Somebody's Daughter (13 page)

Jun-Ho grinningly nodded. “No one can hide from you up here, Sarah.”

I pressed my face as close to the glass as I could manage. Now, I could see the mountains ringing the city again. When I'd first flown into Korea, I'd looked out the plane's window and seen those gray peaks; there had been the last little bit of snow remaining on their summits, as if the mountains had been inverted by the huge hand of God, their peaks dipped in sugar, then righted again. That sight had struck me, suddenly, as so familiar, so
home
for some reason, that this feeling had burbled over into tears. I sobbed—invisibly, I thought—behind a paperback book tented over my face. But the man next to me, a stoic Korean businessman who hadn't said a word to me during the twenty-hour flight, poked a package of tissues over the top of my book.

Beyond the mountains were more mountains. I came out of this place, somewhere. Where was my Korean family during that small, fleeting time? Were they north of the Han River? South? Rich? Poor? What was the name they had given me, and who named me? My mother? Had she been thinking of me those last seconds before the toothed glass and groaning metal devoured her tender flesh, leaving glass diamonds and glistening rubies of blood spangling the asphalt? Where had they been going, why had I not been with them?

Jun-Ho must have wandered away, for he was back, holding in his hand a small figurine that looked like a pair of warped, demented totem poles. At the top, each pole had a grinning monster head.

“Please receive,” he said, proferring it respectfully with both hands. “A gift.”

“What is it?”

“This is a replicate of the gateposts Koreans used to erect outside their villages to honor the Five Generals Who Hold Up the Sky. See here—” He pointed to some Chinese inscriptions carved in the bottom. “It says, ‘General Scare Away Demons.'”

“So will it scare away my demons?”

“It might,” he said. “You try.”

Jun-Ho escorted me around the floor. A few times, we bumped accidentally. We'd never been this close physically, I was realizing—we'd always been separated by an expanse of glass-topped table. I was a good four inches taller than he was.

He stopped at an ice cream stand and bought us watery soft-serve cones. He devoured his in three sucking bites, as if he were eating a juicy peach.

“Jun-Ho,” I laughed. “It's ice cream. You're supposed to lick it.”

“That is American style?” he asked, curling his lip. “This, too, is American style to eat chicken.” He pantomimed licking his outstretched fingers.

“Okay, true,” I said. “We call it ‘finger lickin' good.'”

“Not so good—very dirty,” he said. “Koreans don't eat things you touch by your hands. Even fruit, we use toothy-picks.”

I had to smile at him. His uniform was open at the neck, revealing a small triangle of gray undershirt and the tiniest bit of smooth chest, a child's skin. There was something vulnerable about that place, and I suddenly wanted to kiss it or touch it with my fingers as if it were a baby animal. But I looked down to see his black army boots galumphing on the floor, that idiotic purse dangling from his wrist, and then I wanted to laugh. How had it come to this, that I had become friends with this man from another country, who spoke a language I didn't know, and chewed soft-serve ice cream, ate fruit from toothy-picks?

We called the elevator, and the lady pressed the button for us, again—how could she stand such a job? She kept her eyes lowered, never once looking at us, her makeup so thick it looked like a mask. Perhaps she wasn't real; maybe she was a Stepford Korean. I felt no motion as we descended, heard no sounds, so when the door opened in the lobby, it was as if we'd been beamed in from another planet. The lady bowed mechanically and thanked us as we left.

“Thank you,” I said to Jun-Ho, when he dropped me off at the Residence. Bernie, Helmut, and some of their friends were playing basketball at the dilapidated hoop out front. Even though it had grown quite cool, they'd taken off their shirts—possibly for the benefit of the girls hanging around the fringes of the court. Their skin glistened white as bones in the fading light.

“Americans.” Jun-Ho chuckled, as if the scene confirmed some long-held theory of his. “I hope you passed your time enjoyably, Sarah.”

“I did, thank you,” I said. I had one foot on the concrete of the parking lot, the rest of me still in the car. Between the two bucket seats, a paperback textbook was wedged:
Common American English Slang, Idioms, and Vernacular
.

“And you'll be there next week—we'll go to the orphanage together?”

He nodded, but his face turned sad. I didn't want him to leave; I wanted us to embrace, to touch. But the insistent thunking of the basketball and the assorted cries of “Shit, man!” and “What the f-u-u-u-uck!” kept me from doing anything.

“Thank you, Jun-Ho,” I said again, trying to put all my emotions and feeling into it. Maybe if I knew Korean I could say something that would show my gratitude for all the things he'd done for me. “Thank you” was inadequate, something you said to the elevator lady. But once again, I lacked the words.

Jun-Ho grinned and saluted smartly with his tiny hand, but the sadness remained, a glum residue. I watched as the green car (called a pony galloper in English), belching unhealthy black clouds, chugged back toward the road that would take him, now, to wherever he was going.

“Hey, good going, adoptee-girl,” Bernie said, punctuating his words with the
thunk-thunk
of the pockmarked basketball. “That horny soldier show you a good time? You know it's customary for guys to go to prostitutes right before they get inducted.”

“Shut. The. Fuck. Up.” An unbidden rage curled my hands into claws.

“Bitch,” he said, mortally offended. “You know, your mother must have been a whore or something—those are the kids that get put up for adoption. Normal kids are taken care of by the family.”

I lunged at him, grabbing the ball out of his hands and smashing it across the bridge of his nose, his orbital bones flattening and fracturing under the blow. The girls in the background screamed, Helmut and the other players gaped, but didn't move. But then Bernie rose, blood on his face, and marched to the phone and called the director of the program, describing my transgression. I would be made to go home within the week, days short of my goal. As I saw all this in my head, I turned, leaving him untouched, and flew up the building's steps, up to my room.

Seoul

1993

The next week, Jun-Ho was there, waiting, at the Balzac.

“Ready?” I asked, starting to shake slightly in anticipation, like a frisky horse.

“We should partake of something before we go,” he said. Mildly irritated, I sat down. How could he be thirsty on this, the day of days?

The coffees arrived, in their usual bonglike glasses. He regarded his but didn't drink.

“Sarah,” he said. “I don't know if this is, you know, an auspicious idea.”

“What?”

“Trying to find out about your parents.”

“What are you talking about?” My voice rose several octaves. “You said the orphanage has things in my file.”

“Yes, some officious data. But not so much to help you find out about your family. I am sorry.”

I jumped up. The sugar canister keeled over, the brittle sound of glass on glass. People at the next table openly stared. Jun-Ho, to my surprise, didn't look angry or embarrassed. He just had that sad, vaguely wistful look he had had last time I saw him.

“So this whole thing's been useless?”

He looked down at his hands. He informed me that he'd made the appointment for two weeks hence in the hopes that maybe I would give up, lose interest. To soften the blow.

“Perhaps that is the more advantageous way—for you, for your Korean family,” he said. “Let the past become nostalgic.”

“That's not for you to decide,” I said. “How can you say you'll help me and then turn around and stop? You promised you'd help me.”

Jun-Ho's hands, lying between his knees, flexed open and shut as if he were warming up to play some scales on the piano. He sighed.

“Okay,” he said. “We'll go.
Kapsida
.”

It took two subways and a bus to get to the Little Angels Home. The brick building was nondescript—there wasn't even a sign marking it. Inside, it was hot, the cries of babies and the smell of unwashed baby bottoms filling the stagnant air. I longed to smell some kind of strong-smelling disinfectant. Menthol. Pine. Anything.

A lady in a severely tailored Western suit, a Miss Park, greeted us. She seemed too old to be a “miss.” She had a half-grown-out perm, straight on top, then crimped at random angles like a tangle of insect legs.

She sat us down in her cluttered office that abutted the nursery. An assistant, her own perm crispy-new and uniformly curly as ramen noodles, offered us Dixie cups of sugary coffee. Why was everyone trying to delay me with coffee? The chemical smell of it, mixed with the smell of urine and old formula, turned my stomach.

But a few minutes later Miss Park returned with a folder, and my heart jumped. In there, my life was in there. She handed it wordlessly to Jun-Ho. I expected him to tear it open. He just looked at me.

“Please,” I said. “Please read what it says.”

Two yellowing pages. He glanced at them, looked up again.

“Sarah,” he said. “It doesn't say much. Just about your eating habits and so forth.”

I gripped his arm, as if I needed to feel the veins, sinew, tendons to know he was real, to know we really were in this place from which I'd come.

“Read it to me,” I said. “Don't skip a word.”

He bowed his head, cleared his throat with a mucusy
haAAAARGH
.

“‘The baby did not eat for the first three days after she was brought to the orphanage,'” he read. “‘But after that, she ate some. She had very regular bowel movements. Dr. Bai determined her to be free of diseases. She cries a lot and does not sleep much some times but otherwise seems to be a happy baby.'

“‘She was assigned to foster mother Kang Koom-Soon shortly after.'”

Miss Park, absently flipping through papers, looked up and said something to Jun-Ho. He nodded.

“He says Kang Koom-Soon is dead, he was an old lady.”

I smiled. Jun-Ho was always mixing up the gender pronouns, a small but significant thing that still eluded him.

“Okay, then it says ‘child was adopted at eighteen months by Christine and Kenneth Dor-son of Minnesota, the United States of America.'”

He took out the second page.

“Here is a copy of your passport,” he said, handing it to me. “You were a nice-looking baby. Cute.”

I grasped the page. It was a bad Xerox, all shadows. The child in the picture had a tragic expression, like she was posing for a WANTED poster. That was me?

Lee, Soon-Min
, it said in English letters under the Korean.
The Republic of Korea.

“My Korean name is Lee Soon-Min,” I said in wonder.

“Unh,”
he said, taking the page. He put it back in the folder and closed it.

“Is that all there is?” I said.

He nodded.

“Are you sure? It seemed like there was a lot of writing on that first page—at least four paragraphs.” I looked him in the eye. He flinched, ever so slightly. I stared at him until he opened the folder again.

“‘A name of Lee Soon-Min was bequeathed,'” he added. “They made a passport for you, and you got your special-entry status to America.”

“Wait.” The air was suddenly electric. “They gave me a name?”

“They gave it to you for your passport.” Jun-Ho was sweating. “That is the system of doing so.”

“What do you mean?”

Miss Park stared at me.

“Also, why did I go home with a foster mother—didn't my parents have any relatives?”

I tore the page out of his hands, but again, it was a maze of symbols that I couldn't wring the meanings from.

“Jun-Ho,” I said, voice now dwindling to a whisper. “Truth, please.”

“You were named Lee Soon-Min and sent to America,” he said. “What of it is giving you confusion?”

“I was
named
Lee Soon-Min? I didn't have a name before that, is that what you're saying?”

“The orphanage did not know if you had a name.”

“But why not? It doesn't make sense.”

Jun-Ho paused. I could tell he was itching to light up a cigarette, but he could hardly do it in this place of babies. He twitched instead, waggled the booted foot perched on his knee.

“I won't leave until you tell me.”

To make my point, I folded my arms like Sitting Bull.

Jun-Ho looked back at me, then back down at his boots. He looked, only, sad.

“There is another paragraph here. But if I read, it will cause you much hurt.”

“Hurt?”

“Injury,” he clarified. “The heart inside the chest will become sore.”

The folder was open, like butterfly wings. I couldn't believe that I could just reach out and touch the mysterious framework of my Korean life.

“It's okay, whatever's in there,” I said. “I just need to know. How would you feel if you didn't
know
? I'm Korean but I can't speak Korean. I was supposed to grow up in Korea, like you. I need to know why I didn't.”

Jun-Ho took a deep breath. The folder trembled slightly in his hand, as if a breeze were passing through the silent air of the office.

“‘The baby has no known family,'” he read. “‘She was brought to the orphanage on September 3 as a girl infant who had been left on the steps of the Hoei-Dong Fire Station. There was not any kind of note left with her and she was officially declared abandoned and fit for adoption.'”