“This is the changgo,” she said, holding up the hourglass-shaped drum. “It’s a staple for farmers’ music and p’ansori.
“This is the puk, the barrel drum, two striking surfaces. You can hold it like this, or strap it on.
“This gong is the kaenguri. The kaenguri player sets the rhythm for the others.”
Last, she held up the flute.
“This is a taegum, the Korean transverse flute. Six finger holes, a membrane hole for the vibrato, the seventh hole just for show.”
“Why is that hole there if don’t you use it?” someone asked.
“Ceremonial value, for Ch’ilsong, the Seven-Star Goddess,” Tae Sunsengnim said, as if she were a bored docent in a museum.
She spent the rest of the time scribbling music on the blackboard and teaching us rhythm patterns that we tapped out, ta-ta-ta-tta-tta-tta, with pencils. I knew nothing about notes or bars or measures or rests, while all the other students seemed to be mini Yo-Yo Mas. So intent on following the music, at least, that they seemed not to notice, or care, how lost I was.
SARAH
Seoul
1993
The communal phone in the hall rang, early in the morning.
The sound of flip-flops making a slap-squish slap-squish sound on the floor.
Jeannie’s voice floated down the hall, yobosayo? When she spoke Korean, her voice turned soft, lilting, so feminine that she suddenly became a courtesan in a long-ago Korean kingdom, not the girl who had screeched expletives at Bernie.
In Korea, everything was changeable in the blink of an eye.
A knock.
“Sarah? It’s the Stamp ajuhshi downstairs. He said there’s an international call for you.”
“For me? International?”
The Stamp ajuhshi handed me the receiver of the phone at the watchman’s station. It was heavy, like a dumbbell, and smelled of hair oil.
“Hello?”
“Sarah, is that you? The connection sounds so clear!”
Christine.
“Yes, it’s me.”
“You know, Daddy and I have been trying to call you forever, but the person who answers the phone doesn’t speak any English. We haven’t known what to do for weeks!
“So this time, I just kept saying, ‘Sarah Thorson, U.S.A., Sarah Thorson, U.S.A.,’ and I guess we got through.”
“Is Ken there, too?”
“No, your father’s working late at the office. So are you okay, how is everything?”
“Everything’s fine. It’s early morning here.”
“Are you liking the program? Learning a lot?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“Are your accommodations okay? Are you finding things to eat? Do you need me to send you any more snacks?”
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “In fact, food here is cheaper than in the States—a chunwon can buy you ramen, a whole tin of mok kehndi.”
“A what can do what?”
“Oh, a dollar. For a tin of candy.”
“We’ve been so worried about you, sweetie. We didn’t even know if you’d gotten there okay.”
“I meant to call. It’s just hard to figure out the system.”
“You could write.”
“I could.”
“Are you okay, sweetie?”
No, I was going to say. I’m not okay.
“My Korean birth parents—” I said, half statement, half question. I thought I heard her suck in her breath. This wasn’t the right time to let it slip, I had to hold back. But the questions still came.
“How did they die again, my Korean mother and father?”
“Sarah, are you okay? You’re starting to worry me.”
“How did they die again?”
“Honey, you know it was in a car accident.”
“How did you find that out?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I think it was in your file.”
“So if it was in the file, did they have the names of my biological parents, or any relatives?”
Pause.
“I don’t think so. When a child is given up for adoption in Korea, parents—even dead ones—relinquish all rights. So they don’t keep a record of these things.”
“Could I see a copy of the file?”
“Sarah, I just wanted to call to see how you’re doing over there, not get the third degree. I’ll look for your paperwork—but I’m not sure we still have it.”
“This call must be costing a fortune.”
“It’s okay. I love hearing your voice. Are you sure there’s nothing else I can send?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Well, I miss you.”
“Say hi to Ken and Amanda.”
“Daddy misses you, too. And Amanda.”
Silence.
“Sarah, I love you.”
An “awk!” in the background. Hubert the macaw must be on Christine’s shoulder. His feathers would be glinting red like a new paint job on a sports car. I pictured his beak, two cashews coming together, gently nipping Christine’s ear.
“Sarah? Sweetie?”
The Stamp ajuhshi, leaning back into his flimsy chair, staring dreamily at a package plastered with about twenty “love” stamps, jerked his head up at the sound of the receiver crashing down on the battered body of the black phone.
I would later blame the cutoff on a bad connection.
KYUNG-SOOK
Seoul
1972
Maybe none of that tragedy would have happened if she had never left school. But Kyung-sook couldn’t ever know for sure. In life, it was impossible to spin out all the possibilities.
She thought of the case of Pumpkin Grandmother. Her parents had been very poor, so they had sent her as a child to a house in River Circle Village. She went as a minmyunuri, a future daughter-in-law who would grow up in the household as a servant. Pumpkin Grandmother missed her family terribly and the house’s owners worked her to the bone and made her sleep in the stable with the animals. But the worst indignity was to come years later: being married to the youngest son, the one with the gaping cleft palate and an even uglier temper. The first night after her hair was put up in a married-woman’s knot, he filled up on wine and tore off her clothes—she was only thirteen.
After he blacked out from the cheap rice-alcohol drink, she jerked her clothes back on and fled. She had no bribe for the ferryman, but the man said he would take her across the river for free.
But it turned out the man was also an agent for the Japanese, one who earned a bounty for each young girl he kidnapped. Instead of ferrying her across the river, he took her to the local police station, where she was beaten senseless, thrown into a truck, and shipped to Manchuria where she was raped night and day by the barbaric Japanese soldiers. After the Japanese lost the war, they abandoned the “comfort station,” and she had to make the slow, agonizing journey back to Korea on foot.
“If only I had stayed that night with my husband, as bad as he was,” she sighed to anyone who would listen. “I probably would have had many children to comfort me in my old age.”
Now she was an old woman with a useless arm from being broken so many times. At the bathhouse, one could see poxlike burn scars covering her back. Too ashamed to return to her own village, she had settled in Enduring Pine Village, where, without family to help her, she eked out her living by selling the pumpkins that grew on the roof of her small hovel.
Kyung-sook wondered what other course her own life might have taken had she not left school—would she have become a teacher in the village? But she had been bored by the classes. And her professors were aloof, her classmates snippy girls from Seoul who spent hours in beauty salons getting their hair permed and marcelled, the acrid smell of their wormlike hair sickening her.
Kyung-sook had wanted to talk about music, about her dreams of playing a san-jo in front of hundreds of attentive people. But no, these girls, intent on achieving the newest “beehive” hairstyle and little else, snubbed Kyung-sook, especiall
y once they heard her country accent. One senior girl whose father was an important government official claimed that she could smell manure on Kyung-sook, and she called out “Hey pigshit!” whenever she saw Kyung-sook coming.
What could she do, then, except leave?
SARAH
Seoul
1993
The flute was coming into my hands.
We had been divided into four groups. Our group: another girl named Jeannie, a guy named Kevin.
Up close I saw the instrument was made of bamboo, its joints swollen and awkward, like an old person’s arthritic fingers. Tae Sunsengnim had randomly handed the instrument to me, but the Other Jeannie reached past my open hands and grabbed it.
“This isn’t like any flute I’ve ever played,” she declared, after blowing out a flat whoooooo of a dysenteric owl.
Around us, whump-whumps of the drums, brittle chang-chang-changs of the gong: crazed, shrill noises of some kind of orchestra in hell.
Tae Sunsengnim whistled with two fingers, piercing through the cacophony.
“We can’t all play the instruments at once.” She walked to the group with the hourglass drum.
“We’ll try the changgo first.”
She finally got to us.
“I’m going to play a san-jo, a solo piece in the improvisational style,” she said, in her bored docent voice.
She pursed her lips and blew.
My scalp prickled. It was as if some physical presence had wrenched me off the floor, sending me floating toward this odd music, almost atonal yet unsettlingly beautiful. The notes dug straight for the marrow of my bones.
Tae Sunsengnim rolled the flute a degree away from her mouth, put more of her fingers on the holes, and the notes climbed higher, higher.
I thought my heart was going to burst.
The tiny bones in my ear were going to shatter into splinters.
She continued up the unorthodox scale until the notes teetered maddeningly on the edge of disappearing, like the exquisite urge to sneeze.
“Ugh, that sounds like the beginning of a kung fu movie,” the Other Jeannie commented. When Tae Sunsengnim handed the flute back to her, she passed it off to Kevin.
“What’s this instrument called again?” I asked.
“Taegum,” Tae Sunsengnim said. “Don’t just sit there,” she told Kevin, pushing his fingers onto the holes.
He blew, emanating a muffled, diluted whine. He whoofed again, and again. The flute began tipping to and fro as if he were playing on a pitching ship. Tae Sunsengnim made a face when he returned the instrument, an elastic cord of spittle stretching out between them.
She wiped the mouthpiece and handed it to me.
“Your turn.”
The bamboo was thick, heavy-looking, but when I put the mouthpiece to my mouth, my arms felt like they were going to fly away with the taegum.
“Rest it on your left shoulder.” Tae Sunsengnim roughly pushed on my shoulder to form a vise. “Reach around with your arms and cover the holes with your fingers.”
My fingers, nail beds flat as spades, fit perfectly on the holes. Tae Sunsengnim nodded approvingly when she saw this.
“So remember, it’s not a ttu-ttu blow like for a Western flute,” Tae Sunsengnim said, then added with disgust, “that’s spitting. For the taegum you make your breath a breeze that flows through the instrument. You manipulate this breeze with your fingers.”
The breeze of my breath flowed through the instrument—then out of it, making nary a sound.
“Keep going,” she said. “Keep a good, strong flow.”
I blew. And blew and blew and blew. The air continued to flow out tracelessly, the same disconcerting feeling when you first learn to snorkel: you expect to feel the resistance of the water as you exhale, but there is none, so you try again, harder, harder, until you hyperventilate, the air in your lungs scrabbling for traction.
I started to feel dizzy, as if I were breathing nitrous oxide through this wooden tube. No sound. In desperation, I even resorted to ttu-ttu spitting. That did nothing, except make the mouthpiece wet and slimy.
Tae Sunsengnim grabbed the flute away from me.
“Maybe you’ll do better with the gong,” she said.
SARAH
Seoul
1993
Hallo Miss Sarah,
I hope you are passing time well. What’s shaking? I am sorry I do not have my dictionery with me right now so I will create many mistakes. I hope you will forgive.
I like Camp Ozark and my soldiers friends. We have started joint exersizes. This is first time I meet the blacks. One guy here wears this net on his hair when he sleeps at night. He is a funny guy, always making jokes.
But American guys are not always liking about meeting Korean. Some of them like tae kwon do, but most are not too interested in Korea and of course none of them can speak any Korean like you can. Not even anyonghaseo. The American guys, they are not so joyful toward fraternizing with Korean, so I am not practicing my English as much as I liked, not even as much as when I used to meet with you.
I also have a question for my English. Some guys will be using this word, fagot. My dictionary says it is a word meaning ‘bundle of sticks.’ When I ask the American commander, he (she?) says she (he?) is not telling me what this word is going to mean. Is this something of American slang? Please explain when you write me the next letter.
I hope your Korean studying is going well and that you are passing your time enjoyably.
Very often, I keep you in mind.
Yours Truly,
Pvt. Jun-Ho Kim
Postscript: American guys here call me “Jim.” You can call me that, too, if you like.
“How come I never see you on Sundays?” I asked Doug, over noodles at the Rainbow. “Does a little chauffeur guy come whisk you away, like he does for Bernie Lee?”
Doug shook his head.
“I chase ghosts.”
“Ghosts?”
“Yeah, ghosts. Not kwisin, those flour-faced Korean ghosts, but ghosts of the living.”
“Where do you find them?”
“Different places. But mostly the Yongsan Eighth Army Base. I have a friend I visit, and he lets me go ghost hunting.”
“Was that where your father and mother were?”
“No, they were at Libertytown, north of here.”
“So why Yongsan?”
He shrugged. “It smells like Libertytown. Reminds me of my kidhood.”
“And what smells exactly?”
He shrugged again. “Fried food. I don’t know. It just smells like a place.”
Doug was slipping away again. Sometimes when we talked, I’d inadvertently say a word, make a joke about some experience we’d shared, and then all of a sudden, his face would blank out, and I could see him descending into some kind of toxic hell of memory. There was no telling what would trigger these moods, or what could be done to dispel them.
“Tell me about your kidhood—some good memories.”
“Let me see.” He gobbled a small mountain of kimchi.
“I went bowling once, with my dad. They had a bowling alley in Libertytown. I thought it was so funny to be wearing shoes on those pristine wooden floors—and someone else’s shoes.”
“Tell me more.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Dad would bring Mom stuff from the PX. American pancake makeup, some brand the Korean ladies were all nuts about—Cody? Nylon stockings, peanut butter, Marlboros—she loved to smoke—Johnny Walker Red. She used the whiskey as a bribe for me to get into a local school. If being mixed-blood wasn’t bad enough, Hank technically wasn’t my dad then.”
I held my breath, waiting to see if he’d offer me any more of himself, his history. “For a few years, it was pretty good. They loved each other. Dad was this Polish-Irish punk who’d grown up in a tough black neighborhood in Queens. He decided to change his last name—Osciewicz to Henderson—and go into the army before he ended up in jail. And you know what my mom was. Not exact
ly Romeo and Juliet, those two. More like Bonnie and Clyde. She also married him because she knew we needed a ticket out of there, she didn’t want me growing up in Libertytown. But being back here in Korea, it’s making me remember, one by one, all the terrible things he did to her. I think if I ran into that bastard on the street, I’d kill him.”
Doug looked out the window, even though the rice paper was blocking his view.
“Let’s go there some time,” I said suddenly. “To Libertytown.”
Doug’s hand, the one holding a cigarette, jerked. He looked startled.
“I don’t know if we could get in,” he said.
“Figure out a way.”
He sighed. “You know, I’ve actually been thinking that I want to go back there. Just to see what’s there, what’s changed.”
“So let’s go.”
“Why,” he said, “do you want to go so badly? Are you thinking this is somehow going to help you with your own little identity search? If so, I doubt it. You’re from a Seoul family. Your mother died in a car accident and with your father. Two decades ago, only upper-class people had cars in Korea. Going to the place where I grew up has got to be the farthest place to search for anything about your birth family.”
How was I going to tell him that now, my mother could have been anyone?
“I just want to go,” I shrugged. “I’m offering to keep you company, that’s all.”
“We’ll see,” he said, flipping his cigarette into his half-eaten bowl of noodles, where it extinguished with an extravagant hiss.
KYUNG-SOOK
Seoul
1972
The school refused to give her the tuition money back. Kyung-sook tried saying that her mother was sick and she needed the money for her hospital expenses, but the answer was still no.
Despite this setback, Kyung-sook decided she would still strike out on her own. There was no place for her to play her flute at Imo’s. And Imo, between her harangues about Christo, would want to know what she had learned about pedagogy, and it was becoming harder and harder for Kyung-sook to make things up. That night, Kyung-sook bundled her things up when Imo was sleeping, and she set out, as usual, the next morning, as if going to school.
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