Somebody's Daughter (40 page)

In Seattle, at Customs, someone must have broken a jar of kimchi, because the kimchi smell was oddly worse than it had been at the airport in Korea. I imagined the smell swimming through my hair, dusting my skin like DDT.

I noticed that Brian, the West Pointer could not lift more than a small flight bag. The thick wool of his uniform made up for the heft he must no longer have. His mother stacked their bags onto one of the few luggage carts around.

She said
uff-da!
as she pushed hard to get the cart rolling. I followed behind, somewhat less burdened because Doug had helped me ship my heaviest things home.

In front of me, two Korean ladies had two very sticky and very unhappy babies between them. One of the babies had hair that stood straight up, making him look cartoonishly frightened, the other had downy black fuzz that circled a bald spot at the top of her head like a monk's tonsure. The women were loaded with multitiered luggage, tipping on flimsy wheels, and an overstuffed diaper bag.

I ended up in line behind them. I tried to amuse the babies by making faces as we waited. The tonsure-headed baby rewarded me with a gummy, drooly smile.

One of the ladies smiled at me in weary gratitude.

“Beautiful baby,” I said.

“Oh, they're not ours,” said the woman, who was short and chubby and had an easygoing smile. “These little ones are going to meet their new families. We're just their escorts.”

“We get to fly at a discount this way,” said her companion, who had a stronger Korean accent. She was wearing a sleeveless shirt and I could see the scar from a vaccination, big and round as a mushroom cap, on her upper arm. “Say, are you Korean?”

I pretended to need something from deep within my bag. I didn't want to explain to them that I was one of those babies, grown up.

Then my hand touched
o-jing-o
, smooth and dry and somehow set free from its plastic wrapper. I had completely forgotten about the food: ear o' corn,
ddok
, seaweed. Suddenly, I wanted to cache it away, to have something of Korea when I was back on American soil. Now I needed a plan, an excuse for why I checked “no” on the box that asked if I was bringing any food or food products, fruit, soil, etc. into the country.

The low-tide odor of the
o-jing-o
was starting to seep out of my carryon.

A yellow light went on, urging me to step forward. A man with hard, buckshot eyes faced me. His expression suggested that he was looking for ways to keep me out of
his
country.

I handed him my American passport and my form.

“That your real name, Sarah Thorson?”

“Yes,” I sighed.

“What were you in Korea for?”

“To learn Korean.”

Tendrils of squid-smell were gently swirling around us.

He hoisted my Samsonite onto a stainless steel table like they have at the vet's. He asked me to unbelt it and open it. I sighed, again.

He pawed through my clothes, fingers probing my underwear and the presents I'd brought back: a silk tie and an OB beer (“Korea Best Beer”) T-shirt for Ken, a lacquered box for Amanda, a very well done fake Chanel bag for Christine, and some traditional Korean green tea that I'd gone all the way to the Buddhist neighborhood of Insa-Dong to get. It was a special, uncured kind of tea, the leaves loose in a decorative wooden box, which, I noticed for the first time, said GLEEN TEA.

“What's this?”

The man pulled out Choi
Sunsengnim
's present, exposed the blade.

“A souvenir letter opener.”

“It's a knife. You could hurt someone with this, young lady,” the man said.

“Not you,” I mumbled.

“What did you say?”

“I said it's just a souvenir.”

“There's a prohibition against bringing weapons into the country,” he said.

I thought of it as a letter opener, but Doug proclaimed it a knife, as did this man. A chastity knife. I was reminded of one of the cultural field trips I didn't go on, the Puyo Festival in July: it celebrated the three thousand court ladies in ancient times who committed mass suicide rather than face the penises of oncoming Mongol and Shilla armies. Not unlike ancient Rome's Lucretia, raped, then driven to burying a sword in her viscera to “preserve” her honor. Women's lives cut short because of things men did, or even just threatened to do.

“Okay, keep it then.” There was something fitting to all this. Let me leave this totem behind.

He dropped it in a plastic Ziploc bag, as if it were already evidence for a murder case. He closed my bag and waved me on.

I hoisted my carryon onto my shoulder. Now I smelled like an open tin of sardines. I walked away, careful not to look back, careful to hide my smile.

We landed, finally, in Minneapolis. Outside the window, planes waited patiently as livestock at their jetways; other jetways gaped empty as loneliness. The gray of the airport matched the smudged color of the clouds, floating brains in a washed-out sky. The exact scene from the day I left.

Had I actually left and come back? Or had I nodded off and begun dreaming, my Korean trip yet to begin?

The pilot cut the engines. Everyone rose at once, as if to give him a standing ovation.

“Good luck.” The guy, Brian. His mother began to gather their bags.

“I'll go to the marrow center,” I promised, touching the slip of paper in my pocket. Something jingled from inside. It was the Hodori keychain.

Brian nodded, smiled, but he looked incredibly tired, as if it took all his strength to lift the corners of his mouth. I was at once sorry I had imagined the cancerous cells in his body dividing and dividing as we flew, as if I might have inadvertently caused it to happen.

Outside, the glare of camera lights. WCCO. WMIN.
The Pride of the Northland
. Balloons, signs, open-mouthed Minnesota grins and whoops. People in Vikes shirts. All for Brian, I imagined.

Or maybe those babies. Twenty years ago, I was aware, Ken and Christine had movie camera'ed every minute of my “birth”—my passing from the womb of my Northwest Orient flight, through the tubular jetway, into the cold, bright blaze of the terminal.

Dazed and seeing spots, I stepped into the gate area.

To my left, a blond woman, tanned legs in pink shorts, held the tonsure-monk-baby in her arms. The short Korean woman was nowhere to be found.

I had this thought that the new adoptive mother might look up and see me, that we might exchange secret smiles as I passed. But no, she was gazing at her baby, to the exclusion of everything else in the world. New baby, new life.

But what was this baby's life going to be? Was she going to grow up psychically untethered as I had, a tiny, brave astronaut floating in that airless void of uncertainty? To become an adult and not be able to know what parts were biological legacies, what was the result of habit and environment, what part of the self sang as pure, free improvisation?

But we humans are resilient. We're programmed to be able to pick things out of the rubble and make something new, aren't we? Something possibly beautiful and lasting. Or edible.
Pudae chigae
, for example.

Baby-girl, I wish you luck
, I whispered as I passed.
You're going to need it
.

“Sarah!”

The
famille
Thorson: mother, father, and biological daughter—shared genetic clay—were waiting, leaning on the gate's railing.

For the better part of a year, I had been among “my people.” Suddenly, this trio of Caucasian faces.

This family has nothing to do with me.

They are just some random, suburban Minnesota family.

WELCOME HOME, SARAH! said the posterboard sign Amanda was holding. It had a Korean flag drawn on one side, the Stars and Stripes on the other. How irretrievably corny: Korean, yet American.

“You're here,” I called.

“Of course, silly,” Christine called back. “We wouldn't miss it for the world.”

She detached herself from the crowd to take a picture with her expensive autofocus camera. Amanda was smiling at me, waving, as she clutched the sign with her other hand. Ken looked, somehow, proud. His lawyerly eyes were watery, his mustache trembled.

My legs suddenly became ionized. I walked faster, faster, closing the distance between us.

I started writing the Sarah stories in 1992 and amassed a good number of them, but no matter what I did, the stories didn't gel as either a collection or a novel. Slowly, I began to realize that another voice was struggling to be heard: Sarah's birth mother. I ignored this call for quite a while, because I knew inevitably that I'd need to go to Korea. And beyond the usual hassles of planning and funding such a trip, finding a place to live, etc., I'd also somehow have to find some birth mothers, get them to agree to talk to me about the most traumatic experience in their lives, and I'd have to learn Korean well enough to talk to them! At the time I also had many urgent things occupying my mind: I was getting married, and my mother-in-law-to-be was dying of cancer.

But the voice kept calling to me. Without much hope, I applied for a Fulbright Fellowship, calling my project
Silent Mothers: The Story of Korean Birthmothers
. Practically on the eve on my wedding, I found out that I had actually won it—funding plus other support for a year in Korea. My husband encouraged me to go, even if it meant we'd spend our first year of marriage apart. Three weeks later, I was in Seoul with little more than my Fulbright credentials (which gave me access to the U.S. Army bases) and some leads from my friends Brian Boyd and Mrs. Hyun-Sook Han, which eventually led me to Mrs. Sang-Soon Han and the Ae Ran Won home for women.

Doing research for a fictional work is always tricky—what to leave as the real fact, what to fictionalize? For this project in particular, taking oral histories of the various birth mothers who agreed to be interviewed was both inspiring and heartbreaking. None of the birth mothers who spoke to me imposed restrictions on what I could ask, and they all freely offered so many brave and unsparing glimpses into their hearts (one woman even let me read her diary) that I can never thank them enough for this gift. They all said—independently—that part of their motivation for agreeing to speak with me, despite the stigma and secrecy that still exists, was that they hoped some fragment of their love would pass into the book and be understood by their birth children.

The deepest hearts of these mothers, then, inhabits this book, and I send these women my everlasting love, gratitude, and admiration. Everything else is fiction. Kyung-sook is entirely my creation, as is Enduring Pine Village.

So many people and institutions aided in the writing of this book that inevitably I'm going to forget to thank some very important people—and I apologize in advance.

For financial support and research opportunities, I want to thank the J. William Fulbright Foundation, Yale University, Brown University, the Hedgebrook Writers' Colony, and the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. The O. Henry prize panel gave me a lift by bestowing an honorable mention for one of
Somebody's Daughter
's original seed stories when I needed it most.

Thank you to early readers Edward Bok Lee, Dean Jacoby, Michelle Lee, Ed Hardy, and especially Professor Heinz Insu Fenkl—mentor,
oppa
, all-around great guy. I am also thankful to Brian Boyd, Mrs. Hyun-Sook Han, Mrs. Sang-Soon Han, and of course, my mother, for opening doors for me in Korea, and to Professor Ok-Ju Lee of Seoul Women's University for taking excellent care of me while I was there.

The Sinunus—Karen, Mike, Chris, and Matt—for giving me a beautiful space in which I wrote the final pieces of this book. Quang Bao and the Asian American Writers' Workshop have always been there for me whenever I needed a shoulder, or a little shove.

Thanks to the awesome folks at Beacon, Helene Atwan, my editor extraordinaire, and the rest of Team Beacon: Kathy Daneman, Tom Hallock, Joy Kim, Pamela MacColl, Lisa Sacks, Christopher Vyce, and all the hard-working sales reps. Lots of love to Charlotte Sheedy and Carolyn Kim—thanks for keeping the faith over the long haul.