The woman left the rest of the rice balls when she departed, saying Kyung-sook needed to eat well.
As the train began moving again, Kyung-sook looked out the window at the familiar sight of the mountains. She had let the woman think that indeed she was traveling to her mother’s home to have her baby and once that was done, she would return to her husband in Seoul.
If that could only be true! Not even going across the sea to America, but to have a husband and a life to return to. Except for the Shopkeeper Auntie of her youth, Kyung-sook had never known any woman who’d had a child without a husband. Not even Hye-ja, the one people said had once been a prostitute for Americans in North River County; in the bathhouse she took great pride in her upright, cup-shaped breasts that had never nursed.
Kyung-sook drummed her finger on the train’s window. The jade ring knocked against it with a cheap ticking sound. Kyung-sook yanked the ring off—it was difficult because her fingers were swollen—and she hurled it to the floor, where it broke into several pieces.
Real, pure jade sang when you struck it.
She looked out the window when the train pulled into the station, almost as if she believed someone would meet her.
Of course, there was no one. She had a long way to walk to return home.
Kyung-sook noted the water stains on their gate.
That summer had been one of the worst monsoon seasons ever. Because so much of the land in Enduring Pine Village had been cleared as fire-fields, there were no more trees to stop the water rushing off the mountain. At some points, stains reached several meters high.
Did that mean the rice harvest had been ruined? she wondered. Were her parents all right? Sudden concern for them caused her to bang on the gate’s door.
Her mother came out first. When she saw Kyung-sook standing forlornly outside the gate, wretched bundle and flute in hand, she put her hand to her mouth. Then she saw Kyung-sook’s pregnant stomach, and she screamed.
Was this a malevolent mirage? This was not the same daughter she had sent off to the Seoul Women’s College of Education many seasons ago.
Kyung-sook’s impulse was to bow, low, until her forehead touched the ground. But in her condition, she could not.
Her mother ran out, screaming like a madwoman, but Kyung-sook’s father followed her quickly and intervened, murmuring that everyone needed to come inside the gate before anyone saw what was happening.
“Na-ga! Leave!” her mother shrieked, when Kyung-sook was brought into the yard. “Get out!”
Her father kept shaking his head.
Kyung-sook wanted to die.
But the baby inside her kicked. It was alive.
Kyung-sook’s mother and father argued, then her father merely said to Kyung-sook, “Go in there.” He pushed her toward the old pigshed.
At mountain-chilly nightfall, her father left a burlap seed sack and a bowl of millet cereal outside the shed.
He hadn’t left a spoon, so Kyung-sook ate the cereal with her hands, using her tongue to lap up the last, bitter grains. This was barely human food, she thought. In flush times, it would be a mash they’d feed the pig. She put a hand up to her face and felt bits of millet stuck there. She had no choice in her life anymore, did she? She spread the burlap onto a pile of musty barley-straw, hugged herself for warmth, and fell heavily into sleep.
In the middle of the night, she stirred. Something hurt. In her present condition, too many pains and discomforts vied for her attention. So she merely waited for the pull of fatigue to drag her back down into the dark hands of sleep. Then she slept as if dead—for minutes? hours? days?—but eventually found herself unwillingly bobbing back to the surface of consciousness.
Her bowels needed to be moved.
She couldn’t imagine moving her bulk up from where it had sunk into the moldering straw like quicksand, so she forced herself to sleep on, hoping that urge would go away, but eventually she felt painful, unignorable cramps beginning to stitch into her bowels.
She couldn’t soil her sleeping place. Even the pig wouldn’t have done that. She finally managed to drag herself the few meters to the outhouse, and returned.
Just before sunrise, a different kind of pain jabbed into the blackness. First, a few pinpricks, then more and more until there were so many holes, the whole fabric of sleep gave way in one blinding burst of agony.
She gasped awake, instinctively clutching her stomach as if it were a precious package someone was trying to take away from her. The baby, caught in the tightening vise of her womb, frantically thrust its legs, banging into her spine, agony radiating down the backs of Kyung-sook’s legs all the way to her toes. How could she ever feel worse than she did at this moment? She was cold, she needed to throw up and release her bowels at the same time—but the pain in her back was so terrible she could only roll like a weevil on the dirt floor, hoping to find a position that would make it stop.
Then she vomited, warm and wet on her protruding stomach.
The pain seared her in waves. During a small, electric interval between its peaks, she managed to drag herself, wild with fear, to the outhouse once more, managed to position herself over the hole. The smell of vomit and excrement made her want to throw up again, she prayed she would finish her nasty business here before her whole body seized up again.
She felt something strange. She put a hand in between her legs, feeling in the silvery darkness. Her fingers brushed up against slime. And hair. Not her own pubic hair, but slippery seaweed hair. The baby’s head was crowning in the jungle of her fur.
She screamed.
KYUNG-SOOK
Enduring Pine Village
1972
Her mother’s eyes. Soft, unguarded, the way they looked whenever Kyung-sook had been sick as a child.
“No one can describe the pain of labor.” Her mother’s voice, through the fog. “My mother didn’t tell me, either.”
Kyung-sook’s mouth was so dry and chapped, she couldn’t answer. She was in the house, lying on the warmest spot on the ondol floor, normally reserved for her father. What had happened?
“The baby has a lot of hair, like you did when you were born.”
The baby!
“Where?” she managed to whisper.
“Here.” She showed Kyung-sook a grayish mass swaddled in a pojagi.
Kyung-sook opened the pojagi. Just as she had sensed: a cleft between the legs, tiny like the slit in barley. Bits of white slime, blood, and something black and smelly covered the curled-up body.
“The baby is healthy,” her mother said, rewrapping the pojagi. She paused, then added, “So there’s no need to call the midwife.”
Her mother hadn’t noticed yet that the baby was not all Korean. When the baby grew a bit, the secret would most certainly emerge. Then what? Her proper parents would have no choice but to expel her and the child, for it would be necessary to distance themselves from a hon-hyul, a mixed-blood child. Even more importantly, lacking a father, the child could not be entered into the family registry. Such a child could not enroll in school or have an official marriage—and as a mixed-blood, there was no chance in the world a respectable family would accept her, anyway. She would be destined to life as a ghost, spoken about only in whispers.
The only solution was to get to America, try to find David, she thought. Oh yes, as if she could just walk across the sea…
The baby began to whimper softly. Kyung-sook wanted to hold her, to lick her clean like a mare does to her foal.
“There is no need to call the midwife,” her mother repeated, turning her back so that the baby was out of Kyung-sook’s sight. “Everyone has been busy and distracted since the flood.”
Kyung-sook lay back on the bedding.
“What shall I do?”
Her mother didn’t look at her. “I can go to Seoul. There are places that will care for her … But I will have to go now. Secrets cannot remain so for long in this village.”
Nothing was real to Kyung-sook any more. Not this ba
by. Not her pregnancy. The foreigner least of all.
As if through a fog, Kyung-sook heard her own voice say, surprisingly calmly, “Mother, go, then.” Kyung-sook had heard about these orphanages, started by a kindly American man who had felt so bad seeing pictures of all the orphans wandering the streets after the 6.25 War. These places took in babies and tried to find them homes—in A-me-ri-ca. Kyung-sook was struck: perhaps this child could now go to the Beautiful Country, on her own.
Don’t even hold the child, a voice said. Or else it will be too difficult to let her go.
Kyung-sook shut her eyes.
“Yes, please go,” she whispered, and waited. When she opened her eyes, her mother was gone.
Kyung-sook panicked.
No, I want her back. I’ll raise her, even if you banish me from the house. I’ll find a way.
Kyung-sook rose, felt blood pouring out of her womb like a tipped water crock as she ran toward the door of the house, arms outstretched.
“Baby!” she cried. “I’ll find a way!”
What way? said the voice. Playing your flute at Seoul Station for pennies and bags of yams? Going to the American army base by North River County and selling your body to soldiers? You, a descendant of one of the oldest families in Enduring Pine Village?
Her grasping hands fell away. Her sobs folded her sore and battered body in two.
Beyond the rice-paper door, beyond the stained gate with her family’s ancient seal, her mother was walking away, with her baby.
Kyung-sook slept as if dead. When she awoke, her mother was coming in to see her, bringing in a rice table. Kyung-sook recognized her bowls, one filled with rice, one with broth and feathery pieces of mi-yuk seaweed. Her old chopsticks, her spoon. Kyung-sook fingered those worn, familiar objects.
Her mother spooned the soup into Kyung-sook’s mouth, as if Kyung-sook were her tiny child again. The broth was warm and salty, and Kyung-sook’s very bones cried out for it.
“Eat slowly,” her mother said. “Eat a lot. Then rest.”
Kyung-sook sighed. Her very first taste of food had been rice eaten off her mother’s fingers. Her own baby would never know the taste of her hand.
Where is she, she wanted to say. Where is my baby? Milk had already begun leaking, drop by drop, out of her swollen breasts. But her womb trembled and contracted. Her body was already preparing to forget that it had ever had a child.
Kyung-sook’s mother came with some clean white bandages that she wrapped tight around Kyung-sook’s chest. She helped Kyung-sook lie down into the familiar, warm bedding.
“Have a deep rest,” she said, again. “Then eat some more soup. I’ll go out to see if perhaps a pumpkin is ready, so I can make you some juice-tonic.”
Kyung-sook also dearly wanted to know where her flute had gone, but of course, she didn’t dare ask.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please forgive me,” she moaned, over and over again, not even knowing who she was saying it to.
PART III
KYUNG-SOOK
Enduring Pine Village
1993
Cooking Oil Auntie moaned, swinging her considerable ongdongi around on the bench.
“Aigu, what’s going to happen to poor Okja?” she said, wringing her hands. At the bottom of the TV screen: LOYAL VIEWERS, PLEASE TUNE IN NEXT WEEK AT THIS TIME.
“Damn!” Cooking Oil Auntie pounded her fist on the bench. “Why do they always do this—how can I wait until next week to find out what happens?”
Kyung-sook didn’t know why Cooking Oil Auntie let herself become so sucked in by cheap, sentimental soap operas like this one, The Date Tree. Cooking Oil Auntie, the most tight-fisted businesswoman in the market, wept and exulted over these paper characters as if they were members of her own family.
In the late afternoons, when customers were scarce as frogs in winter, Kyung-sook occasionally accepted Cooking Oil Auntie’s invitation to watch the soap operas because watching TV was such a novelty for her. And the previous soap opera, The Dark Yushin Era and Beyond, had been based on the true history of President Pak Chung-Hee’s so-called Yushin, “Revitalizing Reforms.”
The drama had been beguiling, following the story of two friends who make their way from a small, dirt-poor village to Seoul. One man becomes a hired thug for the strongman government, the other—embittered because his teacher father was executed as a suspected Communist sympathizer—gains entrance to the famous Seoul National University and becomes a prosecutor, fighting the corruption of the government. The plot twist was that both friends fall in love with the same Seoul girl who joins the underground student democratic movement. But when she is killed in a police raid, the former rivals-to-the-death join forces to exact revenge.
Watching the show brought Kyung-sook back to that time of the roaring army trucks, the soldiers and policemen running on the streets.
On the TV, another ticker moved across the bottom of the screen:
… GIRL LOOKING FOR KOREAN BIRTH-GIVING MOTHER NEXT ON THE SEARCH FOR MISSING PERSONS!!…
Kyung-sook’s heart contracted.
“Hm, finally, something new and different on that show,” Cooking Oil Auntie remarked. “Usually it’s just wailing harlmonis.”
“Are you going to watch?”
“Uhn, why not. It’ll take my mind off Okja.”
“Well, maybe if you’re going to keep the TV-machine on, I’ll stay, too—if that’s okay.”
“Suit yourself. Do you have any snacks in that pojagi, by any chance?”
Kyung-sook did have some baby-finger shrimp as well as some spiced squid and boiled peanuts that she had purchased for Il-sik, her husband, who liked eating light snacks and drinking beer at night, sometimes relieving Kyung-sook from the duty of making him dinner.
“I’ve got the shrimp you like so much,” she said, taking it out of her wrapping cloth and handing it over.
“This show is all stories about the human condition,” Cooking Oil Auntie explained, as if she were a schoolteacher and Kyung-sook her student. “First loves, people with crushes on their elementary school teachers, things we’ve seen a million times before right in the village, unh? But they’ve never had a foreigner on the show before—that should be really interesting.”
“A foreigner?”
“The girl’s from America.”
The hosts, an older, squat man and a young woman much taller than he was, came out smiling and joking with the audience. They greeted a middle-aged woman and a shrunken-looking ajuhshi.
Where was the girl?
“Shucks. Figures they save the interesting one for last. Say, d’you have any more snacks?”
Kyung-sook handed over the spicy squid.
“Holding out the best stuff, huh?” Cooking Oil Auntie ripped off a huge leathery piece and stuffed it into her mouth. Then she made a face and gagged.
“Pwah! There’s an ocean’s worth of salt in this stuff—I told you not to buy at Oakla’s snack stall. Urrr! Now my throat’s a desert.”
Kyung-sook sighed and took out a can of POCARI SWEAT, one she had bought as a treat for herself, to drink while keeping Il-sik company.
“—Wasn’t that wonderful, seeing all the people who called for our honored guests, Dr. Shin and Mrs. Choi?” The female hostess’s voice flowed like honey, so refined and smoothed by a perfect Seoul accent, quite discordant with the shock of her low-cut top and short skirt.
“It sounds like we have another heartwarming reunion in the works, thanks again to The Search for Missing Persons!”
The squat male announcer moved in front. His hair, Kyung-sook thought, was too black. A man his age should have at least a touch of gray, or white, like Il-sik had.
“For our next honored guest, we have someone who came a-a-a-all the way from America,” he intoned.
“This girl was abandoned here in Korea as a baby,” the woman announcer added, from behind him.
Kyung-sook’s throat tightened. The woman had used the same word for “throw away the garbage
.”
“… She was sent away from Korea and adopted by a white family in America. But now she has returned to seek her lost truemother. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s listen to her touching story and see if we can help her.”
The hostess waved her arms at a closed door as if she were a shaman imploring a spirit to come out. The door opened, and a girl of maybe twenty or so walked out. She was wearing a pretty purple dress and she stood very tall and confident as she walked out.
Kyung-sook squinted at the screen.
“Hmph, look at that, she’s grown up on American food and see how tall she is—if she were a Korean man they would send her straight up to the DMZ for her military duty, show those North Koreans what giants we’ve become,” Cooking Oil Auntie commented. “And look at that hair.”
The girl’s hair was so black and shiny that in the camera’s lights it looked alive, the way animal fur looked alive. Kyung-sook’s own hair had grown thinner over the years, with age and too many troubles, but when she was young, she, too, had such an abundance that no matter which way you pulled a clump of it, you couldn’t see even a sliver of white from her scalp.
The male announcer asked the girl how she was doing, was she happy and at peace to be there? Now the girl looked scared. She stared back, frozen.
“Do you understand Korean?” he asked her. The girl coughed, screwed up her face.
“I-dunna-know.”
The audience roared.
“What a riot,” said Cooking Oil Auntie. “That girl looks Korean, but out of that mouth comes the exact yabba-yabba of those missionaries who could never learn to speak Korean properly. So strange, like watching a puppet or a retard, isn’t it?”
The girl started to speak English, reading from a piece of paper. Kyung-sook wasn’t surprised to find that she didn’t understand a word anymore.
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