Somebody's Daughter (33 page)

“She's asking if you have a cold,” Doug said. I constricted my throat, searching for a tickle.

“Why, do I look sick?”

“No, it's just a motherly thing to say.”

“Now what'd she say?”

“She wants to know if I, the ‘American,' understand what she's saying. Do you want me to be translating?”

I shook my head. My mother. I would need to learn to communicate with her myself.

Mrs. Lee opened the gate and made a motion, hands down, fingers wiggling like squid tentacles, inviting us in. Doug had told me that the American overhand sweep of the fingers was a disrespectful gesture, one you'd only use with a dog.

At the top of the gate, light refracted through shards of colored glass embedded in the cement. The effect was artful, almost beautiful.

“Doduk-i,”
Mrs. Lee said, when she saw me looking. I opened my Korean-English dictionary: Thieves. The glass, from broken
soju
bottles, was low-rent razor wire.

We entered a cluttered courtyard. Around a single spigot in the middle orbited the detritus of daily Korean living: plastic tubs, laundry stiffening to cardboard on wire racks, leggy plants leaning out of plastic tofu containers, a weightlifting bench—and two child-sized bicycles lying on their sides.

My first thought: Mrs. Lee, at her age, had had more kids?

Then I realized this courtyard was shared by three families; each entryway had a raised concrete platform where battered leather shoes and flip-flops were lined up like the clearance shoe rack at Dayton's.

Mrs. Lee led us to the middle dwelling. Doug slipped off his sneakers in a smooth motion and walked right in, but I had to sit down and untie my shoes. Mrs. Lee gazed fondly at me and helped me pull them off. She was wearing white canvas tennie shoes, Keds knockoffs with the backs smashed flat by her fat heels so they had become, in essence, sneaker-clogs. She carefully arranged our shoes in a row, toes pointing out.

Inside was that same yellow linoleum floor from the
yuhgwons
. It curled upward at the corners slightly, and I saw that it wasn't linoleum at all, but layers of some kind of oilpaper pressed together.

Her “house” was a single room with a phone-booth-sized kitchen that was lower than the rest of it and half outdoors, the stove powered with cannisters of propane. Mrs. Lee gave us some oblong pillows that looked like giant fluorescent-green-and-pink after-dinner mints, and then she disappeared.

Doug and I sat on the floor, our elbows propped on the pillows. On the windowsill sat some green bottled lotion called ALOE ESSENSE 54 and a plastic squeeze bottle of some cream-colored stuff that bore a picture of a big-eyed doll and read KEWPIE in English. A skeletal wire rack held clashing peacock-hued
ajuhma
blouses and trousers.

Mrs. Lee returned lugging a small table chopped off at the knees. It contained a metal teakettle, two plastic cups (the kind little girls play tea-party with), an apple the size of a softball, tangerines, a roll of toilet paper. Inside the cups was what looked like brown sugar, but when she poured the hot water, I smelled the familiar pang of ginseng. She sat herself down and peeled the apple with her left hand, shaving the freckled brown-gold skin into a coil that eventually dropped to the table. She cut the apple into boomerang-shaped wedges.

I glanced over at Doug. He was looking a little bored, a stark contrast to my tense, braced student-driver posture. What was I supposed to do, how was I supposed to act? Like a guest? Like a daughter? Like a stranger?

That weekend, when Doug and I had been having sex, afterward, he rolled up and said to me,
“Sarang-hae.”

“What does that mean?”

“I love you.”

My breath quickened, not because of him, but because I was suddenly thinking of Mrs. Lee, my mother. I was thinking that maybe the next time I saw her, I could use those words. I was crazy with wanting to use those words I'd saved for so long, just for her.

Sarong hey
, I'd written into my notebook, the minute I was alone.

I watched the woman arranging the fruit on a cheap plastic plate. She impaled a piece of apple on a toothpick and held it up to my mouth, a hand solicitously cupping underneath.

The apple was sweet, with the cold, grainy texture of a pear. Mrs. Lee retrieved the KEWPIE bottle, uncapped it, and liberally squirted the creamy goo—which, I had to say, looked uncomfortably like semen—all over the fruit. After surveying her work, she gave it another fart-sounding squirt for good measure, then set the bottle on the low table as if she were contemplating a third pass.

Idly, I glanced at the squeeze bottle. The way the Korean letters under KEWPIE were situated, in a long, strange sequence, I knew the word was a
rae lae oh
, some kind of transliterated foreign word: ra-di-o, el-e-ba-tor, stu-ress-u.

She speared a piece of tangerine through the goo, and held it out to me again. To be polite, I ate. The white stuff was sticky and warm and didn't have much taste—it was more like a lubricant, the ALOE ESSENSE lotion, maybe.

Then I realized.

Ma-yuh-nae-ee-su, was what the letters had spelled.

Mayonnaise.

That bottle, sitting unrefrigerated, in the warmth of the sill. Gag reflex. I took a huge gulp of the tea, grown lukewarm, not hot enough to sterilize my mouth.

“Doug, that's mayonnaise,” I croaked.

“I'm aware,” he said.

“Thanks a lot for telling me!”

Mrs. Lee offered me another piece, apple this time. I shook my head. I asked her where the bathroom was.

She sent me to a corner of the courtyard. It wasn't an outhouse, exactly, but more like a freestanding shack. The standard porcelain trough of a Korean squat toilet (thank God they had Western toilets at school) with a pull-chain flush, the dingy water in the plastic tank looming dangerously overhead. The wastebasket in front of me overflowed with used, brown-smeared TP even though there was nary a square in the holder. The bad smells and the warm, queasy feeling of mayonnaise suddenly overcame me and I vomited.

When I returned, we sat around the table again. Mrs. Lee had brought out a box of chocolate-and-marshmallow-covered mini-pies called OH YES!, each wrapped individually in plastic. Again, to be polite, I ate one. Sugar and chemicals, completely boneless, like biting into foam.

When we left, she gave me a bag of tangerines and the OH YES! pies, then stood outside the gate, waving until we were out of sight.

In my horrible Korean, I had made plans to see her again, next week.

Seoul

1993

I visited Mrs. Lee again, with Doug, then every free afternoon. I even missed music class once, but Tae
Sunsengnim
yelled at me, and I had to promise I wouldn't do that again.

But that left three, maybe four visits a week. I left Doug behind to force myself to speak only Korean. But my Korean words didn't come rushing back. Whenever Mrs. Lee said anything to me besides
Did you eat rice today?
(another motherly greeting, Doug told me), I didn't understand her.

By my fourth, fifth visit, our communication was still facial expressions and hand-patting, but I had decided I didn't need words to communicate with her.

Each time I arrived, her face broke out in a smile, so wide it turned her eyes into black tildes that might grace a word like
mañana
. She helped me with my shoes (even if I was wearing slip-ons), waved me into the house, where she would have the low table set, some kind of treat waiting. The first time, a sandwich: two perfectly square, perfectly white pieces of flimsy bread hugging some kind of roasted meat, grated carrots, green onions, plus a layer of sliced bananas swiped with strawberry jam.

San-du-weech-u.

Her face looked so expectant, I had to eat it. But after, I said to her in Korean something like
Me Korean. Eat Korean food.

She was delighted to discover that I liked
ddok
rice cakes. She bought me
ddok
in the colors of the Italian flag,
ddok
with a crusty layer of sesame seeds,
ddok
that tasted like cinnamon toast. She began insisting I stay for dinner, and she made dumpling soup with pillows of chewy rice cake floating in it, tofu stew, fish fried in eggy batter, always anxiously watching my face as I ate.

The last time, she had purchased her own Korean-English dictionary. After dinner, she opened it and pointed to a word,
sleep
.

I nodded back eagerly. She set out some bedding, a pillow stuffed with some kind of rustling husks. She covered us with a thin quilt made of linen. The piquant smell of mothballs rose from her shoulders. She lay half on the floor to give me more room. In minutes, she was snoring. At one point, she threw a leg over me possessively, something Doug did when we spent the night together.

In the morning, she came in with a stew and some vegetable side dishes on that low table. She also produced a bottle of psychedelically colored fairy orange pop.

She handed me chopsticks, left hand to left hand. The knot I always had inside me seemed to loosen. Her other-handedness, my true inheritance. Back in Eden's Prairie, it had been an abnormality, an asymmetricality, like a chiral molecule, one that has the same basic structure as others, but doesn't fit in anywhere. Christine wrote SARAH in indelible marker onto all my scissors.

I took sips of the soup, which had a pungent, old-sock smell. I ate heaping spoonfuls of clean, white rice that remained in a homogeneous clump, didn't fall apart and scatter like Minute Rice or Uncle Ben's. I even ate a few pieces of the kimchi, stippled with semicolons of hot red pepper that burned and radiated to all parts of my body as it filled my stomach. The orange pop was the only thing I didn't finish.

At school, I announced to Choi
Sunsengnim
that she should call me by my
Korean
name Lee Soon-Min.

“…Nobody doesn't like Sara Lee…” Bernie hummed at me as we left class. “You know, your name has the word ‘Soon' in it. Koreans like to give abandoned girls the name ‘Soon'-something as a joke—it means ‘Jane Doe.'”

“Bullshit,” I said.

He countered, “How about the Woody Allen and
Soon
-Yi scandal? She's an adoptee.”

Even these small, tattered Korean things I had won for myself, Bernie had to take them away, like a bigger kid taking candy from a smaller one.

“Bernie, why don't you leave her alone?” Doug was suddenly behind me. “Why do you have to be like that? She's never done anything to you. Why be such an asshole?”

Bernie's eyes narrowed.

“You know, I used to spend summers as a little kid with my cousins who live in Songt'an, right outside Osan Air Force base,” he said. “Our thing to do for fun was to go to the gate by the PX when the shift was letting out and sing to the shop-girls as they left:

He sang it to the tune of San Toki, the mountain rabbit song.

Doug's expression didn't change, but his nostrils flared and turned white. His body began to lean, almost imperceptibly at first, in the direction of Bernie.

“Heard that song before? All the little kids know it,
kkang-chung
.”

Doug continued to lean. Bernie took a step back, assumed a martial arts stance. He had been taking tae kwon do as his elective class.

I yelled at Doug to stop, but he was like a tipped-over boulder, gaining momentum, hurtling, lunging at Bernie.

Bernie cocked his leg. Doug barreled past and landed a plain old barroom-brawl punch right into the round PRINCETON seal of Bernie's T-shirt. We could all hear Bernie's wind leave his body in a sharp sound like a kite flapping in a stiff breeze.

“The stomach doesn't leave marks,” Doug said, to no one in particular. “That's one thing the old man taught me, at least.”

Bernie was lying on the dusty ground, writhing like a worm.

“Don't…hit…me…again,” he gasped.

“Then leave her alone,” Doug said. “It's that simple.”

Seoul

1993

Mrs. Lee set a plate in front of me. An overlapping stack of pancakes. Instead of Mrs. Butterworth's, there was a dish of soy sauce. She showed me how to cut the pancakes by crossing my chopsticks in the middle and levering them in opposite directions, like scissors. I dipped a piece in the sauce and lapped up that dark, saline taste. The pancakes were filled with something that looked like grass that would later make my shit bright green. She smiled approvingly.

I thought about calling her
Omoni
, Mother, today, but I didn't. That time would come. She called me “Soon-Min-ah.” I had thought, weirdly, that she was calling me “Minna,” which was Nana's name, Norwegian, of course. But later I caught on that
ah
was a sort of diminutive, sort of the opposite of the formal
ssi
we added to our names in class, to signify “Mr.” or “Miss.” Mr. Bernie Asshole Lee.

To Jun-Ho, I had written,
I found her—can you believe it? And her name is Lee. Do you think perhaps that means I might be a Chunju Lee, descendant of the great King Sejong?

I moved to help Mrs. Lee clean up after dinner, but she playfully pushed me away. She flipped on the tiny TV set and motioned for me to watch as she took the remnants of our dinner back into the indoor/outdoor kitchen.

Outside the sliding rice-paper door, my sandals and her tennie-shoe-clogs sat side-by-side on the cement steps, announcing to the world that she and her daughter were spending time together.

I was excited to think I was slowly becoming
Korean
. I had come to regard her house as my own. When nature called, I made my way through the cluttered courtyard to the toilet, squatting over the porcelain trough as if I'd done this all my life. Sometimes, I imagined oh-so-proper Christine balancing the alabaster globes of her ass over the bowl, and it set me to evil giggling.