As we made our way up the aisle, there was an anonymous mutter of contempt that seemed to be aimed at Doug, his green uniform, his father’s face. But he didn’t respond.
In the bus station’s bathroom, I exchanged my sneakers for heels, rolled the waistband of my skirt until I felt it swishing my thighs. Then I troweled on some makeup, although in the dim one-bulb light, I wasn’t sure how accurate my painting was.
Doug donned some horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like Clark Kent. He pulled the cap tight over his hair.
“Nice,” he said, looking at me, his eyes lingering a moment longer than usual. He stashed our civilian stuff behind a bench.
A lone taxi idled outside the bus station. The driver, back slumped against the door as if the car were a giant Barcalounger, fuzzily paged through a newspaper as high-pitched Korean folk music squeed through his radio. Doug leaned in the window, told him in English we were going to Libertytown.
The man turned to look at us. His gaze stopped on my bare, knobby knees. He spat, then gave us the universal “hop in” sign, a backward nod of the head.
Five minutes later he dropped us off in front of a compound, stone fence topped with razor wire. He opened his palm for a twenty-dollar fare, shrugged about his broken meter. The arch on the gate read WELCOME TO LIBERTYTOWN.
“Riberteeton,” the driver cackled. He cracked open the door, as if to accompany us, but then I heard a faint trickling sound and realized he was peeing.
A Korean guy with an armband that said MP guarded the entrance. Doug saluted smartly and said some things about name and rank in plain English that somehow made him sound dumb.
The guard narrowed his eyes when he looked at me. I tried to smile back coyly. He barely glanced at Doug’s I.D. and waved us on through.
As Suzy Bargirl, I tried not to gawk as we walked into the compound. Drunk GIs, red-white-and-blue faces, Nike T-shirts and Levi’s jeans, stumbled in and out of neon-lit clubs with names like THE ALAMO, LAS VEGAS STYLE, HUBBA HUBBA, CHERRY’S. Farther inland, an electric sign rose above the low buildings, a familiar-looking red-pigtailed cartoon-girl’s face aglow. Wendy’s.
This was America, yet it wasn’t. The gentle hills of the countryside weren’t the same, the far-off smells of cooking fires made the place smell like Korea. Libertytown was a foreign version of America, a U.S.-land that they might have at an offshore amusement park.
“Which one’s where your mother worked?” I wasn’t supposed to speak English, but I couldn’t help it.
Doug shook his head violently, didn’t answer. He just tugged me along, a fish on a line. We headed down a dirt path, away from the lights, toward a row of corrugated tin houses.
I could see through their glassless windows: a bed, a mirror, maybe a dresser, and usually a canvas army-issue duffel. A few of the occupants were home. Under the light from bare bulbs, the women primped, skirts so short they made my thigh-high mini look like a muu-muu.
I began to imagine Doug’s mother getting ready for work. The seducing followed by manipulating those pussy-whipped farmboys into raiding the PX for her so she could sell her goods on the black market for some extra cash. Doug, Du-sok, would be shooed away to play outside, or would cram himself into a far corner, shutting his ears to his mother’s love cries.
Stop! I wanted to slap myself. I had no right to construct Doug’s life out of whole cloth—as I did my own. I was the Korean princess, somehow abducted and sent out of the country by evil relatives. I was the treasured child of my mother, but she had died defending me from muggers. The car-accident story had never been enough, it was only a hurried, distracted mercy like the way they put stun guns to the heads of cows before they slaughter them. But now that I had kicked apart that flimsily constructed lie, what was underneath was much, much worse.
Doug looked at me. He reached over and gently touched my fingers, which had become numb and clenched around his arm. When I opened my fist, I felt better. We started walking back the way we’d come.
From the shadows between two lean-tos, a grubby little kid emerged. He was playing with a pink plastic sliding whistle. On closer inspection, I saw it was a tampon applicator. He put it down for a second to dig in his pocket. He held out a fistful of wilted Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit.
“You wanna gum, sol-jah?” he said. Doug gave him a few coins, left the gum. The boy shrugged and resumed playing with his “whistle.”
The streets were even more packed now: burly guys with no necks next to smooth-cheeked kids whose ears stuck out like dried apricots. Many had startlingly beautiful Korean women on their arms. When we passed another club called, not too subtly, AFRICA, I saw some Korean ladies who’d transformed their straight hair—somehow—into cottony Afros. Doug had told me that if a woman so much as accepted a single dance with a black soldier, that was it for her. She would have to start working the black clubs because white soldiers would reject her.
Doug pointed to HUBBA HUBBA, whose lights pulsed suggestively. I decided I was done with this place. It was time to go back to Chosun University. But how could I let Doug know this without blowing my cover? He wasn’t looking at me anyway, he was entering the club. I had no choice but to follow him.
Inside the hollowed-out building, a strange kind of pink lighting gave everyone a hideous, irradiated glow. On the dance floor, a few tease-haired Korean women were slowly gyrating with soldiers, more stood waiting at the bar.
Doug purchased two drinks, one he handed to me. I sipped it. It was warm, tasted like canned Delmonte orange juice.
The woman next to me was exchanging meaningful glances with a GI, whose jungly eyebrows I could see from across the room. The woman sported a huge white cardboard badge on which her picture, a number, and her name, Mi-Ja Choi, were clearly visible.
Doug had explained the badges to me one night, after a few shots of soju (lemon-flavored, an improvement on the usual acrid formaldehyde notes) that we’d bought from the 7-Eleven. The badges were part of some system worked out by both the Korean and American governments for controlling VD outbreaks, a potential threat to the strength of the U.S. Armed Forces. When Doug’s mother had worked, VD-infested GIs had to rely on their memory of whom they had slept with, which usually resulted in a virtual crowd of women with the last name Kim being sent off to the “Monkey House,” a shack halfway up a mountain near the base, with bars on the windows and steel U.S.-military-issue beds lined up in a row.
Jungle-brow approached the woman, his eyebrows even more magnificent up close. She giggled, tipping a little on her high heels. He put his hand on her buttock, squeezing it like a bicycle horn.
She giggled again.
“You buy me drink, hunh?” she tittered, a little unsteadily.
He leered one more time, then bought her a Delmonte orange juice. Before she had a chance to take her first sip, he kissed her. I could see his sluglike tongue working its way into her mouth. She didn’t back away, but her face took on its own abandoned-house look. When he disengaged himself, she laughed and then took a swig of the juice.
Something dry and scratchy landed on my arm, like an insect. A slightly cross-eyed GI had clamped a hand on my upper arm and was smiling crookedly at me, as if he’d just lifted a rock and found a coin.
“Juicy girl?” he said. His thumb reached out and brushed against my breast. I was ashamed to feel my nipple harden and push against my flimsy bra.
“She’s with me.” Doug’s voice was deep.
“What’s wrong with me buyin’ her a little juicy, punk?” he sneered. “I don’t see no ring, so she’s here for alla us.”
Doug stood up to his full height. As he grew, I shrank against the bar.
“Leave her alone.” His eyes went flat. “I’ll kill you.”
The man sneered again, but took a step back.
“She’s ugly. Too tall, too. There’s lots prettier here.”
As the man pushed by me, he took another look at my chest. I hoped against hope that my nipple had smoothed itself.
“Where’s your badge?” he yelled again. “Bet you’re the one been spreading the clap to everyone!”
Doug grabbed my arm. We headed for the exit, me tottering on my ridiculous heels. People were following us.
“Shit!” Doug said. “Oh shit, come on!”
We made it out the door, where I tore the shoes off, my bare feet hitting the dirt.
“MP! MP!” the guy was yelling. “Over here!”
Outside it had become even darker, the light from the neon signs and outdoor lights canceling out the stars. For a second, we weren’t sure which way to go, but Doug’s head turned toward the compound’s gate, sure as a homing pigeon. No matter how long he’d been gone, the landscape of his childhood was branded into his brain.
We grabbed hands and ran.
KYUNG-SOOK
Seoul
1972
It had, of course, been many years that had come and gone like guests at a funeral, but Kyung-sook knew she would never forget the cook-owner. A short woman, rounded as a soybean-paste pot, who swayed her hips from side to side as she walked about the restaurant. She told Kyung-sook she had been left stranded in Seoul as a thirteen-year-old at the end of the Japanese colonial period.
“We had no idea what was going on after the war ended,” she said. “The Russians came in, and they seemed to be a better sort than the Japs—gave us food and medicine, let us speak Korean. But just in case, I started making trips south to peddle some gold things—our family was quite wealthy and my daddy wisely had buried most of our gold so it wouldn’t go to the Jap war effort. It was dangerous work, of course. Once, I ran into a Ruskie soldier. My guide, who had been paid handsomely to see me to the other side, ran away, that bastard. I heard shots pow!-pow!-pow! from the direction he’d gone, so I ran the other way, swam through a creek, and hid in the woods. At daybreak I crawled out, came upon some farm lady tending a plot and I said, ‘I beg of you, in heaven’s name, where am I?’
“She said, ‘You’re in the South, dear,’ and that’s all I needed to know, I was safe.
“One day, on my way to the border town where I normally crossed, the man next to me on the train said, ‘I hope you don’t think you’re going north, child.’
“Of course, I had no idea who he was—he could have been a Commie spy, so I just kept my mouth shut.
“‘I can tell you are,’ the man went on. ‘You don’t even have a little bundle—traveling light, yeh? Well, take heed: the Reds have sealed the border. If you don’t believe me, go see. You’ll see wire fences and big guns waiting to shoot right at your heart.’
“And it was a good thing I did do that,” the cook-owner said. “If I’d tried to cross that night, I’d’ve met my ancestors.”
Kyung-sook listened politely as she stuffed some dumplings. They were advertised as “hand” dumplings, that is, with handmade skins, but only the most naive customer would believe that. Real dumplings, like the kind her mother made for the Lunar New Year, had skins that were thick and irregular and bore traces of her mother’s fingers and the taste of her hand. These premade skins were thin and perfectly square, tasteless as pieces of origami paper.
“So from that day on, I was permanently cut off from my family. How it kills me not to have seen my beloved mother and father into their old age—and now I don’t know whether to do the chesa rites for them, because I don’t know if they’re alive or dead, and it’s all because of those fucking Commies and Americans who sliced our beloved country in two!”
Kyung-sook made a compassionate tsking noise, but Sunhee, the other serving girl, rolled her eyes behind the cook-owner’s back.
The cook-owner went on to recount how on her own, she elbowed her way into the Great South Gate Market, first selling heads of pickling garlic, then her own soft tofu that she made at night, squeezing out the bag of curds with her huge hands.
“I came from an aristocratic family, but I’m no weakling—I could carry a whole day’s supply of the tofu in a giant soup pot on top of my head,” she bragged. “I just had to move my hips from side-to-side like this to keep it balanced. See, I still walk that way, I got so used to it.”
“Yah, so aristocratic, our yangban boss,” Sunhee sniped, when the cook-owner went into the storeroom for more rice. “The reason she waggles her ass like that is to try to catch the eye of Old Bachelor Choi. He’s filthy rich, owns the Jade Moon real estate office, but he orders the cheapest noodle dish here every day. Watch the cook-owner, she’ll make sure to pass his table beating her breast—‘Aiiii-gu, my poor parents! Aiiiigu, my poor husband killed in the Korean War!’ Don’t buy it for a second. She has a northern accent, but you can hear some southern Cholla dialect slip into it from time to time. Her story’s not what she says it is.”
Kyung-sook only smiled as she spooned some more filling into the flour square that felt dusty in her hands. She dipped her little finger in egg yolk, then spread it on the skin’s edges as if she were gluing an envelope. She pressed and crimped the edges together until she made a crescent moon.
No one knew her true story, either. That was the wonderful thing about being in the city—you could be who you wanted, you merely had to spin out some story, and no one cared. Today she was a serving girl in a dumpling house, a rotten place where, when the wind blew a certain way, the smell of sewage from the shantytown reached their noses. But tomorrow she would be a famous musician, asked to perform for the President. Who could say?
“Aigu!” yelled the cook-owner, from the kitchen. Had she burned her arm on the stovepot again? Found another mouse-mess next to the rice? She stood framed at the door to the kitchen, staring at the front of the restaurant.
A Westerner stood in the entrance.
They all blinked. And blinked again. They all knew there were Westerners in Seoul—but how could this one have found his way to this place, at the end of a maze of winding alleys, channels so narrow and twisty that two people with handcarts could not pass going in opposite directions? And their restaurant was just one of a number of shacks, marked only by a small sign in Korean, NOODLES + DUMPLINGS, not even DUMPLING SPECIALIST or the KING’S DUMPLINGS—the name the regulars jokingly gave their little dump.
This man, he was the first paek-in, the first whiteperson any of them had ever seen for real. Kyung-sook could barely stifle startled giggles upon seeing the man’s nose—it was like the prow of a ship. His eyes were strangely round and pale, his skin so pinkish it reminded her of the stupid pale skin on a dog’s belly.
The man had to duck to enter the restaurant. He was wearing a soft hat, and the bits of hair sticking out from under it was black, the color of cooking coal. He pointed to an empty table and made eating motions, as if he wanted to be served some kind of stew that he would eat with his hands.
The cook-owner threw up her hands and looked at the sky.
“Okay, you fucking gods and ancestors,” she bellowed. “What kind of joke have you got in store for me today?”
No one else in the restaurant moved.
“Kyung-sook-ah, make that creature sit down,” the cook-owner ordered. “A foreign bastard, he must be rich.”
Kyung-sook took a step, but then her feet wouldn’t budge.
The cook-owner eyed Kyung-sook for a second, then came over and slapped her on the rump, as if she were a recalcitrant horse or ox.
“You’re the only one here who went to high school, Professor. You expect anyone else here can understand foreigner-speak?”
The cook-owner shoved her, propelling her like those little eggshell boats they used to sail on the river on Lord Buddha’s birthday.
The man didn’t seem to know any Korean; he barked a command in English and pointed to the water-dumplings that Old Bachelor Choi was masticating with his ill-fitting dentures that occasionally slipped out of his mouth.
The cook-owner noted this, and perhaps to celebrate the arrival of the first Westerner to her diner, added an
extra three “king” dumplings onto the plate of water-dumplings. Old Bachelor Choi yelled for more of their free mussel soup. Kyung-sook fetched it for him. Then she served the foreigner.
Looking at his sumptuous plate, the foreigner barked again and shook his head.
Everyone was puzzled. Even Old Bachelor Choi, delicately fishing around in his soup with two fingers, stopped to consider the scene, his mouth puckery as a mended sock.
“What’s he waiting for?” grumbled the cook-owner. “Is he one of those Christo-followers? I heard they have to say all this mumbo jumbo around their food to cleanse it before they eat.”
The foreigner stared at Kyung-sook.
“Not mine, not mine.” His barking had turned to yapping, and she still didn’t understand him—his English didn’t sound anything like the English she had learned in school. He was pointing at the three fat dumplings. “I didn’t order these. No order. No pay.”
When Kyung-sook looked at the king dumplings he was pointing to, they seemed to rise before her eyes. They levitated a few centimeters, switched places as if in fun, then settled back onto the plate. English words then rose to the surface of her brain like bubbles in a pond.
“Eat,” she said. “Please. For you.”
“What are these?” the man said, pointing to the dumplings suspiciously.
“Whang man-du,” she replied. “King. Eat. Especial for you.”
“Oh, ho,” the man said, beginning to smile. He ignored the chopsticks and instead picked up his soupspoon and balanced one of the dumplings on it like a weight. “So I’m a king—” He took an enormous, sucking bite of the dumpling. “Okay.”
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