Somebody's Daughter (20 page)

Doug continued spinning the cigarette, now a dangerous, glowing stub. Each time it stopped, the live end pointed at me.

“She was obviously worried you were going to go back to Korea and stay there,” Doug said. “Leaving her.”

“But don't you see? That means she
knew
.” My voice rose. “She was scared I was going to find my birth mother, and, and—”

I didn't know what lay beyond that “and.”

“Which is what you
are
trying to do.”

“Yes, I am,” I said. “But doing this search would have never occurred to me, had I not gone out on my own and found out the real story. I mean, they fucking told me my birth mother was
dead.
”

“So you seriously want to search for your Korean parents, like an all-out search?”

I sank back into the bedding, nodded. “Why?”

“There's this show. It's called something like
Missing Persons
. People go on there and try to find their lost relatives and friends.”

“Really?”

“It's a popular show, mostly these old
ajuhmas
and
harlmonis
who'd had some fight with their sister or something and want to get back in touch. And the missing person often does call in. Maybe you could try to get on it.”

My heart leapt at the thought of the studio's phones ringing. Of a woman's voice. Someone who will say,
I'm sorry, I'm sorry
, over and over again.
Let me tell you what happened.
And:
I want you to come home.

“But you know,” Doug went on. “It's possible your birth mother's married, with a whole family who doesn't know about her past, so it could get messy. Do you think you could handle the consequences?”

I didn't tell Doug how I'd been walking all over Seoul, looking. I couldn't help myself. Yesterday I'd gone to the Lotte Department Store. Twelve floors, plenty of Korean women. I almost got lost in a haze of silk scarves, jewelry, and perfume before I realized she wouldn't be there. She wouldn't be among those beringed ladies in French designer suits, scarves cleverly knotted about their shoulders, big jade rings on their fingers, Burberry raincoats draped on their arms.

Rich people had abortions, easy as one-two-three. Doug said that the first question the base doctor had asked his mother about her pregnancy with him was,
Do you want to keep it?

So I had fled the opulence of the Lotte and her brethren—the Hyatt, the Swissôtel, the Intercontinental—for a place only a few blocks behind these behemoths, a neighborhood of shacks huddling in the shadow of the sleek skyscrapers like fungi at the base of a tree. I kept going until I got to Hoei Dong, where I was supposedly found. I found a fire station—was it the one? Miss Park at the orphanage had told me that my mother probably set me outside the door and watched from some hidden place until someone took me in. My mother cared about me, she insisted. She did what she did out of the purest form of mother love: sacrifice.

As if Miss Park or anyone could know. Why was everyone so quick to offer me cheap words, when all I wanted was the truth?

I placed myself on a little bench across the street. For the hour I sat, I never saw a single baby laid on the neat stone steps of that building.

“Let's do it,” I told Doug. “Let's do this show, let's try.”

Doug nodded. “There's a Korean saying, ‘Don't let the fear of maggots scare you away from making soy sauce.'”

Seoul

1972

Kyung-sook found herself wondering if the visit from the Westerner had all been a peculiar dream. Sunhee didn't mention it. The cook-owner only complained about finding new holes in the rice bags made by mice, which Kyung-sook could feel running across her feet at night.

Later that day, the cook-owner returned from the market with a good-sized cat. It had rich brown fur the color of tortoiseshell, a nose that was half pink, half black like a Korean mask.

The cook-owner didn't bother giving the cat a name other than Mr. Kitty, and she was pleased when it immediately went into the storeroom and came out with a mouse, its neck neatly broken.

Two days later, though, the cat looked sick, and it lay down right in the front entrance of the restaurant. That was the day the Westerner showed up again. He entered carrying a black hourglass-shaped case, which he placed in the seat opposite him, as lovingly as if he were seating a venerated relative. He made his barking noises and pointed at Old Bachelor Choi's cheap noodle dish.

Then he took off his soft hat, which he had not done before. Black hair tumbled out past his ears, almost touching his shoulders.

“Aigu!” exclaimed the cook-owner. “Is he a man or a woman? These fuckin' Westerners are so perverse.”

Kyung-sook had never seen a man with long hair, except in Imo's pictures of Christo, but he was a god from olden times. However, she thought the foreigner actually looked better with the curtain of coal-black hair framing the sharp angles of his face. In fact, there was something in the man's face that kept drawing her eyes back to it. The cook-owner, so fond of old proverbs, might have said, “In time, it is possible to develop a taste even for sour dog-apricots.”

What place did this man come from, where he could grow his hair out like a woman's with no shame? she wondered.

“Where you come from?” she asked, as she set his noodles in front of him.

The man stared at her, frankly, brazenly, with his amber-colored eyes.

“America,” he said, pointing at his chest. “I'm American.”

Mi-guk
. “The beautiful country,” America's name in Chinese characters. She was thinking of something to say about that when there was a shout from one of the customers—“Look what that dirty cat has done!”—which sent the cook-owner running from the kitchen to see what was the matter.

In a dark corner of the restaurant, the cat had had kittens, six of them in all sorts of different colors: ginger, tortoiseshell, white with spots, black. She was proudly licking them clean as the cook-owner came upon her. Bloody afterbirth was smeared on the floor.

“That damned crook!” she yelled. “That man at the market, I gave him a whole bottle of good sesame oil—not perilla oil—for that cat that he assured me was a male. She's a good mouser, but I'll be damned if I'm going to raise her saekkis.”

The American, amidst all the hubbub, ate quickly. But he gave Kyung-sook another frank look that made Old Bachelor Choi choke on his soup and scandalized Sunhee before he left. Kyung-sook threw salt on his path to express her outrage at what he had done. But for some strange reason, she was also just a little bit thrilled, as if her drab life had suddenly taken on a few new, unexpected colors. She was even more thrilled to find that the man had left a few coins behind at his table. These she scooped up before anyone saw.

“Kyung-sook-ah! Pick up these goddam dumpling soups before they grow icicles!” the cook-owner bellowed. Kyung-sook hurried back into the kitchen. The cat was lying on an old rice sack on the floor, next to her was a bowl of miyuk-guk, the blood-replenishing seaweed soup that was traditionally given to new mothers—not animals. How strange the cook-owner was, Kyung-sook thought.

When Kyung-sook returned for the next order, she found the cook-owner gently crooning to the drowsing cat as if it were a child. She must really love that stupid, dirty thing, Kyung-sook thought, until she stopped, startled, hearing what the cook-owner was singing:

Kitty fucked a rat, fucked a rat. Out came six little saekkis, six pink rat bastards, naked rat bastards. Oh oh Kitty get rid of those disgusting pink rat bastards.

The next day, the cat was prowling the storeroom as usual, pink teats poking out of her belly-fur like soft squash candy. The kittens and the rice sack were gone. Sunhee asked where the babies had gone. The cook-owner, for some reason, looked at Kyung-sook, not Sunhee, when she replied, smiling a strange smile: “I think Kitty ate them for dinner. Yum. Yum.”

Sunhee sighed. “Is that the kind of gross humor you northerners are so proud of?” She grabbed her tray, mumbling how at least at the sieve factory, she didn't have to talk to people while she worked.

Kyung-sook bent to look more closely at the cat as it slunk around the bags of rice. At the corner of its mouth, it indeed had a smudge of blood.

Seoul

1993

Doug flipped on the TV.

The dusty console sparked to life in the dorm's TV room. Bouncing breasts and buttocks. Women and men running on a beach. It was
Baywatch
—the last person had left the TV on AFKN, the Armed Forces Korea Network, which made sure that the American servicemen and women didn't have to miss a single episode due to their military duty. Doug turned to Channel 12, SBC, Sejong Broadcasting. A mélange of tearful faces embracing. A smiling cartoon phone ringing. Game-show music. People talking in Korean.

Cut to a commercial. “Lotte custard-filled cakes—so good they'll make your ancestors come back from the dead!”

A bang of cymbals, cheery game-show music resuming.

“Anyonghashimnikka yorubun, anyonghashimnikka!”

A middle-aged man with thick square glasses and an Elvis pompadour emerged with a willowy young woman. They waved to the audience as confetti rained down.

An
ajuhma
and a woman in her twenties waited at side-by-side podiums. Both of them looked grim, despite the bouncy music, smiling hosts, cheering audience.

The young woman was looking for her childhood piano teacher. She had hated taking lessons, she said, as the hosts listened and murmured well-timed, sympathetic
neh neh
s, but she had loved her teacher for continuing to teach her for free after her father had deserted the family in favor of a “small wife,” a mistress. She and her mother had fallen into destitution, but the fact that she was still taking piano lessons, a vestige of their former middle-class life, had kept her despairing mother from committing suicide. Her mother had rallied, begun selling nylon stockings at the pedestrian overpass near a famous women's university. By being a fixture there—rain or shine—she had been able to amass enough money to send her daughter to that very college on scholarship. In the rush of college life, however, the young woman had lost touch with the teacher.

“Please, if you're out there, Seo Yoon-Ju Sunsengnim, let me hear from you. I so wish to thank you for all you've done for me and my mother.”

Instead of cutting to the phones, though, the hosts turned, smiling, to the
ajuhma
, leaving the young woman crying into a hankie.

The
ajuhma
wanted to find her sister, who had eloped against their parents' wishes years ago.

Sis, I miss you. All is forgiven.
She started to cry.

The cameras cut to a phone. Nothing moved except a small ticker at the bottom that broadcasted the phone number.

Ring!

The first call was for the young woman! A disembodied voice said
yobosayo?
then broke the news that the piano teacher had been killed with her husband and son in an auto accident. The studio filled with the sound of the woman's wails as two pastel-suited women materialized out of nowhere and discreetly led her off the stage.

Our Madam Auntie, she's received several callers as well, the host said, a bit too cheerily.

One caller asked,
“Does your sister have a crimson butterfly-shaped birthmark on her arm that also grows a small patch of hair?”

The woman blinked, disoriented, as if she was coming out of a coma.

“‘Yes,' she's saying,” said Doug. “Her sister has such a birthmark—her childhood nickname was
nabi
, butterfly. The lady is telling her she thinks her sister lives in her apartment building in Taegu. The lady says she's going to give her sister's number to her.”

The audience clapped wildly. The
ajuhma
, howling into her hankie, mumbling
“Nabi-yah, nabi-yah,”
was also led off the stage.

“There's more,” Doug said. “The grande finale.”

Two little boys in identical bowl haircuts were ushered onto the stage. They looked to be about ten and four. The older one put a hand on his brother's thin shoulder when the hosts drew close. The smaller boy shrank, like a smaller fish hoping not to be noticed by a larger, hungry one.

The stiletto-heeled hostess looked into the camera.

“Aren't they cute?” she said, as if she were selling them. “Whose heart wouldn't be crying for two such lovely little boys?”

“This is a weird one,” said Doug. “They're from Kyong San Province—their accents are so thick I can barely understand. Their uncle brought them to Seoul to visit a distant relative but he never showed up to bring them back.”

Doug craned his neck forward, frowning in concentration.

“I guess when the relative called the parents, she was told they'd moved—”

“Let me guess, no forwarding address?”

“No forwarding address,” Doug spat back at me, almost snarling. I looked at him, surprised.

“What's the matter?” I said. “That's what happened, wasn't it? They moved—poof!—without a trace.”

He nodded, mute with anger. What I had done, I couldn't guess. Was I too flip and hurt some hidden, vulnerable part of him? Did I interrupt him? Something else? He was still so much a puzzle to me, a Rubik's cube of endless facets, that to manage one side's solid comfortable color would leave the others hopelessly parti-colored and obscured. Irritation, petulance papered over darker mysteries. Only when we were having sex were things simple and defined.

“So what's going on?” I prodded, as distraction. “On the show.”

We waited, along with the two little boys, to see if the phones would ring. The cameras closed in on the boys' humiliated, miserable faces, revealing the incompetent asymmetricality of their haircuts, the ill-fitting clothes that were obviously not theirs. Then, mercifully, the cameras pulled away to show the audience, mostly grannies with tight, kinky perms and cardigans that bagged at the wrists.