Somebody's Daughter (36 page)

“Oh, yes. This neighborhood was designated an ‘eyesore' by the government—they used to call it ‘Shit Alley' because of the sewage stench from the shanties—so they razed the place to tidy up for the Olympics.”

“It was all torn down?”

“Well, those awful mud shanties certainly wouldn't have made Korea look very admirable to the outside world. 'Course, no surprise we didn't have any foreigners visit the neighborhood, being so far away from the Olympic Stadium and all.”

“So do you remember the establishment that was right where this apartment building is? A tiny restaurant, it had a sign that said ‘noodles and dumplings' out front.”

She shook her head. “I don't have the faintest recollection of a noodle house, here. Sure could use one, though.”

How could this be? It was as if she'd never been here, nor Sunhee, nor the cook-owner, nor Old Bachelor Choi. Their diner, the teahouse, the Chinese restaurant she'd gone to with
him
, all these things were gone, replaced by sharp-angled buildings, shiny glass enclosures where men and women sat casually together drinking coffee right in view of anyone. A woman even began smoking—in public!

Kyung-sook felt as if she were in a foreign city. Seoul Station was still in the same place, but when she made her way to where her imo had lived, she found a giant building, “One-Hundred-Kinds-of-Things-Store,” occupying the
entire
block. Crowds of people were going in and out of it, carrying colorful shopping bags that said “New Generation.” No one stopped to ask if she was lost, they only pushed roughly past her, stamped on her feet.

Imo gone, as well as the sealmaker. Along with the houses with the terracotta tile roofs that curved up like wings. Now everything was boxes, all sharp boxes.

There was only one, last place she could go to try to retrieve her past.

Chosun University.

Seoul

1993

“There's this place I want to take you,” Doug said. “My mother told me about it—we always had plans to go there, but somehow never did. She said it's a village that time forgot.”

“A Korean ‘Land of the Lost'?” I teased. “Will we see dinosaurs, giant ferns?”

“Maybe,” he said. “It'll definitely be different than this—” He gestured around the café we were in, the Doctor Zhivago. Inside, it was highway Americana—Route 66 signs, license plates, diner menus. Plastic saguaro cacti on the tables, a Confederate flag hanging over the door. From multiple speakers, Whitney Houston belted the theme song from
The Bodyguard
, which had, in the last week, become a kind of garish aural wallpaper plastering the interiors of all the cafés and stores.

Doug and I took a bus going north, an hour out of Seoul. Then we took a cab ride over an unpaved road that led to a place where the flat plains of rice seemed to meet the jutting mountains. A shallow, grass-green river meandered almost completely around the village, giving you the illusion that it was an island, a floating raft of rice.

River Circle Village.

We rode
hapsung
in the cab with another young couple and their toddler. The driver doubled his money by collecting the full fare from both parties. We were ferried across the water by a sullen
ajuhshi
poling a crude wooden craft.

Was this place was for real? The alleys were lined by long earthen walls covered by morning glories and four-o'clocks, creeping vines with gourds hanging off them like decorative light bulbs. Behind the walls sat old-time houses with thatched roofs, an occasional tiled one with edges curved like wings. The people walked around wearing the baggy farmer clothes that the actors had worn at the Folk Village, a Korean Colonial Williamsburg, that we had visited for a class trip.

The Korean couple had similar expressions of awe on their faces. The village folk ignored us.

“Why is this like this?” I asked Doug.

“The villagers decided they wanted to keep living the old way,” he said. “In the seventies the government instituted this ‘New Village Program' where they forced modernization of all the country houses, but the government officials probably didn't want to muddy their shoes with ox shit to get out here, so they left them alone.”

On our way here, we had passed another isolated mountain hamlet, but it couldn't have looked more different: paved roads, a medieval castle-esque WEDDING TOWN with crenelated towers. In the town square, kids in Nike basketball shirts squatted outside MOTHER'S STORE eating ice cream. A train depot moldered outside of town.

“That's a shame,” I said.

“Modernizing isn't necessarily bad,” Doug shrugged. “When I was younger, I was darker, more Asian-looking. Kids used to call me ‘rice paddy boy,' and teachers used to ask me if Koreans were dumb slant-eyed peasants like in M*A*S*H. It's kind of nice now to see Americans driving Hyundai cars and drinking OB beer in fancy restaurants.”

“This place is wonderful, though,” I said.

“You know that little town we just passed? The one with WEDDING TOWN? I believe that's the village my mother came from. It has the same name, at least.”

“She never took you there, in all that time you were in Korea?”

He narrowed his eyes at me.

“No,” he said coldly. “You can't go back to a place like that, when you've become what my mother became.”

I knew enough to stay quiet, until he wanted to talk again.

We ate a dinner of rice mixed with mountain vegetables, side dishes of dark-brown
mook
made from acorns. Bitter with tannins, it quivered like jello, but I didn't foresee Bill Cosby endorsing it anytime soon. Next to the restaurant was a rice wine house. We sat outdoors on a raised wooden platform papered with that yellow oilpaper they used on the floor. The waitress brought us some of those grassy pancakes that Mrs. Lee had made me, plus a big pot of milky white liquid that we shared using a hollowed-out gourd as a dipper. Doug said it was a traditional farmers' rice wine called
mac'oli
. It didn't taste like milk at all, it burned like a shot of tequila. A few of the village men were drinking and smoking from long pipes next to us, the breeze carrying the smoke and their voices away from us.

The rice wine went straight to my head. The moon was rising into a flung-out sky, and shy stars were emerging, one by one, to keep Venus company.

For dessert, the waitress brought us some irregularly shaped rice cakes, steamed on a bed of pine needles, which gave them a resiny taste-smell that brought me back to many summers ago.

“We used to rent this cabin on Sand Lake,” I told Doug. “In northern Minnesota, there are so many lakes, they just give up and name half of them ‘Sand Lake.'”

Doug leaned forward, sleepily interested.

“The cabin was nothing special. It didn't even have indoor plumbing. I used to have to tell Christine when I needed to go to the bathroom at night, and she would go out with me.”

I was afraid of spiders, so Christine would whack around the privy first with a broom, then she'd wait outside. Sometimes I could hear her gently singing, her voice carrying through the crescent-moon ventilation cutout on the door.

“The lake smelled like pines, exactly like these cakes,” I said.

“I keep forgetting you grew up in the sticks.”

“Well, we would go
up
to the sticks, from Minneapolis. Ken was originally from the north country. He remembered a lot of stuff from growing up, like how to take the bark off birch trees without killing them. He used to make little birchbark boats down in the basement.”

“When was the last time you were there?”

“I was seven or maybe eight,” I said. “They later bought a place on Bass Lake, closer to the Cities. That lake, ironically, is a ‘dead' lake, without fish in it. I think there's some movement afoot to change its name to Lake Gitchigumee, you know, the whole Hiawatha story.”

“You fished?”

I nodded, recalling my child-sized Zebco, its clear filament, the red-and-white bobber, lead sinker shaped like a tear. Like any true Minnesota child, I caught sunfish by the stringerful. Even the ones hardly bigger than my child's palm, Christine prepared. I admired her courage as she slit open the fishes' bellies and pulled out their soft, silvery guts, scaling and cutting until she had a row of neat white filets which she would dip in a mixture of cornmeal, flour, and black pepper and pan-fry.

We would sit on the deck at twilight, squeeze slices of lemon over the crunchy-coated fish and watch the sun go down, while in the background, mosquito coils burned like incense. When the mosquitoes donned their teeny-tiny gas masks and made their way through the smoke, we would go back into the cabin, shut the screen door, and Christine and Ken and I would play endless games of Chutes and Ladders or Parcheesi, as many times as I wanted.

“I like hearing that,” Doug said. He was smoking again, and he exhaled a cloud that remained for a few seconds like an apparition before fading into the sky.

It became too late to secure a taxi back, but a passerby showed us to a place where a woman would rent us a room in her house. The room had a clean wooden floor and bedding that smelled like rice starch and sunlight. We lay down, naked, then realized there was only one pillow. Doug gave it to me.

After making love, he fell asleep. I, as usual, stayed awake. I stared at him in the muted light from the moon. He looked like an angel when he slept, one arm protectively around me, the other curled under his chin, fingers extended as if he were secretly waving at me.

I gently worked the pillow under his head. He gave a sigh, rubbed his eyes in a childlike gesture, and I saw the baby he had once been in the adult he was now.

The idea of escape was a fiction, I realized. You could travel to the other end of the earth in an airplane, but you wouldn't get too far from yourself and your accretion of all your secret histories, the sins and curses and mercies that ever touched you. People entered and disappeared from your life, but they irrevocably left parts of themselves, the way that soft candy prayerfully pressed by Korean mothers onto the gates where their children were taking their college entrance exams eventually hardened and became part of the gate itself.

Perhaps I'd finally learned, from this strange twisted language, the answer to my question,
Why am I I?
In Korean you rarely used the “I,”
nae-ga
. Instead of “I'm going to the store,” you just said “Going to the store.” You only needed to say “I” in situations where you needed to distinguish yourself, “I—not Doug, not Bernie, not Jun-Ho, not Jeannie—am going to the store.” I felt too insecure, however, about when an “I” was truly needed, and so I sprinkled
nae-ga
s all over my sentences the way a desperate cook keeps adding salt, even as
Sunsengnim
kept scolding me, saying, “Sal-ah-
ssi
, we know it's
you
.”

I am I, not anybody else. The subject is understood.

For our morning rice, the
ajuhma
presented us with a full country breakfast: bean-sprout soup, a pile of sesame leaves washed in the morning dew, searingly hot chili peppers she expected us to dip in hot pepper paste before eating, cubes of radish kimchi, fried tofu, a bundle of wild onions, bowls and bowls of rice. And from somewhere, she had procured a warm bottle of fairy orange soda.

“Eat a lot,”
she told us.

We took the bus back to Seoul, the subway back from the Express Bus Terminal. Doug held my hand the whole way. I couldn't stop smiling at him. The subway doors opened at our stop,
Cho-Dae
—short for Chosun Daehakyo. I jumped out the door ahead of Doug, and we almost clotheslined a countrified
ajuhma
running past, bundle in hand, head wrapped in a towel. She burrowed into the crowd on the platform to bemused cries of
Hey, what's your hurry, Auntie?
She was a strange, almost anachronistic vision, as if we had inadvertently brought her back from the River Circle Village with us, a seed hidden in our clothes.

We took the long way back to the Residence so I could stop for an ice cream. It was a Sunday, with shoppers, young families out in force, giggling junior-high girls crowding two, three at a time into photo-sticker booths. As we strode along, me chewing my General Yi's Turtle Boat Ship ice cream, I found myself starting to look, that hopeful gaze, again. I looked at the shape of eyes, the curve of bone, the way hair fell off a part. I looked and looked. For chocolate-chip-colored moles and thick hair. At every woman
d'un certain âge
who walked by, all the way until we entered the Chosun campus.

Enduring Pine Village

1993

Chosun University.

That had been her real destination all along, of course. The place where they said the girl would be.

But how to get there, the other side of the city? There were no trolleys anymore. Instead, buses in all sorts of colors and numbers went every which way. A kindly passerby told her that the “underground-iron-train” was the best way to go to the Chosun neighborhood, and he pointed out that the station was right there, under their feet!

Kyung-sook descended stairs that gave way to a long corridor that ran under the street. A faded, neglected sign said “Emergency Shelter”—it must have been part of the network of old bomb shelters from the 6.25 War. She followed the corridor to the end and found herself in the middle of a clot of people, whooshing trains, shoe stores, newsstands, underwear places, seaweed-roll vendors, machines spitting out money. The posted map revealed a jolly knot of bright-colored worms, the names of the stations unfamiliar. Great East Gate Stadium? Air Port? South of Han River? Poyang Satellite City?

When she bought her ticket, she asked the ticket ajuhshi how to get to Chosun University, but the man, bathed in a haze of smoke from his cigarette, mumbled a contemptuous reply and waved at the next person in line to step forward.