Somebody's Daughter (11 page)

“My name is Sarah Thorson,” I choked. “I'm from America. I was adopted from the Little Angels Orphanage. I want to find out about my birth family, especially my mother. This
is
the Little Angels Orphanage, isn't it?”

She responded in loud Korean, irate words that drove away any clinging bits of the language in my head. I couldn't even remember how to say,
Is there anyone who can speak English?
or
Please help me
. I could only wait for her to finish saying what she was going to say. When she did, she hung up.

At lunch, I asked Doug if he could call for me.

“No,” he said to my surprise.

“Why not?”

“I don't want such a huge responsibility. If you want to do it right, get a Korean native speaker. Why not ask Choi
Sunsengnim
?”

I cringed, picturing Choi
Sunsengnim
, fingers rifling through the helpless pages of my history, how she'd exclaim
oh-moh!
if she found something juicy.

“But Doug, I'm sure you'd do fine—you're the best speaker in the class.”

“Sarah, I'm a Korean kindergartner who swears really really well. I don't know the word for ‘adoptee'. I only knew ‘orphanage' because my mother used to threaten to put me in one, when I got on her nerves.”

“You could use the dictionary.”

“A reminder, I can't read—that's why I was kicked out of Level Three. I wouldn't be able to write down what the orphanage people are going to say—I'd miscommunicate things. I'm sorry. I do want to help you.”

“Do you?” Besides that day he taught me the song about the mountain rabbit, Doug would never practice Korean with me even when I risked embarrassment by venturing something in my horrible Korean first: when he showed up to class one morning with a ripped hole in his pants, I looked at his bloodied, exposed knee and said,
“Uh-tuh-kae?”
—how? He told me in English about going up to T'apkol Park at daybreak to catch a glimpse of the elderly men doing calisthenics together, of tripping on some stone steps. In contrast, when I had said, almost unthinkingly, to Bernie when he held the classroom's door open for me:
komapsumnida
, thank you, he—at least—had replied
kurae
, the Korean version of
de nada
.

“You always say you'll help—then you don't,” I accused. “When Jun-Ho leaves, I won't have anyone to practice Korean with.”

“I can't speak Korean to Americans,” he said. “You're ‘American' to me.”

“What?”

“The way you speak Korean, your accent. Korean's always been dangerous for me—when I was growing up, my dad beat me every time he caught me speaking Korean to any Americans.”

I caught my breath.

“He couldn't stand seeing me, his kid, open his mouth and have gook-speak come out. Once, I accidentally greeted one of the staff sergeants in Korean—that's how this happened.” He gestured toward his left eye, the one that looked “sad.” When I focused on it, I saw how it hung slightly lower than the other, a gem jarred from its setting.

Oh moh!
I wanted to say. “I'm sorry, I didn't know,” I said, instead.

He smiled the beginning of a wicked smile. “You've got to work on your accent. You sound like the goddam base chaplain who learned his Korean from Berlitz.”

“You know,” I said. “There actually is a word I can say with a proper Korean accent.”

I knew he wouldn't believe me. My inability to correctly pronounce any Korean word had become legendary in the Motherland Program. The language turned like meat in my mouth, the sharp corners of the letters rounding, proper intonations breaking free of their moorings. What came out of my Americanized, hybridized mouth was both comic and grim, a Babelized language of loss that would cause Choi
Sunsengnim
to sigh in despair, Jeannie to giggle behind her hand, Helmut to say “Ach!” The nun, I hope, prayed for me.

But there was a word,
ddong
—the word for crap, merde, shit—that I could pronounce. I had few opportunities to say
shit
in class, but in the safety of my room, I would sometimes say
“ddong, ddong, ddong”
to the walls, wondering how was it that I could say
ddong
when I couldn't even manage the
dd
sound: in my mouth, the word
ddal
, “daughter,” weakened to
dal
, “moon,” or even further to
tal
, “mask.”

It was only when I said
ddong
that the sound came from someplace else, from a Korean-run sound factory that produced that exact
dd
sound, the resonance of a church bell in the moment right after its tense and waiting surface has been struck. In this way, the word for “shit” stayed itself and didn't become the word for “East.”

“Ddong.”
I said, expecting a laugh.

“You said that perfectly, you know.”

He was deadly serious.

I shrugged.

“You must have memories,” he said.

I shook my head. Where
ddong
had come from, I hadn't the faintest clue. Looking into my past was like looking into dark water. I wondered what Amanda's memories from eighteen months were like. But then it didn't matter: she had flash photos, home movies, eyewitness stories giving light and color and shape to the murk.

“Sometimes, I'm afraid I'm going crazy here,” I told Doug. “I don't know what's real, what's not real, what's memory, what's pure projection. I have these flashes:
mandu
dumplings, I
know
these from somewhere. But if I really sit down and think, I know the dumplings from General Tsao's, this Chinese restaurant in Minneapolis. Same way, that day we were up on mountain, I had this flash—I've been here before—but we don't have mountains in Minnesota and I've never been out West to see the Rockies—isn't that crazy?”

“No, that's not crazy,” Doug said.

My fingers, grown slippery with sweat, couldn't contain my metal chopsticks. They hit the table, then slid to the floor. The
ajuhma
glared when I reached over to the container for a new, possibly clean, set. Doug showed me again the proper way to wrap my fingers around them, his hand covering mine like a paw.

“So what are you going to do about contacting the orphanage?”

I bit my thumbnail.

“Do you think if I studied really hard this week, my Korean could get good enough to do the calling myself?”

His answer: a laugh.

Seoul

1993

“You will pick an afternoon class for your elective,” Choi
Sunsengnim
told us in English, to make sure we—I—understood. “You can choose between traditional music, tae kwon do, ceramics, or remedial pronunciation.

“
Sal-ah-ssi
, I think it would be best for you to participate in the pronunciation class,” Choi
Sunsengnim
said, when the sheet arrived on my desk.

I felt my usual irritation at her meddling, but then I reminded myself: the orphanage was there, presumably with some real, solid information for me. By the time we started the elective classes, everything could be different. Maybe I'd find some of my family, and I'd start living with them. Once I began sleeping in a Korean bed, eating Korean food made by familial hands, everything Korean about me would come back naturally, I was sure. Maybe I'd even leave the Motherland Program, come back as the best speaker in the class.

I put my name under the pronunciation class and smiled agreeably at
Sunsengnim
.

Enduring Pine Village

1963

This flute would take her out of the village.

She didn't know where, or when, but she sensed a larger future waiting for her beyond the craggy mountains, beyond their flowering valley.

Would she be like Yongsu and merely disappear?

More likely she would leave on her own two feet, in the light of day, as her imo had done before her. But unlike Imo, she would return in glory and acclaim after having grasped her singular destiny as a musician.

Kyung-sook's aunt, her imo, had been the first of the Huhr clan to ever leave the village, and she had never returned. She had been driven out because of her love for the whiteman's god, Christo.

Imo was the only Christo-follower in all the generations of a clan that had always worshipped the Lord Buddha, kept up the ancestor-worshipping rites, and—something they tried hard to keep secret—occasionally dipped into the shrouded crevices of shamanism.

In fact, when Kyung-sook's mother was sixteen, she had fainted upon hearing some harvest-time changgo drumming. Suddenly, she had risen up and begun to dance wildly, foaming at the mouth and claiming in a guttural voice that she was the Sauce-Pot God. The local shaman, observing this, had remarked that she could become a shaman priestess, a mu-dang, if she allowed the gods to descend on her. Her parents were horrified. Most people thought of shamans as disreputable types who dwelled on the margins of proper society. Shaman priestesses were known to tear off their clothes or simulate sexual acts during a kut, they shamelessly extorted money from the sick, the desperate. Becoming a mu-dang was out of the question for someone from a respectable family.

From time to time, however, Kyung-sook's mother still experienced fainting spells marked by a strange voice muttering prophecies that people took careful note of—because they almost always came true. Sometimes when this happened, her parents would beat her or plunge her in water to make the voices stop. But when they did, her skin would bloom with an angry rash, as if the spirit were determined to come out somehow.

In an attempt to break this cycle, both Kyung-sook's mother and her sister, Imo, were sent to the missionary school, which had declared war against such earthy paganism and, as an added incentive, provided its students a free daily meal.

Of course, the main mission of Our Holy Father School was to convert children to become Christo followers. Kyung-sook's mother easily ignored the gibberings of the ladies in black-and-white robes that only showed their rubbery faces. They showed her a picture of a whiteman and said in bad Korean, “This is Christo, your Father,” and they slapped her when she laughed and said, “No, my father is the man out in the rice fields.”

Sometimes the somber missionary man would come out and make her partake of acrid red liquid and dry crackers, saying, amazingly, that those foodstuffs were Christo's
blood
and
bones
. At other times, they forced her to stare at pictures of Christo, this time bloodied and hanging from two joined pieces of wood. One particularly ugly image was of his face, blood streaming from some sharp brambles on his head, eyes rolling upward, his mouth in the middle of a ghastly scream.

Kyung-sook's mother remained unmoved as the nuns yelled at her in more bad Korean about this sulfur-smelling place called Hell where everyone who didn't follow Christo burned up in eternal torment. Then they tried to beat the stubbornness from her, but she was used to blows at home and took her punishment without expression.

Once, she was supposed to be praying in front of a man-sized statue of Christo on the cross-pieces. She dutifully murmured the meaningless words, her hands pressed palm-to-palm, elbows out, the same way she prayed at the Buddhist temple.

If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it
, one of the nuns said.

The gilded, pierced body of Christo began to tremble and shake, even as Kyung-sook's mother continued to mumble, “Ow-er Hebben-ree Fad-dah …”

Then, the arms of the figure flew off and crashed to the floor.

The devil! the nun screamed. It could only be Satan who could manage such a thing. Kyung-sook's mother was banished from the school.

But Imo was different.

She loved hearing the stories of Christo, how he healed the sick, how he hated the tax collectors and other bad men yet welcomed the prostitute who came to him with a pure heart. Those bloody portraits of him caused her to weep when she learned how Christo had suffered on the cross—for her and all Christo-followers. During Communion, she would find her heart singing, expanding as the magic wafer melted on her tongue, and she thought of how through this suffering Christo became an essence, a pure light.

The Huhr matriarch, of course, was furious when Imo declared she was renouncing Lord Buddha and her venerated ancestors, even going so far as to declare that other members of the family should do the same. The matriarch had wanted to stop the shaman cycle, not have Christo-follower children. She immediately hired the local shaman to perform an exorcism. The mu-dang danced to exhaustion, shaking rattles and hitting gongs in front of Imo's face—to no avail. The mother then called in the more powerful River Circle shaman, one who, upon entering the house, immediately detected the presence of Christo, and without any preparation at all, fell into a trance and began beating Imo with her fists, shrieking at the spirit of Christo to come out. She sacrificed a pig's head, she danced in bare feet over sharp scimitars. But each time she tossed the divining fish, waiting for its head to point out the door, signaling that the spirit of Christo had left the house, it did not. It always pointed back at Imo.

When Imo left Enduring Pine Village, her own mother did not say goodbye to her. Imo traveled to Seoul with few possessions other than the Bible the nuns had given to her, the one that had her Christian name, Mary Rose, inscribed on it in gold powder, as she had been their biggest success.

Destiny, woo-myung, turns and turns on a cosmic wheel.

“We are prepared to send you to college,” Kyung-sook's parents told her. “Because our family has no sons. If you pass the entrance exam, you may go. Your imo in Seoul, though long estranged from the family, has agreed to lodge you.”