Somebody's Daughter (6 page)

Jun-Ho ventured more Korean, words that flew past my ears like bullets.

I toyed with my glass, empty except for a thin layer of aquarium-green slime at the bottom. I was tired. Jun-Ho was laughing.

“What's so funny?”

“I will speak some English, if that is okay to explain?”

“Fine, whatever.”

“Your name in Korean, it can mean many things.”

“My name?”

“Yes, in Korean, you are ‘child for purchase.'”

“What?”

“You are ‘child for purchase.'”

I had once heard Jeannie complain that discretion was not a Korean trait, that Koreans had no shame about demanding intimate details: How much money do you make? What's your blood type? It was apparently acceptable to admire a stranger's boy child by reaching into his pants and squeezing his penis, remarking on its heft and size. Choi
Sunsengnim
must have told Jun-Ho that I had been an “exported” child.

“‘Murderous assassin child,' that is another,” he said, giggles turning to guffaws.

“I'm sorry,” I said. My hand clenched under the table. “I don't understand what you're talking about.”

“Your
name
,” he said.

My name. Sarah. “God's treasure.”

“Sal-Ah,” he said. “
Sal
in the Korean vernacular means ‘to-be-purchased' and
ah
means ‘child.' Or
sal
in Chinese characters can mean ‘assassin.' Assassin child, you understand?”

Choi
Sunsengnim
also pronounced my name as Sal-Ah instead of SAY-Rah, which I had attributed to the Korean propensity to tumble English r's and l's together. Now I wondered, was she also thinking of me as child-for-purchase?

Jun-Ho started speaking in Korean again.

“What?”

“I said, do you want to meet here at this location next week?”

Next week? I had planned to meet him only once to satisfy
Sungsengnim
. I should have known better. It seemed like every person in Seoul was trying to learn English. Every time I opened my mouth in public, a crowd of people would materialize around me, saying “hello?” “excuse?” and shoving business cards, which I couldn't read, in my face.

“I will pay,” Jun-Ho said, when the hour was up. From under his seat he pulled out a rectangular leather case with a wrist strap—a purse, in not so many words—and took out a wallet. Inside there were only some pink bills—dollar-bill equivalents. My kiwi juice had been at least six or seven dollars, American.

“I can pay for mine.”

“Oh no. We are in Korea. We will do it Korean way.” He waggled his eyebrows at me, so I wasn't sure he was totally innocent of the double entendre he'd just made. He returned from the cash register and, with a decorous bow, handed me a plastic-wrapped rectangle.

“A gift,” he said.

A packet of toilet paper that said Balzac Cafè (accent
grave
instead of accent
aigu
).

“In your opinion, next week at the congruent time is okay-dokay?” he said, sliding his empty wallet back into his pocket.

What else do you say to someone who's just bought you a seven-dollar glass of juice and given you a present?

I said okay-dokay.

Seoul

1993

I gulped, pretended not to listen, and strained to hear every word.

“… and the guy, he died from eating too much RAMEN!!!” Bernie was saying.

Ramen, my daily bread, so to speak. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. When I was lazy, I crushed the noodles in my hands and ate them raw.

“This guy made instant ramen for all his meals because he was busy studying for his law exams—did you know Koreans are the world's largest consumers of ramen? No shit, I was surprised when I heard that, too—Koreans eat more ramen than all the people in China? Anyway, turns out the noodles had been fried in
industrial waste oil
. The company did it deliberately, too, to increase its profit margin. I guess they figured no one would eat only ramen for days on end.”

“Oh, I saw the headline in the
Korea Herald
,” Jeannie said, a hand sneaking onto Bernie's knee. “People are calling on the CEO to perform ritual suicide.”

“Yeah, but it'll turn out he's some old high school chum of the President—he'll get off. There's no fucking accountability, look at that mall that collapsed in Pusan and killed all those people, not to mention the formaldehyde they put in the
soju
to give it an extra kick. I bought some at the 7-Eleven and it knocked me flat on my ass. I thought I was going to need to get my stomach pumped.”

“By the way, what brand of ramen was that?” I ventured.

“Horangi,”
Bernie said with disdain. “It means ‘tiger,' by the way.”

Thank God. My brand was KONG BEANS, the only one that had any English on its label.

Choi
Sunsengnim
glanced at the clock, began to rise from her seat. Behind her, the classroom door suddenly opened, and a guy carrying our
ill-gup
textbook walked in.

We stared. It had been so long since I'd seen a white person—besides the nun—that the newcomer looked strange and out of place, like he'd just walked in from the moon.

“Who are you?” Choi
Sunsengnim
asked.

He stopped in front of her desk.

“Doug Henderson.” His skin was an opaque white like school paste, and pocked with ice pick scars, suggesting he'd had bad acne as a teen. He was also a giant by Korean standards, over six feet, spindly like a houseplant that doesn't get enough sun. A military star winked from the collar of his frayed flannel shirt.

“Must be one of those fuckwad army guys,” Bernie Lee speculated, as if the visitor wasn't standing right in front of us. “The Eighth Army pays for them to take classes here.”

“I was sent down from Lee
Sunsengnim
's class,” Doug Henderson said.

“Lee
Sunsengnim
, level-three Lee
Sunsengnim
?” Choi
Sunsengnim
stared at him, the same way she had stared at me when she found out I didn't have Korean parents.

“Level-three Lee
Sunsengnim
?” she repeated.

“Sam-gup ae so nae ryunun dae yo,”
he said.

I could hear people's mouths dropping open with wet sounds, including my own. This guy spoke Korean. Really well. Maybe even better than Bernie Lee, who was the best in the class. I almost expected to see a Korean person emerge from behind as a ventriloquist. This was all a joke, right?

“
Oh-moh
, Mis-tah Henda-son,” Choi
Sunsengnim
said in awe. “You speak like a Korean.”

The guy shrugged and sat down in the only place that was open, the desk next to me. He didn't look at any of us.

At lunchtime, everyone ran off together as usual. I gathered my things, wondering what I could eat for lunch besides ramen. Take a chance on a sandwich with its frizzled red fillings? Pick the rice out of those paper-wrapped wheels? Take a risk on raccoon-flavored chips?

Doug Henderson remained, like a rock. Like he was going to sit there until it was time for class again tomorrow.

“How about some lunch?” I said, impulsively.

He looked sidewise at me, then unfolded himself from the seat. Wordlessly we walked out the back gate, across the pedestrian walkway, down the first alley to a crumbly beige structure with a corrugated metal roof. I'd passed this place daily on the way to the 7-Eleven, but because I couldn't read Korean, I had no idea the word meant restaurant.

We ducked the low doorway and entered the gloomy stucco shack. When my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the rest of our class materialized at a table in the corner. No one acknowledged us, except for the nun, who nodded in greeting as she chopsticked a clump of kimchi out of a bowl, holding the wide sleeve of her habit so it wouldn't dip into the hot, red kimchi juice.

We took a two-person table on the opposite side. The table was an odd, square shape, only a container of metal chopsticks and spoons, and a roll of toilet paper on top of it. The seats were low and plastic, like children's outdoor furniture. There seemed to be waitresses, middle-aged ladies in tight, unattractive perms, but no one had given us a menu. Doug was fixated on a peeling and stained piece of paper tacked up on the wall. It was all in Korean, the characters running up-and-down instead of side-to-side the way we'd learned them.

“What are you going to have?” I asked. In the kitchen, matrons with bulky arms that stevedores might admire were attending to rows of stone pots hissing on the blue-flamed gas range, or scooping rice out of a giant cooker. A sweaty waitress hoisted a tray of four bowls of stew, still boiling, onto her head, and plunged fearlessly among the clustered tables.

“I'm having
lar-myun
,” he said.

Oh, what the hell. This would be an adventure.

“Make it a double,” I said.

“Ajuhma—lar-myun, dugae!”
He yelled at the waitress, the one unloading the tray of stews spitting steam. She glared, bowl in hand, callused thumb half in the soup, but then turned and shrieked in the direction of the kitchen,

“Onni! Lar-myun, dugae!”

Maybe five minutes later, she came back and set two bowls filled with—of all things—ramen in front of us.

She also unloaded tiny platters of lumpy things that collectively gave off a festering oceanic smell, like the beach at low tide.

I waited to see what Doug Henderson, the copper-haired boy, would do with these meal components. The waitress thumped another bowl in onto our table.

Kimchi: fermented spiced cabbage. Korea's national food, as I had learned from our cultural activities visit to the Folk Village. You packed the raw materials—cabbage, hot peppers, garlic, ginger, shrimp paste, salt—in these ceramic pots big enough to cook a missionary in and buried it in the ground, like seeds. But instead of sprouting, it came back pickled and spicy and pungent as old socks.

Doug speared a clump of the kimchi, smutty with burning-hot peppers, and ate. He huffed on his noodles and pulled half the bowl into his mouth, like the character in
The Five Chinese Brothers
, the brother who could slurp up the entire ocean into his mouth.

We had yet to say three words to each other. Instead of eating, I watched the dust motes writhing about our heads in the ray of sunlight suddenly let in by one of the waitresses, who had pushed open a sliding rice-paper window.

Doug picked from all the little side dishes as he ate, orchestrating the tastes together, the way Amanda and I used to play “breakfast smörgÃ¥sbord” as kids: place a forkful of scrambled egg inside mouth, insert half a stick of crispy bacon, add a blob of jam or marmalade or Mrs. Butterworth's, top with a bite of buttered burnt toast, close mouth and chew until the sweet-salty-greasy contents are all deliciously mashed together. Repeat until Christine tells you that what you're doing is disgusting.

I tried the ramen. Oily red broth, delicious and MSG-y, the way ramen is supposed to taste. From the little platters of stuff, I ventured a strand of what looked orzo pasta.

The taste, pleasant. Sprinkled with black pepper, but no pepper taste. I ate more. Sweet. Chewy. When I pulled a piece out, exactly two bits of pepper came with it. I looked closer, and almost screamed.

Eyes.

The pepper was eyes. This wasn't pasta, but some kind of worm or fish that had bifocal vision. Doug grabbed a bunch of them with his chopsticks, placed them in his mouth, ate a bite of noodles and raised his eyebrows to me as if to say, “good, huh?” He unrolled a few squares of toilet paper and wiped his lips.

When we finished—he didn't ask why I left most of my meal untouched—Doug paid and returned with two sticks of Lotte gum that warned on the label, FOR LADY ONLY!

Outside, we blinked in the bright sunlight. It wasn't quite spring yet, but one of the restaurant ladies, who Doug said are called
ajuhmas
, aunties, followed us out and set a pot of peonies by the door. The buds were still closed tight as fists. Christine kept peonies in her garden at home, and I knew that they needed ants to eat off the sticky glue before the globes could open. Korean ants must know to do the same thing. This thought cheered me.

I popped my gum into my mouth, hoping to get rid of the trace of some unpleasant metal-fish taste—from the worms?

Perfume exploded in my mouth. Without thinking, I spat.

“Shit,” said Doug, returning from wiping his mouth. “What the hell kind of gum was that? I feel like I just ate a bar of soap.”

I looked up from my own wad, glistening wetly in my palm, smelling chemically fragrant like room freshener.

“Ick, I assumed the FOR LADY ONLY thing was just the English gibberish they slap on everything,” I said. My 7-Eleven face soap, for instance, had Meg Ryan's face beaming pixie-ishly from the wrapper over the bizarre brand name, SEXY-MILD.

Now talking, I continued to babble: “But I guess the wrapper was trying to communicate something real, like FOR HOOKER ONLY, YOUR FLOWER BREATH WILL ENTICE MEN LIKE BEES.”

Doug Henderson stared at me, as if in disbelief, then turned on his heels, a military move. The next thing I saw was his back rapidly receding down toward the mini-highway. He wasn't looking back. If he did, he would have seen me standing among discarded green
soju
bottles, the pot of peonies, a broken plastic slipper, candy wrappers, and other jetsam and flotsam in the narrow alley, wondering if I'd already lost the closest thing I had to a friend in Korea.

Enduring Pine Village

1993

Kyung-sook had been selling various kinds of shrimp at the market for almost twenty years. Her days had a reassuring sameness to them: up before dawn to prepare Il-sik's breakfast rice, warm and fresh, then attending to her father. Then to her market stall when the sky had lightened enough for her to see the wares she was arranging. After that, she would wait for her customers.