Somebody's Daughter (15 page)

Kyung-sook wondered why the white people would want to kill their god in the first place, as she fought drowsiness to listen to Imo. Finally, a customer banged on the door. While Imo tended to him, Kyung-sook snuggled deeper into the bedcovers hoping for some sleep until the next interruption.

Seoul

1993

“I thought Choi
Sunseng
wanted you to take pronunciation,” Jeannie said when she saw me enter the rec room. I noted how she'd cheekily left off the honorific “nim” in
Sunsengnim
.

“She did. But the class was cancelled—lack of interest.”

A tall and lanky woman walked into the room.

“Hello, class,” she said in a barely accented English. Her name was Tae
Sunsengnim
, our music teacher.

“I'm a graduate student here at Chosun,” she said. “I went to the conservatory at Oberlin College for violin, but then I decided I wanted to study Korean folk music instead.”

She unzipped some nylon bags and took out an hourglass-shaped drum, a tom-tom-shaped drum, a mini-gong the size of a saucepan lid, and a wooden flute.

“This is the
changgo
,” she said, holding up the hourglass-shaped drum. “It's a staple for farmers' music and
p'ansori
.

“This is the
puk
, the barrel drum, two striking surfaces. You can hold it like this, or strap it on.

“This gong is the
kaenguri
. The
kaenguri
player sets the rhythm for the others.”

Last, she held up the flute.

“This is a
taegum
, the Korean transverse flute. Six finger holes, a membrane hole for the vibrato, the seventh hole just for show.”

“Why is that hole there if don't you use it?” someone asked.

“Ceremonial value, for Ch'ilsong, the Seven-Star Goddess,” Tae
Sunsengnim
said, as if she were a bored docent in a museum.

She spent the rest of the time scribbling music on the blackboard and teaching us rhythm patterns that we tapped out,
ta-ta-ta-tta-tta-tta
, with pencils. I knew nothing about notes or bars or measures or rests, while all the other students seemed to be mini Yo-Yo Mas. So intent on following the music, at least, that they seemed not to notice, or care, how lost I was.

Seoul

1993

The communal phone in the hall rang, early in the morning.

The sound of flip-flops making a slap-squish slap-squish sound on the floor.

Jeannie's voice floated down the hall,
yobosayo?
When she spoke Korean, her voice turned soft, lilting, so
feminine
that she suddenly became a courtesan in a long-ago Korean kingdom, not the girl who had screeched expletives at Bernie.

In Korea, everything was changeable in the blink of an eye.

A knock.

“Sarah? It's the Stamp
ajuhshi
downstairs. He said there's an international call for you.”

“For me? International?”

The Stamp
ajuhshi
handed me the receiver of the phone at the watchman's station. It was heavy, like a dumbbell, and smelled of hair oil.

“Hello?”

“Sarah, is that you? The connection sounds so clear!”

Christine.

“Yes, it's me.”

“You know, Daddy and I have been trying to call you forever, but the person who answers the phone doesn't speak any English. We haven't known what to do for weeks!

“So this time, I just kept saying, ‘Sarah Thorson, U.S.A., Sarah Thorson, U.S.A.,' and I guess we got through.”

“Is Ken there, too?”

“No, your father's working late at the office. So are you okay, how is everything?”

“Everything's fine. It's early morning here.”

“Are you liking the program? Learning a lot?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“Are your accommodations okay? Are you finding things to eat? Do you need me to send you any more snacks?”

“Everything's fine,” I said. “In fact, food here is cheaper than in the States—a chunwon can buy you ramen, a whole tin of
mok kehndi
.”

“A what can do what?”

“Oh, a dollar. For a tin of candy.”

“We've been so worried about you, sweetie. We didn't even know if you'd gotten there okay.”

“I meant to call. It's just hard to figure out the system.”

“You could write.”

“I could.”

“Are you okay, sweetie?”

No, I was going to say. I'm not okay.

“My Korean birth parents—” I said, half statement, half question. I thought I heard her suck in her breath. This wasn't the right time to let it slip, I had to hold back. But the questions still came.

“How did they die again, my Korean mother and father?”

“Sarah, are you okay? You're starting to worry me.”

“How did they die again?”

“Honey, you know it was in a car accident.”

“How did you find that out?”

“Oh, I don't know. I think it was in your file.”

“So if it was in the file, did they have the names of my biological parents, or any relatives?”

Pause.

“I don't think so. When a child is given up for adoption in Korea, parents—even dead ones—relinquish all rights. So they don't keep a record of these things.”

“Could I see a copy of the file?”

“Sarah, I just wanted to call to see how you're doing over there, not get the third degree. I'll look for your paperwork—but I'm not sure we still have it.”

“This call must be costing a fortune.”

“It's okay. I love hearing your voice. Are you sure there's nothing else I can send?”

“No, I'm fine.”

“Well, I miss you.”

“Say hi to Ken and Amanda.”

“Daddy misses you, too. And Amanda.”

Silence.

“Sarah, I love you.”

An “awk!” in the background. Hubert the macaw must be on Christine's shoulder. His feathers would be glinting red like a new paint job on a sports car. I pictured his beak, two cashews coming together, gently nipping Christine's ear.

“Sarah? Sweetie?”

The Stamp
ajuhshi
, leaning back into his flimsy chair, staring dreamily at a package plastered with about twenty “love” stamps, jerked his head up at the sound of the receiver crashing down on the battered body of the black phone.

I would later blame the cutoff on a bad connection.

Seoul

1972

Maybe none of that tragedy would have happened if she had never left school. But Kyung-sook couldn't ever know for sure. In life, it was impossible to spin out all the possibilities.

She thought of the case of Pumpkin Grandmother. Her parents had been very poor, so they had sent her as a child to a house in River Circle Village. She went as a minmyunuri, a future daughter-in-law who would grow up in the household as a servant. Pumpkin Grandmother missed her family terribly and the house's owners worked her to the bone and made her sleep in the stable with the animals. But the worst indignity was to come years later: being married to the youngest son, the one with the gaping cleft palate and an even uglier temper. The first night after her hair was put up in a married-woman's knot, he filled up on wine and tore off her clothes—she was only thirteen.

After he blacked out from the cheap rice-alcohol drink, she jerked her clothes back on and fled. She had no bribe for the ferryman, but the man said he would take her across the river for free.

But it turned out the man was also an agent for the Japanese, one who earned a bounty for each young girl he kidnapped. Instead of ferrying her across the river, he took her to the local police station, where she was beaten senseless, thrown into a truck, and shipped to Manchuria where she was raped night and day by the barbaric Japanese soldiers. After the Japanese lost the war, they abandoned the “comfort station,” and she had to make the slow, agonizing journey back to Korea on foot.

“If only I had stayed that night with my husband, as bad as he was,” she sighed to anyone who would listen. “I probably would have had many children to comfort me in my old age.”

Now she was an old woman with a useless arm from being broken so many times. At the bathhouse, one could see poxlike burn scars covering her back. Too ashamed to return to her own village, she had settled in Enduring Pine Village, where, without family to help her, she eked out her living by selling the pumpkins that grew on the roof of her small hovel.

Kyung-sook wondered what other course her own life might have taken had she not left school—would she have become a teacher in the village? But she had been bored by the classes. And her professors were aloof, her classmates snippy girls from Seoul who spent hours in beauty salons getting their hair permed and marcelled, the acrid smell of their wormlike hair sickening her.

Kyung-sook had wanted to talk about music, about her dreams of playing a san-jo in front of hundreds of attentive people. But no, these girls, intent on achieving the newest “beehive” hairstyle and little else, snubbed Kyung-sook, especially once they heard her country accent. One senior girl whose father was an important government official claimed that she could smell manure on Kyung-sook, and she called out “Hey pigshit!” whenever she saw Kyung-sook coming.

What could she do, then, except leave?

Seoul

1993

The flute was coming into my hands.

We had been divided into four groups. Our group: another girl named Jeannie, a guy named Kevin.

Up close I saw the instrument was made of bamboo, its joints swollen and awkward, like an old person's arthritic fingers. Tae
Sunsengnim
had randomly handed the instrument to me, but the Other Jeannie reached past my open hands and grabbed it.

“This isn't like any flute
I've
ever played,” she declared, after blowing out a flat
whoooooo
of a dysenteric owl.

Around us,
whump-whump
s of the drums, brittle
chang-chang-chang
s of the gong: crazed, shrill noises of some kind of orchestra in hell.

Tae
Sunsengnim
whistled with two fingers, piercing through the cacophony.

“We can't all play the instruments at once.” She walked to the group with the hourglass drum.

“We'll try the
changgo
first.”

She finally got to us.

“I'm going to play a
san-jo
, a solo piece in the improvisational style,” she said, in her bored docent voice.

She pursed her lips and blew.

My scalp prickled. It was as if some physical presence had wrenched me off the floor, sending me floating toward this odd music, almost atonal yet unsettlingly beautiful. The notes dug straight for the marrow of my bones.

Tae
Sunsengnim
rolled the flute a degree away from her mouth, put more of her fingers on the holes, and the notes climbed higher, higher.

I thought my heart was going to burst.

The tiny bones in my ear were going to shatter into splinters.

She continued up the unorthodox scale until the notes teetered maddeningly on the edge of disappearing, like the exquisite urge to sneeze.

“Ugh, that sounds like the beginning of a kung fu movie,” the Other Jeannie commented. When Tae
Sunsengnim
handed the flute back to her, she passed it off to Kevin.

“What's this instrument called again?” I asked.

“Taegum,”
Tae
Sunsengnim
said. “Don't just sit there,” she told Kevin, pushing his fingers onto the holes.

He blew, emanating a muffled, diluted whine. He whoofed again, and again. The flute began tipping to and fro as if he were playing on a pitching ship. Tae
Sunsengnim
made a face when he returned the instrument, an elastic cord of spittle stretching out between them.

She wiped the mouthpiece and handed it to me.

“Your turn.”

The bamboo was thick, heavy-looking, but when I put the mouthpiece to my mouth, my arms felt like they were going to fly away with the
taegum
.

“Rest it on your left shoulder.” Tae
Sunsengnim
roughly pushed on my shoulder to form a vise. “Reach around with your arms and cover the holes with your fingers.”

My fingers, nail beds flat as spades, fit perfectly on the holes. Tae
Sunsengnim
nodded approvingly when she saw this.

“So remember, it's not a
ttu-ttu
blow like for a Western flute,” Tae
Sunsengnim
said, then added with disgust, “that's spitting. For the
taegum
you make your breath a breeze that flows through the instrument. You manipulate this breeze with your fingers.”

The breeze of my breath flowed through the instrument—then out of it, making nary a sound.

“Keep going,” she said. “Keep a good, strong flow.”

I blew. And blew and blew and blew. The air continued to flow out tracelessly, the same disconcerting feeling when you first learn to snorkel: you expect to feel the resistance of the water as you exhale, but there is none, so you try again, harder, harder, until you hyperventilate, the air in your lungs scrabbling for traction.

I started to feel dizzy, as if I were breathing nitrous oxide through this wooden tube. No sound. In desperation, I even resorted to
ttu-ttu
spitting. That did nothing, except make the mouthpiece wet and slimy.

Tae
Sunsengnim
grabbed the flute away from me.

“Maybe you'll do better with the gong,” she said.

Seoul

1993

Hallo Miss Sarah
,

I hope you are passing time well. What's shaking? I am sorry I do not have my dictionery with me right now so I will create many mistakes. I hope you will forgive.