Somebody's Daughter (4 page)

That girl, she thought, who did she think she was?

She watched Small Singing leave the cooking oil stall, heavy with groceries and the child strapped to her back by a quilted podaeki. She probably needed to add some meat to her load, or at least stop at the fishmonger's before trotting down the dusty road back to her in-laws', where she would wash, chop, peel, scale, and cook the day's dinner, laboriously feeding wood or charcoal briquettes into the stove, the whole time the baby on her back crying for milk, the mother-in-law wailing that she was going to die of hunger before her infernal daughter-in-law would have some food ready.

Once the endless dishes of seasoned vegetables, salted fish, steamed rice, several kinds of kimchi were laid out, the house would quiet as everyone except Small Singing ate their fill. Small Singing was known to be a fine cook, so likely when it was her turn to eat, alone in the cold kitchen, only some dregs of vegetables, perhaps a fish head if she was fortunate, would be left to mix with the grains of rice still sticking to the sides of the blackened iron pot. To clean the rice pot, she would pour a kettle of hot water into it, then drink up the rice-water to fill her stomach.

Her mother-in-law, who had always secretly envisioned her son marrying someone who looked like those sleek, big-eyed women she saw in the fashion magazines and not the snaggletoothed daughter of the night-soil hauler, would often interrupt even this rude meal. Between burps and tooth-sucking, she would complain that the seasoned bellflower roots, which Small Singing had scrubbed to whiteness with salt, then shredded painstakingly with a pin, had needed more hot pepper. In slicing the fruit for the last course, perhaps a bit of pale apple-flesh had been wastefully pared away with the skin. Small Singing would have to get on her knees, lower her eyes, and say, “Forgive me, Mother. I did wrong.”

Later, Small Singing's husband, a filial son, would reiterate his mother's message with his fists.

The next time Small Singing came to Kyung-sook's stall, she would have a bruise under one eye, her lip would be swollen and split like a packed pig's intestine sausage. The baby on her back would be dirty and crying. The late afternoon sun would be slanting through the spaces between the plastic roof-tarps, so Small Singing would implore Kyung-sook to hurry and give her a kun of shrimp paste, which she would wrap into her carrying-cloth and go on her way.

That girl thinks she's better than I am because of that pumpkin-headed baby, Kyung-sook would think with wonder, shaking her head.

Seoul

1993

“Sarah-
ssi
—” Choi
Sunsengnim
sighed like a deflating balloon before adding, “What will we do with you? You are falling far behind in class.”

“Thank God
Sunsengnim
finally said something,” muttered Bernie Lee, sotto voce. “She's holding up the whole class.”

Okay, I admit I had trouble remembering the word for “car,”
cha-dong-cha
, and no one else seemed to have trouble with it. But it wasn't for lack of trying. I studied all night. It was just that Korean words were so damn hard to remember.

Bernie was staring at me. He was wearing yet another orange-and-black PRINCETON sweatshirt, as if he feared we might forget where he went to college unless he reminded us, every day.

“What are you looking at?” I snapped.

“You look Korean,” he said. “But you sound
exactly
like a white person
trying
to speak Korean—it's the weirdest thing.” His face was handsome in its own way: long, angular, hairless as a pear. I already disliked him.

“You're a Twinkie,” he concluded. “Yellow on the outside, white on the inside.”

“Ber-nie,” Jeannie giggled. “That's so mean.”

I rolled my eyes. He didn't know the first thing about me: in a taxonomy of Hostess junk-food cakes, I went beyond Twinkie, I was a Sno-ball, the coconut treat that's white to the core.

Some time after Rev. Jansen's mini-sermon on whose daughter I was, I became the
Fabulous Sarah Thorson
, the daughter with Ken's seaglass-blue eyes, Christine's creamy complexion, pale cornsilk hair.

But are you saying that you truly believe you have blond hair and blue eyes—despite what the mirror tells you?
An unbelieving shrink, from when I was ten.
Is that why you keep trying out for
The Sound of Music
every year even though you must know they would never give the part to someone who looks like you?

How could it be otherwise? With the arrival of Amanda (who eventually landed the part of Gretl, the youngest Von Trapp daughter), our family became the living embodiment of the Scandinavian phenotype. I wanted to be included.

True, an accidental pass by a mirror, a store window, the bright-polished side of a toaster might yield a glimpse of a girl with black, straight hair, eyes the shape and color of apple seeds, a light spray of chocolate-chip colored moles across her left cheek. But those fleeting images I disowned. That girl's Asian face was recognizable yet strange, like seeing your name writ large in an unfamiliar hand.

The lovely, fragmentary Fabulous Sarah Thorson was the one who explained away the dissonance of family pictures: Who—or what—was that dark stain in the middle of this American family?

Not the Fabulous Sarah Thorson: she comes from sturdy Norwegian- and Swedish- and German-American stock. Her speech is punctuated with Norwegianisms like
uff-da!
, and her Nana, who looks just like Grandma Moses, was born in Norway. At Christmastime the Fabulous Sarah Thorson stuffs herself with Swedish potato
lefse
and
spritz
cookies, even chokes down rubbery bits of lye-pickled Norwegian
lutefisk
herring, which will make her father, Ken, happy, for he is the Son of Thor.

I claimed stomachaches on school picture day. Christine despaired at the crooked parts in my hair, green balls of snot hanging from my nose. No matter what high gloss she could buff me to in the mornings, I acquired my own patina of gleet and ooze by afternoon.

“Sarah, don't you ever look in a mirror?” she would sigh, scouring my face with a spat-on hankie as I sat in the back of the car on the way to yet another classical music concert or Ibsen play at the Guthrie Theater. Even now, when I sit in the back seat of a car, that maternal musk revisits me, that same intoxicating Joy-parfum-lipstick-wax-Mommy-breath-Johnson's-baby-powder concoction I once discovered inside the bundles she mummified in yards of toilet paper, those white pillows hiding mysterious, rusty stains.

Yet, why did the spit-hankie never touch Amanda? Amanda with her blond curls neatly barretted off her face, scuffless Mary Janes; in the summer, she ran free under the radiant sun while Christine smeared me with a zinc-oxide sunblock the color of chalk. It was only those young summers when we rented that cabin out at Sand Lake that Christine let me enjoy the unadulterated kiss of the sun. That was back when Nana was still alive, when we still lived in that tiny house in Bliss Court, and when Amanda was still part of some cosmological future Ken and Christine couldn't even (pun intended) conceive of. By the time we moved to Inwood Knoll, within the environs of the Eden's Prairie Country Club, my hue had become her obsession. Thus the summers in whiteface, designated a nonsinging minstrel, the most useless kind.

But the Fabulous Sarah Thorson, I knew, tans a honey-gold, which makes her look even blonder, her seaglass eyes paler. I depended on her to get through the day. That time I had almost lost her made me realize that.

The last day of school in fifth grade. Our teacher had covered the back wall in brown kraft paper and told us to make a mural of our ideal summer vacation.

I drew myself as a stick figure, fishing rod in hand, sitting atop a crate (THIS END UP pointing down—humor where I lacked artistic talent). I was drawing in our Sand Lake cabin, when Merlin Gustafson muscled me aside.

“You need ching-chong eyes,” he declared. He reached a sweaty arm across me and rubbed a black crayon over my figure's dot-eyes until they became a pair of heavy, horizontal lines.

Then, his encore: he pulled the corners of his eyes until the lids became razor slits, pulled until they turned inside out, displaying pink, moist undersides.

The Fabulous Sarah Thorson, exploding: blue eyes, creamy white skin, golden hair. Protoplasm splattering everywhere.

The bell rang. While my classmates streamed out into the larger world, I ran into the girls' room, sitting fully clothed on the toilet, trying to shut out the voices.

Returning to the classroom, I dug through the Crayola box until I found the color I wanted: a deep, oceanic blue. Then I redrew my eyes as larger orbs, Merlin's horizontal lines the circles' diameter; when finished, my picture had eyes bigger than everyone else's, a drugged, dilated-pupil look that satisfied me.

In Korea, however, everything has reversed. This morning, in a crowd of people hurrying to class, I happened to glance at the giant mirror posted at the entrance of the school. For a giddy, vertiginous second, I didn't know who I was looking for, or who I would find. I had somehow smoothly joined this black-haired, dark-eyed crowd.

“So, iss dat why you never told us your last name?” asked Helmut, who came from Munich. The first day, the three students of authentic Korean stock had proudly rattled off their Korean names, surnames placed first in the traditional style: Lee Jae-Kwan (Bernie), Lee Jiyoung (Jeannie), and Kim Bum-Sik (Helmut). I just said, “I'm Sarah,” a habit acquired after hearing “Thorson, that's a funny name for an Oriental,” ad nauseum.

“Hey Twinkie, do you even know your Korean family name?” Bernie, working my nerves. “All Koreans should know their family names and their ancestral clans.”

“My clan,
I-ssi
, is the Chunju Lees,” Jeannie broke in, giving Bernie a significant look. If there was an “in” clan, that, apparently, was the one. Almost a quarter of Koreans shared the name Lee, but these particular Lees could claim lineage reaching back to the beloved King Sejong, the inventor of the Korean alphabet, whose picture graced the ten-thousand-won bill. Apparently, for each family there was some kind of official document, a family register that recorded all the births and deaths and marriages starting from when the first Koreans climbed out of the Primordial Ooze.

“Mein klan is the Cheju-do Kims,” added Helmut.

Bernie looked at me with a cranky, hungry expression, as if suffering from some male version of PMS.

“Why are you even here?” he said. “It's not like you're going to go home and start talking in Korean to your
pah-rents
.”

“You don't own Korea,” I said, scratching my nose with an upraised middle finger.

“Ooh, I'm scared of you,” he said.
“Sunsengnim!”

“Lee Jae-Kwan-
ssi
?”

He spoke quickly in Korean, the only words I recognized were my name and “bad.” He was obviously tattling that I had flipped him the bird; however, in his re-creation of my crime, he raised a fist—thumb poking out between the first two fingers. Exactly the gesture I had made to the old crone that day I tried to buy some steamed bread.

Choi
Sunsengnim
looked in shock from the thumb to me and said, “
Oh moh!
Sarah-
ssi
, please! We must show respect in our classroom.”

“Bernie is the one who started the whole thing—” My voice involuntarily thinned to a whine. “He—”

“Please, Sarah-
ssi
. Of all the students, you have the most to learn. As I was about to be saying, you must have extra conversation practice. A friend of my brother's wants to make his English better, so you two can do a language exchange. His name is Kim Jun-Ho, and he's a student here at Chosun University, although right now he's doing his mandatory military service.”

I opened my mouth to protest. This was the beginner's class, for Christ's sake, the class for people who don't know any Korean. But even the nun, from Paris, had studied Chinese from when she had been a missionary in Hunan province. A goodly number of Korean words were based on Chinese ones, so she already had a solid vocabulary. She, for instance, didn't have any trouble remembering the word for “car”:
cha-dong-cha
was “moves-by-itself-vehicle” in both Chinese and Korean.

Choi
Sunsengnim
handed me a telephone number. She would brook no objections.

“I will wait to hear from him, Jun-Ho Kim, how it was,” she said.

“Let's get
pudae chigae
for lunch,” Bernie said, after class. Everyone else, nun included, seemed to think that was a splendid idea. No one turned to me and said, “Sarah, what are you doing for lunch? Want to come along?”

Sarah the misfit, even in her native country. How had it come to this, I wondered, that in the space of a single generation, I had become some kind of Darwinian reject, a fish with lungs, a duck-billed platypus. I wasn't Korean-hyphen-anything, for what was Korean in me had become vestigial, useless. But at the same time, ching-chong eyes prevented me from claiming any kind of race solidarity with the nun—or with my so-called family, back in Minnesota.

All I knew was that if someone were to invite me, I would gladly eat poo day chee-gay, even if it was literally made out of poo, I would allow Bernie Lee to classify me as any preservative-and-lard-filled cake he wanted to, just so long as I wouldn't have to eat yet another meal standing awkward and abandoned at the 7-Eleven counter.

The four clattered out without me.

Enduring Pine Village

1993

Enduring Pine Village was Kyung-sook's official ancestral village, but more tellingly, because she still lived there, had lived there basically all her life, it was also her ko-hyang, her hometown. The best way to know a stranger, any fool knows, is to know their hometown.