Somebody's Daughter (28 page)

Out on the main street, a line of trucks roared by, so loud it made the ground shake. Army trucks, filled with soldiers, guns at the ready. They sped by once, maybe twice a day lately. Old Bachelor Choi said it was because of the student demonstrations.

“I hope it's not going to be like the riots of '60 and '61,” he said. “After the body of that high school student demonstrator washed up on shore in Masan with torture marks all over him, all hell broke loose. Even housewives and maidens took to the street. The police got all panicky and would sometimes just shoot wildly into the crowds. So much bloodshed.”

The trucks invaded the foreigner's neighborhood, too. The man David watched the soldiers go by as he and Kyung-sook opened the gate to his flat. He spat on the ground as if he had a bad taste in his mouth.

“See?” he told Kyung-sook. “Those brave protesting students just want fair elections. And the government is killing them—just the way they tried to kill Park's legitimate political rival, that man Kim. This is what's happening right now. Your Korea is being ruled by dictators who are planning to run your poor country into the ground.”

Kyung-sook didn't know what to say. She didn't want David to know how ignorant she was of her country's politics. In the village, it had made little difference if this president or that one was elected; you were just not to say anything critical about the sitting one, that was all she knew.

In the restaurant, they could all hear the army trucks roar by again, the noise seeming closer this time, almost as if the trucks were in the alley itself. The cook-owner swore as the dishes rattled, as the usual noontime din was drowned out by the noise of powerful engines.

“Sis,” said Sunhee to Kyung-sook, after the trucks had passed. “Cook-owner said you're going to get married and go back to America with Mr. Fish. You lucky thing! Oh, I should start studying English so
I
could meet a Westerner. I'm almost an old maid, working in this dump with no prospects.”

“What are you calling a dump?” the cook-owner sniped, still a black spot in Kyung-sook's eyes. “It is said, ‘Kick a stone in anger and you hurt your own foot.' Feel free to go elsewhere for your fucking employment!”

“I was just kidding,” Sunhee said, hanging her proud head a little. She had obviously once been a beauty, which was what had gotten her in trouble in the first place at the sieve factory, between the enmity from the other female workers and the extra attention she received from the married male boss. “Where else do I have to go?”

She looked at Kyung-sook enviously.

Seoul

1972

Kyung-sook woke to find that the baby had moved between the winged bones of her hips. Now less weight on her ribs, but down beneath, everything pressed, so heavy. The man David snored beside her, his mouth flung open.

Kyung-sook rose and began rummaging in the box of food. There was a banana and a few sweet biscuits. Some rice was needed, also. She put the banana and biscuits in the windowsill first.

Please, merciful Birth Goddess, please make the baby wait to come out until we are safely in America.

David walked over to the window, wiping his eyes, just as Kyung-sook took up a handful of rice.

“What the hell is this?” he said.

Kyung-sook leaped toward the offerings as he swept them from the windowsill. She still had the rice in her hands, and the hard grains slipped through her fingers as the banana and biscuits tumbled ignominiously to the floor. She wanted to weep.

“Karen, it's unclean to leave food out like this! Do you want us to have flies and roaches in here?”

The fruit and shattered biscuits lay scattered on the floor. Between them, the rice grains stood up on their tips, every one of them pointing up at the sky. A sure sign the Goddess was displeased.

“Oh, if that doesn't take the cake,” David muttered. “A goddam mess all over the floor, and I haven't even been awake for five minutes.”

Kyung-sook looked back at him. She didn't understand him anymore—he wasn't pleased with anything she did. Just last week she had gone to the beauty parlor and gotten a modern bobbed haircut and a perm. But when he saw it, he just looked at her and barked, “What did you do to your hair?”

He was staring at her with hard eyes, the colored part going up into the lid—what Koreans called snake-eyes.

The snake-eyes frightened her.

“You are just an Oriental peasant at heart, aren't you?”

Again, she did not understand. Instead, she grasped her stomach and showed him.

“What about baby?” she demanded of him. “Why you never say no thing about baby?”

He shook his head.

“You can't come back to America with a baby,” he said, calmly. “I thought it was obvious.”

What did he mean?

“I don't want children. I'm going to graduate school. The fact that you're still pregnant makes me think you don't want to come to America with me.”

“I wanna go A-me-ri-ca.”

“Then you have to get rid of the baby—it's getting to be almost too late. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

Sometimes, when the man spoke too fast, the meaning of his words was a fluttering thread that slipped out of Kyung-sook's hands. But now, his meaning was becoming all too clear.

He was talking about nak-tae. Abortion.

Kyung-sook began to cry. Was this man a human being?

“That's the only way,” he said. “Did you think it was going to be easy for me, bringing home a foreign bride? There's a war going on in Asia that people aren't too happy about. This is going to be very hard on me. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

“Baby,” she said.

“I know it's hard subverting the maternal instinct,” he said. “But it's only a fetus, fe-tus, it's not a baby yet. The unpleasant part will be over before you know it, and we can go on to America. Can't you see your country is collapsing? Your president is a murderer of his own people, Karen. The army went and shot all those protesters in the middle of the day, some of them were mere children. There's no chance for democracy here. My government wants me to get out, too.”

Kyung-sook was so tense, her teeth began chattering.

“Go to this clinic tomorrow and have it done. I know the doctor—he'll take care of you, let you stay overnight. The day after, I'll pick you up and we can go to the Bando Hotel together and get our plane tickets.”

He handed her a piece of paper, with the name of a Dr. Rhee and an address scrawled in transliterated Korean. And, as if he were making a huge sacrifice, the man David handed her a ten-thousand-won bill.

“This is all I can spare because I need to prepare for our trip,” he said. “Go get your savings and bring it with you. Forty, fifty thousand at the very least.”

Kyung-sook found herself in the section of the city right behind Chong-no, Bell Street, in the Chinese medicine neighborhood. The smell of herbs and roots and dried animal parts made her feel even more nauseous. She walked by several stores that said, WE SELL DEER ANTLER and TIGER PENIS, GENUINE RED GINSENG.

The office was on the second floor of an acupuncture clinic.

She staggered up the steep stairs to the door that proclaimed “Dr. Rhee.” Inside, it was dark and hot and smelt of rotting wood, so different from the shiny foreigner's clinic at HanYong University. The walls bore ghostly stains of cigarette smoke and grease from a hot plate sitting on a table. There were no nurses in white uniforms, just Dr. Rhee, an old man with a mole that looked like a giant leech eating up almost half his face.

He didn't look like a doctor, Kyung-sook thought. Maybe a tol p'ari doctor, a quack doctor. There were no certificates on the walls, only a table with a fraying curtain that went around it and a bucket that had some metal tools soaking in cloudy water.

Dr. Rhee glanced at her stomach and cackled. His fingers were stained with tobacco, a pack of cheap Peacock cigarettes sat on his desk.

“You are very big, very close to delivering, I'd say. This is not going to be an easy operation. How much do you have?”

Kyung-sook reluctantly showed him the pile of bills she had pulled together, all the wages she had scrimped and saved.

“That's not enough,” he said, scowling. “That's not hardly enough. I'm breaking the law, you know, risking my own neck.”

Then he turned away and hawked, as if he was going to spit.

Kyung-sook's head was spinning.

“Please,” she said. “How much more do you need?”

“One hundred thousand won.”

One hundred thousand! Kyung-sook looked around wildly, as if there was money to be found for the picking in the office. She found herself looking at the curtain around the table. There were stains of dark blood, like pinpricks, sprayed on the fabric.

Kyung-sook ran headlong down the steep stairs into the street, where she retched into the gutter. When she looked up, saliva dripping from her chin, she saw Dr. Rhee in his second-floor window looking down at her.

“You stupid poji-cunt, Yankee shit-whore.” He shook his head, then slammed the window shut.

Kyung-sook went back to the restaurant. For some reason, the door was unlocked, but no one was there. No cook-owner, no Sunhee.

She had to think. Maybe the cook-owner could loan her the money. And maybe David could bring her to the foreigner's clinic, so she wouldn't have to face that terrible Dr. Rhee. She had to do it all soon, while she could still convince herself that the bulge in her belly was really not a baby, but an obstacle, the one obstacle lying between her and a new life in A-me-ri-ca.

She was so weary, she sat down and fell into a deep sleep in the back of the restaurant, and before she knew it, it was morning.

As soon as she awoke, she ran to David's boarding house. Impatient, she slid open the rice-paper panel. The room was bare, except for a bucket and a rag sitting in the middle of the floor, a crumpled English-language
Korea Herald
in the corner.

Kyung-sook ran into the courtyard. There, the bent-over landlady was sweeping.

“Ajuhma,” she said to her.

“Don't tell me you're looking for your big-nose boyfriend,” she snorted, beginning to sweep more vigorously.

“I am.”

“Well, he flew the coop, Missy. Been gone since day before yesterday.”

Kyung-sook heard a noise, like a rushing wind. The sound of her past, present, and future flying away.

When she woke, she was under the covers in an unfamiliar room. The landlady came in with some cold barley tea and helped her to sit up while she drank it.

“That big-nose ran out on you, too?” she asked, then clicked her tongue in reproach. “That bastard nom owes me two months' rent, which is nothing compared to what you—”

She stopped herself.

The landlady let Kyung-sook stay in the warm covers for another hour. Then her husband came home, and she said Kyung-sook had to leave.

Kyung-sook walked away, dazed, cupping her abdomen. The baby kicked right under her hand. Without thinking, she felt herself squeezing back with her palm.

Maybe it'll be a boy, she mumbled to herself. A boy is still a boy, someone who could help her support her parents, then herself, in old age…

“Where have you been?” shrieked Sunhee.

“What do you mean?”

“The cook-owner is dead!”

Dead!

“Oh, it was horrible! They said she was returning from the market, and as she was crossing the street she was run over by one of the army trucks!”

“What?” said Kyung-sook.

“The soldiers, they just drove away. I stayed with her all night until I could finally get someone to help me bring her body back here to the restaurant. I was so upset I just drove all the customers away. I didn't know what else to do.”

Kyung-sook thought she was going to retch again when she saw the cook-owner's body laid out on the concrete floor of the storeroom where she used to sleep. Blood and dirt were matted into her hair. Sunhee had tried to nudge the body onto a mat, but the cook-owner, in death, had become like a rock and was impossible to move.

Kyung-sook sat, numbly.

“One of the customers said there's some kind of rioting going on down south,” Sunhee babbled. “So the President declared a national emergency and sent the army into Seoul to keep order here. The streets are just crawling with soldiers and police.”

Kyung-sook just rocked back and forth, holding the bulge in her stomach in between her hands.

Sunhee hurriedly scrawled a sign saying “Closed because of death” and bolted the door.

“Are you just going to sit there?” she said to Kyung-sook. “When are you going away with the Westerner?” Kyung-sook didn't answer her. The two of them sat in the restaurant all night, listening to the occasional roar of army trucks.

Early the next day, a young, well-dressed couple knocked on the door of the restaurant. They said they were the cook-owner's niece and nephew-in-law. They viewed the body without emotion, looking around at the restaurant's furnishings with more interest. Some workmen came to take the body away.