Somebody's Daughter (31 page)

On the TV, another ticker moved across the bottom of the screen:

… GIRL LOOKING FOR KOREAN BIRTH-GIVING MOTHER NEXT ON
THE SEARCH FOR MISSING PERSONS
!!…

Kyung-sook's heart contracted.

“Hm, finally, something new and different on that show,” Cooking Oil Auntie remarked. “Usually it's just wailing harlmonis.”

“Are you going to watch?”

“Uhn, why not. It'll take my mind off Okja.”

“Well, maybe if you're going to keep the TV-machine on, I'll stay, too—if that's okay.”

“Suit yourself. Do you have any snacks in that pojagi, by any chance?”

Kyung-sook did have some baby-finger shrimp as well as some spiced squid and boiled peanuts that she had purchased for Il-sik, her husband, who liked eating light snacks and drinking beer at night, sometimes relieving Kyung-sook from the duty of making him dinner.

“I've got the shrimp you like so much,” she said, taking it out of her wrapping cloth and handing it over.

“This show is all stories about the human condition,” Cooking Oil Auntie explained, as if she were a schoolteacher and Kyung-sook her student. “First loves, people with crushes on their elementary school teachers, things we've seen a million times before right in the village, unh? But they've never had a foreigner on the show before—that should be really interesting.”

“A foreigner?”

“The girl's from America.”

The hosts, an older, squat man and a young woman much taller than he was, came out smiling and joking with the audience. They greeted a middle-aged woman and a shrunken-looking ajuhshi.

Where was the girl?

“Shucks. Figures they save the interesting one for last. Say, d'you have any more snacks?”

Kyung-sook handed over the spicy squid.

“Holding out the best stuff, huh?” Cooking Oil Auntie ripped off a huge leathery piece and stuffed it into her mouth. Then she made a face and gagged.

“Pwah! There's an ocean's worth of salt in this stuff—I told you not to buy at Oakla's snack stall. Urrr! Now my throat's a desert.”

Kyung-sook sighed and took out a can of POCARI SWEAT, one she had bought as a treat for herself, to drink while keeping Il-sik company.

“—Wasn't that wonderful, seeing all the people who called for our honored guests, Dr. Shin and Mrs. Choi?” The female hostess's voice flowed like honey, so refined and smoothed by a perfect Seoul accent, quite discordant with the shock of her low-cut top and short skirt.

“It sounds like we have another heartwarming reunion in the works, thanks again to
The Search for Missing Persons
!”

The squat male announcer moved in front. His hair, Kyung-sook thought, was too black. A man his age should have at least a touch of gray, or white, like Il-sik had.

“For our next honored guest, we have someone who came a-a-a-all the way from America,” he intoned.

“This girl was abandoned here in Korea as a baby,” the woman announcer added, from behind him.

Kyung-sook's throat tightened. The woman had used the same word for “throw away the garbage.”

“… She was sent away from Korea and adopted by a white family in America. But now she has returned to seek her lost truemother. Ladies and gentlemen, let's listen to her touching story and see if we can help her.”

The hostess waved her arms at a closed door as if she were a shaman imploring a spirit to come out. The door opened, and a girl of maybe twenty or so walked out. She was wearing a pretty purple dress and she stood very tall and confident as she walked out.

Kyung-sook squinted at the screen.

“Hmph, look at that, she's grown up on American food and see how tall she is—if she were a Korean man they would send her straight up to the DMZ for her military duty, show those North Koreans what giants we've become,” Cooking Oil Auntie commented. “And look at that hair.”

The girl's hair was so black and shiny that in the camera's lights it looked alive, the way animal fur looked alive. Kyung-sook's own hair had grown thinner over the years, with age and too many troubles, but when she was young, she, too, had such an abundance that no matter which way you pulled a clump of it, you couldn't see even a sliver of white from her scalp.

The male announcer asked the girl how she was doing, was she happy and at peace to be there? Now the girl looked scared. She stared back, frozen.

“Do you understand Korean?” he asked her. The girl coughed, screwed up her face.

“I-dunna-know.”

The audience roared.

“What a riot,” said Cooking Oil Auntie. “That girl looks Korean, but out of that mouth comes the exact yabba-yabba of those missionaries who could never learn to speak Korean properly. So strange, like watching a puppet or a retard, isn't it?”

The girl started to speak English, reading from a piece of paper. Kyung-sook wasn't surprised to find that she didn't understand a word anymore.

“I'll tell you the story, dear audience,” said the translator. “This girl, Sal-Ah, doesn't know anything about her Korean truemother or truefather. Her white American parents adopted her even though of course there was no blood connection—isn't that a nice Western custom? She has come to Korea and is studying in the Kyopos-come-back-to-Korea program at Chosun University. Her adoption records say she was abandoned on—”

“Welcome, please enter!” boomed Cooking Oil Auntie. Kim Grandmother, one of the maids at the wealthy Merchant Pak's house poked her head into the stall like an inquisitive turtle.

“… She was raised in the care of the Little Angels orphanage until she was adopted. Truemother, if you are out there and want to atone for your deed, or if there are any other family members, or anyone knows anything about this girl, please be so kind as to call us now at the station. 02-332-8175.”

Cooking Oil Auntie inserted a cork in the bottle of rich, brown sesame oil and sent Kim Grandmother on her way.

“Did you catch when that girl was, um, left behind?” Kyung-sook asked.

“Unh? No. But she looks like she's in her early-adult season, doesn't she? That would make it sixties? seventies when she was dumped? Sounds about right: that was the time when women were starting to work in the factories with men—and of course, getting in trouble. Remember how that police box in North River Village added that window you could push a baby through if you wanted to throw it away?”

“Well, I'm not sure all the babies were ‘thrown away,'” Kyung-sook said, that horrid word sharp on her lips. “I'm sure there were reasons.”

“Reasons, sure. These mothers
all
have their reasons. Like the mothers who abandoned their kids right after the 6.25 War. Some of those kids wandering the streets were true orphans, of course. But the biggest bunch of them were mixed-blood U.N.-soldier spawn—I saw that on the
Evening Garden
news program. I guess their mothers found it pretty convenient to just ditch 'em and start fresh, huh?”

Kyung-sook thought of the proverb, “If you keep your mouth closed, you cannot bite yourself,” and she did just that. She kept her eyes on the TV screen.

In the TV studio in Seoul, there was silence. A silence that filtered all the way to Enduring Pine Village, to Cooking Oil Auntie's stall. Kyung-sook couldn't even hear a cock crow in the market.

Who could break such a silence?

“Aigu, nobody's calling for that sorry child.” Cooking Oil Auntie began to polish her blue-green oil bottles, the same beautiful color as the flies that buzzed around the dungheap. Kyung-sook felt the heat from the roasting sesame seeds searing her face.

The camera didn't move from the girl's face.

The male announcer walked in front of the camera.

“We're sorry, folks, but no one called for this lost American girl. Maybe the caller is just too shy. At the bottom of our screen we're going to run our studio number again. This girl is going to stay in Korea for the rest of the summer, so if you know anything, be sure to give us a call. Once again, it's 02-332-8175. And keep watching
The Search for Missing Persons
especially to see if the woman from Mokp'o who called today is really Mrs. Choi's sister! If so, that means we have two sisters from the North separated by two wars finally reunited here in the South—it promises to be a very touching reunion. So stay tuned and kamsamnida ladies and gentlemen till next week!”

“That poor kid,” Cooking Oil Auntie muttered as she flipped off the set. “Talk about children who suffer for the sins of their parents. How could a human mother fling her child to the four winds like that? A half-nigger GI baby I could see, maybe. But a beautiful Korean girl like that? I don't care
what
the circumstances might have been—if she were my child, I would have become a beggar, done anything to raise her. You
do
that for your own child.”

She looked at Kyung-sook for confirmation. Kyung-sook was looking the other way. The girl on the screen, she looked to be of pure Korean blood. But was it possible? The foreigner-man, after all, had been tall and he'd had his yun-tan coal-black hair.

“Those women, especially those so-called ‘modern women'—their attitudes threaten our whole society!” Cooking Oil Auntie went on. “They should have abortions instead of heaping so much shame on us as a nation—it makes us look so backward, having Korean kids raised by foreigners. Part of the fault is that it's too easy—they can just pretend to forget the kid on a park bench, as if a child were a package of green onions—”

“That girl probably would have had a terrible life growing up in Korea!” Kyung-sook suddenly exclaimed. All the blood in her body seemed to have found its way into her face, which threatened to burst like a child's cheap rubber ball. “You shouldn't make judgments on situations you know nothing about!”

“The same could be said for you,” Cooking Oil Auntie said, slowly scanning Kyung-sook's face. “I at least know what it's like to have a child, don't I?”

Kyung-sook rose quickly from where she'd been sitting. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep the tears inside. Her mouth filled with a warm taste of iron.

Cooking Oil Auntie paused.

“Look here, Sister, it took me many years to have my son, I know too well the pain of being barren—it was even worse than having my husband die on me.”

Kyung-sook still didn't say anything.

“If it helps, I've heard that wanton women get pregnant much more easily than dutiful wives like you, or me with my one son. Maybe there's something to that—the merciful Lord Buddha will reward us with a hundred male children and fifty daughters in our next lives.”

Kyung-sook spun on her heel, grinding a small hole in the dirt floor.

Cooking Oil Auntie didn't call after her.

Seoul

1993

The phone call was for me.

“Miss Sarah Thorson? This is Noh Kyunghee.”

A rustling of paper.

No Kyung Hee? Korean names, endless combinations of strange syllables. Kyung/Mi/Jae/Ho/Jun/Ok. Did I know her?

“Uh, hi.”

“How are you?”

“Fine. Uh, do I know you?”

“Sejong Broadcasting.”

The Search for Missing Persons.
Kyunghee Noh.

“We had a call for you arrive this afternoon.”

“For me?” Was I hearing right? “From who, whom?”

“From a lady who says she's your mother.”

Seoul

1993

The woman's name was Mrs.
Lee
. Lee Ok-Bong. My mother. She lived here, in Seoul. All this time. And now I had her number.

When I informed Doug of the news, he shouted, lifted me off my feet and spun me around like the Tilt-a-Whirl at the State Fair.

“She finally called the station,” I gasped, giddy, a whole new world of possibility spiraling out before me.

But then I didn't call her. I woke up the next morning, a leaden lump in my stomach.

What if I'm not ready? How will my knowing her change me forever?

Doug seemed almost irked by my sudden recalcitrance. He practically tore the number out of my hands, spoke tersely to whoever answered, and set up a meeting. We were going to meet at the Little Angels Orphanage, Doug's idea. Kyunghee Noh had been pushing for an on-air meeting at the station—she was sorely disappointed with me, she said.

Enduring Pine Village

1993

“What is this number?” Il-sik said to his wife. Kyung-sook looked to see a tiny scrap of paper held in his good hand. Had it fallen out of her skirt pocket when she was bending over the wash?

“Oh, it is nothing.” She took it back from him. “Cooking Oil Auntie told me about a supplier in Seoul who could get me the storage tins for the shrimp paste more cheaply—no one on this earth knows more about saving money than she.”

“Are you all right?” he asked. “It seems like you've been very tired lately.”

Kyung-sook looked at her husband. His right hand, less like a hand than a crabbed piece of old gingerroot.

“I tire in the dog days of summer, that's all,” Kyung-sook told her husband. “All day in the market listening to those squawking customers and then coming home to take care of Father, changing his diaper like he's a baby.”

“You are a filial daughter, your father is very fortunate,” he said.

“I am fortunate in marrying you—I have no in-laws who would forbid me to do this,” she said.

“You know, you have some white hairs now,” her husband said.

Kyung-sook patted her hair. She never looked in the mirror anymore, she could tie the strands into a married-woman's bun without one.

No one wants to grow old, Kyung-sook thought. When she was a child, her maternal grandmother and grandfather had seemed of a completely different, if friendly, species. They had skin like rice paper that had gotten wet and dried again. Their voices were tentative and quavery, like someone who had once been sure of himself but had now grown to doubting.