Somebody's Daughter (2 page)

Top that, Singapore! Gumbel's cheery smirk seemed to say.

“Well, Sarah's really American, not Kor—,” Amanda had begun, until the look on Christine's face—despairing, fierce—stopped her.

We invent what becomes us.

Seoul

1993

The plane had finally approached Kimp'o Airport three bad movies and five shrink-wrapped meals after I'd left Minneapolis. The video monitors had shown a graphic rendering of our progress, a cartoon of our plane inching its way over the Pacific Ocean toward the Korean peninsula. As we descended toward Seoul, the white cartoon-plane veered from its arcing trajectory to fly directly over some dot in the Sea of Japan called Tokdo. The Korean people on board cheered.

The twinkly-eyed senior across the aisle turned and smiled. He and his wife, matching canvas Elderhostel totes, clutched gnarled hands over the shared armrest, fingers tangling like brush.

“Glad to be home, eh?”

It took me a second to realize he was talking to me. Another second to step back and see me as he did: Korean girl returning to Korea.

I wiped at the corners of my eyes, fuzzed by no sleep.

“Oh yah, you betcha,” I said, in my purest Minnesota-nice accent. His wife, whose name would just have to be Effie or Jean, leaned forward out of her husband's shadow to beam at me.

“We can still turn around and just go back home—Daddy and I don't care about cancellation fees.” Christine's last words to me at the mouth of the jetway. “Sarah, you don't have to do this to yourself.”

She made it sound like I was off to get a tribal tattoo, or maybe to go do that Sioux sun dance where you pierce your breast with a sharp spike attached by rope to a pole and dance around the pole in the hot sun for days, waiting for a vision.

“I'm just taking my slightly belated graduation trip,” I'd said. In the waning days of my senior year, I'd been promised “a trip anywhere you like” if I could get myself off the Hold list and back into that stream of graduating seniors.

An extra credit report on plate tectonics (Earth Sciences), plus a record one week of resisting the urge to bolt while sitting in every class except maybe Chemistry, earned me my prize.

However, somehow, that subsequent summer oozed through my fingers, and I was still snoozing in my bikini when dead leaves and Ken and Christine's insistence that I take a try at college came raining down on me. I lasted not quite a year as a Golden Gopher at the U of MN, Duluth. I never knew the shores of Lake Superior could be so cold.

So here I was, taking my trip just a little bit late. It was just that no one expected me to choose Korea as my final destination.

My watch proclaimed it almost midnight, but a blinding sun was battering to be let in under the ovalette window shades, my tongue stung from the sugar-greased pastries and rank orange juice the stewardesses had foisted on us.

In the airport, the silver-topped heads of the Elderhostel couple acted as a beacon as I followed them to Immigration and waited behind them in the line marked FOREIGNERS. They seemed to know what they were doing. In line, the woman showed her husband something in
Fodor's Asia
. At the baggage claim, my things were among the last to arrive, and Effie and Burt, as I'd named them, went on without me. After that, the only Caucasian people I saw were a few shorn soldiers in camouflage fatigues and black boots that always looked too big.

The last set of opaque electronic doors spit me out, then hermetically sealed behind me. I found myself in an arrival area filled with clots of identically black-haired people leaning over metal barricades, as if at a parade. Grannies, children, every age in between. TV monitors placed overhead about every six feet—the scene of me standing bewildered multiplied about eight hundred times—occupied the attention of the people on the fringes of the crowd. It appeared that some dignitary, or maybe a movie star, would be coming through. But if I could read Korean, I would have seen the signs plastered throughout:
Because of the increasingly hazardous congestion at our beloved country's national airport, please send only ONE family member to drop off or pick up the traveler
. In actuality, the government had already secretly broken ground for an additional airport on the other side of Seoul, acknowledging how obdurate and unbreakable, the Korean custom of deploying the entire extended family to greet or send off a sojourning family member.

The travelers behind me grunted their impatience and so I moved on. At the taxi stand, the snoozing driver didn't respond when I tapped on the window. I opened the back door, feeling like I was breaking into his house. But he didn't object, he readily accepted the Korean directions the school had provided. He lit a new cigarette, jerked the stick shift, and we began to make our way down a drive snaking between two giant Coca-Cola and Samsung billboards, neon looking wan and strange in the light of day.

We were bound for open fields framed by a sky that seemed to go on forever. Low flames blackened the fields of dead stubble to our left. On the right, three solitary figures inhabited the landscape: a man guiding a primitive plow being pulled through the dirt by two women straining under ropes, towels and pink plastic sun visors wrapped around their heads. Behind them, a yellow billboard rose out of the earth: HYUNDAI—FOR BETTER LIFE.

As if entering Oz, the fields gave way to tile-roofed storefronts, clusters of office-type buildings, then glass-and-steel skyscrapers. A shiny Kia car dealership, a Printemps department store. A giant pagoda-like gate commanded its own concrete island as six lanes of traffic flowed around it (Seoul once was a gated city, like Troy). Taxis and sleek black cars, billiard-ball-striped buses jostled us for space. On the sidewalks, men in suits, women in designer outfits carried fancy ruffled umbrellas to shade their faces from the sun. How could this be? My teachers always said that Korea, despite parts of it being gussied up for the Olympics, was a poor country, one where people only had small fistfuls of rice to eat, where they ate dogs and cats.

And what about Nana, goading Amanda and me into eating mushy Brussels sprouts?

“Remember the starving children in KOREA.”

Or had it been,
“Remember the starving children in INDIA”
? Both?

A multistory Pizza Hut whizzed by.

The driver shot through a majestic stone arch that said CHOSUN UNIVERSITY chiseled in English, somehow managing not to run down any of the students placed like obstacles in the street. We passed Gothic stone buildings, drove through what looked like a miniature forest, looped up a long driveway, then came to a stop in front of a building that looked like a Howard Johnson's: efficient, cagelike.

INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS RESIDENCE, it said, in English.

The driver dug some wax out of his ears with a pinkie, pointed at the meter with that same digit.
23,000.

Then he left me there. I made my way into the International Students Residence, my luggage wheels squeaking and echoing in what I feared was a dark and empty building.

It had seemed, on the face of it, a clever plan to arrive a few days before the Motherland Program officially started (March 1, also the beginning of the Korean school year). The brochure had said the Residence would be open as much as five days before. But I was, indeed, the lone occupant of that dank building, save for the five-foot watchman who skulked around the halls like some Asian Quasimodo. From time to time, he experimentally lobbed some Korean my way, then muttered something like
aiiieesshh
when I didn't reply.

It hadn't occurred to me that most of my program-mates
were
already here in Korea, some had even come a full month early. But unlike me, they had Korean parents who had molded their young bodies with Korean hands, so that their hearts had a space for this place. They knew how to bow correctly, the polite way to receive a gift. They also had relatives who took them in, gave them comfortable places to sleep, and filled their plates at every opportunity.

I had gone a small ways into the neighborhood beyond the school's back gate searching for food. But each time, confronted with the sprawling signs, the hard, sticklike letters, my courage failed me. The days ticked off, one by one, until the third day had passed with nothing to eat but a single bag of airline peanuts.

By then, I even found myself longing for the baggie of tollhouse cookies that Christine had forced on me at the last minute, that I had left on top of a garbage bin at Kimp'o Airport. At the time it had been a kind of adolescent exuberance—I'm an ocean away from Christine! But now, dammit, I was hungry. I didn't want to admit that maybe Christine was right, that having never been in a foreign country before (unless you want to count fishing in Canada), I was ill-prepared to be here in Seoul.
Korea is a Third-World country. Everything over there is very different than what you're used to here.

“Mwoy yah?!”
the crone screamed.

I had approached her, and her wooden cart displaying some kind of golden steamed bread, on tiptoes. She was squatting next to the cart, leaning against one of its battered wheels, eyes closed. I stared at her face, fissured with wrinkles. Her hair, thinning, greasy, shrimp-gray, was pulled back into a tight bun that looked like it was made out of wire.

She opened her eyes with an almost audible snap, as if she had always known I was there. Startled, I did what I always do when I'm nervous: I made a fist and chewed on my thumb as it poked out, I've-got-your-nose fashion, between my fingers.

“Yah!”
she screamed again, her thin eyebrows converging like birds.

My head, bulbous and light above my body. The bread seemed a brighter yellow, as if lit from within.

“I'd like to buy some,” I said loudly, motioning with my fisted thumb.

“Mussen sori yah?”
The woman leaped to her feet and began to slap the air around her as if she were fighting off a sudden swarm of gnats.

“Ga, Ga—GA!”
she yelled, dancing.