This was making no sense.
“Try it in Korean,” I said. “My friend understands.”
Kyunghee Noh sighed, the same way Choi Sunsengnim did when I couldn’t say neh. I wondered if she was dying to go home, maybe meet her boyfriend for coffee instead of spending her time talking to some psychotic Americans. Resignedly, she spoke in Korean. Her words sounded elegant and educated. I wanted to hit her more than ever.
Doug said, when she finished: “She says there’s too much han—sadness and regret—in people’s lives already, so they watch this show to escape their han for an hour; they look to the happy stories to give hope to their own lives.”
“But I’m not here for these people’s entertainment!” I was practically screaming. “I’m trying to find my mother.”
Kyunghee Noh shook her head. “I am sorry,” she said. “Perhaps it was a mistake to have you on the show. We can not guarantee that anyone will receive a call. But I will pray for you that you can find your mother. Maybe someone will call later. You check with the station.” She handed me a card.
I took it. We both understood it was a palliative, a piece of candy from the doctor that we were both pretending would take away the sting of a shot. I turned the card over. Saejong Braodca§§ting, it read in a quasi-Teutonic font, the rest of the Korean was lost to me.
“Let’s go,” I said to Doug.
We followed Kyunghee Noh through the labyrinthine corridors.
She gave us a parting bow as we walked out of the building back into Yoido’s strange phosphorous light. I imagined she would lock and bolt all the doors when we left, pull up the drawbridge.
What had just happened to me? Somewhere within the gilt and neon and bitter dirt of this country was a woman who held a truth that I was so desperately seeking.
Mother!
KYUNG-SOOK
Seoul
1972
“Ai-gooo,” the cook-owner said, noting Kyung-sook’s expanding belly. “Tsk-tsk-tsk.”
As a girl, Kyung-sook had once asked her father, the smartest person she knew, exactly how a baby came into the world.
Her father had paused in his lunch. His spoon wavered over his rice and soup, as if he couldn’t decide which one to start with first. He took a big scoop of the soybean-paste soup followed by a scoop of rice that had barley and purple beans mixed in. It was a flush year, that year.
“Ho, my child is grown enough to bring lunch out to the fields all by herself, and now she wants to know all the ways of the world, doesn’t she?”
“Tell me, please, Appa.”
“Well, if you want to know. First, a woman and a man get married—”
“Ah, it’s the marriage that does it!” she’d cried. “I knew it—when Teacher O’s daughter married last fall, she grew a big belly right after.”
“Wait, wait. It’s not just the marriage that does it,” her father had laughed. “That’s first, you’re right. Then if the husband and wife sleep together, a baby crawls into the mother’s stomach. Of course at first, the baby is just a tiny seed, but then it grows and grows, just as the rice sprout eventually becomes a full head groaning with rice.”
She contemplated this. Then she said, “Sleep with someone to grow a baby?” She’d suddenly remembered the time she and Min-Ki had fallen asleep together in the shade of a tree by the celadon-green coils of the Glass River.
“I’ve got to work now.” Her father picked the last, tenacious grains of barley sticking to the bowl, sipped the very last spoonful of soup. He set the bowls on Kyung-sook’s carrying-cloth, then stretched out his arms as if he were trying to reach the sky. He rubbed his back, sighed, groaned, and spat. Then he yelled for the men to bring the ox over.
“Just remember that the marriage comes first, child,” he said, as he began his stiff, tottering walk back to the fields. “You see, it is possible for the baby to accidentally go to an unmarried mother. But that causes so much sadness—no one is happy to see it, even if it’s a boy. Horrible things will happen to it, the way Unmarried Shopkeeper Auntie’s child was born without a nose.”
Kyung-sook had watched her belly in the days that followed, worriedly checking. Some days it looked like her normal nine-year-old girl’s belly. But other days it seemed to be growing, expanding. Her father had said it was possible for a baby to make a mistake and come to a girl who wasn’t married, wasn’t that right? How would she tell her parents she was pregnant? She thought anxiously about it at night, fingering her belly, trying to feel for a baby-shape under the skin.
After the Month of Pure Brightness passed, her stomach turned definitely bigger. If she turned to the side and looked at her shadow, her stomach curved out like a burial mound. There were no mirrors in the house except for the broken fragment of one that her mother kept. Kyung-sook came back early from the fields one day and struggled to view her stomach in the slender shard.
What kind of deformed baby was growing in there?
“Mother, I think I have a baby.”
Her mother did not glance up from the rice she was washing.
“Ai-goooo!” she lamented. “Who has put such idiotic ideas in your head?”
“Mother,” she had said tremulously. “Once, I fell asleep with Min-Ki by the river. He fell asleep, too.”
“Yah! We need to have an exorcism for you,” her mother said. “Some bad spirit is whispering things in your ear. You cannot have a baby until your blood begins to flow every month. Then if your husband sticks his pepper inside you, the blood will stop and you’ll want to throw up all the time. Then, and only then, will you have a baby. Or maybe after you’ve heard all this, you won’t want to. Now, quit bothering me, do your schoolwork.” She had begun shooing Kyung-sook away with wet hands that had grains of rice stuck to them.
“But Mother,” Kyung-sook had protested. “Look at my stomach!” She had pulled down her black Japanese-style monpae pants to show her.
“Are you studying or are you spending all your time looking at your stomach?” her mother had yelled at her. But she did take note of her belly and the next day dragged Kyung-sook to the country doctor, who made her swallow an envelope of the bitterest powder. When Kyung-sook went to the outhouse later, she saw long, white worms in her ddong. Soon after, her stomach returned to its normal size. How could it be, she wondered, that a girl’s stomach could hold both worms and a baby?
Kyung-sook looked back at the cook-owner. For the last couple of days, every time she looked at her, she saw not the cook-owner’s face, but an opaque black spot. No matter how much she blinked, it would not go away.
“Is that kid going to be three feet tall and talking by the time the barbarian notices?” the black spot said.
“He’s going to marry me,” Kyung-sook said. “And I’m going to America with him.”
“Well, tell him to hurry it up, Blinky. Doesn’t he know we can’t have you walking around with a big belly and no husband?—you’re scandalizing the customers!”
Kyung-sook wanted to laugh out loud, thinking of their restaurant’s clients, the men stopping for a cheap dinner before a night out at the kisaeng houses. The married construction worker who was busily trying to seduce Sunhee. Or the cook-owner herself, passing her ondongi under Old Bachelor Choi’s nose every day—who was she kidding, preaching to her?
It was true that the man David didn’t come to the restaurant any more, but he said it was because the cook-owner made him nervous. Every time he showed his face, the cook-owner would throw salt at him, as Kyung-sook had done that first day.
“Your silly Korean superstitions,” he said, the last time they had left the restaurant, the cook-owner venturing out even into the heavy monsoon rain to fling salt in his wake.
“That’s why the East will always be stuck behind the West: Korea’s thought is based on ghosts and goblins, not science.”
Kyung-sook wasn’t exactly sure what was so superior about Western thought. This man wore his shoes in the house, no shoes out (he regularly walked out in
to the courtyard barefoot like the worst kind of beggar). It was appalling to watch him touch his food with his hands instead of using utensils or wipe his nose with a dirty cloth he used over and over. And of course, there was the matter of those awful toilets. She wasn’t exactly sure what was so superior about Western thought.
“I don’t want to see you throwing salt or worshipping those dried fish,” he said. “You’re going to be meeting my professors and lots of other important people, so I want them to see what a sophisticated young lady you are.”
Kyung-sook, nodded, even though from time to time, she, too, felt an urge to ward off bad spirits by throwing salt at that man, to scrub the coarse grains into places he had touched her. But then she thought about how she had once slipped a bill from his pile of American money and taken it to the credit-house. She had been amazed at the profusion of won she had received for that single American bill. She went to the silk market and purchased a jauntily olok-dolok-striped hundred-day outfit for the child. It gave her a thrill to think of raising her child in the Beautiful Country—she could probably have servants, even. And eventually, she would convince this man to send for her parents, so they could all live together in the bounty of A-me-ri-ca.
Out on the main street, a line of trucks roared by, so loud it made the ground shake. Army trucks, filled with soldiers, guns at the ready. They sped by once, maybe twice a day lately. Old Bachelor Choi said it was because of the student demonstrations.
“I hope it’s not going to be like the riots of ’60 and ’61,” he said. “After the body of that high school student demonstrator washed up on shore in Masan with torture marks all over him, all hell broke loose. Even housewives and maidens took to the street. The police got all panicky and would sometimes just shoot wildly into the crowds. So much bloodshed.”
The trucks invaded the foreigner’s neighborhood, too. The man David watched the soldiers go by as he and Kyung-sook opened the gate to his flat. He spat on the ground as if he had a bad taste in his mouth.
“See?” he told Kyung-sook. “Those brave protesting students just want fair elections. And the government is killing them—just the way they tried to kill Park’s legitimate political rival, that man Kim. This is what’s happening right now. Your Korea is being ruled by dictators who are planning to run your poor country into the ground.”
Kyung-sook didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want David to know how ignorant she was of her country’s politics. In the village, it had made little difference if this president or that one was elected; you were just not to say anything critical about the sitting one, that was all she knew.
In the restaurant, they could all hear the army trucks roar by again, the noise seeming closer this time, almost as if the trucks were in the alley itself. The cook-owner swore as the dishes rattled, as the usual noontime din was drowned out by the noise of powerful engines.
“Sis,” said Sunhee to Kyung-sook, after the trucks had passed. “Cook-owner said you’re going to get married and go back to America with Mr. Fish. You lucky thing! Oh, I should start studying English so I could meet a Westerner. I’m almost an old maid, working in this dump with no prospects.”
“What are you calling a dump?” the cook-owner sniped, still a black spot in Kyung-sook’s eyes. “It is said, ‘Kick a stone in anger and you hurt your own foot.’ Feel free to go elsewhere for your fucking employment!”
“I was just kidding,” Sunhee said, hanging her proud head a little. She had obviously once been a beauty, which was what had gotten her in trouble in the first place at the sieve factory, between the enmity from the other female workers and the extra attention she received from the married male boss. “Where else do I have to go?”
She looked at Kyung-sook enviously.
KYUNG-SOOK
Seoul
1972
Kyung-sook woke to find that the baby had moved between the winged bones of her hips. Now less weight on her ribs, but down beneath, everything pressed, so heavy. The man David snored beside her, his mouth flung open.
Kyung-sook rose and began rummaging in the box of food. There was a banana and a few sweet biscuits. Some rice was needed, also. She put the banana and biscuits in the windowsill first.
Please, merciful Birth Goddess, please make the baby wait to come out until we are safely in America.
David walked over to the window, wiping his eyes, just as Kyung-sook took up a handful of rice.
“What the hell is this?” he said.
Kyung-sook leaped toward the offerings as he swept them from the windowsill. She still had the rice in her hands, and the hard grains slipped through her fingers as the banana and biscuits tumbled ignominiously to the floor. She wanted to weep.
“Karen, it’s unclean to leave food out like this! Do you want us to have flies and roaches in here?”
The fruit and shattered biscuits lay scattered on the floor. Between them, the rice grains stood up on their tips, every one of them pointing up at the sky. A sure sign the Goddess was displeased.
“Oh, if that doesn’t take the cake,” David muttered. “A goddam mess all over the floor, and I haven’t even been awake for five minutes.”
Kyung-sook looked back at him. She didn’t understand him anymore—he wasn’t pleased with anything she did. Just last week she had gone to the beauty parlor and gotten a modern bobbed haircut and a perm. But when he saw it, he just looked at her and barked, “What did you do to your hair?”
He was staring at her with hard eyes, the colored part going up into the lid—what Koreans called snake-eyes.
The snake-eyes frightened her.
“You are just an Oriental peasant at heart, aren’t you?”
Again, she did not understand. Instead, she grasped her stomach and showed him.
“What about baby?” she demanded of him. “Why you never say no thing about baby?”
He shook his head.
“You can’t come back to America with a baby,” he said, calmly. “I thought it was obvious.”
What did he mean?
“I don’t want children. I’m going to graduate school. The fact that you’re still pregnant makes me think you don’t want to come to America with me.”
“I wanna go A-me-ri-ca.”
“Then you have to get rid of the baby—it’s getting to be almost too late. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Sometimes, when the man spoke too fast, the meaning of his words was a fluttering thread that slipped out of Kyung-sook’s hands. But now, his meaning was becoming all too clear.
He was talking about nak-tae. Abortion.
Kyung-sook began to cry. Was this man a human being?
“That’s the only way,” he said. “Did you think it was going to be easy for me, bringing home a foreign bride? There’s a war going on in Asia that people aren’t too happy about. This is going to be very hard on me. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Baby,” she said.
“I know it’s hard subverting the maternal instinct,” he said. “But it’s only a fetus, fe-tus, it’s not a baby yet. The unpleasant part will be over before you know it, and we can go on to America. Can’t you see your country is collapsing? Your president is a murderer of his own people, Karen. The army went and shot all those protesters in the middle of the day, some of them were mere children. There’s no chance for democracy here. My government wants me to get out, too.”
Kyung-sook was so tense, her teeth began chattering.
“Go to this clinic tomorrow and have it done. I know the doctor—he’ll take care of you, let you stay overnight. The day after, I’ll pick you up and we can go to the Bando Hotel together and get our plane tickets.”
He handed her a piece of paper, with the name of a Dr. Rhee and an address scrawled in transliterated Korean. And, as if he were making a huge sacrifice, the man David handed her a ten-thousand-won bill.
“This is all I can spare because I need to prepare for our trip,” he said. “Go get your savings and bring
it with you. Forty, fifty thousand at the very least.”
Kyung-sook found herself in the section of the city right behind Chong-no, Bell Street, in the Chinese medicine neighborhood. The smell of herbs and roots and dried animal parts made her feel even more nauseous. She walked by several stores that said, WE SELL DEER ANTLER and TIGER PENIS, GENUINE RED GINSENG.
The office was on the second floor of an acupuncture clinic.
She staggered up the steep stairs to the door that proclaimed “Dr. Rhee.” Inside, it was dark and hot and smelt of rotting wood, so different from the shiny foreigner’s clinic at HanYong University. The walls bore ghostly stains of cigarette smoke and grease from a hot plate sitting on a table. There were no nurses in white uniforms, just Dr. Rhee, an old man with a mole that looked like a giant leech eating up almost half his face.
He didn’t look like a doctor, Kyung-sook thought. Maybe a tol p’ari doctor, a quack doctor. There were no certificates on the walls, only a table with a fraying curtain that went around it and a bucket that had some metal tools soaking in cloudy water.
Dr. Rhee glanced at her stomach and cackled. His fingers were stained with tobacco, a pack of cheap Peacock cigarettes sat on his desk.
“You are very big, very close to delivering, I’d say. This is not going to be an easy operation. How much do you have?”
Kyung-sook reluctantly showed him the pile of bills she had pulled together, all the wages she had scrimped and saved.
“That’s not enough,” he said, scowling. “That’s not hardly enough. I’m breaking the law, you know, risking my own neck.”
Then he turned away and hawked, as if he was going to spit.
Kyung-sook’s head was spinning.
“Please,” she said. “How much more do you need?”
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