Somebody's Daughter (21 page)

“They have a caller.”

A woman's voice, tears almost visible.

“Um-ma yah,”
she said, shrieking as if she'd been poked with an electric cattle prod.

As if simultaneously prodded, the boys started to cry,
“Um-ma! Um-ma!”
The audience cheered.

“It's their mother, isn't it?
Um-ma
sounds like the way a cow would say ‘mommy.'”

“She said she's their mother.”

The disembodied voice heaved, sobs keening like a whale.

“What else is she saying?”

“She said they had to leave the boys because they were in financial trouble. Their turn came up in the local rotating credit pool, and they lost all the money in some real estate swindle—some ten million won. They couldn't pay it back, so they ran away.”

“Bet there are some other people who'd also love to get back in touch with them. Ring-ring.”

Doug laughed.

“She says she's going to find a way for them to meet. As you can probably hear, she feels terrible. The kids are all saying, ‘Mommy, come get us. Cousin's wife isn't feeding us.'”

I sat up. “It's a sign,” I said. “Those kids found their
mother
. Let's do it.”

“You want to?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, it's worth a try. The fact that you were covered in
ddong
would be hard for someone to forget, I think.”

“Do we have to bring that up?” I said. “I mean, what if Choi
Sunsengnim
watches that show? Or Bernie—I'll die.”

“Sarah, why the hell do you care so much what other people think? Bernie Lee is dirt. Choi
Sunsengnim
is your teacher. This is
your
life. If they don't like it, tell them to go fuck themselves.”

“Okay, okay. Let's concentrate on getting me on that show.”

“Well, it's over.”

Indeed, the opening scenes of some soap opera were on the screen.

“Next week, I'll watch the show again and jot down the number.”

Next week! Impatience rose up like a wave, then subsided. Doug moved closer to kiss me. His thin lips felt surprising full on my mouth.

The door to the TV room swung open, knocking aside the flimsy metal chairs we'd set against it. Bernie Lee walked in, eating sloppily from a box of Captain Crunch that must have been sent from home. He observed the two of us and eyed me smugly. He was probably thinking that now that Jun-Ho was gone, I had a new lover already, slut that I was.

He headed back out the door, spilling tiny, hard nuggets of the cereal.

“Twiggi,”
he said to Doug, not me, before he left.

“What's ‘twiggy'?” I asked Doug. “Korean for ‘you-are-sleeping-with-a-ho'?”

Doug shook his head. He was biting his lip.

“Mongrel,” he said, letting go of my hand.

Seoul

1972

No matter how much the foreigner ate, he stayed thin. The rims around his eyes were pinkish, like a rabbit's, the rest of his skin transparent like skimmed milk.

“The sun could shine right through that big-nose,” the cook-owner muttered. “Those foreign bastards sure have a nice life. But with that life comes softness. He can't even eat a chili pepper without screaming—what does that mean about
his
pepper, hm?”

The man had come to their dumpy little restaurant again and again. He grew tired of the water-dumplings and noodles and then gamely agreed to try whatever food the cook-owner would make him, even though it would often make him gasp and sweat with the heat or pucker with the salt.

He also had extremely strange eating habits. He never drank his soup, even when the cook-owner subjected him to two-day-old dumplings, dried-out pasty things that would surely clog in his throat like cotton balls.

“I want water, wa-ter, w-a-t-e-r!” he howled to Kyung-sook after eating some hot radish kimchi.

“Mul,” she said back to him. “Korean word for water.”

“Mooly, whatever!” he said, clutching his throat.

Kyung-sook brought him his water, flavored with burnt barley so he would know it had been recently boiled.

“I want water, not scalding hot tea,” he groaned, but he gulped two, three, four cups of the liquid and asked for more. Korean people would never waste so much stomach-space on fluid at a meal. Sunhee giggled and called him mul-gogi, “Fish,” or mul-gogi-ssi, “Mr. Fish.”

Today, Mr. Fish had managed to communicate to them that it was his birthday. At the market that day, one of the cook-owner's anchovy suppliers had added a nice bag of pundaegi, silkworm larvae, as a reward for her loyalty and also because it was silk-making season, and so the brownish wads, shaken from their precious cocoons, were quite abundant. To celebrate Mr. Fish's birthday, the cook-owner prepared a gigantic plate of them doused in sweet sauce. As Kyung-sook served him, a few of the fat pundaegi levitated off the plate like bees before a flowering bush, but no one seemed to notice. The man, perhaps knowing that they expected him to find the food strange, bent his head toward the overflowing plate and quickly ate it all, the sight of his pink tongue lapping like a dog's astonishing and disgusting them, making Old Bachelor Choi's dentures flop into his soup once more.

“Cook-owner says he make you real birth-day food next time,” Kyung-sook told him. She couldn't help being a little pleased at how her high school English was coming back to her. “He make miyuk-guk, seaweed soups.”

“Me-YUCK-GOOK. Oh, goody,” the man said in a sarcastic voice. Kyung-sook didn't understand sarcasm.

“What is it?” she asked, instead, pointing to the black hourglass case.

“I'll show you,” the man said. He opened it and took out a Western guitar. It was made of a beautiful, whorled wood that reminded her of her taegum—which she had not played in ages, her fingers bent with fatigue after a day's worth of serving.

The man sat back casually, extending his legs as if he were in the comfort of his own house's living room. He plucked the strings of the beautifully curved instrument. The notes came out soft, much more liquid and melodious than the tones of a Korean harp.

“You like?” he asked. Kyung-sook nodded.

“Then let me take
you
out to a restaurant for a change. And you can hear some more.”

Kyung-sook wasn't fully sure she understood the man's words, but she did want to hear more music.

“Tomorrow,” Mr. Fish said, giving her that same frank look as he left.

Seoul

1993

“Your hands seem to be made for playing the
taegum
,” Tae
Sunsengnim
remarked. “I have no idea why you can't play it, then.”

Instead of glissandos and silvery notes, the flute hissed at me when I picked it up, or even looked at it. It also required reading music, adding another set of foreign sticks and signs to my already bursting brain even though Jeannie from Korean class had kindly shown me a mnemonic to help me remember the notes: E/very G/ood B/oy D/eserves F/udge.

“Your turn,” said the Other Jeannie, the Julliard know-it-all I'd dubbed “Evil Genie.” Our group was trying the last instrument, the
changgo
hourglass drum. So far, no one had been able to play that drum well enough to be considered for the upcoming talent show.

Tae
Sunsengnim
sighed in despair, seeing that it was my turn. She picked up the
kaenguri
and started bashing out the beat on its polished brass surface.

Chang-chang-ch-ch-ch-CHANG!

I had the drum strapped on by a cotton sling, not unlike the ones New-Agey people carried babies in. The drum was balanced on the point of my right hip, I had the two different drumsticks—one like a chopstick, the other with a ball at the end. You were supposed to sway the top half of your body back and forth while you hit both sides of the
changgo
, sometimes hitting as if you were playing a snare, and sometimes hitting the two sides separately, sometimes switching lightning-fast between the two. While all this was going on, your feet were supposed to move at a slower beat.

I decided the best chance I had was to just play, not think.
Bang! Bang! Thump! Whump! Tok!
I let my arms fly away like birds.

“Hm,” Tae
Sunsengnim
said, lowering the gong to watch me bang away. “Not bad.”

Seoul

1972

Before that day, she had never eaten going-out food in her life, unless you counted the time she and her friends had spent all day plucking chickens for Widower Rhee, and then had gone to the market and gorged themselves on bowls of steaming fish-cake soup and sweet-bean-filled goldfish bread.

But to go someplace to eat when you had perfectly good food at home seemed unthinkable—an option only for the rich, the fat people who weren't satisfied with nourishing Korean food but who also had to acquaint their lips with the foods of France or China. The food in their restaurant was not so much going-out food as it was sustenance for old bachelors who had no one to cook for them, the occasional student, the hurried businessman looking to put something in his stomach before a night of drinking. Dumplings and noodles, rice, and only two or three side dishes. It was never anything special.

But the foreigner had come to take Kyung-sook away from the restaurant.

“Go, go,” the cook-owner had urged her. “I'll do the serving for a few hours, no sweat. Go stuff your belly till it explodes.”

Kyung-sook had felt shy, and slightly absurd, but the two of them made their way through the alleys to the main street. Kyung-sook rarely ventured this far from the restaurant: only if she had to run to the market when they were low on this or that vegetable or if they needed more roasted barley. But each time she had been in such a hurry, she had never really looked at what was going on in the street.

Today she saw the street through a foreigner's eyes. The gorgeous colors of a silk store. The legless man wheeling himself belly-first on a rusty-wheeled plank as he held a cup out for coins (and the foreigner even dug out some ten-won pieces and gently placed them in the man's cup; she had never known someone who would treat a stranger—a beggar, no less—with such respect). She noted the dinginess and promise of the closed door of a teahouse, felt the regretful han of a man sitting next to his bucket of squirming eels as he sang.

“Do you like Chinese food?”

They were standing in front of a Chinese restaurant. Its façade was painted a gaudy red and gold, various Chinese signs for health, happiness, and prosperity circling the door. Kyung-sook had heard the word “food” and guessed he was asking for approval, so she nodded.

It seemed strange that a foreigner could teach her so much about her own country, but he did. For one, who would have known that going outside to eat could be so pleasant? Or that Chinese food prepared by Korean hands could be so delicious? The foreigner knew just the things to order, saying the dishes' names to the waitress in a way that Kyung-sook knew he had sampled them before and found them to his liking.

Chinese food, she found, had a subtle, slightly sweet flavor so unlike the garlic-red-pepper-ginger heat of Korean cooking. He had ordered some black noodles called jia-jia-myun, a dish called Seven Tastes: rice mixed with bits of vegetables and seafood, glowing like treasures. The man even spooned tiny shrimp, pink and curled like a baby's finger, right into Kyung-sook's mouth. She was shocked by his audacity, but still, she obediently opened her mouth for a sliver of meat which he said was Peking
dalk
, but its meltingly silken taste told her it wasn't chicken, but some other kind of marvelous meat.

“Next time, we'll have pork chops,” he said, as they finished with tea, fragrant and slightly bitter, the same amber color of his eyes. The man seemed so worldly, although Kyung-sook was a little taken aback when he left his chopsticks sticking up in his half-eaten bowl of rice—didn't he know that would attract the dead?

The man took out a thick wad of won to pay. His dress and bearing was that of a poor student, yet he had paid for a meal she hadn't even had the capacity to dream about. So perhaps it was true that everyone in America was fabulously rich. That money practically grew on trees and all one had to do was pluck it where it hung on low branches, not even having to strain, the way one did for persimmons, which stayed coyly out of reach.

“We're not done yet with our date,” he said to her. She didn't understand what he said, so she just smiled, remembering to cover her mouth.

He took her to a teahouse, the Moon River. He must have been a regular customer there because the teahouse auntie barely gave him a glance, and the old men at a table did not break their concentration from the grid of their paduk game when the foreigner walked in.

“Shall I play you a real song this time?” he asked, as he unsnapped the latches on the hourglass case.

He didn't wait for her reply, just cradled the instrument in his lap and began to play, a melody that unspooled, fluid and supple, like a bolt of fine silk dropped to the ground.

Kyung-sook's heart seized. How could she have foreseen such beautiful music entering her life?

Seoul

1993

“You know, Sarah, with practice, you have the potential to excel at playing the
changgo
,” Tae
Sunsengnim
told me after the next class.

With practice, I could do the same with sex, Doug told me, the next time we went to a
yuhgwon
together.

So Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I took an extra hour to play the
changgo
under Tae
Sunsengnim
's instructions. The other days, under Doug's, I practiced making love.