Somebody's Daughter (16 page)

I like Camp Ozark and my soldiers friends. We have started joint exersizes. This is first time I meet the blacks. One guy here wears this net on his hair when he sleeps at night. He is a funny guy, always making jokes.

But American guys are not always liking about meeting Korean. Some of them like tae kwon do, but most are not too interested in Korea and of course none of them can speak any Korean like you can. Not even
anyonghaseo.
The American guys, they are not so joyful toward fraternizing with Korean, so I am not practicing my English as much as I liked, not even as much as when I used to meet with you.

I also have a question for my English. Some guys will be using this word, fagot. My dictionary says it is a word meaning ‘bundle of sticks.' When I ask the American commander, he (she?) says she (he?) is not telling me what this word is going to mean. Is this something of American slang? Please explain when you write me the next letter.

I hope your Korean studying is going well and that you are passing your time enjoyably.

Very often, I keep you in mind.

Yours Truly
,

Pvt. Jun-Ho Kim

Postscript: American guys here call me “Jim.” You can call me that, too, if you like.

“How come I never see you on Sundays?” I asked Doug, over noodles at the Rainbow. “Does a little chauffeur guy come whisk you away, like he does for Bernie Lee?”

Doug shook his head.

“I chase ghosts.”

“Ghosts?”

“Yeah, ghosts. Not
kwisin
, those flour-faced Korean ghosts, but ghosts of the living.”

“Where do you find them?”

“Different places. But mostly the Yongsan Eighth Army Base. I have a friend I visit, and he lets me go ghost hunting.”

“Was that where your father and mother were?”

“No, they were at Libertytown, north of here.”

“So why Yongsan?”

He shrugged. “It smells like Libertytown. Reminds me of my kidhood.”

“And what smells exactly?”

He shrugged again. “Fried food. I don't know. It just smells like a place.”

Doug was slipping away again. Sometimes when we talked, I'd inadvertently say a word, make a joke about some experience we'd shared, and then all of a sudden, his face would blank out, and I could see him descending into some kind of toxic hell of memory. There was no telling what would trigger these moods, or what could be done to dispel them.

“Tell me about your kidhood—some good memories.”

“Let me see.” He gobbled a small mountain of kimchi.

“I went bowling once, with my dad. They had a bowling alley in Libertytown. I thought it was so funny to be wearing shoes on those pristine wooden floors—
and
someone else's shoes.”

“Tell me more.”

“Oh, I don't know. Dad would bring Mom stuff from the PX. American pancake makeup, some brand the Korean ladies were all nuts about—Cody? Nylon stockings, peanut butter, Marlboros—she loved to smoke—Johnny Walker Red. She used the whiskey as a bribe for me to get into a local school. If being mixed-blood wasn't bad enough, Hank technically wasn't my dad then.”

I held my breath, waiting to see if he'd offer me any more of himself, his history. “For a few years, it was pretty good. They loved each other. Dad was this Polish-Irish punk who'd grown up in a tough black neighborhood in Queens. He decided to change his last name—Osciewicz to Henderson—and go into the army before he ended up in jail. And you know what my mom was. Not exactly Romeo and Juliet, those two. More like Bonnie and Clyde. She also married him because she knew we needed a ticket out of there, she didn't want me growing up in Libertytown. But being back here in Korea, it's making me remember, one by one, all the terrible things he did to her. I think if I ran into that bastard on the street, I'd kill him.”

Doug looked out the window, even though the rice paper was blocking his view.

“Let's go there some time,” I said suddenly. “To Libertytown.”

Doug's hand, the one holding a cigarette, jerked. He looked startled.

“I don't know if we could get in,” he said.

“Figure out a way.”

He sighed. “You know, I've actually been thinking that I want to go back there. Just to see what's there, what's changed.”

“So let's go.”

“Why,” he said, “do
you
want to go so badly? Are you thinking this is somehow going to help you with your own little identity search? If so, I doubt it. You're from a Seoul family. Your mother died in a car accident and with your
father
. Two decades ago, only upper-class people had cars in Korea. Going to the place where I grew up has got to be the farthest place to search for anything about
your
birth family.”

How was I going to tell him that now, my mother could have been anyone?

“I just want to go,” I shrugged. “I'm offering to keep you company, that's all.”

“We'll see,” he said, flipping his cigarette into his half-eaten bowl of noodles, where it extinguished with an extravagant hiss.

Seoul

1972

The school refused to give her the tuition money back. Kyung-sook tried saying that her mother was sick and she needed the money for her hospital expenses, but the answer was still no.

Despite this setback, Kyung-sook decided she would still strike out on her own. There was no place for her to play her flute at Imo's. And Imo, between her harangues about Christo, would want to know what she had learned about pedagogy, and it was becoming harder and harder for Kyung-sook to make things up. That night, Kyung-sook bundled her things up when Imo was sleeping, and she set out, as usual, the next morning, as if going to school.

A job would be easy to come by for a hard worker such as herself, she thought, as she headed toward the city's center.

In the neighborhood by the Myung-Dong cathedral, she stopped in a Korean dress store that had a headless mannequin wearing a hanbok out front. She politely inquired about a job as a shop-girl. The owner shook her head.

She stopped next at a bookstore, the Chosun, named promisingly after one of the great old dynasties of Korea.

“I'm a hard worker,” she told the owner, who was sitting amidst a pile of yellowed books, some with the covers torn off. A musty-pleasant smell, like sniffing in the corner of an antique chest, pervaded the entire place.

“I'm a college student and I know my han-mun Chinese characters well,” she added. “I could help you with cataloging your titles.”

The man looked at her with rheumy, mucus-beaded eyes.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I can't afford employees.”

“I could work for very little.”

“No one wants to read the classic texts anymore,” he said, as if talking to a third person in the room. “You used to need to know a thousand han-mun characters just to read a newspaper decently. Now we have to carry those things—”

He gestured toward a stack of cheaply bound books by the door.
Goodbye, Weapons
, it said in Korean, written by someone named Ehl-nest Hae-ming-wae.

“—and I can barely make my key money even carrying those. The newest Western translations are what people want to read.”

Kyung-sook decided she wouldn't want to listen to the man complain all day, anyway. She liked books, but she could do almost anything.

Closer to the City Hall area, she came upon a row of Western dress shops.

She went into the one that said live fashion in English. A few store signs here and there appeared this way, so she was glad she had learned her English letters in school.

The first thing she noticed when she entered was how clean and uncluttered the store was, not like a Korean dress shop. There were only a few dresses displayed, not packed as many to a rack as possible. There was soft Western music playing in the background, a tune so engaging, it would make you want to hum.

“What do you want?”

Kyung-sook was shocked at the saleswoman's tone, her use of the intimate style of Korean.

“Well—,” Kyung-sook began.

“You obviously can't afford these clothes.” The woman set her jaw. “Please leave—we can't abide loiterers. And man-chi-jima!—don't touch!”

Kyung-sook tried to shake off her disappointment as she left, walking past all the dress shops. Their hard, glass façades all seemed to shout at her, “Don't touch!”

She wandered down an alley. It was a thread-alley, winding around and around until she found herself in an older section, not unlike Imo's neighborhood, where the houses had cracked roof tiles and red chili peppers or squash slices drying on straw mats right out in the dusty street.

After Kyung-sook had passed the same street a few times, a well-dressed woman who had been watching her wander about, suddenly stepped from the shadows of a doorway and approached her, asking her if she was looking for work.

“How did you know?” Kyung-sook asked, astonished.

She smiled. “I must be a fortuneteller, yes?” She said she was out seeking likely candidates for a position in her coffee shop as a “coffee lady.”

Kyung-sook was intrigued. This woman in her vivid green-and-pink hanbok seemed to be rising like a phoenix out of this drab neighborhood. How difficult could work in a coffee shop be? She followed the woman down yet another thread-alley past Heavenly Real Estate and South Mountain Tailors, past a row of closed, gated homes, to the Spring Fragrance Coffee Shop. On the wooden door, a handlettered sign read “closed.”

The coffee ladies worked for tips, the woman said, ushering Kyung-sook into the one-room shop. A few round tables crowded haphazardly in a corner, some with their legs pointing toward the ceiling. On the walls hung some old-time Korean paintings and gourd dippers; an electric gramophone sat in the corner.

The proprietress brushed by Kyung-sook to retrieve a pitcher that said “coffee.” She poured some brownish liquid into a china cup that had a handle on one side, like an ear, and as she set the cup in front of Kyung-sook, she gave off a powerful, but pleasant scent, like flowers and ginger. Kyung-sook was excited: she had heard of coffee, but like most people in the village, had never had a chance to sample this exotic Western beverage.

The proprietress perched decorously on a stool, her shoulders forward, as well-bred ladies were taught to do.

“As I said, it's just tips, but most of the enterprising ladies I employ earn quite a nice living,” she went on. And this was what most young women on their own in Seoul were looking to do, wasn't it?

Kyung-sook nodded eagerly.

All the job entailed was getting men to buy cups of the house's coffee. Each cup sold meant a few won for the coffee lady, but the real money came from the tips they received from their customers. Of course, if Kyung-sook was going to work there, the proprietress said, she might want to get a loan from her to go out and buy some jazzier clothes, and some makeup.

“You could start this very afternoon if you like,” she offered. “I'll put your clothes and makeup on your tab.”

Kyung-sook nodded vigorously again.

“But why,” she wanted to know, “would the men pay tips for coffee?” She was disappointed to find that the coffee tasted like brine-water, nothing special at all.

“Don't be coy,” the woman said impatiently. “Do you think men come into these places to overpay for coffee that's mostly burnt barley? The smart regulars skip the coffee and just get their feel before they have to go back to work.”

“Feel?” Kyung-sook ventured.

“Where in the world are you from?” The proprietress's face suddenly bent into an unbecoming sneer. “Hm, I should have known from your country-clod accent and awful clothes. This is a coffee shop, yes? Men come here to relax and have a nice conversation with a nice lady and feel her nice breasts, her titties, if you will. And no dating customers—we want steady customers, but not that steady.”

Kyung-sook's mouth fell open, like a fish. She had never heard such language coming from the mouth of someone who spoke in such a respectable Seoul accent.

The woman was staring at her with cold eyes. Her lipstick looked as if she had spread red chili paste on her mouth.

“So do you want to start this afternoon, or not?”

Kyung-sook didn't know what to do. She had a strange urge to cry out, “Mother!” Without thinking, she grabbed her bundle and ran for the door, wondering why she hadn't noticed that although the shop was romantically named “Spring Fragrance,” all the windows were completely covered in black paper and the entrance was hidden several paces off the thoroughfare.

“Hey, you owe me fifty won for that cup of coffee!” the woman roared, the intricate tasseled ornament on her silk jacket swinging wildly as she leaned out the doorway. “Come back here you devil-bitch! Thief!”