Somebody's Daughter (9 page)

Except for Kyung-sook.

Even as a child, you hardly ever slept, her mother had told her once. When we brought you to the fields, you sang with the birds, all day. That's why your milk-name was Chatterbox, my daughter.

She should have been a son.

There had been a son, born a year before the 6.25 War. Her parents had named him Jae-song, Having All the Brilliant Stars in the Sky. So overjoyed by his birth, they didn't even give him a milk-name, like Dog Shit, which would have hidden from the gods how very precious he was to them.

When the family had fled south, away from the onrushing North Korean soldiers, they, with a group of refugees from another mountain village, had had to ford the Glass River at night. It was rumored that the area was infiltrated with enemy soldiers.

Someone had procured a makeshift raft, and a dozen people clambered onto the listing platform, two men in the back carefully poling it through the water.

Halfway across, Having All the Brilliant Stars in the Sky began to cry.

Kyung-sook's mother attempted to give him her breast, but as she fumbled at the tie of her top-blouse, hands snatched the child away from her.

You want to get us all killed?

Keep the baby quiet!

Kyung-sook's mother had wanted to scream
Where is my baby?
, but there was no sound in the moonless night except for the
slup-slup
of the river against the banks.

A flash of light on the other side, a sharp report.

Soldiers were indeed there.

Someone shoved the child back into the mother's arms when the raft hit the opposite bank, the people scattering into the night amid gunshots.

Kyung-sook's parents hid among the trees as shadows of soldiers came within meters of them. Kyung-sook's mother kept her hand tightly over the child's mouth.

We can't all die this way, like dogs, she vowed.

Only later, under the safety and light of a refugee camp, did she see that Having All the Brilliant Stars in the Sky had been smothered. By her hand, or by another's on the raft, she would never know.

“Madame Shrimp Auntie, my mother has sent me to pick up half a kun of shrimp paste!”

A little girl in pigtails stiff as calligraphy brushes stood at the entrance of the stall.

“Come on in, Child,” Kyung-sook said, getting up from her crate. She shook out the folds in her apron. “My aren't you chak-hae, a good girl, helping your mother with the errands?”

The girl bowed modestly, and Kyung-sook took advantage of her averted eyes. The girl's hair was dark as night, making the white sliver of a part look all the more tender and sweet. Her hands were grubby, but well formed, each fingernail an exact miniature of an adult's.

Kyung-sook measured out the shrimp paste, making sure to add in a little extra, and gave it to the little girl. Then she glanced at her unfinished lunch.

“Here, why don't you take this?” she said, palming her red-bean bun. She expected the girl to take an impulsive bite out of the sweet, as children were wont to do, but this girl received it respectfully with two hands, then placed it in her pojagi, which already had a bundle of Chinese chives sticking out of it. From a hidden pocket, the girl took out some crumpled bills and smoothed them before handing them to Kyung-sook.

“You're not hungry?” Kyung-sook asked, disappointed. The girl's clothes, she noticed, were slightly worn, but bleached clean and ironed. The bits of colored yarn tied to the ends of her braids attested to someone's love and care.

“I want to share it with my mother and my little brother,” she said. “They like bread.”

Kyung-sook smiled and bent down to the girl's eye-level.

“You're a good girl who'll have lots of good fortune, I can tell,” she said. “I could have become a face reader if I didn't become a shrimp seller, you know—my readings are quite accurate.”

The girl lifted her head, and her eyes met with Kyung-sook's for the barest second. A tiny, pleased smile played at the corners of her mouth before she again bowed modestly.

White-hot lightning shot through Kyung-sook's body, igniting her to the roots of her hair, making her jerk upright. She caught her breath. She fought to control her expression.

“I must go now,” said the girl.

“Hm, oh yes, go along, Dear,” Kyung-sook said, barely daring to breathe.

What was this feeling?

The girl bowed and said, “Goodbye, Shrimp Auntie,” and Kyung-sook replied, as she did to all her customers, “Come again, would you?”

But behind her smile, her face still felt tight and hot. For the briefest moment, she found herself thinking what she would never let herself think before:

That girl could have been mine.

Seoul

1993

“So how's your
yuhja chingu
?” Jeannie said to Bernie. Sneeringly.

The new daytime drama,
The Ill-Gup Class
.

It seemed just yesterday that the studio audience had been left with the image of the two of them, bottle of
soju
in hand, going off into the neon sunset, to one of the “love hotels” near campus.

“She's more than a
chingu
,” Bernie replied, with a sneer of his own. “She's my
ae in
, my love thang.”

“Yeah, right,” Jeannie muttered. “She's obviously just trying to get a free ticket to the States, just like those skanky
yang kongju
who hook up with the GIs.”

“Hey, watch it. Don't you know that the majority of the Koreans in the States can trace their way back to some Korean whore who hooked up with a GI, Miss High and Mighty?”

“So how fitting for you!” she spat back.

“
My
dad came over through the special provisions made for professionals, since he was a surgeon. You told me your dad has a
chang-sa
—a grocery, wasn't it?”

“That doesn't mean shit,” Jeannie said. “He has an advanced degree in chemistry.”

“But if he's stuck running a grocery, that sounds like a green card problem to me.” Bernie began humming that horrible Phil Collins song, “It's No Fun Being an Illegal Alien.” Jeannie turned livid.

“Hey, soldier-boy.” Bernie, bored with Jeannie for the time being, looked toward Doug. Doug didn't move.

Bernie said something to him in his quick, fluid Korean.

Doug replied in equally rapid Korean.

Now Bernie looked frustrated.

Thankfully, just then, Choi
Sunsengnim
burst in, overloaded with books.

She wearily dropped her load on the desk, mumbled something about the traffic, and started to take attendance.

We were all here, for a change.

At lunch at the dingy restaurant (ironically named
Mujigae
, “rainbow”), we saw the rest of our class again. Bernie gave Doug the finger, American-style.

“Don't pay any attention to Bernie,” I told Doug. “Did you hear him tell Helmut his haircut made him look like a Hitler Youth?”

“Oh, I can handle guys like him,” Doug said. “I met a dozen Bernies in college. That was the first place I tried to ‘come out' as a Korean, at the Korean club.”

“Your college had a Korean
club
?”

“Yeah, but they wouldn't let me in it. The guy who ran it was this asshole, Pil-baek Bang. This guy drove a Mercedes, wore a suit and tie to class. First meeting, he says to me, ‘Why are you here?' I said, ‘Because I'm Korean.' And you know what he said to me?”

I shook my head.

“He said the club wasn't for the half-breed sons of Western princesses.”

“Western princess?”

“Yeah.
Yang kongju
, a Korean woman who's hooked up with an American GI. It's a synonym for prostitute.”

“Um,” I said.

“In a way he hit the nail right on the head. My mother was a bargirl at a bar that serviced American GIs, and I am half white.”

“So … Um.”

“But unlike some bargirls, after
Umma
met Hank, my dad, she had sex with him exclusively—and they did marry.”

I blinked. So casual, as if he were discussing something suitably public—a stock trade, maybe—not a trade in his mother's body.

“What led her to that, um, life?” I ventured.

You probably would have become a prostitute if you'd stayed in Korea
.

He shrugged. “She was a peasant. She was really smart, but being the fifth daughter of the village junkman who called his kids One, Two, Three, Four, and Five and who liked his rice wine a little too much, being sent to school wasn't an option. Working the bar scene was.”

“Oh.”

“So how old were you when you were adopted?”

“Eighteen months, I think.”

“Were you born in Seoul?”

“I guess. That's where my parents lived.”

“What happened to your Korean parents—do you remember them at all?”

“They died in a car accident. I don't have any memories of Korea at all.”

“Tell me about being an adopted Korean, then. What's that like?”

My metal chopsticks scraped against the stainless steel bowl, my rice a half-eaten, ruined sphere. Why had no one ever bothered to ask me that, until this guy Doug, two steps away from being a complete stranger? Why was my being in the Thorson family presumed, assumed normal, and anything else was not?

“What's there to tell?” I chewed and chewed until the rice disintegrated to liquid, my jaws clenching.

Sundays were our “family day.” We went to church together, we hunkered down at home for a big midday meal, before which we said long graces about how grateful we were. Grateful that Ken made tons of money so we could have our nouveaux-Victorian palace in this place that had no sidewalks. Grateful that Christine could buy all this food at Lund's. Grateful. Full of grate. I hated that word.

Don't talk to your mother like that! Don't you know that when you first came, she stayed up all night, night after night, trying to feed you? You might have died, otherwise.

I was aware I refused to eat when I first came to America. But was that my fault? I was eighteen months old.

You don't know what it is you have, don't you know what your life would have been over there? You should be grateful
.

Sundays. In Korea, that's the day families emerged from their homes. Saturday, still a workday, but Sundays, mother and fathers, sometimes grandmothers and grandfathers, accompanied children to parks, to Lotte World's skating rink and Bavarian Village, to museums. Sometimes they even outfitted themselves in identical clothes, say red-and-blue polo shirts, like some traveling athletic team. My greedy eyes would devour them.

The Motherland Programmers would also regroup. One girl always greeted a sun-browned uncle who drove a “Power Bongo” pickup truck filled with turnips or potatoes. Bernie Lee met a white-gloved chauffeur, one who had been known to wait for him for hours, wiping nonexistent specks of dust off the sleek black car with a feather brush. Sometimes even mothers and fathers visiting from the States arrived.

In the evening, everyone returned, logy from huge meals, toting shopping bags stuffed with persimmons, fried honey cookies, rice cakes, and boxes of canned fruit drinks with names like SacSac. As they said goodbye to family, ballasted by edible tokens of care and affection, I watched them, chin on my fists, elbows sore from being pressed into the windowsill for hours.

I realized then that I had been misguided in my envy of the people in Eden's Prairie, thinking it was merely their whiteness I wanted. No, it was their knowing their place in the world, a complacency the Motherland Program students shared. In Korea, Bernie Lee became Lee Jae-Kwan. Then he could return to America and Princeton and being Bernie, for he had parents whose faces mapped where he had come from, his life made perfect sense. So, too, the lives of Jeannie from Illinois, Helmut, the Gallic nun. They all carried with them the solid stones of their past in one hand, and bright, shiny futures in the other. For me, everything was vapor. I had to take it on faith that my past even existed.

“What about your Korean family?” Doug said. “You must have had relatives, an extended family, siblings maybe.”

“I don't know.”

“Your adoptive parents never told you anything?”

“I don't think they know much more than that, either.”

“Well, now that you're in Korea, don't you want to find out?”

You're afraid to face your feelings of being different
, said the social worker (the self-righteous one, for whom I decided that “MSW” stood for Minority Savior Woman).
And then you lash out at those around you, making quite a mess for everybody.

Sparing Christine and Ken's feelings had never been foremost on my mind. I called them “Ken” and “Christine” (over their howls of protest) to show them I didn't fully consider them to be my “real” parents. But I couldn't fathom taking that next step, to consider being part of a
Korean
family.

And really, I needed to be pragmatic: knowing the past wasn't going to change the present. Some undiscovered nugget wasn't going to suddenly make me wake up white, or in a different house, in a different country. I would still be Sarah Ruth Thorson, American citizen, of 27 Inwood Knoll, U of M dropout.

“You were born here,” Doug said. “In Korea. Your story begins here, not in America.”

“Tell me something I don't know.” Someone else's voice. Sounding snappish, juvenile.

I looked down at my hands. Not the white, slender, cerulean-blue-veined hands I used to see. But ochre-tinted, almost tanned, the yellowish cast making the veins look slightly green, blue-green like the salty sea.

His words had cracked something open. All my stated reasons for being in Korea scudded away, clouds unveiling a full moon of certainty. I had known all this time, hadn't I, the same way I had seen the sign
on a calendar and known somehow that it was the Chinese sign for moon. Bright, spare, unmistakable.