Somebody's Daughter (19 page)

Kyung-sook took a step, but then her feet wouldn't budge.

The cook-owner eyed Kyung-sook for a second, then came over and slapped her on the rump, as if she were a recalcitrant horse or ox.

“You're the only one here who went to high school, Professor. You expect anyone else here can understand foreigner-speak?”

The cook-owner shoved her, propelling her like those little eggshell boats they used to sail on the river on Lord Buddha's birthday.

The man didn't seem to know any Korean; he barked a command in English and pointed to the water-dumplings that Old Bachelor Choi was masticating with his ill-fitting dentures that occasionally slipped out of his mouth.

The cook-owner noted this, and perhaps to celebrate the arrival of the first Westerner to her diner, added an extra three “king” dumplings onto the plate of water-dumplings. Old Bachelor Choi yelled for more of their free mussel soup. Kyung-sook fetched it for him. Then she served the foreigner.

Looking at his sumptuous plate, the foreigner barked again and shook his head.

Everyone was puzzled. Even Old Bachelor Choi, delicately fishing around in his soup with two fingers, stopped to consider the scene, his mouth puckery as a mended sock.

“What's he waiting for?” grumbled the cook-owner. “Is he one of those Christo-followers? I heard they have to say all this mumbo jumbo around their food to cleanse it before they eat.”

The foreigner stared at Kyung-sook.

“Not mine, not mine.” His barking had turned to yapping, and she still didn't understand him—his English didn't sound anything like the English she had learned in school. He was pointing at the three fat dumplings. “I didn't order these. No order. No pay.”

When Kyung-sook looked at the king dumplings he was pointing to, they seemed to rise before her eyes. They levitated a few centimeters, switched places as if in fun, then settled back onto the plate. English words then rose to the surface of her brain like bubbles in a pond.

“Eat,” she said. “Please. For you.”

“What are these?” the man said, pointing to the dumplings suspiciously.

“Whang man-du,” she replied. “King. Eat. Especial for you.”

“Oh, ho,” the man said, beginning to smile. He ignored the chopsticks and instead picked up his soupspoon and balanced one of the dumplings on it like a weight. “So I'm a king—” He took an enormous, sucking bite of the dumpling. “Okay.”

“O-kay,” she mimicked back teasingly. She wondered if he could see in her face how repulsive she found him.

Everyone in the restaurant was still looking at the foreigner. Even Old Bachelor Choi, who had finally caught his teeth and was busily returning them to his mouth. He smiled, chimplike, as broth dribbled from the corners of his mouth.

The cook-owner removed the cover from a pot of boiling water, releasing a ghostly cloud of steam. She looked like she was laughing about something.

“Oh my fucking gods and ancestors,” she said.

Seoul

1993

We were being carpet-bombed. By cherry blossoms, whenever we went outside.

How great it was to be back amidst the cherry trees of the Chosun U. campus. I gave Bernie Lee such a wide smile that he narrowed his eyes and said, “You're freaking me out, Twinkie.”

“Maybe I'm just happy to see you. I didn't see you all weekend.”

His eyes narrowed further, to threadlike slits. “Uh huh. You go somewhere or something?”

“Maybe.” I almost looked over at Doug, but I didn't dare. Instead, I just smiled again. How great it was that it was spring. How great, everything.

Outside, everything smelled pink. Pairs of college boys armed with cameras roamed the campus, cajoling girls to stand for photos under the clumps of blooms, the photographee often slipping a hand on a feminine shoulder or tender upper arm while the girl was immobilized under the camera's eye.

The next day, the cherry trees were just normal trees with leaves, not a single petal left. Then the weather turned hot, and azaleas and forsythia, blazing yellows and fuchsias, exploded from bushes, as if unleashed by the heat. The sun became a physical presence, a punishing hand. People walked as if beaten, heads bowed on wilting stems of necks. At the Rainbow, diners paradoxically ordered spicy soups bubbling in their own black cauldrons. They would slurp and sigh until they took a shower in their own sweat. I preferred
neng myun
, a mound of cold buckwheat noodles in iced broth, topped with a slice of fatty beef and a hard-boiled egg balanced on top like a maraschino cherry. When the
ajuhma
carried it, it looked like strange, precarious island rising out of a sea of cloudy broth.

“I heard
chang-ma
's going to be bad this year,” said Bernie in class.

Not
chang-ma
again. The little animals that fall from the sky and pulled out your hair.

“What
is
that?” I asked Doug.
“Chang-ma.”

Bernie grinned at me, as if he had a delicious prank with my name on it waiting. “The monsoon season. It rains every day, buckets and buckets of rain, but it doesn't cool things down. It just makes it really humid. You'll feel like you're wearing a suit of moisture, bathed in sweat. Your laundry will always be damp. You'll grow mold.”

Doug nodded. “I remember one summer the rains were so bad that people living near river banks got washed away or killed in mudslides. The Han River rose so much it took out the bridge to Seoul.”

“It's coming later this year,” Bernie said. “That's a sign it's going to be bad.” His tone was now merely informative. Friendly, even.

After class, it began to rain a cold, spattery rain.

“Is this
chang-ma
?” I asked Doug.

“No,” he said. “Don't worry, you'll know it when it happens.”

After lunch, we made our way down the alley toward a
yuhgwon
, one of those tiny boarding houses marked with an electric sign that looked like a cup of tea with waves of red steam rising off it. That meant it had hot water.
Yuhgwons
, a.k.a. “love hotels,” were plentiful in our neighborhood, for horny students as well as itinerant travelers, of which Doug and I were both.

The stout
yuhgwon ajuhma
with warts dotting her fingers didn't give us another look as she took Doug's money and placed a key on the low table in front of her. The key opened up a vaultlike room that had a clean yellow floor, a single window, and little else except for some bedding stacked in a corner and a calendar on the wall that had a generic Korean country scene on it. I'm sure in Korean it said something like, COMPLIMENTS OF EDWARD DIEHL, YOUR STATE FARM AGENT, LIKE A GOOD NEIGHBOR.

It had come to this: Doug was going to be the one to receive my slightly outmoded virginity.

Two nights ago, pursued by whiskey-slurred voices and heavy footsteps, life's thread grew unbearably thin and taut. We had hidden among the trees by the side of the road, struggling to muffle our ragged breaths as shafts of light from flashlights poked all around us.

“I thought that motherfucker was weird, right off, he was in his cami's—who wears their uniform out for a night on the town?”

“Some do, you know. Maybe he just got off war games.”

“Well, the girl, she was a gook chick, but there was something funny about her, too—I told you she didn't have her badge. And they ran out like bats out of hell when I called you guys. This ain't no pink goddam elephants we're talking about.”

“Well, I don't see anything out here now, soldier. Go home and sleep it off, would you?”

When the realization came that yes, we came, we saw, we outsmarted the U.S. Army, exhilaration welled up inside me, so crystalline and powerful that I wanted to shout. When I looked at Doug, I could see his eyes shining in the dark.

We walked all the way back to the bus station, where we waited for the next bus, which delivered us back to the Residence just as dawn was breaking, just as the dorm's night watchman, twig broom in hand, was opening the doors to a new day.

“I want to sleep with you,” I had whispered into Doug's ear on the bus ride back. He had appeared to be sleeping, but obviously, he had heard.

“By the way, I'm a virgin.”

“I didn't know.”

“Guess you had me pegged differently, huh?”

“I didn't really think about it at all.”

I wasn't the Virgin Mary, I told him. If I had to describe myself using associative words, as I had in those endless psychological tests of my childhood, virginal, chaste, untouched, were not words that would appear on the list.

I was a virgin, I explained, because I was. No action verbs involved. In high school, when life begins to revolve around that pulsating star of sex, that's when I discovered that I hated absolutely everybody. So I did things like dye my hair unnatural colors, hang around with the most despised geeks and druggies, and I didn't find myself in those situations—prom, overnight ski trips—where sex usually occurs. True, once I was invited to a party being held at an Eden's Prairie three-car-garage-and-indoor-pool home while the parents were away. I'm not sure why my presence had been requested. The jocks and jockettes who called me “chink” or “jap” by day ignored me at night, which was worse.

I stood clutching a beer in a flimsy plastic cup while everyone else around me danced, necked, smoked pot, or guzzled beer from plastic funnel “beer bongs.” I was relieved when Spleef Murphy, the redheaded boy who'd later end up as my AP chemistry partner, pointed to a dark bedroom and raised his eyebrows. Though he would always screw up the molarity of our reagenting solutions, that night, the touch of his hand as he groped my breasts, the enthusiastic way he sucked at my crotch as if he were gulping down draughts of punch, the lucid gaze of his pea-green eyes—all this comforted me. I was being felt and seen and tasted in a cavernous bedroom among posters of a blond vixen bent in a racing crouch, naked except for her Nordica ski boots, an ancient poster of Farrah sitting on a Mexican blanket, her famous toothy smile-scream, her nipple winking at us through her swimsuit's flimsy fabric.

I was aware of Doug patting my back, the way one might do when trying to burp a baby.

“I don't think of it as losing,” I said, looking into his eyes. “It's gaining. With you, it would be.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a foil package, flat yet with bones in it, like a kite.

On TV and in the movies, post-sex rituals differ, but they seem to always include cigarettes. Doug, perhaps to not disappoint, also lit one up and leaned back languidly onto the
yuhgwon
's lozenge-shaped pillows.

I found a strange reassurance in the small spots of blood spattering my thigh. I had crossed the line. And with Doug. No emotional aftermath, my secrets tucked safe inside his boarded-up house. The smell of the smoke was an incense, like being together in the tender anonymity of a hazy opium den. Doug put his free hand on my hipbone, his fingers spread wide, as if claiming territory. My tongue loosened. I found myself telling him about my trip to the orphanage. An even more intimate detail than contained in all the folds and crevices in my body that he had explored.

“Shit,” he said, softly. “I had no idea.” He removed his cigarette from his mouth, began spinning it around the bridge of his thumb, something bored Korean students did with their pens.

“Can you believe the people who call themselves my parents have lied to me, basically my entire life?”

“Well, to play devil's advocate, it's possible the car-accident story originated with the orphanage. Koreans like to fudge, make nice. People with terminal cancer are told they have an ulcer. The doctors don't want to
upset
them.”

I had always asked about my biological parents as soon as I was old enough to understand. And they had that story pat and waiting. Often, Christine would change the subject, tickling me or doing something else to get me animated.

“And whose sweetie pie are you?” she might ask, gaily sticking her fingers in all my tickly places. “Whose little pumpkin face?”

“I'm yours,” I would answer.

“And who am I?” Fingers, everywhere.

“You're my mommy!” By this time I would be screaming with involuntary laughter.

“I always felt like Christine was hiding something, she had that guilty dog-who-peed-in-the-corner look. When I told them I was going to Korea, Ken was reluctant, but okay. Christine went batshit.”

“Batshit, like how?”

“She actually ripped up the brochure and chucked it in the garbage, saying the Motherland Program was
only
for true Koreans, people with Korean last names.”

“That's seriously psycho.”

I remembered looking around the table: Amanda emotionally detaching by pretending to check her hair for split ends. Ken's comb-shaped mustache quivering. Christine, bottle-blond hair, the thinning patch on top exposed in the harsh overhead light of the kitchen table. Her scalp blazed red, like her face. I remembered thinking, joltingly:
these people are not my family. They're just some random people.