Somebody's Daughter (12 page)

Seoul

1993

Eureka! I had devised a system for conquering Korean, a system for memorizing words. French, at least, had cognates with English:
Liberté, fraternité, egalité
. And Spanish was cognate city.
Producto de México.

So I created my own for Korean.
Oo-yu
, the word for milk, became (m)
oo-yu
. And so forth.

In class we had been asked to name a family member we liked. Bernie had shown off with
“I like my X”
(X, a long word I'd have to look up later, which turned out to be “mother's brother's wife”). At my turn, I said I liked my
harmony
. My grandmother. My perfect cognate.

Nana Thorson was the one who had taken care of me after Amanda was born. Amanda, milkweed fluff for hair, eyes that turned from transparent to a clear, devastating blue. The house had been packed with visitors, as if the Christ child had been born here.

At first, I was scared of Nana, of the way she looked at me—as if I had done something wrong. But she warmed up, and we had tea parties where she'd happily pretend to quaff the grass-clipping-and-dirt tea I'd made her. When my irritating Aunt Connie (a neighbor, not a true aunt), the one with the chicken legs, would come over, exclaiming over Amanda's “angel hair,” saying “You can see whose daughter she is, that's for sure,” Nana would call me over with a secret curl of her ring finger.

“Sarah,” she'd whisper. “Did you know that your hair is the exact black-purple of a blackbird's wing?—I can't imagine anything more beautiful!”

She used to tell me how the lakes in Minnesota were formed in the footprints of Paul Bunyan's great blue ox, Babe. And she'd sing me to sleep with this nonsense song that sounded like
bya-bya, litten gurren
. It wasn't until she died and they put coins on her closed eyes and her frail white-haired friends came over to sing some hymns in a strange language that I realized she had been singing to me in Norwegian.

“Harmony is what you use in music.” Bernie rolled his eyes. “
Harlmoni
is grandmother.”

Some kind of cog in my brain slipped. I wanted to stand on my desk and release my rage. Nana, gone, just like my nascent, budding Korean tongue.

“Fuck you, Bernie,” Doug said, his cold expletive turning my scorching rage into a manageable, tepid goo. “Sarah, you're doing much better—you just need a little time and practice.”

At the Balzac Cafè, Jun-Ho ordered coffee. The waitress returned with the usual pot of hot water, a small paper tube of Maxwell House Instant, a larger one of Cremora. You mixed the two powders into a cylindrical glass, added the hot water, and stirred it with a long swizzle, as if the whole thing was a chemistry experiment, searching for the formula for the world's weakest coffee compound. I nursed a ginseng tea that I'd tried in vain to sweeten with three spoonfuls of sugar.

“What did you do this week?”
he asked in Korean.

I stared back at him.

“What did you do this week?”

“I understood what you said.” I was furious, again, but I didn't know at whom. All I could think was, if I could remember
ddong
, I could remember other words.

What did you do this week?

No Korean words came to mind.

“Korean food is spicy.”
I parroted a phrase I'd memorized from the lesson.

“Yes, it is spicy,”
Jun-Ho said, without missing a beat.

He said something else that I didn't understand. I cocked my head at him, pushed one ear forward, as if all my trouble was in the hearing, a physical impediment.

“What I said: all my life I want to visit to America to say hello to the big green lady.”

“Big green lady?”

“You know, like this.” He toasted me with his coffee, Cremora'd to a leisure-suit beige.

“What are you talking about?”

“The big green lady, the freedom lady. The independence lady.”

“Oh, you mean the Statue of Liberty?”

“Yes, Statue of Lib-ah-ty.” Hello Kitty came out again.

“Liberty,” I said. “Li-ber-ty.”

“Libahty. Thank you, Miss Sarah. I am noticing some probulem with English words with facing consonants. Thank you for your helps.”

“Actually, I need some helps, too.”

“Okay, what helps?”

“Remember how I said I want to find out about my Korean mother? I called the orphanage, and I, um, don't think they speak any English.”

“You want me to do the telephone?”

I nodded with relief. I gave him the piece of paper on which I'd written the number of the orphanage, my full name, Ken and Christine's names, our address, the year I was adopted, my birthday.

“I want to go there and look at my file as soon as possible.”

He studied the paper.

“Okay, you wait.” He made his way toward a bank of phones lined up like slot machines at the entrance of the café. I couldn't help following him.

From his wallet he extracted not coins, but a credit card that had a picture of Mickey Mouse on it. Almost no one used coins at public phones, I'd noticed. The card seemed much more convenient and advanced.
Everything over there will be very different than what you're used to here, much more primitive.

He punched in the number, waited, said hello—which was accompanied by a half bow. I heard “Sal-ah Dor-son” and “Min-ah-so-tah,” and then he lost me in a stream of native-speaker Korean. He kept on, five, ten minutes.

“What? What?” I said, even before he had hung up.

“I spoke to a Miss Park, the curator.”

“What?” I said. “About what?”

“How to get to the orphanage, that kind of things,” he said.

“But do they have anything, on me?”

“There are some records, yes.”

“About my family?”

He nodded, slowly. “They keep a record of each child. But maybe not so much for to tell you about your parents.”

“But
something
. I mean, you were on the phone for a long time.”

He nodded.

“Can we go there right now?”

“Two weeks, that is the soonest someone can see you. That will be the last time we meet, also.”

“Two
weeks
?”

“That is what the curator said.”

I sighed. Jun-Ho's flash card system had the side effect of overcramming his brain with arcane and slangy words, churning his speech into a stew of malapropisms. When the hot coffee made him sweat, he giggled about his “respiration.” When recounting Bernie's scorn at my attempt to say
harlmoni
, the word for grandmother, Jun-Ho pronounced that Bernie needed to see a “shrimp.”

And earlier, he had been puzzled by my shocked look in response to him saying he was going to miss these afternoons of “intercourse” with me. Should I tell him that “curator” wasn't the right word for the orphanage lady? But suddenly, I couldn't think of what the right one would be. Curator now sounded strangely accurate, as if it had picked up new meanings as I pondered it.

I gave up. I was ready to give up on Korea. All I wanted right now were the answers to my life. How was I going to exist, child-for-purchase, for two more weeks?

Seoul

1993

“Miss Sarah!”

Jun Ho's hair was now so close-cropped, it revealed the stark whiteness of his scalp, like the sun shining into primeval forest canopy. The Oxford shirts and sweater vests had given way to his army uniform, regulation camouflage. He was calling to me from a car, a kiwi-green hatchback.

“How about if we do something different?” he asked, out the open window.

He tossed me a grin as I slid in. Unlike your average scowly-faced Korean man, e.g., the Stamp
ajuhshi
or the unsmiling men who worked in the Institute's administrative office, Jun-Ho let his face melt with mirth or cheer when he felt it. I was beginning to think I might actually miss him when he was gone.

The car started with a hop and a chirp, and he pulled into the vortex of Seoul traffic. The car was his friend's. Borrowed, he said, so he could show me around a bit before he left. I was suddenly aware that I'd seen very little of Seoul besides the immediate neighborhood of the school, so I sat back, pleased.

“Next week is the orphanage,” I said. “You're coming with me to translate, right?”

He cracked another grin. “Right now, we will have fun,” he said. “We will talk only about fun things. We shall conversate in Korean, or English?”

“Oh please, I'm experiencing brain-lock,” I told him, gazing at a plastic Tweety Bird ornament hanging from the rearview mirror. I wondered if his “friend” was male or female. A lacquered Kleenex box dripping with an elaborate fringe of fake pearls (Koreans seemed to never be without their tissues) in the back window also gave no clue.

“You have to speak to me in English if you want me to say anything at all.”

“Aye-aye.” He saluted smartly, before clapping both of his small hands back on the wheel to avoid a gargantuan bus tipping over the asphalt's solid white line, threatening to obliterate us.

“There, the U.S. Embassy used to be, before the Korean War,” Jun-Ho pointed, as we passed a two-storied Western-style building, insignificant in the shadow of the Lotte Hotel across the street. Now, it was UNITED STATES INFORMATION SERVICE.

“And Lotte, you know Lotte?”

“Oh yes,” I said. Lotte was a chaebol, a Korean conglomerate, probably one of the largest. Besides the hotel, there was Lotte gum, Lotte cookies, Lotte-burgers, Lotte shoes and Lotte sportswear, not to mention Lotte World, the Disneyland of Korea.

“
The Sorrows of Young Werther
. That is one of my favorite texts that I was introduced to in college.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, Lotte, Goethe's great love.”

“Oh.”

Jun-Ho navigated the buglike car through the yellow afternoon light. I was surprised to see that all the road signs were in English as well as Korean, although a sign that said Yongduip'o (arrow, next exit) didn't mean a lot to me.

Jun-Ho explained that the signs were for the U.S. military—in case of an emergency, they needed to be able to get around. He also pointed out some huge, dolmen-like concrete structures, which he said were antitank barriers.

We were going to Yoido, Seoul's own Île de la Cité. Yoido, he told me, contained all the city's important buildings: the National Diet, the National Library, Korea's version of Wall Street, Korea Broadcasting, and the Six-Three Building, the tallest building in Korea.

As we crossed the bridge, the traffic slowed to a snarl at the nexus of bridge and island. But no one honked; this condition must be normal and expected. The pollution here seemed even worse than the rest of Seoul; the slanting sun gave Yoido an unnatural phosphorous glow. As we waited, I looked out onto the waterfront, bordered by dilapidated food stands, skeletal trees, and a concrete walkway along which mothers, children, and old men strolled, their faces pushed dreamily to the wind. The children's voices unfurled into the chemical air like colored kites, adding another layer of unreality to the bleak landscape.

Truly, Yoido, this showcase of the city, was barbaric. There wasn't enough room for all the vehicles trapped in the blocked and hardened arteries of the island. Besides the desiccated trees teetering precariously near the water, there were no other signs of sustainable vegetation. Everything on this island seemed faked, claustrophobic. It was someone's vision of a great, metropolitan structure, but it wasn't mine.

After measuring our progress in millimeters, we finally reached our destination, the Six-Three Building. It was called that because it had sixty-three floors, or was supposed to—I didn't count. In the late seventies when Korea wanted to show the world it wasn't just some backward country, Jun-Ho told me, it erected this. At the time, the highest building in Asia was fifty-five floors. The Koreans ascended to sixty and added on an extra three floors along with a cloud-puncturing antenna just to make sure it was the tallest. The building had an impressive glimmery gold surface on its exterior that would make it look like a trophy in the setting sun.

We headed for the observation deck. In the elevator, a lady dressed in a stiff Jetsons-type uniform announced something in a soft voice and then pushed the buttons with a white-gloved hand. She was even taller than I was.

We walked out of the elevator into a round space that was covered by what I can only describe as a glass orb, almost geodesic, Buckminster Fuller-ish.

By leaning into the sides of the orb, we could command a panoramic view of the city. I would have expected the city to be obscured by Yoido's smog, but from our height, we could see past all that.

“Wow!” I said. “You can see
everything
.” The scenery seemed to be shifting very slowly, but steadily. Then I realized that
we
were the ones who were moving; the round platform was turning, revolving-restaurant-style.