Somebody's Daughter

by Marie Myung-Ok Lee

  “O-kay,” she mimicked back teasingly. She wondered if he could see in her face how repulsive she found him.

  Everyone in the restaurant was still looking at the foreigner. Even Old Bachelor Choi, who had finally caught his teeth and was busily returning them to his mouth. He smiled, chimplike, as broth dribbled from the corners of his mouth.

  The cook-owner removed the cover from a pot of boiling water, releasing a ghostly cloud of steam. She looked like she was laughing about something.

  “Oh my fucking gods and ancestors,” she said.

  SARAH

  Seoul

  1993

  We were being carpet-bombed. By cherry blossoms, whenever we went outside.

  How great it was to be back amidst the cherry trees of the Chosun U. campus. I gave Bernie Lee such a wide smile that he narrowed his eyes and said, “You’re freaking me out, Twinkie.”

  “Maybe I’m just happy to see you. I didn’t see you all weekend.”

  His eyes narrowed further, to threadlike slits. “Uh huh. You go somewhere or something?”

  “Maybe.” I almost looked over at Doug, but I didn’t dare. Instead, I just smiled again. How great it was that it was spring. How great, everything.

  Outside, everything smelled pink. Pairs of college boys armed with cameras roamed the campus, cajoling girls to stand for photos under the clumps of blooms, the photographee often slipping a hand on a feminine shoulder or tender upper arm while the girl was immobilized under the camera’s eye.

  The next day, the cherry trees were just normal trees with leaves, not a single petal left. Then the weather turned hot, and azaleas and forsythia, blazing yellows and fuchsias, exploded from bushes, as if unleashed by the heat. The sun became a physical presence, a punishing hand. People walked as if beaten, heads bowed on wilting stems of necks. At the Rainbow, diners paradoxically ordered spicy soups bubbling in their own black cauldrons. They would slurp and sigh until they took a shower in their own sweat. I preferred neng myun, a mound of cold buckwheat noodles in iced broth, topped with a slice of fatty beef and a hard-boiled egg balanced on top like a maraschino cherry. When the ajuhma carried it, it looked like strange, precarious island rising out of a sea of cloudy broth.

  “I heard chang-ma’s going to be bad this year,” said Bernie in class.

  Not chang-ma again. The little animals that fall from the sky and pulled out your hair.

  “What is that?” I asked Doug. “Chang-ma.”

  Bernie grinned at me, as if he had a delicious prank with my name on it waiting. “The monsoon season. It rains every day, buckets and buckets of rain, but it doesn’t cool things down. It just makes it really humid. You’ll feel like you’re wearing a suit of moisture, bathed in sweat. Your laundry will always be damp. You’ll grow mold.”

  Doug nodded. “I remember one summer the rains were so bad that people living near river banks got washed away or killed in mudslides. The Han River rose so much it took out the bridge to Seoul.”

  “It’s coming later this year,” Bernie said. “That’s a sign it’s going to be bad.” His tone was now merely informative. Friendly, even.

  After class, it began to rain a cold, spattery rain.

  “Is this chang-ma?” I asked Doug.

  “No,” he said. “Don’t worry, you’ll know it when it happens.”

  After lunch, we made our way down the alley toward a yuhgwon, one of those tiny boarding houses marked with an electric sign that looked like a cup of tea with waves of red steam rising off it. That meant it had hot water. Yuhgwons, a.k.a. “love hotels,” were plentiful in our neighborhood, for horny students as well as itinerant travelers, of which Doug and I were both.

  The stout yuhgwon ajuhma with warts dotting her fingers didn’t give us another look as she took Doug’s money and placed a key on the low table in front of her. The key opened up a vaultlike room that had a clean yellow floor, a single window, and little else except for some bedding stacked in a corner and a calendar on the wall that had a generic Korean country scene on it. I’m sure in Korean it said something like, COMPLIMENTS OF EDWARD DIEHL, YOUR STATE FARM AGENT, LIKE A GOOD NEIGHBOR.

  It had come to this: Doug was going to be the one to receive my slightly outmoded virginity.

  Two nights ago, pursued by whiskey-slurred voices and heavy footsteps, life’s thread grew unbearably thin and taut. We had hidden among the trees by the side of the road, struggling to muffle our ragged breaths as shafts of light from flashlights poked all around us.

  “I thought that motherfucker was weird, right off, he was in his cami’s—who wears their uniform out for a night on the town?”

  “Some do, you know. Maybe he just got off war games.”

  “Well, the girl, she was a gook chick, but there was something funny about her, too—I told you she didn’t have her badge. And they ran out like bats out of hell when I called you guys. This ain’t no pink goddam elephants we’re talking about.”

  “Well, I don’t see anything out here now, soldier. Go home and sleep it off, would you?”

  When the realization came that yes, we came, we saw, we outsmarted the U.S. Army, exhilaration welled up inside me, so crystalline and powerful that I wanted to shout. When I looked at Doug, I could see his eyes shining in the dark.

  We walked all the way back to the bus station, where we waited for the next bus, which delivered us back to the Residence just as dawn was breaking, just as the dorm’s night watchman, twig broom in hand, was opening the doors to a new day.

  “I want to sleep with you,” I had whispered into Doug’s ear on the bus ride back. He had appeared to be sleeping, but obviously, he had heard.

  “By the way, I’m a virgin.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Guess you had me pegged differently, huh?”

  “I didn’t really think about it at all.”

  I wasn’t the Virgin Mary, I told him. If I had to describe myself using associative words, as I had in those endless psychological tests of my childhood, virginal, chaste, untouched, were not words that would appear on the list.

  I was a virgin, I explained, because I was. No action verbs involved. In high school, when life begins to revolve around that pulsating star of sex, that’s when I discovered that I hated absolutely everybody. So I did things like dye my hair unnatural colors, hang around with the most despised geeks and druggies, and I didn’t find myself in those situations—prom, overnight ski trips—where sex usually occurs. True, once I was invited to a party being held at an Eden’s Prairie three-car-garage-and-indoor-pool home while the parents were away. I’m not sure why my presence had been requested. The jocks and jockettes who called me “chink” or “jap” by day ignored me at night, which was worse.

  I stood clutching a beer in a flimsy plastic cup while everyone else around me danced, necked, smoked pot, or guzzled beer from plastic funnel “beer bongs.” I was relieved when Spleef Murphy, the redheaded boy who’d later end up as my AP chemistry partner, pointed to a dark bedroom and raised his eyebrows. Though he would always screw up the molarity of our reagenting solutions, that night, the touch of his hand as he groped my breasts, the enthusiastic way he sucked at my crotch as if he were gulping down draughts of punch, the lucid gaze of his pea-green eyes—all this comforted me. I was being felt and seen and tasted in a cavernous bedroom among posters of a blond vixen bent in a racing crouch, naked except for her Nordica ski boots, an ancient poster of Farrah sitting on a Mexican blanket, her famous toothy smile-scream, her nipple winking at us through her swimsuit’s flimsy fabric.

  I was aware of Doug patting my back, the way one might do when trying to burp a baby.

  “I don’t think of it as losing,” I said, looking into his eyes. “It’s gaining. With you, it would be.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a foil package, flat yet with bones in it, like a kite.

  On TV and in the movies, post-sex rituals differ, but they seem to always include cigarettes. Doug, perhaps to not di
sappoint, also lit one up and leaned back languidly onto the yuhgwon’s lozenge-shaped pillows.

  I found a strange reassurance in the small spots of blood spattering my thigh. I had crossed the line. And with Doug. No emotional aftermath, my secrets tucked safe inside his boarded-up house. The smell of the smoke was an incense, like being together in the tender anonymity of a hazy opium den. Doug put his free hand on my hipbone, his fingers spread wide, as if claiming territory. My tongue loosened. I found myself telling him about my trip to the orphanage. An even more intimate detail than contained in all the folds and crevices in my body that he had explored.

  “Shit,” he said, softly. “I had no idea.” He removed his cigarette from his mouth, began spinning it around the bridge of his thumb, something bored Korean students did with their pens.

  “Can you believe the people who call themselves my parents have lied to me, basically my entire life?”

  “Well, to play devil’s advocate, it’s possible the car-accident story originated with the orphanage. Koreans like to fudge, make nice. People with terminal cancer are told they have an ulcer. The doctors don’t want to upset them.”

  I had always asked about my biological parents as soon as I was old enough to understand. And they had that story pat and waiting. Often, Christine would change the subject, tickling me or doing something else to get me animated.

  “And whose sweetie pie are you?” she might ask, gaily sticking her fingers in all my tickly places. “Whose little pumpkin face?”

  “I’m yours,” I would answer.

  “And who am I?” Fingers, everywhere.

  “You’re my mommy!” By this time I would be screaming with involuntary laughter.

  “I always felt like Christine was hiding something, she had that guilty dog-who-peed-in-the-corner look. When I told them I was going to Korea, Ken was reluctant, but okay. Christine went batshit.”

  “Batshit, like how?”

  “She actually ripped up the brochure and chucked it in the garbage, saying the Motherland Program was only for true Koreans, people with Korean last names.”

  “That’s seriously psycho.”

  I remembered looking around the table: Amanda emotionally detaching by pretending to check her hair for split ends. Ken’s comb-shaped mustache quivering. Christine, bottle-blond hair, the thinning patch on top exposed in the harsh overhead light of the kitchen table. Her scalp blazed red, like her face. I remembered thinking, joltingly: these people are not my family. They’re just some random people.

  Doug continued spinning the cigarette, now a dangerous, glowing stub. Each time it stopped, the live end pointed at me.

  “She was obviously worried you were going to go back to Korea and stay there,” Doug said. “Leaving her.”

  “But don’t you see? That means she knew.” My voice rose. “She was scared I was going to find my birth mother, and, and—”

  I didn’t know what lay beyond that “and.”

  “Which is what you are trying to do.”

  “Yes, I am,” I said. “But doing this search would have never occurred to me, had I not gone out on my own and found out the real story. I mean, they fucking told me my birth mother was dead.”

  “So you seriously want to search for your Korean parents, like an all-out search?”

  I sank back into the bedding, nodded. “Why?”

  “There’s this show. It’s called something like Missing Persons. People go on there and try to find their lost relatives and friends.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s a popular show, mostly these old ajuhmas and harlmonis who’d had some fight with their sister or something and want to get back in touch. And the missing person often does call in. Maybe you could try to get on it.”

  My heart leapt at the thought of the studio’s phones ringing. Of a woman’s voice. Someone who will say, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, over and over again. Let me tell you what happened. And: I want you to come home.

  “But you know,” Doug went on. “It’s possible your birth mother’s married, with a whole family who doesn’t know about her past, so it could get messy. Do you think you could handle the consequences?”

  I didn’t tell Doug how I’d been walking all over Seoul, looking. I couldn’t help myself. Yesterday I’d gone to the Lotte Department Store. Twelve floors, plenty of Korean women. I almost got lost in a haze of silk scarves, jewelry, and perfume before I realized she wouldn’t be there. She wouldn’t be among those beringed ladies in French designer suits, scarves cleverly knotted about their shoulders, big jade rings on their fingers, Burberry raincoats draped on their arms.

  Rich people had abortions, easy as one-two-three. Doug said that the first question the base doctor had asked his mother about her pregnancy with him was, Do you want to keep it?

  So I had fled the opulence of the Lotte and her brethren—the Hyatt, the Swissôtel, the Intercontinental—for a place only a few blocks behind these behemoths, a neighborhood of shacks huddling in the shadow of the sleek skyscrapers like fungi at the base of a tree. I kept going until I got to Hoei Dong, where I was supposedly found. I found a fire station—was it the one? Miss Park at the orphanage had told me that my mother probably set me outside the door and watched from some hidden place until someone took me in. My mother cared about me, she insisted. She did what she did out of the purest form of mother love: sacrifice.

  As if Miss Park or anyone could know. Why was everyone so quick to offer me cheap words, when all I wanted was the truth?

  I placed myself on a little bench across the street. For the hour I sat, I never saw a single baby laid on the neat stone steps of that building.

  “Let’s do it,” I told Doug. “Let’s do this show, let’s try.”

  Doug nodded. “There’s a Korean saying, ‘Don’t let the fear of maggots scare you away from making soy sauce.’”

  KYUNG-SOOK

  Seoul

  1972

  Kyung-sook found herself wondering if the visit from the Westerner had all been a peculiar dream. Sunhee didn’t mention it. The cook-owner only complained about finding new holes in the rice bags made by mice, which Kyung-sook could feel running across her feet at night.

  Later that day, the cook-owner returned from the market with a good-sized cat. It had rich brown fur the color of tortoiseshell, a nose that was half pink, half black like a Korean mask.

  The cook-owner didn’t bother giving the cat a name other than Mr. Kitty, and she was pleased when it immediately went into the storeroom and came out with a mouse, its neck neatly broken.

  Two days later, though, the cat looked sick, and it lay down right in the front entrance of the restaurant. That was the day the Westerner showed up again. He entered carrying a black hourglass-shaped case, which he placed in the seat opposite him, as lovingly as if he were seating a venerated relative. He made his barking noises and pointed at Old Bachelor Choi’s cheap noodle dish.

  Then he took off his soft hat, which he had not done before. Black hair tumbled out past his ears, almost touching his shoulders.

  “Aigu!” exclaimed the cook-owner. “Is he a man or a woman? These fuckin’ Westerners are so perverse.”

  Kyung-sook had never seen a man with long hair, except in Imo’s pictures of Christo, but he was a god from olden times. However, she thought the foreigner actually looked better with the curtain of coal-black hair framing the sharp angles of his face. In fact, there was something in the man’s face that kept drawing her eyes back to it. The cook-owner, so fond of old proverbs, might have said, “In time, it is possible to develop a taste even for sour dog-apricots.”

  What place did this man come from, where he could grow his hair out like a woman’s with no shame? she wondered.

  “Where you come from?” she asked, as she set his noodles in front of him.

  The man stared at her, frankly, brazenly, with his amber-colored eyes.

  “America,” he said, pointing at his chest. “I’m American.”

  Mi-guk.
“The beautiful country,” America’s name in Chinese characters. She was thinking of something to say about that when there was a shout from one of the customers—“Look what that dirty cat has done!”—which sent the cook-owner running from the kitchen to see what was the matter.

  In a dark corner of the restaurant, the cat had had kittens, six of them in all sorts of different colors: ginger, tortoiseshell, white with spots, black. She was proudly licking them clean as the cook-owner came upon her. Bloody afterbirth was smeared on the floor.

  “That damned crook!” she yelled. “That man at the market, I gave him a whole bottle of good sesame oil—not perilla oil—for that cat that he assured me was a male. She’s a good mouser, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to raise her saekkis.”

  The American, amidst all the hubbub, ate quickly. But he gave Kyung-sook another frank look that made Old Bachelor Choi choke on his soup and scandalized Sunhee before he left. Kyung-sook threw salt on his path to express her outrage at what he had done. But for some strange reason, she was also just a little bit thrilled, as if her drab life had suddenly taken on a few new, unexpected colors. She was even more thrilled to find that the man had left a few coins behind at his table. These she scooped up before anyone saw.

  “Kyung-sook-ah! Pick up these goddam dumpling soups before they grow icicles!” the cook-owner bellowed. Kyung-sook hurried back into the kitchen. The cat was lying on an old rice sack on the floor, next to her was a bowl of miyuk-guk, the blood-replenishing seaweed soup that was traditionally given to new mothers—not animals. How strange the cook-owner was, Kyung-sook thought.

  When Kyung-sook returned for the next order, she found the cook-owner gently crooning to the drowsing cat as if it were a child. She must really love that stupid, dirty thing, Kyung-sook thought, until she stopped, startled, hearing what the cook-owner was singing:

  Kitty fucked a rat, fucked a rat. Out came six little saekkis, six pink rat bastards, naked rat bastards. Oh oh Kitty get rid of those disgusting pink rat bastards.