“You know how pudae chigae originated?” Doug said. “During the Korean War, people were starving, so they would bring back garbage from the American army bases and boil it to make soup.”
“You always tell me these things after I’ve eaten them,” I said, but then I got to thinking. What was my mother’s life like during the Korean War? Did she, like hundreds of other people in Seoul, hover around the garbage pile of the Eighth Army base, wishing for a piece of meat-fat or bone that had already been in someone’s mouth so she could make some soup?
I cashed some of my travelers’ checks and brought them the next time I went to visit Mrs. Lee. I offered it respectfully with two hands, but she didn’t make a move to receive them, so I pushed them into her hands twice, three times, explaining that I felt bad about how she was spending a small fortune feeding me. She cried and flung the bills back at me, so when she was in the toilet shack, I slipped them in the mini-root-cellar box she kept in the corner of the kitchen. When she finished with that ten pounds of garlic, probably in a day or two, she would find the money.
I wanted her to accept my help, to have her know that I didn’t feel the least shred of anger toward her any more, now that I knew her. I hadn’t had a terrible life with Ken and Christine. Materially, it had been a resounding success.
That night after we’d gone to bed, I looked at her pillowy face and wondered what her expression had been right after I was born. Happy? Sad? Dismayed? Did she see bits of herself or her late husband looking back at her?
I recalled going out with Christine and Amanda to the Magic Pan, maybe a year ago. I’d noticed how Amanda and Christine had eaten their crepes in an identical way, wielding forks and knives as precisely as gem cutters, picking out the pieces of meat and leaving the shroudlike crepes behind. Even their similarly shaped mouths pursed the same way, like drawstring bags, lapidary movements, invisible threads connecting bone to bone, flesh to flesh.
I remembered thinking: I’ll never have that, someone to compare myself to. But now, of course, I did.
Only the tiniest bit of doubt remained. A dusty dark seed that looked spoiled and old and dead—unlikely to sprout and cause its trouble.
But if it did crack open, extend a tentative root, I would be forced to follow that pale thread to its very end.
Mrs. Lee would be a complete stranger.
SARAH
Seoul
1993
There are things, Doug told me, that only exist for Koreans, that aren’t explainable in the English language.
Like han, that wrenching, incurable feeling of regret. Or nun-chi, the ability to size someone up without even talking to them.
“Like that first day you asked me to eat lunch with you,” he said. “My nun-chi nudged me, told me you were someone I’d want to get to know—even though after meeting the other Motherland Programmers I doubted there would be a single person on the program I’d want to be friends with.”
The DNA test results had come in. Miss Park wanted both me and my omoni, my um-ma, to meet in the office. I was sure if the DNA didn’t match, she would have said so on the phone. Now, I was so excited and relieved that my mother and I were going to be official.
Miss Park’s face looked tight and drawn.
“I’m so sorry,” Julie said. “Mrs. Lee is not your mother.”
The wind was rushing in to fill parts of my brain that had suddenly gone blank.
“Excuse me?” was all I could say.
“The DNA tests confirmed it.” She showed me the report. The samples had been sent all the way to America. The results were in a language I could read and understand. My name, hers. NO MATCH. I stared at Mrs. Lee. Why? My eyes burned. Had she been pulling some kind of scam?
“Could you ask her why—” I had to pause, then went on, “why she was so sure I was her daughter?”
Mrs. Lee balled up a paisley hanky and spoke in a sobbing Korean.
“She said she just knew when she saw you on TV—you look a lot like her late husband when he was a boy. She also said you two like all the same things: you’re both left-handed, she used to love to play the changgo drum when she was your age, too.”
Mrs. Lee gripped my hand. A warm, familiar feeling. But I gently slipped it out. I felt a sudden, unaccountable loyalty to Christine, of all people. I would never let her hold my hand—or even touch me the tiniest bit—the way I had let this woman, countless times.
Mrs. Lee sniffled, said something.
“She said she was a little troubled hearing you say you’d been found at a fire station, because she had actually brought you to the Little Angels orphanage herself. But she thought that perhaps someone had miswritten in your file, because after she had placed you on the steps, another baby was brought in, not long after, and the two of you were taken in together.”
I blinked. The other baby was probably me, brought in shit-slimy from the fire station. That meant there was yet another, shadowy woman out there that I needed to find. And there was some other Korean adoptee, perhaps in America, who was Mrs. Lee’s daughter.
“Agi-yah, mi an hae,” Mrs. Lee said, still crying. Child, I’m sorry. That much, I understood.
“I don’t think she’s lying,” Julie said. “We did once have a woman who came here claiming to be a mother, but you could tell she was wrong, right off the bat. She acted, I don’t know, cold. We had doctors examine her and it turned out she’d never had a baby at all, I think she just wanted to get some money or something.”
I thought of the bills lying under the papery heads of the garlic. I could feel the weight of the han.
“Mi an hae yo,” I said to the woman, Mrs. Lee Ok-bong.
“They’re saying ‘I’m sorry,’” Julie said, looking at Doug, a touch condescendingly.
Doug answered her in Korean.
“Oh,” she said, taken aback.
“Things aren’t always what you expect them to be,” he shrugged.
KYUNG-SOOK
Enduring Pine Village
1993
“Excuse me,” Kyung-sook said to a passerby, the third person she had approached. “But is this Han-Mi Dong?”
The young woman’s hair was cut so short, it looked like a feathery cap twirling around her head. She scowled at Kyung-sook, who had stepped in front of her to make her stop.
“Is this the Han-Mi neighborhood?” Kyung-sook repeated.
“Yeah, what of it?” she said, walking off in a huff.
Kyung-sook looked around, then around again. She didn’t recognize anything. She was sure that the dumpling house had been right in front of her, but instead of the corrugated tin roof she searched for, she was greeted by a modern apartment building rising straight up from the widened street. Colorful quilt-covers airing on balcony railings fluttered like flags from different nations. It hurt Kyung-sook’s neck to try to peer to the very top.
“Are you looking for something, Older Sister?”
The country accent was music to Kyung-sook’s ears. A woman taking out a bound plastic sack of garbage was looking at Kyung-sook with friendly curiosity.
“I think I used to live in this neighborhood, many years ago,” Kyung-sook said. “Do you remember if there used to be a dumpling house right here? The neighborhood folks called it ‘King’s Dumplings.’ There used to be a silk store down the lane, Jade Moon Real Estate on the corner.”
“Oh, my, I remember the silk store,” the woman said. “But that was an awful long time ago, even before they tore down the neighborhood.”
“Tore down?”
“Oh, yes. This neighborhood was designated an ‘eyesore’ by the government—they used to call it ‘Shit Alley’ because of the sewage stench from the shanties—so they razed the place to tidy up for the Olympics.”
“It was all torn down?”
“Well, those awful mud shanties certainly wouldn’t have made Korea look very admirable to the outside world. ’Course, no surprise we didn’t have any foreigners visit the neighborhood, being so far
away from the Olympic Stadium and all.”
“So do you remember the establishment that was right where this apartment building is? A tiny restaurant, it had a sign that said ‘noodles and dumplings’ out front.”
She shook her head. “I don’t have the faintest recollection of a noodle house, here. Sure could use one, though.”
How could this be? It was as if she’d never been here, nor Sunhee, nor the cook-owner, nor Old Bachelor Choi. Their diner, the teahouse, the Chinese restaurant she’d gone to with him, all these things were gone, replaced by sharp-angled buildings, shiny glass enclosures where men and women sat casually together drinking coffee right in view of anyone. A woman even began smoking—in public!
Kyung-sook felt as if she were in a foreign city. Seoul Station was still in the same place, but when she made her way to where her imo had lived, she found a giant building, “One-Hundred-Kinds-of-Things-Store,” occupying the entire block. Crowds of people were going in and out of it, carrying colorful shopping bags that said “New Generation.” No one stopped to ask if she was lost, they only pushed roughly past her, stamped on her feet.
Imo gone, as well as the sealmaker. Along with the houses with the terracotta tile roofs that curved up like wings. Now everything was boxes, all sharp boxes.
There was only one, last place she could go to try to retrieve her past.
Chosun University.
SARAH
Seoul
1993
“There’s this place I want to take you,” Doug said. “My mother told me about it—we always had plans to go there, but somehow never did. She said it’s a village that time forgot.”
“A Korean ‘Land of the Lost’?” I teased. “Will we see dinosaurs, giant ferns?”
“Maybe,” he said. “It’ll definitely be different than this—” He gestured around the café we were in, the Doctor Zhivago. Inside, it was highway Americana—Route 66 signs, license plates, diner menus. Plastic saguaro cacti on the tables, a Confederate flag hanging over the door. From multiple speakers, Whitney Houston belted the theme song from The Bodyguard, which had, in the last week, become a kind of garish aural wallpaper plastering the interiors of all the cafés and stores.
Doug and I took a bus going north, an hour out of Seoul. Then we took a cab ride over an unpaved road that led to a place where the flat plains of rice seemed to meet the jutting mountains. A shallow, grass-green river meandered almost completely around the village, giving you the illusion that it was an island, a floating raft of rice.
River Circle Village.
We rode hapsung in the cab with another young couple and their toddler. The driver doubled his money by collecting the full fare from both parties. We were ferried across the water by a sullen ajuhshi poling a crude wooden craft.
Was this place was for real? The alleys were lined by long earthen walls covered by morning glories and four-o’clocks, creeping vines with gourds hanging off them like decorative light bulbs. Behind the walls sat old-time houses with thatched roofs, an occasional tiled one with edges curved like wings. The people walked around wearing the baggy farmer clothes that the actors had worn at the Folk Village, a Korean Colonial Williamsburg, that we had visited for a class trip.
The Korean couple had similar expressions of awe on their faces. The village folk ignored us.
“Why is this like this?” I asked Doug.
“The villagers decided they wanted to keep living the old way,” he said. “In the seventies the government instituted this ‘New Village Program’ where they forced modernization of all the country houses, but the government officials probably didn’t want to muddy their shoes with ox shit to get out here, so they left them alone.”
On our way here, we had passed another isolated mountain hamlet, but it couldn’t have looked more different: paved roads, a medieval castle-esque WEDDING TOWN with crenelated towers. In the town square, kids in Nike basketball shirts squatted outside MOTHER’S STORE eating ice cream. A train depot moldered outside of town.
“That’s a shame,” I said.
“Modernizing isn’t necessarily bad,” Doug shrugged. “When I was younger, I was darker, more Asian-looking. Kids used to call me ‘rice paddy boy,’ and teachers used to ask me if Koreans were dumb slant-eyed peasants like in M*A*S*H. It’s kind of nice now to see Americans driving Hyundai cars and drinking OB beer in fancy restaurants.”
“This place is wonderful, though,” I said.
“You know that little town we just passed? The one with WEDDING TOWN? I believe that’s the village my mother came from. It has the same name, at least.”
“She never took you there, in all that time you were in Korea?”
He narrowed his eyes at me.
“No,” he said coldly. “You can’t go back to a place like that, when you’ve become what my mother became.”
I knew enough to stay quiet, until he wanted to talk again.
We ate a dinner of rice mixed with mountain vegetables, side dishes of dark-brown mook made from acorns. Bitter with tannins, it quivered like jello, but I didn’t foresee Bill Cosby endorsing it anytime soon. Next to the restaurant was a rice wine house. We sat outdoors on a raised wooden platform papered with that yellow oilpaper they used on the floor. The waitress brought us some of those grassy pancakes that Mrs. Lee had made me, plus a big pot of milky white liquid that we shared using a hollowed-out gourd as a dipper. Doug said it was a traditional farmers’ rice wine called mac’oli. It didn’t taste like milk at all, it burned like a shot of tequila. A few of the village men were drinking and smoking from long pipes next to us, the breeze carrying the smoke and their voices away from us.
The rice wine went straight to my head. The moon was rising into a flung-out sky, and shy stars were emerging, one by one, to keep Venus company.
For dessert, the waitress brought us some irregularly shaped rice cakes, steamed on a bed of pine needles, which gave them a resiny taste-smell that brought me back to many summers ago.
“We used to rent this cabin on Sand Lake,” I told Doug. “In northern Minnesota, there are so many lakes, they just give up and name half of them ‘Sand Lake.’”
Doug leaned forward, sleepily interested.
“The cabin was nothing special. It didn’t even have indoor plumbing. I used to have to tell Christine when I needed to go to the bathroom at night, and she would go out with me.”
I was afraid of spiders, so Christine would whack around the privy first with a broom, then she’d wait outside. Sometimes I could hear her gently singing, her voice carrying through the crescent-moon ventilation cutout on the door.
“The lake smelled like pines, exactly like these cakes,” I said.
“I keep forgetting you grew up in the sticks.”
“Well, we would go up to the sticks, from Minneapolis. Ken was originally from the north country. He remembered a lot of stuff from growing up, like how to take the bark off birch trees without killing them. He used to make little birchbark boats down in the basement.”
“When was the last time you were there?”
“I was seven or maybe eight,” I said. “They later bought a place on Bass Lake, closer to the Cities. That lake, ironically, is a ‘dead’ lake, without fish in it. I think there’s some movement afoot to change its name to Lake Gitchigumee, you know, the whole Hiawatha story.”
“You fished?”
I nodded, recalling my child-sized Zebco, its clear filament, the red-and-white bobber, lead sinker shaped like a tear. Like any true Minnesota child, I caught sunfish by the stringerful. Even the ones hardly bigger than my child’s palm, Christine prepared. I admired her courage as she slit open the fishes’ bellies and pulled out their soft, silvery guts, scaling and cutting until she had a row of neat white filets which she would dip in a mixture of cornmeal, flour, and black pepper and pan-fry.
We would sit on the deck at twilight, squeeze slices of lemon over the crunchy-coated fish and watch the sun go down, while in the background, mosquito coils
burned like incense. When the mosquitoes donned their teeny-tiny gas masks and made their way through the smoke, we would go back into the cabin, shut the screen door, and Christine and Ken and I would play endless games of Chutes and Ladders or Parcheesi, as many times as I wanted.
“I like hearing that,” Doug said. He was smoking again, and he exhaled a cloud that remained for a few seconds like an apparition before fading into the sky.
It became too late to secure a taxi back, but a passerby showed us to a place where a woman would rent us a room in her house. The room had a clean wooden floor and bedding that smelled like rice starch and sunlight. We lay down, naked, then realized there was only one pillow. Doug gave it to me.
After making love, he fell asleep. I, as usual, stayed awake. I stared at him in the muted light from the moon. He looked like an angel when he slept, one arm protectively around me, the other curled under his chin, fingers extended as if he were secretly waving at me.
I gently worked the pillow under his head. He gave a sigh, rubbed his eyes in a childlike gesture, and I saw the baby he had once been in the adult he was now.
The idea of escape was a fiction, I realized. You could travel to the other end of the earth in an airplane, but you wouldn’t get too far from yourself and your accretion of all your secret histories, the sins and curses and mercies that ever touched you. People entered and disappeared from your life, but they irrevocably left parts of themselves, the way that soft candy prayerfully pressed by Korean mothers onto the gates where their children were taking their college entrance exams eventually hardened and became part of the gate itself.
Perhaps I’d finally learned, from this strange twisted language, the answer to my question, Why am I I? In Korean you rarely used the “I,” nae-ga. Instead of “I’m going to the store,” you just said “Going to the store.” You only needed to say “I” in situations where you needed to distinguish yourself, “I—not Doug, not Bernie, not Jun-Ho, not Jeannie—am going to the store.” I felt too insecure, however, about when an “I” was truly needed, and so I sprinkled nae-gas all over my sentences the way a desperate cook keeps adding salt, even as Sunsengnim kept scolding me, saying, “Sal-ah-ssi, we know it’s you.”
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