Somebody's Daughter (27 page)

“What are you doing?” he yelled, making her jump back. His black yun-tan hair was all disheveled around his face.

“Make dinner?” she ventured, in a small voice.

“Je-sus,” he said. “You don't put sugar on pasta, you put cheese and tomato sauce.”

He had been referring to the can with strange red fruit with the hat on—the
toh-mah-toh
—the shit-smelling
cheez-u
from the green cylinder.

“Okay, you didn't know,” he said, finally, patting Kyung-sook on the arm, the same way her father patted their long-haired ox.

Kyung-sook took the bowl; she would eat her own creation, then.

“No, don't,” he said. “You put so much sugar in it, you're going to get fat.”

He made another dish of the pasta, showing Kyung-sook how to put the red fruit and cheez-u on top of it, and she had to admit it was actually sort of tasty that way, if you held your nose when the
cheez-u
smell was too much.

When she began to clean up, he instructed her to throw away the leftover bowl of
mac-a-loni
. Staring into the garbage pail, she remembered the winter when they ran out of food, and how Hye-ja, the one who was scorned by the housewives because she worked at the Yankee army base, had lugged a full bucket of American garbage all the way back to the village. The bucket had been filled with egg-shells, bones, moldy food, some kind of dark, acrid sand that Kyung-sook now knew was coffee grounds, and even an army boot. Hye-ja had boiled the whole thing in the town plaza. Even the housewives had stepped forward, tongues silent, stomachs empty, and had greedily, gratefully drunk up their portion of the “piggie stew.”

“Just dump it, Karen.”

She hesitated a moment, then did what he asked. The song in her head played again. A-me-ri-ca!

Seoul

1993

I could actually see the dark eye of the camera coming closer as it zoomed in for the misery shot. Sweat sprouted from my pores as if I were a saturated sponge being squeezed, I had Nixonesque stains under my arms. My muscles ached. I needed to move, but of course, I couldn't leave the podium. I settled on letting my tongue explore the coffee-scorch blister on my soft palate. It was meaty and soft, like the inside of a grape.

The hosts stood in front of me, all I could see was their backs. They said something to the audience.

“Aigu!”
someone exclaimed. Kyunghee Noh whispered to me, “No callers. I am sorry.”

How could this have happened?

I was glued to the stage in shock, but the two feminine bouncers came to pry me off, while the host chatted jocularly with the audience and got them to laugh again.

Doug took my hand as I numbly entered the greenroom.

“You did great,” he said. “You were wonderful.”

“Lot of good that did.”

“But they didn't mention the
ddong
,” Doug said, his free fist balling up. “They omitted that whole thing.”

“But why—” I sat down, the full weight of events falling like scales on my shoulders.

The short man came back to usher us out. Doug immediately launched into a tirade. The man stepped back cautiously away from him, mumbling something, and scurried away again.

“He's just a flunky,” Doug muttered. “I told them to get whoever's in charge if they don't want their greenroom trashed.”

Kyunghee Noh appeared. I stifled the urge to fit my hands around her neck, begin beating her with her own clipboard.

“Mr. Lee says you have some problem?”

“Yes, we have a fucking problem,” I said. “How could you leave out the part about how I was found with excrement smeared all over me?”

Kyunghee Noh frowned.

“Of course we can not say such a thing even if you will be telling it like that.”

“What?”

“We have a policy for our show, standards. What you said about the
ddong
, there are many people who will be thinking it is disgusting.”

My mouth opened in disbelief. I was aware that Korean women were expected to never let their teeth or the inside of their mouths show, and here I was letting myself look like Mr. Ed. Kyunghee Noh seemed to note this, and added, “If you want disgusting, you watch the American Armed Forces channel.”

I sputtered. “But it's the truth. This happened to me. ME. Some Korean person did that to me. A Korean, like the people who watch your show. A Korean left me there, covered in shit! Do you think it was easy for me to tell you this?”

Kyunghee Noh bit her lip, her eyes skittering back and forth as if she was reading something in front of her. “I am sorry. I can not explain well in English. How to say it, our show watchers are looking for happy stories, that is why they watch. You do not watch a TV story on animals if you do not have interests in animals, yes?”

This was making no sense.

“Try it in Korean,” I said. “My friend understands.”

Kyunghee Noh sighed, the same way Choi
Sunsengnim
did when I couldn't say
neh
. I wondered if she was dying to go home, maybe meet her boyfriend for coffee instead of spending her time talking to some psychotic Americans. Resignedly, she spoke in Korean. Her words sounded elegant and educated. I wanted to hit her more than ever.

Doug said, when she finished: “She says there's too much
han
—sadness and regret—in people's lives already, so they watch this show to escape their
han
for an hour; they look to the happy stories to give hope to their own lives.”

“But I'm not here for these people's entertainment!” I was practically screaming. “I'm trying to find my mother.”

Kyunghee Noh shook her head. “I am sorry,” she said. “Perhaps it was a mistake to have you on the show. We can not guarantee that anyone will receive a call. But I will pray for you that you can find your mother. Maybe someone will call later. You check with the station.” She handed me a card.

I took it. We both understood it was a palliative, a piece of candy from the doctor that we were both pretending would take away the sting of a shot. I turned the card over.
Saejong Braodca§§ting
, it read in a quasi-Teutonic font, the rest of the Korean was lost to me.

“Let's go,” I said to Doug.

We followed Kyunghee Noh through the labyrinthine corridors.

She gave us a parting bow as we walked out of the building back into Yoido's strange phosphorous light. I imagined she would lock and bolt all the doors when we left, pull up the drawbridge.

What had just happened to me? Somewhere within the gilt and neon and bitter dirt of this country was a woman who held a truth that I was so desperately seeking.

Mother!

Seoul

1972

“Ai-gooo,” the cook-owner said, noting Kyung-sook's expanding belly.
“Tsk-tsk-tsk.”

As a girl, Kyung-sook had once asked her father, the smartest person she knew, exactly how a baby came into the world.

Her father had paused in his lunch. His spoon wavered over his rice and soup, as if he couldn't decide which one to start with first. He took a big scoop of the soybean-paste soup followed by a scoop of rice that had barley and purple beans mixed in. It was a flush year, that year.

“Ho, my child is grown enough to bring lunch out to the fields all by herself, and now she wants to know all the ways of the world, doesn't she?”

“Tell me, please, Appa.”

“Well, if you want to know. First, a woman and a man get married—”

“Ah, it's the marriage that does it!” she'd cried. “I knew it—when Teacher O's daughter married last fall, she grew a big belly right after.”

“Wait, wait. It's not just the marriage that does it,” her father had laughed. “That's first, you're right. Then if the husband and wife sleep together, a baby crawls into the mother's stomach. Of course at first, the baby is just a tiny seed, but then it grows and grows, just as the rice sprout eventually becomes a full head groaning with rice.”

She contemplated this. Then she said, “Sleep with someone to grow a baby?” She'd suddenly remembered the time she and Min-Ki had fallen asleep together in the shade of a tree by the celadon-green coils of the Glass River.

“I've got to work now.” Her father picked the last, tenacious grains of barley sticking to the bowl, sipped the very last spoonful of soup. He set the bowls on Kyung-sook's carrying-cloth, then stretched out his arms as if he were trying to reach the sky. He rubbed his back, sighed, groaned, and spat. Then he yelled for the men to bring the ox over.

“Just remember that the marriage comes first, child,” he said, as he began his stiff, tottering walk back to the fields. “You see, it is possible for the baby to accidentally go to an unmarried mother. But that causes so much sadness—no one is happy to see it, even if it's a boy. Horrible things will happen to it, the way Unmarried Shopkeeper Auntie's child was born without a nose.”

Kyung-sook had watched her belly in the days that followed, worriedly checking. Some days it looked like her normal nine-year-old girl's belly. But other days it seemed to be growing, expanding. Her father had said it was possible for a baby to make a mistake and come to a girl who wasn't married, wasn't that right? How would she tell her parents she was pregnant? She thought anxiously about it at night, fingering her belly, trying to feel for a baby-shape under the skin.

After the Month of Pure Brightness passed, her stomach turned definitely bigger. If she turned to the side and looked at her shadow, her stomach curved out like a burial mound. There were no mirrors in the house except for the broken fragment of one that her mother kept. Kyung-sook came back early from the fields one day and struggled to view her stomach in the slender shard.

What kind of deformed baby was growing in there?

“Mother, I think I have a baby.”

Her mother did not glance up from the rice she was washing.

“Ai-goooo!” she lamented. “Who has put such idiotic ideas in your head?”

“Mother,” she had said tremulously. “Once, I fell asleep with Min-Ki by the river. He fell asleep, too.”

“Yah! We need to have an exorcism for you,” her mother said. “Some bad spirit is whispering things in your ear. You cannot have a baby until your blood begins to flow every month. Then if your husband sticks his pepper inside you, the blood will stop and you'll want to throw up all the time. Then, and only then, will you have a baby. Or maybe after you've heard all this, you won't want to. Now, quit bothering me, do your schoolwork.” She had begun shooing Kyung-sook away with wet hands that had grains of rice stuck to them.

“But Mother,” Kyung-sook had protested. “Look at my stomach!” She had pulled down her black Japanese-style monpae pants to show her.

“Are you studying or are you spending all your time looking at your stomach?” her mother had yelled at her. But she did take note of her belly and the next day dragged Kyung-sook to the country doctor, who made her swallow an envelope of the bitterest powder. When Kyung-sook went to the outhouse later, she saw long, white worms in her ddong. Soon after, her stomach returned to its normal size. How could it be, she wondered, that a girl's stomach could hold both worms
and
a baby?

Kyung-sook looked back at the cook-owner. For the last couple of days, every time she looked at her, she saw not the cook-owner's face, but an opaque black spot. No matter how much she blinked, it would not go away.

“Is that kid going to be three feet tall and talking by the time the barbarian notices?” the black spot said.

“He's going to marry me,” Kyung-sook said. “And I'm going to America with him.”

“Well, tell him to hurry it up, Blinky. Doesn't he know we can't have you walking around with a big belly and no husband?—you're scandalizing the customers!”

Kyung-sook wanted to laugh out loud, thinking of their restaurant's clients, the men stopping for a cheap dinner before a night out at the kisaeng houses. The married construction worker who was busily trying to seduce Sunhee. Or the cook-owner herself, passing her ondongi under Old Bachelor Choi's nose every day—who was she kidding, preaching to her?

It was true that the man David didn't come to the restaurant any more, but he said it was because the cook-owner made him nervous. Every time he showed his face, the cook-owner would throw salt at him, as Kyung-sook had done that first day.

“Your silly Korean superstitions,” he said, the last time they had left the restaurant, the cook-owner venturing out even into the heavy monsoon rain to fling salt in his wake.

“That's why the East will always be stuck behind the West: Korea's thought is based on ghosts and goblins, not science.”

Kyung-sook wasn't exactly sure what was so superior about Western thought. This man wore his shoes in the house, no shoes out (he regularly walked out into the courtyard barefoot like the worst kind of beggar). It was appalling to watch him touch his food with his hands instead of using utensils or wipe his nose with a dirty cloth he used over and over. And of course, there was the matter of those awful toilets. She wasn't exactly sure what was so superior about Western thought.

“I don't want to see you throwing salt or worshipping those dried fish,” he said. “You're going to be meeting my professors and lots of other important people, so I want them to see what a sophisticated young lady you are.”

Kyung-sook, nodded, even though from time to time, she, too, felt an urge to ward off bad spirits by throwing salt at that man, to scrub the coarse grains into places he had touched her. But then she thought about how she had once slipped a bill from his pile of American money and taken it to the credit-house. She had been amazed at the profusion of won she had received for that single American bill. She went to the silk market and purchased a jauntily olok-dolok-striped hundred-day outfit for the child. It gave her a thrill to think of raising her child in the Beautiful Country—she could probably have servants, even. And eventually, she would convince this man to send for her parents, so they could all live together in the bounty of A-me-ri-ca.