“Komapsumnida, Omoni,” I said. Thank you, Mother. There, I’d said it. Her tilde-eyes turned moist.
She shuffled behind me in her tennie-clogs up to the gate, held my hand, and wished me “Chal mok-oh”—eat well. She didn’t let go of my hand when I walked away, instead, she extended her arm until our physical connection broke, and then she kept her arm outstretched, as if preserving some kind of invisible force that connected us.
Half-way down the lane I peeked into the bag. A six-pack of tiny yogurt drinks, each of the plastic bottles hardly bigger than a spool of thread. I didn’t know if I should tell her that Julie Koh from Little Angels had called suggesting that we get a DNA test to confirm everything.
Under the yogurt drinks were some rice crackers, baked so crisp that later, in my room, they would crackle in my mouth like shattering pottery.
KYUNG-SOOK
Enduring Pine Village
1993
Kyung-sook had decided that life itself was an unfathomable, unreliable puzzle. You looked at it from a certain angle and you felt one way, looked at it from another and you would feel differently.
Of course, anyone who knew of her past would be astounded to learn that she had married at all.
Hyun Il-sik was fifteen years older than Kyung-sook, and everyone regarded him as the village cripple. His father had deserted the family after he saw Il-sik’s deformed hand, but his mother raised him just the same as if he’d been whole. Indeed, Il-sik learned to do skilled woodwork, his father’s trade, with just one hand.
Il-sik’s mother died when he was twenty-five. Since their family wasn’t originally from Enduring Pine Village, Il-sik had no kin. He left the village, and by the time he came back, Kyung-sook was working at her job in the market, her own mother had died, and she was taking care of her father.
Kyung-sook didn’t take much notice of Il-sik except that he had bought a small patch of worn-out land, and he busily refurbished the old granary, relic of the times of rice and barley, that stood upon it. Somewhere along the line, he, like Imo, had become a Christo-follower.
Christo himself, he announced to the villagers, had told him to return to the village and start a church.
A few people began attending. Kyung-sook saw them making their way to the old granary in their best clothes, carrying their books of the Christo-word as well as books of Christo music. Kyung-sook found herself intrigued. When she peeked into the building during the week, she saw nothing special: a raised platform, a few simple wooden benches.
At the front of the church sat the two joined sticks.
Kyung-sook had always been struck by the way the Christo religion could be represented so simply. Looking at this spare but unmistakable symbol of Christo gave her an odd but natural feeling of calm, the way coming upon song-hwadang, the piled rock pagodas, deep in the mountains first startled her—the hand of man, here in the mountains!—then made her feel reassured. Each passing traveler had added a stone, carefully selected to fit with the others, placed atop the delicate balance of the column with a prayer, his personal entreaty adding to the countless prayers for safety and well-being that had come before.
When no one was looking, Kyung-sook slipped into the church again, and again. Day of Water, Day of Fire, Day of Gold. Every day except the Day of Sun. The stillness encompassed in that old granary reminded her of the chapel at the missionary school. She used to sneak into that space, reveling in that clear, silky silence for as long as she could. If someone came upon her, she’d duck her head and pretend to be praying to Christo. But she hadn’t been there for Christo, or any other deity. She loved being able to sit in one place, and just be. Other than her favorite places by the Three Peaks Lake or the Glass River, nothing else offered her this solace.
“Praise the Lord!”
Il-sik had come up behind her one day when Kyung-sook was peeking into the open door of the sanctuary. He invited her to the Sunday’s service and Kyung-sook, embarrassed, could find no way to gracefully refuse.
“There is something wrong, dear wife,” Il-sik said. Worry had carved a new wrinkle deep into his brow.
You cannot vanquish your past, Kyung-sook thought. Even though her belly was the soft, useless one of a middle-aged lady, it still had the memory of being stretched tight as a drum, the baby inside rolling and tapping to her own rhythm. She remembered how she used to tickle her navel—that place where she had first been connected to her own mother—and how the baby would kick.
And now, the more she tried to forget, the more the memories pushed inside.
Il-sik began asking her again what was wrong, really, was she sick? She said no, but some days she could barely get up, she would have such shooting pains in her stomach. At night, she shivered under the covers as a fever raged. Il-sik urged her to see the doctor. Finally, he carried her on his weakening back all the way to the hospital. The doctor listened to Kyung-sook’s pulse for many minutes and then proclaimed that she had hwa-byung, the fire sickness.
There is no medicine, the doctor said. You have to find the source of the fire and let it burn—until it is finished. If you insist on containing it inside, it will continue to destroy you.
“Please,” Il-sik said to his wife, as he gazed upon her laying on their yo. “You must tell me the source of your torment. I will wait here, forever if I must, until you tell me.”
Kyung-sook struggled to remain calm, cool as summer fruit. But the fire, which had been raging for almost twenty years, jumped within her. Sweat boiled out of her pores. Kyung-sook felt so very weary. She was no firekeeper, not anymore. She needed to let it out, endure the scorches from the outside instead of the slow incineration from within. She told Il-sik everything of her past. Everything.
“Divorce me,” she said, when she was finished.
“I cannot judge,” Il-sik said. “Only Our Father can do that. For us on earth, we need to forgive, the way Christo forgave even his betrayers and doubters, that is His grace.” But Il-sik did not speak in his confident church voice; it was more in the manner of one who, by repeating something over and over, hopes to convince himself that something impossibly foolish may yet be true.
“Yobo, I don’t know what to do—about the child. If that is the same child.”
“You do what you have to do, Wife,” Il-sik said, and he turned his tear-stained face away.
SARAH
Seoul
1993
A spatulate, toothpick-like stick swabbed painlessly on the inside of my cheek, that’s all it took. Miss Park had convinced me to go through with the test, Little Angels would pay for everything. I was the first successful “reunion” they’d ever had, and now they were struggling with what kind of protocol they should have in place, if others should follow my same journey.
I didn’t mind. In fact I would be reassured to have all this confirmed through the quantifiable conclusions of science, to know that I shared with Mrs. Lee the one-in-five-billion pattern of DNA that marked us, irrevocably, as belonging together.
KYUNG-SOOK
Enduring Pine Village
1993
“September 3, afternoon, that’s when the baby was dumped, according to the orphanage records the American girl provided us with,” the voice on the phone said. “Do you know anything about this girl?”
“No,” Kyung-sook said, clutching the phone’s receiver. “She is the wrong girl. Thank you for your effort.” And she hung up.
September 3, her daughter’s seng-il, the day she had fallen into the world so inauspiciously.
Some years, the date passed without Kyung-sook noticing it, a blessing. But most years, she revisited the smell of excrement, the red curtain of pain, her empty arms and breasts that cried milky tears.
But was that girl the child? How many women that day might have been weeping as a child left their arms?
“I’m going to go to Seoul,” she told Il-sik. “I’ve arranged for Song Grandmother to take care of Father for a few days, to come in and cook for you.”
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Il-sik’s face was tight and anxious, quivering like a bowstring.
“I won’t be gone long,” she said.
SARAH
Seoul
1993
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PLEDGE, “WE’LL KEEP THE FLAME ALIVE FOREVER”? The newest scandal, according to the hodgepodge, sometimes ungrammatical Korea Herald (put out by American expats), was that despite heartfelt vows to keep the ’88 Olympic torch burning into eternity, the flame had fizzled out, and no one had noticed for over a week. As Lotte World added Lotte Swimming, Lotte Folk Museum, and the Lotte Magic Island to its vast complex, the Olympic Stadium, which was next to it, languished. It hadn’t seen any action since the Reverend Sun Myung Moon united 35,000 Korean “Moonie” couples in marriage last August. I hadn’t even known that the Moonies were Korean.
I put the paper down, glanced at the clock. It was time to head to the school’s auditorium for the Talent Show. I had invited Mrs. Lee, and I wondered if she’d be there. I had vacillated about asking her—at the time it seemed so seventh-grade piano recital—but now I wondered whether I’d be disappointed if she didn’t come.
A strange thing happened there. Stranger than the sight of Bernie Lee doing tae kwon do moves set to opera music. Stranger than James Park (“Jam-EZ is how I pronounces it,” he said), a gangsta-rapper-wannabe who sang an original song from his soon-to-be-released Korean CD, “Yellow Niggah.” Maybe even stranger than the girl who took off all her clothes, spit milk on the audience, and rolled around, naked, on a bed of rice. Our own Korean Karen Finley.
I was supposed to play the changgo, which in itself wasn’t so weird, but at the last minute, the Traditional Drumming Group of Chosun University had commandeered Tae Sunsengnim’s puk drum and kaenguri for some anniversary performance, so instead of playing as part of a group, I was told I was going to perform an impromptu drumming solo.
Tae Sunsengnim informed me of this maybe half an hour before the performance. I felt like a trained donkey, and I balked. Tae Sunsengnim merely shoved me out on stage with her mighty ham-hands. I couldn’t remember a single thing I was supposed to do—usually I just followed the beat mashed out on the gong.
So I just brought the drum and the stick together.
Then, it was as if I’d brought two charges together. My whole body shuddered. The room started spinning. What was that Korean phrase about spinning?
… bing! bing! tol-myun-so…Like the Fourth of July when Amanda handed me a live sparkler and it exploded in my face, all I could see was light. My feet were moving on their own. My arms were moving on their own. I was a puppet jerked by some spastic puppeteer. I was crying. I was laughing. I could hear people speaking Korean, and I was shouting back to them. I could hear other drums pounding out an insistent beat that drowned out my pulse. I couldn’t breathe. I was going to collapse right in the middle of the stage.
Pinwheels of pistachio-colored light were still twirling in front of my eyes when my body finally slowed. My arm dropped, I stopped frenetically beating the drum like those toy monkey drummers. The light was replaced by faces in the audience.
Then, for the smallest second, I thought I saw her, although it wasn’t Mrs. Lee. It was someone with a sad, sad face.
Backstage, Tae Sunsengnim unknotted my white headband, soaked with sweat.
“Sarah,” she said. “I’ve never seen such an inspiring solo. You must come back to Korea and perform with our traditional drumming group.”
“No shit, man,” called Jam-EZ, as he fussed with his American-flag do-rag just before he went onstage. He turned and called over his shoulder, “That spinning split at the end woulda given James Brown a hernia!”
Someone was behind me. I turned quickly, wondering if I might catch another glimpse of that fleeting, sad face.
“Agi-yah.” It was the happy voice of Mrs. Lee. She clapped her hands and looked at me, as if particularly moved, and said, “Chotta!”
SARAH
Seoul
1993
“I’ve never seen you eat things like that,” Doug said.
I shrugged. The octopus stir-fry had actually been pretty tasty, suckers and all, and I’d even ordered it myself by hollering, Ajuhma! Nak-ji bokum hana ju sae yo! I made a big show of slurping up the last rubbery tentacle.
“How about something really different?”
For dinner he took me into the Chosun neighborhood to find a pudae chigae restaurant.
Poo day chee-gay.
Wasn’t that what Bernie et al. had been clamoring for, that first week of class?
There was a pudae chigae restaurant a stone’s throw from Chosun’s arched stone gates. At six o’clock in the evening, most of the tables were packed, college students poking chopsticks into a communal well, drinking cheap soju.
The waiter lit a small butane warmer at the bottom of the giant wok built into the center of the table, and then he returned with a block of ramen, some rice cakes that looked like extruded white Play-Doh, a handful of weedy-looking greens. He put them all into the depression and poured boiling water plus hot pepper paste over the mixture. Then, Benihana-style, he diagonal-sliced some hot dogs and a few good chunks of SPAM and ceremoniously dumped it all into the wok’s maw. When the whole mess got to boiling and gurgling, he added a few blaze-orange panes of American cheese.
Doug ordered us a ceramic pot filled with soju. He showed me how to drink it Korean-style, the younger person pouring it into the shot glass for the older person, using two hands to show respect. You toasted, shouting “kom-bae!” and then you were supposed to knock the incendiary liquid back in one swallow.
We drank as we waited for the pudae chigae to cook. At the next table, some drunk male students screeched and gave each other noogies, knocking their purses off the table.
“They’re hopeless young romantics talking about azaleas,” Doug said. “Azaleas. My mother said when she was young, she used to eat them.”
“How fancy-schmancy,” I said, feeling pleasantly blurred around the edges. That had also been Christine’s thing. For a party, along with smelly mold-encrusted French cheeses, plates of baby vegetables, she always ordered edible flowers. Violets, flamelike nasturtiums, yellow-and-purple brindled pansies in clear plastic containers from Byerly’s. She had gotten the idea from Ladies’ Home Journal.
“It was that or die waiting for the first barley to ripen,” Doug said. “There’s a month in spring the lunar calendar calls the ‘month of hunger,’ when the winter supplies run out but nothing’s ripe yet. She said one spring, the mountainside looked like it was still the dead of winter because so many families had gone out and stripped it bare of every green thing.”
“Oh,” I said. Doug ladled out some of the soup, the texture and color of molten lava. The sweet, spicy, syrupy goo was delicious. It reminded me of back home, how I would make ramen noodles: throw out the spice packet, make my own soup out of crushed garlic, one dash Tabasco, spoonfuls of La Choy soy sauce, squeeze of ketchup, and last, a single drop of honey. Noodles hot and sweet and salty, totally unlike the “Oriental Seasoning packet” but eerily like our pudae chigae. Was this craving, then, part of my Korean genetic code, tattooed on that winding helix of DNA?
But Koreans also ate plenty of strange things that I would gladly pass on. Crickets, sightless sea slugs, and something called pundaegi, silkworm larvae that looked (and smelled?) like prehistoric trilobites. On campus, girls carried black-and-gold-chain Chanel bags in one hand, greasy paper cones of pundaegi in the other.
Once, I was watching Doug eat some kind of seafood stew from which he pulled out nacreous shells like coins. I impulsively reached out with my long-handled spoon (Korean spoons made expressly for this purpose?) and stole a sip of broth. The broth was scalding, and so spicy, it made tears jump into my eyes. The taste was fishy, hot, horrible, and I was glad I hadn’t known about the slimy fish-egg sacs, lying like amputated thumbs beneath the opaque broth.
But there was something in the taste that drew me to it�
�I took another sip, then another.
“You’re Korean,” Doug said simply. “That soup is too salty and spicy for Westerners to handle—it’s called ‘spicy soup’ in Korean. On the base they used to make the newbies eat it, as a joke.”
I wiped my eyes and took a sip of beer.
“Cut open a Korean and that’s probably what you’ll find: salt and hot red peppers,” he said.
Was I really this Korean? I wondered. In Minnesota, cinnamon is too spicy for some folks. And nothing on the Scandinavian menu is pickled in salt—even lutefisk is pickled in lye. When the ajuhmas made kimchi at the Rainbow, they dragged giant plastic trash barrels outside the restaurant into which they’d mix limp cabbage with hot red peppers, thumbs of ginger—and entire bags of rock salt, the size of the bags Ken used to de-ice the driveway.
But, yes, Ken. When we used to go to Sand Lake in the summers, he would always make sure a bag of spuds—and three different kinds of salt—were on the grocery list. At the cabin he would slice the raw tubers into discs, whose starchy whiteness he’d dip first into onion salt, then double-dip into regular salt. He also stole pinches of raw hamburger before he put them on the grill, rolling them in coarse salt the way Nana rolled cheddar cheese balls in nuts at Christmastime.
Was there anything better than cramming a hard piece of oniony potato into my drooling mouth? It was our Sand Lake tradition, just the two of us. He would always start it by saying, “Madam Sarry-Sar, how about some po-tah-toes?” with a snooty lockjaw accent like Mr. Howell on Gilligan’s Island. Or, “We’re having hamburgers tonight, how about starting with some hors d’oeuvres?” which he would pronounce as “horses’ doofuses” in that same accent, which always made me giggle.
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