Somebody's Daughter (24 page)

Sometimes, the traditional musicians invited Kyung-sook to their flats, where they lived four, five to a room. They ate only cheap fried noodles because that was all they could afford.

“And you have to learn popular tunes, so you can play at the rich people's parties—to survive,” they told her morosely.

That Kyung-sook could not do. She couldn't trap her music amidst the lines and stiff wires of this Western scale, submit them to the nasty-sounding conventions, “sharps” and “flats.” When she played a san-jo, she improvised what her spirit moved her to play, which was the very purpose of this kind of music—what in nature was scripted and bound by wires, broken down into a calculus of notes and measures?

“There's nothing for you here,” the David man said, tugging her down toward his bedding, which he let sit on the floor all day. “Let me take you away from all this.”

Kyung-sook recalled the day she had defiantly sat herself down in front of Seoul Station with her taegum and begun to play. If people would just hear, she believed, they would be reminded of this ancient instrument's power: how its music was so beautiful it had been said to stop wars and heal disease in the ancient dynasties.

A small, curious crowd had immediately gathered. The younger people stepped over her, huffing about her being in their way. The people who stayed exclaimed how they hadn't heard that kind of music in a very long time. A granny even wiped her eyes and gave her a whole bag of just-roasted yams to take home. A bent-over old man donated all the coins his daughter-in-law had sent him off with that morning.

As the shadows grew long, people drifted away, and a police officer came up to her and told her there were laws against panhandling. The number of coins she'd received were barely enough for a trolley ride home.

“Better watch out, little sister,” he warned. “Bad things happen to people who are out at night, after the curfew.”

The man looked like he wanted a kiss-u, again.

Kyung-sook wanted to hear the song about the man from the land of green palm trees again. She lifted her flute to her lips and began to play. The man strummed his guitar, their notes weaving together as easily as two small rivers become a larger one. Kyung-sook at last began to relax, letting her mind become tangled in its own melodies, going to a place where there were no worries.

Seoul

1993

“Why don't we do something different?” I said to Doug. “Why don't we try to find the
Doksuri
teahouse, the one they keep talking about in our textbook? It's supposed to be the official teahouse of Chosun University.”

“Pabo-yah,”
Bernie leaned in before Doug could answer. “Our textbook is obviously about a hundred years old—it has stuff like ‘don't take me on a five-won plane ride.' You couldn't find a teahouse in this neighborhood if you looked for days. Everything is
ka-peh
, like the Balzac
ka-peh
where you go with your army guy.”

I sucked in my breath.

“I didn't ask you,” I said, and added, knowing he hated his American name, “Ber-nard.”

At the Rainbow, I choked on guilt as well as noodles, so when Doug suggested going “somewhere,” I readily agreed, even though I had music class. To further assuage my guilt, I handed him a key to my room that I'd just had made by an
ajuhshi
who had a little tent-stand full of keys on the street. I thought he'd have a noisy vibrating machine, like the one at Ace Hardware, but instead, he glanced at my key, sat down, cross-legged and barefoot, took out a blank and began shaping it with a simple metal file, smoking a cigarette, looking as inattentive as if he were trimming his nails on a boring afternoon. But in short order, the key was done, and I went back to the room and tried it—it worked.

“Mi casa es tu casa,”
I told Doug. “By the way, what does
pabo-yah
mean?”

“‘You fool.'”

I sighed. “Why does Bernie hate me so much?”

“He doesn't hate you, he's like the fifth grader who throws rocks at the girls he likes. He's obviously attracted to you, your nice face, your double eyelids—”

“Double eyelids? I'm some kind of lizard?”

“The fold,” he explained. “Only a few Koreans naturally have that. Most people have to get surgery.”

Korean women—and some men—apparently had surgery to make their eyes look more “Western.” In the
Korea Herald
, I'd read an article about a famous young movie actress who had refused to get the surgery before playing Ch'un Hyang, a Korean folk heroine known for her beauty and steadfastness. The surgery had been mandated by her contract—“Whoever plays Ch'un Hyang has to have beautiful eyes,” a studio executive had been quoted as saying. The actress wasn't working anymore.

“And your hair,” Doug went on. “I've never seen anyone with such thick hair.”

“My hair,” I snorted. “When I was in sixth grade, I wanted a Dorothy Hamill wedge like everyone had. It looked like the bottom of a broom after it was cut.”

Doug laughed.

“Why should you want to look like Dorothy Hamill? She's not Korean.”

I smiled. The Fabulous Sarah Thorson thought she looked great in a wedge, the gold colors of her hair flowing in creamy waves. In reality, my hair would do only one thing: point to the ground. Even when soaking wet, each strand stayed true to itself, separate as sand. I found myself wishing for a snarl, a comb-stopper that would make me smirk and grimace as I tried to jerk it out, something that would give me a reason to use No More Tangles, like Amanda.

“You're so strange,” he said. “It's as if you can't see yourself.”

Who can truly see themselves? Mirrors, film, only project in two dimensions. We live in a world with three. Maybe the closest was having someone else see you. I was thinking of the time I was caught digging in the cat box.

Christine had asked me to fetch something from the basement, and underneath the pegboard that held the fishing rods, cross-country skis, tennis rackets, I came upon a sand-filled tray. My fear of the dark had kept me out of the basement (four-year-old Amanda somehow used to be able to shut off the light and slam the door, trapping me in eternal darkness with spiders), but now the sand caught my eye with its minty color, how it was level, almost groomed, inviting as a pan of cool water. I stopped, plunged my hand in, liking the way the sand felt dry and granular, not gritty and creepily damp like sandbox sand.

First, I saw her feet. Slim, tanned ankles in white canvas Tretorn tennies, white cotton bootie socks with pom-poms sticking out over the edges.

Her hand pulled my collar as if it were a scruff.

“Dirty!” Christine's chest reddened over the V-neck of her tennis whites. “Are you crazy? Did you learn that awful habit over there?”

The blue in her eyes, the white of the pearls circling the base of her neck. She looked improbably beautiful, even as she was screaming at me. How was I to know that the Persians peed and crapped into this
box
? I thought they were creatures that didn't
go
at all; I saw no evidence of them going outside, like our neighbor's black lab, Captain Midnight, who was always crouching around, tail in a question-mark, leaving cigar-shaped sticks all over our yard.

“Look at me,” she said, pulling us nose-to-nose. “You. Do. Not. Dig. In. The. Cat. Box.”

Her irises expanded and contracted, a camera's shutter clicking. Flash-frozen in her gaze, I saw her seeing me: a dark, foreign object, denizen of the basement, defiler of the cat toilet.

“You hate me!” I wanted to scream.

Then she swept a strand of blond hair from her eyes. Her eyes their normal cerulean blue. Her lips curved up in a smile.

“Let's go wash our hands, honey. Why, it's almost time for lunch, isn't it?” She paused to carefully enclose the round head of her tennis racket into a square, wooden press, even let me, slowly, fumblingly tighten the screws.

Doug unrolled the cotton
yo
piled in the corner and pulled me down on it as if it were a blanket on the beach.

“I called the TV station, Sejong Broadcasting, by the way,” he said, into my hair.

“You mean
Missing Persons
?” I yelped, sitting up.

“Yup. The show's actually called
The Search for Missing Persons
—dramatic, eh?”

“What happened?”

“They're very busy. So many people have someone missing in their lives.”

“Oh.”

“So I told them you're American, only here until the end of the summer. I called and asked them again and again. Oh, maybe fifteen times in the last two days.”

I sat, watching him.

“You've got a slot, two weeks from Tuesday. Sejong Broadcasting is in Yoido, which is this little island on the Han River where all the TV stations are.”

I sat in shock.

I've been to Yoido already, I almost said.

“It might take an hour to get there by cab if there's traffic. So get ready to take a little trip after lunch two weeks from Thursday. I'll go with you—if you want me to.”

“Of course I want you to. Thank you so much,” I said.

Then I started crying. I could feel his hand, warm and reassuring, on my back.

Seoul

1972

Yun-tan, he never stopped talking about America. Soon the word itself, A-me-ri-ca, played like a song inside Kyung-sook's head.

The other day, when Kyung-sook had gone to his flat, he had had a present waiting.

Bananas!

Kyung-sook didn't think she could accept such a costly gift. Just the other day, he had taken her to a Western restaurant where she had eaten breaded pork cutlets and corn salad for the first time—she had never had anything so delicious before. The man told her the bananas were for her. After she recovered from her shock and disbelief, she carefully wrapped the golden curves in her wrapping cloth to take back to share with the cook-owner and Sunhee. The man David, he just laughed at her, saying that in America one could eat bananas all day if you wanted, like a monkey.

“Wah!” said the cook-owner, back at the restaurant. “I've never even
seen
a banana before.”

The three of them stared at the fruit as if it were made of pure gold. When they finally ventured to try it, they carefully shaved tiny, sweet bits off one banana, left the rest on top of the little table by the counter as a luxurious decoration. After a few days, however, they turned brown and rotted, spreading a sickly-sweet smell through the restaurant.

“You need to consider your happiness for a change,” the foreigner–man said. “I know that in Korea, women sacrifice as daughters, then as wives, then as mothers. They never have anything to call their own.”

Kyung-sook was irritated with the man's tone—he seemed to say that he understood her country the best, and that she needed
him
to explain it to her. Still, she couldn't help recalling Bong-soon, the girl named after the pink balsam-flower, who was the prettiest, most sought-after girl in the village. Even after bearing her husband Hyung three sons and taking meticulous care of his elderly parents, Hyung had gotten the wind in his blood and had taken a mistress—one that he married shortly after Bong-soon killed herself by filling her apron with stones and wading into the Glass River. She had barely reached thirty.

Kyung-sook spit out the sticky squash candy she had been chewing. Stuck inside it was one of the lead fillings from her teeth. The man looked into her mouth with alarm.

“I'll take you to the clinic at HanYong University.”

The famous HanYong University had been founded by an American missionary family, the Overtons, so the school was particularly prized by Koreans. It was one of the most difficult ones to gain entrance to, second only to Seoul National University.

Kyung-sook found herself among the stately stone buildings, square courtyards, groomed topiaries, the dignified statues of various Overtons that stood erect as if overseeing the flowering rose gardens.

“The architecture is modeled after Harvard, a famous university in America—they even imported this ivy that's growing on the walls,” the man said, then added, “Harvard, that is where I'll be going to graduate school.”

Of course all Koreans knew about Harvard, the school that was famous even in A-me-ri-ca, land of famous schools.

“How you know so much about this HanYong University?” Kyung-sook asked.

“The descendants of the first Overtons still live in Korea. Hargrave Overton had a party for all the Peace Corps workers before we were sent to our various postings,” he said. “He had his family there—he has a beautiful Korean wife and three children, one of them an adopted orphan. And you know what's funny? None of the kids—not even the Korean orphan—speaks a word of Korean!”

“Not a one word?” asked Kyung-sook.

“You're always teasing me about not learning much Korean,” he said, pinching Kyung-sook's arm playfully. “Okay, I still haven't picked up hangul, your Korean alphabet, which you
claim
your wonderful King Sejong devised so that it can be learned in an hour. But you know, Overton said that old-time missionaries used to call Korean ‘the devil's language.'”

“Why?”

“Because the devil purposely made the language so hard to learn in order to keep the missionaries from Christianizing people. Overton himself comes from a family that's been in Korea for three generations, but he doesn't speak any Korean himself, either. He sends his kids to the Seoul Foreign School, where they only speak English.”

“But what about mother, you said he Korean lady?”

“Yeah,
she
.”

“But—” Kyung-sook said. “To children? How she speak to children?”