A Southern Girl (5 page)

I spotted the Parks, an elderly couple who had attended every open house since I’d been employed at the home. Mr. Park, a stooping, grandfatherly man with an easy smile, wore a dark business suit while his wife dressed in colorful traditional silks. Mr. Park held the post of senior warden of the largest Presbyterian church in Seoul and was among the orphanage’s most generous benefactors. He rarely spoke on these visits, yielding to his quite talkative wife, but he tousled the hair of every child within his reach. I’ve been told the Parks have thirty-one grandchildren.

From the back of the elevator came two couples who drew my immediate interest. A man of medium height, slender build and rigid posture wore a military uniform, the silver bars of a first lieutenant shining on his epaulets. His wife, roughly of equal height in her heels, wore a pale blue wool suit with a vivid scarf and a broach of circled pearls over the breast. The other couple was older, perhaps late thirties or early forties. They held
hands as they walked and murmured to each other. Both couples were Americans.

The visitors began to mingle among the children, who remained standing by their beds. Visitors initiated introductions. The children old enough to attend preschool practiced their responses for a week preceding each open house. They extended their hands, made their best effort at eye contact, then bowed slightly at the waist. Visitors had been instructed to return the handshake and bow as reinforcement to the child’s training but to avoid hugging or other manifestations of intimacy on first contact. These opening moments always produced strain. Five and six-year-olds, particularly those experiencing their first open house, tensed with the approach of strangers and remained so for several minutes, as if their performance was being graded by unseen jurors.

Questions were tricky in this setting. Clearly, the child’s background was latent with potential embarrassment. To combat the shoe-shuffling silence after introductions, the administration instituted a practice called “projections.”

Projections allowed each child to express, by means of a creation, a symbol or an artifact placed at the foot of the navy blue-and-white bedspread, a measure of talent, ability, or interest. The beds displayed an eclectic collection of drawings in pencil, paintings in watercolor, baseball bats, sheet music, basketball sneakers, ballet slippers, library books, dolls, a flute, even a calculator exhibited by one of our six-year-olds who was precocious in math. We discouraged stuffed animals among the older children but permitted them to the toddlers.

After introductions, adults asked about the child’s projections to further break the ice and to avoid questions that might lead to hard answers; life-claiming auto accidents, parents-consuming house fires, or careless abandonments. As a source of questions for visitors and pride for the children, projections eased and enriched open house. But, as I well knew, there was a darker rationale for this practice.

I made it a habit to greet visitors with polite efficiency, resisting my natural urge to be overly outgoing. There was nothing worse in this setting than appearing like a salesperson on commission. I teased the children, reacted when they teased back, and always tried to pan the room for a child who lacked a visitor.

As I approached the older of the two American couples, I signaled the interpreter on duty. After an exchange of names, the woman introduced as Mrs. Jennings related their reason for visiting. I recognized only the words “Korean” and “Pittsburgh.”

My interpreter translated. “They have two adopted children, both from our country. They wish to adopt another. They are visiting from Pittsburgh and wish to select a child while they are here. She is most concerned that the child be compatible with the two at home.”

I nodded, asking the interpreter, “What are the ages and sex of the two at home?” Mrs. Jennings, a plump woman with stiffly coiffed hair and an ample bosom, smiled pleasantly as I got my answer.

“She says they have boys, ages three and seven.”

“And are they looking for a particular child?”

“They would like a girl, age four or five.”

“Very well,” I said. “We have many here. Let’s take a stroll through the ward.”

I steered the group to a cot on which a girl sat fingering her pillow case. A pair of old women had just departed. I approached the girl, reached down for her hand, and grasped it gently in my own.

“This is Eun,” I said. “She has been with us for three years. She was five in November. Eun, this is Mr. and Mrs. Jennings from the United States.”

Eun rose and extended a tentative hand to Mr. Jennings, then to his wife. Mrs. Jennings smiled. “What a pretty girl you are.” The interpreter translated. “And what have we here?” She pointed to the jump-rope at the end of the bed.

The girl darted around the bed and seized the rope. “I’m the best. I can do one hundred without a miss.” She stepped away from the bed and began skipping. The rope hit the tile with a rapid-fire “thwap” and her blue-black hair in a pageboy cut lifted on the sides with each descent. The Jennings looked at each other, then applauded. Eun let the rope slack to the floor. Then, slightly winded, she resumed her seat on the bed.

Mrs. Jennings beamed with what I thought to be excessive broadness—a bad omen for Eun. “That was wonderful.” Then she paused. “What about the piano, dear? Do you have any interest in music? I just love music in the house.”

Eun listened to the interpretation, then looked toward me before shaking her head. “I like to be outside.”

Mrs. Jennings smiled again. “You’re so right. Practicing inside on a beautiful day is just no fun, is it?”

No, it wasn’t, Eun agreed as the Jennings again shook hands and moved on to the next bunk. More cots. More handshakes. More smiles. At the flute player, a girl with a narrow face and close-set, intense eyes, they lingered. For the first time, the Jennings raised the subject of their sons.

“And what would you think of having brothers?” Mrs. Jennings asked. The girl gave an imperceptible shrug and remained expressionless. The Jennings exchanged glances and moved on. At the next row, Mrs. Jennings saw a young girl hovering over the small electronic keyboard at the end of her bed. She studied the child, her head tilted slightly to the side, before turning to me. “What about that one? We missed her.”

I had to be honest. “She has a brother here. He is twelve. We attempt to keep brothers and sisters together. If you were interested in both …”

Mrs. Jennings laid her hand on my forearm. “You’re right. It would be tragic to separate them.”

As the Jennings finished their tour, the American lieutenant signaled me. For some time, he and his wife had been seated in chairs lining the wall that separated the nursery from the dormitory area. He glanced often at his watch. Evidently, he had been waiting for the interpreter, who joined us.

“You’re in charge?” he asked me.

“I am. This is my ward. May I be of service?”

The lieutenant introduced his wife. He was stationed at Eighth Army Headquarters, he explained, and had just received orders to return to the States. His shoes glistened in the glare of the fluorescent lights overhead and two battle ribbons adorned his chest. “The wife and I thought we’d like to adopt one of these little tigers.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Don’t matter. Young and healthy, that’s all we care about.”

His wife added, “Aren’t they just the cutest little things you’ve ever seen?” The interpreter hesitated, unsure the remark was intended to be translated. Before she could decide, the lieutenant spoke.

“Where do you keep the little tykes?”

The interpreter stumbled over “tykes.”

“Behind that wall,” I said. “I am surprised you have not heard them.” I led them into the nursery. They stopped first at a crib with an infant just awakening from a late-morning nap. As the lieutenant and his wife bent over him, the child broke into a grin of infinite grace, and a gurgling coo that has no earthly equivalent escaped his rounded mouth. The couple beamed.

The lieutenant looked at me. “How old is this one?”

“This is Tong Soon. He is five months old and healthy.”

“He’s a pistol.”

The interpreter was familiar with this slang, but I was not. At the explanation, we all laughed.

“He’s just too sweet,” said the wife, her eyes fixed on the crib. She and the lieutenant had evidently talked of the need to remain objective, detached. But as she watched the infant’s hand come to his mouth and his head turn to follow her movement above, I felt sure she pictured that baby in the nursery she would decorate when they got home. Her hand went down to seize her husband’s.

The lieutenant remained businesslike. “Show us the youngest one you’ve got. We’ve read a lot about that bonding business.”

I’m sure my face slacked. “Let me think for a moment.” I panned the remaining cribs, cataloguing their contents, while my mind debated my instincts. “Over there,” I said at last, “is the youngest.” They walked to the crib most distant from the doorway by which we had entered.

“This is Soo Yun. She is perhaps three weeks old. We cannot be certain.”

Soo Yun slept facing away from the four of us collected by her crib. A knitted cap protected her head. The lieutenant and his wife leaned to see her face.

“Can’t tell much,” said the lieutenant.

“She’s sooo tiny,” added his wife, glancing over her shoulder toward Tong Soon’s crib.

“Yes,” I agreed. “So tiny. That is because she has been ill. She will enter the hospital this afternoon for tests.” She came to us ill, but the decision to send her for tests was one I made on the spur of the moment. Her fever had spiked again and I suspected pneumonia.

“Poor thing,” said the wife, contorting her face in a grimace which I read as a studied and habitual response to bad news not affecting her directly.

“That’s too bad,” added the lieutenant.

“Would you care to wait until she awakes?”

The couple made eye contact. “I don’t think that’s necessary,” he said. She nodded her agreement and asked if they could return to Tong Soon.

“Certainly,” I replied. “He is an adorable baby with a sweet disposition.”

That afternoon, when the last visitor had left and the ward returned to normal, I carried Soo Yun to Dr. Lee. He agreed that her symptoms had lingered too long. She would be taken for tests to the Korean Children’s Hospital, a glass and steel tower in the center of the city. As I returned to my ward, I felt the full weight of the stress exerted by every open house.

During my first year at the home, I saw no similarity between my chosen profession and that of my parents, the restaurant. Business wasn’t for me, or so I thought. But as time passed, I came to see that I too had cast my lot in a capitalism of sorts. To be sure, the home made no profit. It was heavily subsidized by the Korean government and the burden of its funding grew annually. But the home, like the restaurant, had a product.

“Life is business,” I heard my father say more than once. Perhaps he was correct. As a girl waiting tables, I remember the expressions of customers who declined the daily specials. There was universality to those expressions, a collective inhale as the eyes narrowed and the forehead wrinkled and the lips pursed from indecision. “No,” they would often say, “I will have …” I remember taking those decisions personally, as though it were not the bibimbop or bulgogi being rejected, but me. Later, I wondered if it mattered that the specials were verbalized. The printed menu lay flat on the table, but specials carried with them part of me; my voice, my enthusiasm, my sincerity. “No,” they would say at last, “I will have … something else.” Someone else.

For a scant instant, I saw that look today on the face of Mrs. Jennings. And worse, infinitely worse, I sensed that internalization of rejection in Eun, flush in the victory of her flawless rope-skipping. I had a ward teeming with daily specials, many so listless, so uninspired, so ordinary that they would never attract a customer. “Life is business.”

The lieutenant and his wife apparently had decided on Tong Soon and filled out forms before leaving. I thought I heard them discussing names, but the interpreter had gone and I could not be sure. In my heart, I sang a song, a lullaby, for Tong Soon. The lieutenant and his wife seemed like good people. Their attraction to him had been immediate and heartfelt. Perhaps a perfect match, as sometimes happened. And who could say what lives, present and future, had been altered in the radiance of that angelic smile and that heavenly coo.

And I wondered if I did right by Soo Yun. I had to be honest, didn’t I? My position demanded it. But by disclosing the medical concern at the outset, I had effectively sealed her in the security of the home. Perhaps that was my intent. Soo Yun was special. The lieutenant and his wife would make good parents to Tong Soon if it all worked out, and he would be fortunate to have them.

But they were not special.

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