Somebody's Daughter (17 page)

Kyung-sook ran and ran, veering up a different alley, then another, until she had run up the summit of a hill. There, she stopped, panting. Was anyone pursuing her?

She was in front of a decrepit dumpling shop in an alley that smelled of old grease and bean curds. In the hills a short distance beyond lay a shantytown. Amidst the mud shacks were a few opulent creations made of cardboard and flattened soda cans that glittered in the light, the cans no doubt scavenged somehow from the Yankee army base.

NOODLES + DUMPLINGS said the crudely handpainted sign propped outside the door of the shop.

A toadlike woman emerged and dumped some gray water into the dirt. Kyung-sook glanced over her shoulder, quietly asked the woman if, perhaps, they needed a serving girl.

The toadlike woman's answer surprised her.

“C'mon in—our regular girl ran off with some fuckin' bastard hoodlum this very morning.” The woman identified herself as both the cook and the owner of the establishment. In her accent, a North Korean dialect was still perceptible.

Kyung-sook followed the woman into the restaurant, throwing one last, worried glance over her shoulder. She certainly hoped the coffee-shop owner had given up on her pursuit.

“Hm, but you sure you can do this work?” The cook-owner stopped to scrutinize Kyung-sook, reached out a water-wrinkled finger and poked her, as if testing a fish for freshness. “You look a little frail, your hands look like the hands of a schoolgirl.”

“I am a girl from the country,” she reassured her, exaggerating her country accent a little. “I have spent many seasons planting rice.” Her hands had stayed soft and white because for the last year she had mostly studied while her mother's hands were exposed to the sun and wind and water.

“I admit, I went to high school,” she told the cook-owner. “But I am also a hard worker.”

“All right, Professor. We'll soon enough see what strength you've got in those limbs.”

She motioned for Kyung-sook to follow her into the back room where she returned to a basin of uncooked rice on the floor. She squatted next to the bowl, a rosary of farts trailing out from between her thick thighs. Kyung-sook immediately bent down and helped her clean the rice, picking out pebbles, bits of straw, small black rice bugs, a few mouse droppings. The cook-owner poured a pitcher of water into the rice, swirling it around with her hand. The water became cloudy as the powdery talc rose to the top, her hand disappeared into the grains of rice the way Kyung-sook's feet used to disappear into the mud of the rice field.

When the water finally ran clear, the cook-owner rose and dumped the whole load of wet rice into the iron cooker.

Then she handed Kyung-sook a tray filled with heavy stone bowls. “Get ready to sling some fuckin' dumpling soup!” she yelled, her hot breath filling the air like boiling soy sauce.

By the end of the day, Kyung-sook couldn't even lift her hand to scratch her nose, her arms hung like weights. As the cook-owner banged the restaurant's sliding doors shut, Kyung-sook approached her and shyly asked her if she might have a place to stay, perhaps in the back of the restaurant.

“Yah! This is a restaurant, not a damned hotel,” the cook-owner grumbled.

“I don't have anywhere to go,” Kyung-sook's voice was barely a whisper.

The cook-owner sucked air.

“Great, I get rid of one headache and I promptly get another, curse you fuckin' gods and ancestors!”

“I'll have to sleep out on the street if you don't let me stay here in the restaurant.”

“The police will arrest you if they find you on the street after curfew, especially these days—don't you know anything?” the cook-owner said irritably. She glanced at Kyung-sook's fingers, bruised from banging on the serving trays.

“Please,” Kyung-sook said. “I beg you … Teacher's Wife.”

From the look on the cook-owner's face, Kyung-sook knew that no one had ever addressed her by such a respectful title before.

“Well, lessee. On the other hand, I suppose if you slept in the storage space, you might drive the mice out.”

In the closet in the very back of the restaurant, there was barely enough room to unroll a sleeping mat amid the bags of rice and flour and rock salt, but this was exactly the kind of thing Kyung-sook was hoping to find. It was quiet, and she could play her flute as much as she wanted. During the day she could palm a few dumplings or fingerfuls of rice when the cook-owner wasn't looking, perhaps take a few spoonfuls of anchovy broth off the tops of customers' soups, and thus save up for her career.

That night as she lay down in her new space, Kyung-sook found a needle of regret working its way into her heart. She was troubled by thoughts of her imo: she had spent weeks eating her imo's paltry food, sharing her threadbare bedding, and she had left her without a word of thanks, only a note saying she had returned to the village.

Perhaps if she had gotten to know her imo better, she could have explained to her about her plans and dreams, her hopes of becoming a famous musician. Maybe Imo, who had herself gone away from the village in order to pursue her destiny, would understand. Kyung-sook fingered her flute. She loved the way the wood warmed under her hand, until the instrument was like a living thing unto itself. She consoled herself with the thought she would indeed see her imo again someday. But right now, she had her year laid out before her, like empty bowls waiting to be filled.

Seoul

1993

Doug said, “It's going to be a bit tricky, getting in there.”

“In where?”

“Libertytown.”

I looked to his face to see if an invitation was there. His eyes had that curious, blank look like those abandoned houses with boarded-up windows.

“My friend at Yongsan said he could help.”

“Clever idea, going to him. Someone already in the army.” I kept my voice noncommittal.

“He gave me this—and some other stuff.” Doug showed me a military ID. His friend had blond hair. And glasses.

“At least your friend isn't black.”

“It'll be dark when we go, also.”

“We?”

“Don't you want to come?”

“Of course!” I found myself grinning, like I'd passed some kind of test.

“The best cover for you would be pretending to be my prostitute girlfriend.”

“You're not serious,” I said.

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

“You don't have to go.” The boarded-up look again.

I just needed to ignore the irony, I decided, treat this more like Halloween. Doug was right, of course: a Korean girl from a suburb of Minneapolis was going to be a lot harder to explain than a Korean ho from a nearby village. From my wardrobe I fetched a skirt whose waistband I could hike up, plus a CALVIN KLEEN tank top, purchased from a street vendor.

“After lunch,” Doug said. “We'll go to the bus station together.”

The bus seats were capped with white covers, like dentist's chairs. People continued to clamber on and on. The combined exhalations of the passengers swirled a reek of digested kimchi into the air. A stumpy
ajuhma
boarded the bus carrying a bunch of dried squid impaled on a wooden pole. The squid were football-sized, squashed flat enough to fold and mail. A dozen hands extended chunwons, and soon there was a stuffy, fishy smell added to everything else, even as the loop of a recording told us in a breathy woman's voice (as Doug translated):

For the comfort of your fellow passengers, please do not bring strong-smelling food on the bus.

The bus lumbered into the street like a large animal waking. I pressed my face against the window. The Seoul bus station, not unlike the bus station in Minneapolis, was situated in a not-so-nice neighborhood. My eyes took in the buckling tin-roofed shops, people squatting in the shade of the few urban trees, slices of zucchini drying on rooftops, thousand-year-old men with wispy snow-capped beards spitting into the gutter.

This was the real Korea, devoid of white people, or even Korean Americans like Bernie Lee. She could very well be out here, I thought, in front of my face.

After unsnarling ourselves from Seoul traffic, almost like a dream, we were on the highway, open spaces rolling out before us. A few tiny shacks dotted the landscape, as if planted there by the hands of giants, but it was mostly rice fields. The fortresslike mountains around Seoul gave way to gentle hills, rock peaks softening to the shape of a woman lying on her side.

I turned from the window to say something to Doug, but he was asleep, oblivious to the roar of the bus's engine, the gay chatter in the seats around us. He seemed to be lost in that magical deep-sleep of childhood.

I rooted in the 7-Eleven bag, pulled out a crunky chocolate bar, a cartoon of a smiling, big-lipped African with a bone through his nose on the wrapper. I wished I could nap, too, but I've never been able to. I'm not a good sleeper at night, either.

Back when I shared a room with Amanda, I always marveled at her ability to drop off to sleep the minute her head hit the pillow.

On TV commercials for Nytol, the wild-eyed insomniac was always a man or a lady, never a child. Children always slept peacefully, effortlessly. Some nights I managed to push myself down into a shallow dozing, barely skimming the tops of my dreams. But what I yearned for was to tumble into a thicket of logy black sleep, the kind where Amanda would sigh and giggle and snore and fart with abandon.

So while Amanda snuggled safe and secure at the foot of the Thorson family tree, I stared into the blackness for hours until I swear I could see atom particles bouncing to and fro.

Why am I I?
I wondered, over and over, a fist of unease knuckling my stomach.

Until the morning light, when it was time to get up, wash, don the Fabulous Sarah Thorson face. At least during the day I had a role to play, and I knew the lines. At night, it was all chaos. Especially after I turned thirteen and started having The Dream, the one with her in it. After that, I wanted to sleep, and sleep deep, more than ever. This desperation, of course, kept me awake, a water-stiffened rope that kept me firmly moored on this side of consciousness.

We were approaching a town. Motorcyclists clad in plastic slippers passed us on the shoulder, stacks of toilet paper rolls on the back of their bikes towering over them like cresting waves. Power Bongo pickups, the size of riding lawn mowers, transported even more magnificent loads of cabbages, TVs, bed frames, and cardboard boxes held to the back by faith and straining black bungee cords.

I was wondering if I was going to have to wake Doug, but his eyes snapped open when the driver called our stop. He leaned over me and gazed out the window at the same scenes, in the dying light. If we stayed on the bus, we could go all the way up to the mountain seacoast resort of Sorak-san, which, by some whim of geography, was situated slightly north of the thirty-eighth parallel and therefore technically in North Korea. I guess that most of the Diamond Mountains, a chain of peaks that were sacred to Koreans, were in North Korea, but this tail end had somehow been left in the South, and the South Koreans had developed it as a national park. Jeannie had been there and described it as incredibly touristy—souvenir and ice-cream vendors no matter how high up the mountain you climbed—but also vaguely ominous, with heavily armed soldiers patrolling the fenced-off beaches, the tall machine-gun-equipped towers from which grim soldiers watched the expanse of sea for telltale traces of an encroaching North Korean submarine.

As we made our way up the aisle, there was an anonymous mutter of contempt that seemed to be aimed at Doug, his green uniform, his father's face. But he didn't respond.

In the bus station's bathroom, I exchanged my sneakers for heels, rolled the waistband of my skirt until I felt it swishing my thighs. Then I troweled on some makeup, although in the dim one-bulb light, I wasn't sure how accurate my painting was.

Doug donned some horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like Clark Kent. He pulled the cap tight over his hair.

“Nice,” he said, looking at me, his eyes lingering a moment longer than usual. He stashed our civilian stuff behind a bench.

A lone taxi idled outside the bus station. The driver, back slumped against the door as if the car were a giant Barcalounger, fuzzily paged through a newspaper as high-pitched Korean folk music squeed through his radio. Doug leaned in the window, told him in English we were going to Libertytown.

The man turned to look at us. His gaze stopped on my bare, knobby knees. He spat, then gave us the universal “hop in” sign, a backward nod of the head.

Five minutes later he dropped us off in front of a compound, stone fence topped with razor wire. He opened his palm for a twenty-dollar fare, shrugged about his broken meter. The arch on the gate read WELCOME TO LIBERTYTOWN.

“Riberteeton,” the driver cackled. He cracked open the door, as if to accompany us, but then I heard a faint trickling sound and realized he was peeing.