Somebody's Daughter (35 page)

The waiter lit a small butane warmer at the bottom of the giant wok built into the center of the table, and then he returned with a block of ramen, some rice cakes that looked like extruded white Play-Doh, a handful of weedy-looking greens. He put them all into the depression and poured boiling water plus hot pepper paste over the mixture. Then, Benihana-style, he diagonal-sliced some hot dogs and a few good chunks of SPAM and ceremoniously dumped it all into the wok's maw. When the whole mess got to boiling and gurgling, he added a few blaze-orange panes of American cheese.

Doug ordered us a ceramic pot filled with
soju.
He showed me how to drink it Korean-style, the younger person pouring it into the shot glass for the older person, using two hands to show respect. You toasted, shouting
“kom-bae!”
and then you were supposed to knock the incendiary liquid back in one swallow.

We drank as we waited for the
pudae chigae
to cook. At the next table, some drunk male students screeched and gave each other noogies, knocking their purses off the table.

“They're hopeless young romantics talking about azaleas,” Doug said. “Azaleas. My mother said when she was young, she used to eat them.”

“How fancy-schmancy,” I said, feeling pleasantly blurred around the edges. That had also been Christine's thing. For a party, along with smelly mold-encrusted French cheeses, plates of baby vegetables, she always ordered edible flowers. Violets, flamelike nasturtiums, yellow-and-purple brindled pansies in clear plastic containers from Byerly's. She had gotten the idea from Ladies' Home Journal.

“It was that or die waiting for the first barley to ripen,” Doug said. “There's a month in spring the lunar calendar calls the ‘month of hunger,' when the winter supplies run out but nothing's ripe yet. She said one spring, the mountainside looked like it was still the dead of winter because so many families had gone out and stripped it bare of every green thing.”

“Oh,” I said. Doug ladled out some of the soup, the texture and color of molten lava. The sweet, spicy, syrupy goo was delicious. It reminded me of back home, how I would make ramen noodles: throw out the spice packet, make my own soup out of crushed garlic, one dash Tabasco, spoonfuls of La Choy soy sauce, squeeze of ketchup, and last, a single drop of honey. Noodles hot and sweet and salty, totally unlike the “Oriental Seasoning packet” but eerily like our
pudae chigae
. Was this craving, then, part of my Korean genetic code, tattooed on that winding helix of DNA?

But Koreans also ate plenty of strange things that I would gladly pass on. Crickets, sightless sea slugs, and something called
pundaegi
, silkworm larvae that looked (and smelled?) like prehistoric trilobites. On campus, girls carried black-and-gold-chain Chanel bags in one hand, greasy paper cones of
pundaegi
in the other.

Once, I was watching Doug eat some kind of seafood stew from which he pulled out nacreous shells like coins. I impulsively reached out with my long-handled spoon (Korean spoons made expressly for this purpose?) and stole a sip of broth. The broth was scalding, and so spicy, it made tears jump into my eyes. The taste was fishy, hot, horrible, and I was glad I hadn't known about the slimy fish-egg sacs, lying like amputated thumbs beneath the opaque broth.

But there was something in the taste that drew me to it—I took another sip, then another.

“You're Korean,” Doug said simply. “That soup is too salty and spicy for Westerners to handle—it's called ‘spicy soup' in Korean. On the base they used to make the newbies eat it, as a joke.”

I wiped my eyes and took a sip of beer.

“Cut open a Korean and that's probably what you'll find: salt and hot red peppers,” he said.

Was I really this Korean? I wondered. In Minnesota, cinnamon is too spicy for some folks. And nothing on the Scandinavian menu is pickled in salt—even
lutefisk
is pickled in lye. When the
ajuhmas
made kimchi at the Rainbow, they dragged giant plastic trash barrels outside the restaurant into which they'd mix limp cabbage with hot red peppers, thumbs of ginger—and entire bags of rock salt, the size of the bags Ken used to de-ice the driveway.

But, yes, Ken. When we used to go to Sand Lake in the summers, he would always make sure a bag of spuds—and three different kinds of salt—were on the grocery list. At the cabin he would slice the raw tubers into discs, whose starchy whiteness he'd dip first into onion salt, then double-dip into regular salt. He also stole pinches of raw hamburger before he put them on the grill, rolling them in coarse salt the way Nana rolled cheddar cheese balls in nuts at Christmastime.

Was there anything better than cramming a hard piece of oniony potato into my drooling mouth? It was our Sand Lake tradition, just the two of us. He would always start it by saying, “Madam Sarry-Sar, how about some po-tah-toes?” with a snooty lockjaw accent like Mr. Howell on
Gilligan's Island
. Or, “We're having hamburgers tonight, how about starting with some
hors d'oeuvres
?” which he would pronounce as “horses' doofuses” in that same accent, which always made me giggle.

“You know how
pudae chigae
originated?” Doug said. “During the Korean War, people were starving, so they would bring back garbage from the American army bases and boil it to make soup.”

“You always tell me these things
after
I've eaten them,” I said, but then I got to thinking. What was my mother's life like during the Korean War? Did she, like hundreds of other people in Seoul, hover around the garbage pile of the Eighth Army base, wishing for a piece of meat-fat or bone that had already been in someone's mouth so she could make some soup?

I cashed some of my travelers' checks and brought them the next time I went to visit Mrs. Lee. I offered it respectfully with two hands, but she didn't make a move to receive them, so I pushed them into her hands twice, three times, explaining that I felt bad about how she was spending a small fortune feeding me. She cried and flung the bills back at me, so when she was in the toilet shack, I slipped them in the mini-root-cellar box she kept in the corner of the kitchen. When she finished with that ten pounds of garlic, probably in a day or two, she would find the money.

I wanted her to accept my help, to have her know that I didn't feel the least shred of anger toward her any more, now that I knew her. I hadn't had a terrible life with Ken and Christine. Materially, it had been a resounding success.

That night after we'd gone to bed, I looked at her pillowy face and wondered what her expression had been right after I was born. Happy? Sad? Dismayed? Did she see bits of herself or her late husband looking back at her?

I recalled going out with Christine and Amanda to the Magic Pan, maybe a year ago. I'd noticed how Amanda and Christine had eaten their crepes in an identical way, wielding forks and knives as precisely as gem cutters, picking out the pieces of meat and leaving the shroudlike crepes behind. Even their similarly shaped mouths pursed the same way, like drawstring bags, lapidary movements, invisible threads connecting bone to bone, flesh to flesh.

I remembered thinking: I'll never have that, someone to compare myself to. But now, of course, I did.

Only the tiniest bit of doubt remained. A dusty dark seed that looked spoiled and old and dead—unlikely to sprout and cause its trouble.

But if it did crack open, extend a tentative root, I would be forced to follow that pale thread to its very end.

Mrs. Lee would be a complete stranger.

Seoul

1993

There are things, Doug told me, that only exist for Koreans, that aren't explainable in the English language.

Like
han
, that wrenching, incurable feeling of regret. Or
nun-chi
, the ability to size someone up without even talking to them.

“Like that first day you asked me to eat lunch with you,” he said. “My
nun-chi
nudged me, told me you were someone I'd want to get to know—even though after meeting the other Motherland Programmers I doubted there would be a single person on the program I'd want to be friends with.”

The DNA test results had come in. Miss Park wanted both me and my
omoni
, my
um-ma
, to meet in the office. I was sure if the DNA didn't match, she would have said so on the phone. Now, I was so excited and relieved that my mother and I were going to be official.

Miss Park's face looked tight and drawn.

“I'm so sorry,” Julie said. “Mrs. Lee is not your mother.”

The wind was rushing in to fill parts of my brain that had suddenly gone blank.

“Excuse me?” was all I could say.

“The DNA tests confirmed it.” She showed me the report. The samples had been sent all the way to America. The results were in a language I could read and understand. My name, hers. NO MATCH. I stared at Mrs. Lee. Why? My eyes burned. Had she been pulling some kind of scam?

“Could you ask her why—” I had to pause, then went on, “why she was so sure I was her daughter?”

Mrs. Lee balled up a paisley hanky and spoke in a sobbing Korean.

“She said she just knew when she saw you on TV—you look a lot like her late husband when he was a boy. She also said you two like all the same things: you're both left-handed, she used to love to play the
changgo
drum when she was your age, too.”

Mrs. Lee gripped my hand. A warm, familiar feeling. But I gently slipped it out. I felt a sudden, unaccountable loyalty to Christine, of all people. I would never let her hold my hand—or even touch me the tiniest bit—the way I had let this woman, countless times.

Mrs. Lee sniffled, said something.

“She said she was a little troubled hearing you say you'd been found at a fire station, because she had actually brought you to the Little Angels orphanage herself. But she thought that perhaps someone had miswritten in your file, because after she had placed you on the steps, another baby was brought in, not long after, and the two of you were taken in together.”

I blinked. The
other
baby was probably me, brought in shit-slimy from the fire station. That meant there was yet another, shadowy woman out there that I needed to find. And there was some other Korean adoptee, perhaps in America, who was Mrs. Lee's daughter.

“Agi-yah, mi an hae,”
Mrs. Lee said, still crying. Child, I'm sorry. That much, I understood.

“I don't think she's lying,” Julie said. “We did once have a woman who came here claiming to be a mother, but you could tell she was wrong, right off the bat. She acted, I don't know, cold. We had doctors examine her and it turned out she'd never had a baby at all, I think she just wanted to get some money or something.”

I thought of the bills lying under the papery heads of the garlic. I could feel the weight of the
han
.

“Mi an hae yo,”
I said to the woman, Mrs. Lee Ok-bong.

“They're saying ‘I'm sorry,'” Julie said, looking at Doug, a touch condescendingly.

Doug answered her in Korean.

“Oh,” she said, taken aback.

“Things aren't always what you expect them to be,” he shrugged.

Enduring Pine Village

1993

“Excuse me,” Kyung-sook said to a passerby, the third person she had approached. “But is this Han-Mi Dong?”

The young woman's hair was cut so short, it looked like a feathery cap twirling around her head. She scowled at Kyung-sook, who had stepped in front of her to make her stop.

“Is this the Han-Mi neighborhood?” Kyung-sook repeated.

“Yeah, what of it?” she said, walking off in a huff.

Kyung-sook looked around, then around again. She didn't recognize anything. She was sure that the dumpling house had been right in front of her, but instead of the corrugated tin roof she searched for, she was greeted by a modern apartment building rising straight up from the widened street. Colorful quilt-covers airing on balcony railings fluttered like flags from different nations. It hurt Kyung-sook's neck to try to peer to the very top.

“Are you looking for something, Older Sister?”

The country accent was music to Kyung-sook's ears. A woman taking out a bound plastic sack of garbage was looking at Kyung-sook with friendly curiosity.

“I think I used to live in this neighborhood, many years ago,” Kyung-sook said. “Do you remember if there used to be a dumpling house right here? The neighborhood folks called it ‘King's Dumplings.' There used to be a silk store down the lane, Jade Moon Real Estate on the corner.”

“Oh, my, I remember the silk store,” the woman said. “But that was an awful long time ago, even before they tore down the neighborhood.”

“Tore down?”