapsumnida, thank you, he—at least—had replied kurae, the Korean version of de nada.
“You always say you’ll help—then you don’t,” I accused. “When Jun-Ho leaves, I won’t have anyone to practice Korean with.”
“I can’t speak Korean to Americans,” he said. “You’re ‘American’ to me.”
“What?”
“The way you speak Korean, your accent. Korean’s always been dangerous for me—when I was growing up, my dad beat me every time he caught me speaking Korean to any Americans.”
I caught my breath.
“He couldn’t stand seeing me, his kid, open his mouth and have gook-speak come out. Once, I accidentally greeted one of the staff sergeants in Korean—that’s how this happened.” He gestured toward his left eye, the one that looked “sad.” When I focused on it, I saw how it hung slightly lower than the other, a gem jarred from its setting.
Oh moh! I wanted to say. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” I said, instead.
He smiled the beginning of a wicked smile. “You’ve got to work on your accent. You sound like the goddam base chaplain who learned his Korean from Berlitz.”
“You know,” I said. “There actually is a word I can say with a proper Korean accent.”
I knew he wouldn’t believe me. My inability to correctly pronounce any Korean word had become legendary in the Motherland Program. The language turned like meat in my mouth, the sharp corners of the letters rounding, proper intonations breaking free of their moorings. What came out of my Americanized, hybridized mouth was both comic and grim, a Babelized language of loss that would cause Choi Sunsengnim to sigh in despair, Jeannie to giggle behind her hand, Helmut to say “Ach!” The nun, I hope, prayed for me.
But there was a word, ddong—the word for crap, merde, shit—that I could pronounce. I had few opportunities to say shit in class, but in the safety of my room, I would sometimes say “ddong, ddong, ddong” to the walls, wondering how was it that I could say ddong when I couldn’t even manage the dd sound: in my mouth, the word ddal, “daughter,” weakened to dal, “moon,” or even further to tal, “mask.”
It was only when I said ddong that the sound came from someplace else, from a Korean-run sound factory that produced that exact dd sound, the resonance of a church bell in the moment right after its tense and waiting surface has been struck. In this way, the word for “shit” stayed itself and didn’t become the word for “East.”
“Ddong.” I said, expecting a laugh.
“You said that perfectly, you know.”
He was deadly serious.
I shrugged.
“You must have memories,” he said.
I shook my head. Where ddong had come from, I hadn’t the faintest clue. Looking into my past was like looking into dark water. I wondered what Amanda’s memories from eighteen months were like. But then it didn’t matter: she had flash photos, home movies, eyewitness stories giving light and color and shape to the murk.
“Sometimes, I’m afraid I’m going crazy here,” I told Doug. “I don’t know what’s real, what’s not real, what’s memory, what’s pure projection. I have these flashes: mandu dumplings, I know these from somewhere. But if I really sit down and think, I know the dumplings from General Tsao’s, this Chinese restaurant in Minneapolis. Same way, that day we were up on mountain, I had this flash—I’ve been here before—but we don’t have mountains in Minnesota and I’ve never been out West to see the Rockies—isn’t that crazy?”
“No, that’s not crazy,” Doug said.
My fingers, grown slippery with sweat, couldn’t contain my metal chopsticks. They hit the table, then slid to the floor. The ajuhma glared when I reached over to the container for a new, possibly clean, set. Doug showed me again the proper way to wrap my fingers around them, his hand covering mine like a paw.
“So what are you going to do about contacting the orphanage?”
I bit my thumbnail.
“Do you think if I studied really hard this week, my Korean could get good enough to do the calling myself?”
His answer: a laugh.
SARAH
Seoul
1993
“You will pick an afternoon class for your elective,” Choi Sunsengnim told us in English, to make sure we—I—understood. “You can choose between traditional music, tae kwon do, ceramics, or remedial pronunciation.
“Sal-ah-ssi, I think it would be best for you to participate in the pronunciation class,” Choi Sunsengnim said, when the sheet arrived on my desk.
I felt my usual irritation at her meddling, but then I reminded myself: the orphanage was there, presumably with some real, solid information for me. By the time we started the elective classes, everything could be different. Maybe I’d find some of my family, and I’d start living with them. Once I began sleeping in a Korean bed, eating Korean food made by familial hands, everything Korean about me would come back naturally, I was sure. Maybe I’d even leave the Motherland Program, come back as the best speaker in the class.
I put my name under the pronunciation class and smiled agreeably at Sunsengnim.
KYUNG-SOOK
Enduring Pine Village
1963
This flute would take her out of the village.
She didn’t know where, or when, but she sensed a larger future waiting for her beyond the craggy mountains, beyond their flowering valley.
Would she be like Yongsu and merely disappear?
More likely she would leave on her own two feet, in the light of day, as her imo had done before her. But unlike Imo, she would return in glory and acclaim after having grasped her singular destiny as a musician.
Kyung-sook’s aunt, her imo, had been the first of the Huhr clan to ever leave the village, and she had never returned. She had been driven out because of her love for the whiteman’s god, Christo.
Imo was the only Christo-follower in all the generations of a clan that had always worshipped the Lord Buddha, kept up the ancestor-worshipping rites, and—something they tried hard to keep secret—occasionally dipped into the shrouded crevices of shamanism.
In fact, when Kyung-sook’s mother was sixteen, she had fainted upon hearing some harvest-time changgo drumming. Suddenly, she had risen up and begun to dance wildly, foaming at the mouth and claiming in a guttural voice that she was the Sauce-Pot God. The local shaman, observing this, had remarked that she could become a shaman priestess, a mu-dang, if she
allowed the gods to descend on her. Her parents were horrified. Most people thought of shamans as disreputable types who dwelled on the margins of proper society. Shaman priestesses were known to tear off their clothes or simulate sexual acts during a kut, they shamelessly extorted money from the sick, the desperate. Becoming a mu-dang was out of the question for someone from a respectable family.
From time to time, however, Kyung-sook’s mother still experienced fainting spells marked by a strange voice muttering prophecies that people took careful note of—because they almost always came true. Sometimes when this happened, her parents would beat her or plunge her in water to make the voices stop. But when they did, her skin would bloom with an angry rash, as if the spirit were determined to come out somehow.
In an attempt to break this cycle, both Kyung-sook’s mother and her sister, Imo, were sent to the missionary school, which had declared war against such earthy paganism and, as an added incentive, provided its students a free daily meal.
Of course, the main mission of Our Holy Father School was to convert children to become Christo followers. Kyung-sook’s mother easily ignored the gibberings of the ladies in black-and-white robes that only showed their rubbery faces. They showed her a picture of a whiteman and said in bad Korean, “This is Christo, your Father,” and they slapped her when she laughed and said, “No, my father is the man out in the rice fields.”
Sometimes the somber missionary man would come out and make her partake of acrid red liquid and dry crackers, saying, amazingly, that those foodstuffs were Christo’s blood and bones. At other times, they forced her to stare at pictures of Christo, this time bloodied and hanging from two joined pieces of wood. One particularly ugly image was of his face, blood streaming from some sharp brambles on his head, eyes rolling upward, his mouth in the middle of a ghastly scream.
Kyung-sook’s mother remained unmoved as the nuns yelled at her in more bad Korean about this sulfur-smelling place called Hell where everyone who didn’t follow Christo burned up in eternal torment. Then they tried to beat the stubbornness from her, but she was used to blows at home and took her punishment without expression.
Once, she was supposed to be praying in front of a man-sized statue of Christo on the cross-pieces. She dutifully murmured the meaningless words, her hands pressed palm-to-palm, elbows out, the same way she prayed at the Buddhist temple.
If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it, one of the nuns said.
The gilded, pierced body of Christo began to tremble and shake, even as Kyung-sook’s mother continued to mumble, “Ow-er Hebben-ree Fad-dah …”
Then, the arms of the figure flew off and crashed to the floor.
The devil! the nun screamed. It could only be Satan who could manage such a thing. Kyung-sook’s mother was banished from the school.
But Imo was different.
She loved hearing the stories of Christo, how he healed the sick, how he hated the tax collectors and other bad men yet welcomed the prostitute who came to him with a pure heart. Those bloody portraits of him caused her to weep when she learned how Christo had suffered on the cross—for her and all Christo-followers. During Communion, she would find her heart singing, expanding as the magic wafer melted on her tongue, and she thought of how through this suffering Christo became an essence, a pure light.
The Huhr matriarch, of course, was furious when Imo declared she was renouncing Lord Buddha and her venerated ancestors, even going so far as to declare that other members of the family should do the same. The matriarch had wanted to stop the shaman cycle, not have Christo-follower children. She immediately hired the local shaman to perform an exorcism. The mu-dang danced to exhaustion, shaking rattles and hitting gongs in front of Imo’s face—to no avail. The mother then called in the more powerful River Circle shaman, one who, upon entering the house, immediately detected the presence of Christo, and without any preparation at all, fell into a trance and began beating Imo with her fists, shrieking at the spirit of Christo to come out. She sacrificed a pig’s head, she danced in bare feet over sharp scimitars. But each time she tossed the divining fish, waiting for its head to point out the door, signaling that the spirit of Christo had left the house, it did not. It always pointed back at Imo.
When Imo left Enduring Pine Village, her own mother did not say goodbye to her. Imo traveled to Seoul with few possessions other than the Bible the nuns had given to her, the one that had her Christian name, Mary Rose, inscribed on it in gold powder, as she had been their biggest success.
Destiny, woo-myung, turns and turns on a cosmic wheel.
“We are prepared to send you to college,” Kyung-sook’s parents told her. “Because our family has no sons. If you pass the entrance exam, you may go. Your imo in Seoul, though long estranged from the family, has agreed to lodge you.”
SARAH
Seoul
1993
Eureka! I had devised a system for conquering Korean, a system for memorizing words. French, at least, had cognates with English: Liberté, fraternité, egalité. And Spanish was cognate city. Producto de México.
So I created my own for Korean. Oo-yu, the word for milk, became (m)oo-yu. And so forth.
In class we had been asked to name a family member we liked. Bernie had shown off with “I like my X” (X, a long word I’d have to look up later, which turned out to be “mother’s brother’s wife”). At my turn, I said I liked my harmony. My grandmother. My perfect cognate.
Nana Thorson was the one who had taken care of me after Amanda was born. Amanda, milkweed fluff for hair, eyes that turned from transparent to a clear, devastating blue. The house had been packed with visitors, as if the Christ child had been born here.
At first, I was scared of Nana, of the way she looked at me—as if I had done something wrong. But she warmed up, and we had tea parties where she’d happily pretend to quaff the grass-clipping-and-dirt tea I’d made her. When my irritating Aunt Connie (a neighbor, not a true aunt), the one with the chicken legs, would come over, exclaiming over Amanda’s “angel hair,” saying “You can see whose daughter she is, that’s for sure,” Nana would call me over with a secret curl of her ring finger.
“Sarah,” she’d whisper. “Did you know that your hair is the exact black-purple of a blackbird’s wing?—I can’t imagine anything more beautiful!”
She used to tell me how the lakes in Minnesota were formed in the footprints of Paul Bunyan’s great blue ox, Babe. And she’d sing me to sleep with this nonsense song that sounded like bya-bya, litten gurren. It wasn’t until she died and they put coins on her closed eyes and her frail white-haired friends came over to sing some hymns in a strange language that I realized she had been singing to me in Norwegian.
“Harmony is what you use in music.” Bernie rolled his eyes. “Harlmoni is grandmother.”
Some kind of cog in my brain slipped. I wanted to stand on my desk and release my rage. Nana, gone, just like my nascent, budding Korean tongue.
“Fuck you, Bernie,” Doug said, his cold expletive turning my scorching rage into a manageable, tepid goo. “Sarah, you’re doing much better—you just need a little time and practice.”
At the Balzac Cafè, Jun-Ho ordered coffee. The waitress returned with the usual pot of hot water, a small paper tube of Maxwell House Instant, a larger one of Cremora. You mixed the two powders into a cylindrical glass, added the hot water, and stirred it with a long swizzle, as if the whole thing was a chemistry experiment, searching for the formula for the world’s weakest coffee compound. I nursed a ginseng tea that I’d tried in vain to sweeten with three spoonfuls of sugar.
“What did you do this week?” he asked in Korean.
I stared back at him.
“What did you do this week?”
“I understood what you said.” I was furious, again, but I didn’t know at whom. All I could think was, if I could remember ddong, I could remember other words.
What did you do this week?
No Korean words cam
e to mind.
“Korean food is spicy.” I parroted a phrase I’d memorized from the lesson.
“Yes, it is spicy,” Jun-Ho said, without missing a beat.
He said something else that I didn’t understand. I cocked my head at him, pushed one ear forward, as if all my trouble was in the hearing, a physical impediment.
“What I said: all my life I want to visit to America to say hello to the big green lady.”
“Big green lady?”
“You know, like this.” He toasted me with his coffee, Cremora’d to a leisure-suit beige.
“What are you talking about?”
“The big green lady, the freedom lady. The independence lady.”
“Oh, you mean the Statue of Liberty?”
“Yes, Statue of Lib-ah-ty.” Hello Kitty came out again.
“Liberty,” I said. “Li-ber-ty.”
“Libahty. Thank you, Miss Sarah. I am noticing some probulem with English words with facing consonants. Thank you for your helps.”
“Actually, I need some helps, too.”
“Okay, what helps?”
“Remember how I said I want to find out about my Korean mother? I called the orphanage, and I, um, don’t think they speak any English.”
“You want me to do the telephone?”
I nodded with relief. I gave him the piece of paper on which I’d written the number of the orphanage, my full name, Ken and Christine’s names, our address, the year I was adopted, my birthday.
“I want to go there and look at my file as soon as possible.”
He studied the paper.
“Okay, you wait.” He made his way toward a bank of phones lined up like slot machines at the entrance of the café. I couldn’t help following him.
From his wallet he extracted not coins, but a credit card that had a picture of Mickey Mouse on it. Almost no one used coins at public phones, I’d noticed. The card seemed much more convenient and advanced. Everything over there will be very different than what you’re used to here, much more primitive.
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