Somebody's Daughter (5 page)

Enduring Pine Village was situated within the southern tail of the sacred Diamond mountains, almost within sight of the border with North Korea. It was a place of wildrushing beauty intertwined with a melancholy history, just like in the sentimental song:

Back in the Chosun dynasty, a geomancer had decreed that a new village should be erected “where the mountain peaks resemble a horse's ears, and where the valley is encircled by ancestor pines.”

The horse-ear formation was found next to a grove of long-needle pines, the kind that bore the pale nuts revered as a delicacy and whose parasol-like shape was a staple of classical paintings. The elders noted this auspicious sign and made sure that the first structure built in this new settlement was a shrine for San-shin, the Mountain God who had so generously inspired the geomancer.

The town became known as Enduring Pine Village for its abundance of long-needle pines, blue-green pines, and the stately white-bark fir. Farmers marveled at how rice planted in the mountain soil seemed to mature overnight. Pregnant women received the ultimate blessing from the Birth Goddess: sewn bundles of bright red chili peppers hung from almost every family's gate announcing the good news—sons.

And because the village happened to be situated at almost the exact midpoint between the capital to the south and the northern provinces, naturally travelers stopped at the village to meet and trade, and soon there was a booming business for Enduring Pine Village's wine houses, which became famous for the pungent local mac'oli rice wine as well as the most beautiful, most witty kisaeng hostesses in all of Korea.

The spirits continued to offer their protections even during the terrible Japanese colonial period. No villagers lost their homes. No women—kisaeng or otherwise—were taken to the rape camps set up for the Japanese soldiers.

Even on the fateful March First, 1919, when villagers pulled out their taegukis, the forbidden national flags, and cried “Korea will live a thousand years!,” the Japanese did not retaliate with bayonets and murder as they did in other parts of Korea. When the Americans dropped their light-flashing weapons in Hirossi-ma and Naga-sagi, ending the war and the occupation, thousands of Korean slaves in Japanese munitions factories cried black tears and died in misery far from home, but none from Enduring Pine Village, such was its auspicious nature.

The villagers wondered later, of course, about the turn of Fortune's wheel. Had they grown too complacent, full stomachs forgetting what it is like to be hungry? During the colonial period, everything Korean was forbidden, but villagers had gone into their homes and done their rites to the Korean gods in secret and at great risk. Now, as free men, the younger magistrates had been known to neglect San-shin's shrine, especially during the period they were preoccupied with maneuvering Enduring Pine Village to become the county seat. Further, these same upstart magistrates, seduced by promises of education and Western-style medicine, welcomed the white missionaries, who openly declared their hatred of Korean gods; before anything else, the first thing the whitemen did to “help” the villagers was to destroy San-shin's shrine.

Starting on 6.25, bombs fell from the sky. The North Korean soldiers seized Enduring Pine Village's males—young and old—for their army, killing anyone who resisted, including sobbing mothers and grandmothers.

South Korean forces recaptured the village, but then the Communists took it again. The villagers were forced to flee once, twice, three times. During the Armistice, the Red soldiers retreated north through the village. What people came back to: at the village's east end, the Shim family—father, mother, sons, daughters, the lastborn five-year-old twin sons—were found floating in macabre poses, rag dolls flung against a wall. The elder Shim, hedging his bets, had assisted both the Communists and the ROK governments—depending on which flag flew from the pole in front of town hall—so no one was sure who had tied them to a fence and shot them. More corpses unburied themselves from a hasty grave behind the high school. Starving soldiers had even broken into the mission and murdered two of the white nuns.

War changes everything. Many others never returned—killed, frozen, or starved to death. Neighbors settled feuds by turning people in as Red sympathizers, real or not. Of the ancestral yangban families, only a handful remained. Enduring Pine Village's new inhabitants were refugees from the north or carpetbaggers—scoundrels and opportunists, or those with something to hide. No one knew, for instance, where Cooking Oil Auntie's family had come from. They had appeared at the village gates almost a decade after the 6.25 War, speaking with a strange, harsh accent even though they insisted, somewhat haughtily, that they were from Seoul.

What did the future hold? The rice production had dwindled so much that during droughts, rice had to be imported from other parts of Korea. Every year, the soil grew poorer, more oily chemicals needed to be applied to the fields (and washed out into the rivers during the monsoon rains).

A few years before, Korea's president, himself from a rice-growing village, came up with an idea to preserve Enduring Pine Village, like its neighbor, River Circle Village, as a tourist site, where the increasingly urban population might come to watch rice being grown the traditional way. The government had gone so far as to spread asphalt, six lanes wide, over still-arable land, to accommodate the tour buses and cars. But then a new president came into office, and the plans were scrapped. The expanse of asphalt sat abandoned, an immovable black sea on the southern end of the village.

Nowadays, many of the farmers left their farms and instead boarded a bus on the Days of Moon that took them to the battery factory in the new Satellite Suburb Village of Ho-Chun, where they would work for the week and return home on the weekends, carrying their chemical-saturated workclothes in drawstring sacks, their fingertips burnt clean of prints by the corrosives they handled.

As a child, Kyung-sook had been regaled with tales of the majestic courts, the educated literati of the old Chosun dynasty. She knew that her great-grandfather was buried in a special site at the foot of the sacred Horse Ear Mountain. She had been shown his headstone, a pagoda-like chinsa ornament marking his scholar-official credentials, the biography of his life—his schooling, his passing the Civil Service Exam, his government rank—all displayed in the gray stone.

This place was much more than just a random rice-farming hamlet, Kyung-sook's parents told her, it was once an important trade and governmental center. But stories of the past meant little to Kyung-sook.

“I saw the Five-daughter Kim Granny coming out of the rice cake shop,” Cooking Oil Auntie remarked, sticking her head into Kyung-sook's stall.

Kyung-sook, small rake in hand, continued smoothing the mountain of salted shrimp before her. The tiny, curled bodies pressed against the lip of the barrel.

“Oh, goodness, I just ran in here without even a ‘good morning,' didn't I?”

“Suit yourself,” Kyung-sook said.

“Well, ‘Good morning, Shrimp Auntie.' There. Anyway, you're not my superior in age are you? We can skip the formalities, don't you think?”

Cooking Oil Auntie settled her wide ongdongi onto the upturned apple crate Kyung-sook used for a seat.

“Now, did you hear me? The Five-daughter Kim Granny was buying ceremonial rice cakes.”

“What's so odd about that? She was just over at the fishmonger's saying it's time for the yearly chesa.”

“Oh, yes, Kim Granny makes a lot of noise about the ancestor offerings, but everyone knows the cakes are an appeasement for the last-one's spirit.”

“The last-one?”

“The last-one, the fifth daughter of Kim the junkman. You must remember—he didn't even bother to learn his daughters' names, he just called 'em One, Two, Three, Four, and Five.”

Kyung-sook almost jumped. A familiar name, unearthed like a forgotten kimchi pot.

“You mean—Yongsu?”

“Unh, Yongsu, the one with the boy's name.” Cooking Oil Auntie nodded, eying a display of baby-finger shrimp, the kind you served with beer. “None of the daughters married very well in that wretched family, but Necessary Dragon—”

“She was my friend,” Kyung-sook interrupted. “In my childhood season.”

“Oh moh!” Cooking Oil Auntie sat up. “You don't say! Well, Pig Intestine Sausage Auntie told me that Alder Pass shaman told the family that her spirit demanded they hold a yearly appeasement ceremony.”

“That's claptrap, a shaman wanting to make quick money,” Kyung-sook said. “I don't think she's dead. There's never been any word.”

“Of course she's dead. She left the village unmarried, and never came back to check on her parents, even for their hwangap, when they reached that most venerable age of sixty.”

Kyung-sook started smoothing the next barrel's shrimp.

“What I would guess,” Cooking Oil Auntie mused, “is that she froze to death as a beggar some winter. Or maybe she met her end with those Yankee soldiers on the army base—that was the direction she was heading when she left, supposedly. If that were my daughter, I'd do an appeasement ceremony, too: people who meet a bad end always leave behind restless spirits.”

Kyung-sook wondered how many years it had been since she'd last seen Yongsu. Twenty? Thirty? Her childhood friend, the one she admiringly called Older Sister, would have fifty years on her now.

“Ai-gu,” Kyung-sook sighed. “The spring breezes always make me sleepy.” She moved as if she wanted to sit down.

Cooking Oil Auntie took the hint. On the way out, she pretended to be swatting at a fly and palmed a few sweet curls of the baby-finger shrimp. She hummed as she walked back to her stall, the heels of her slipper-shoes raising a cloud of dust.

Kyung-sook's hands suddenly started trembling. That memory, jumping out at her like that, over a chasm of so many years. It made her wonder, what else of her life had she forgotten—or made herself forget?

Seoul

1993

“My name is Sarah Thorson,” I said to the Korean man sitting across from me, strangely relieved to be speaking English. We were at the Balzac Café. The neighborhood bordering the huge main gate of Chosun University turned out to be home to a number of these trendy coffee-and-juice bars named after dead French writers: the Rousseau, the Rimbaud, and around the corner, Proust.

“I am very happy to be making your acquaintance. Please let me introduce Jun-Ho Kim.” The man rose and bowed deeply from the waist. My first Korean bow! I tried to reciprocate, but it was an unfamiliar motion that collapsed in on itself, and I ended up executing a slightly eccentric plié.

“
You
don't need a language exchange,” I said. “You already speak English fine.”

Jun-Ho Kim giggled, then lit up a cigarette. He had small, childlike hands, a 50s buzzcut. His oxford shirt was buttoned all the way up the neck, the kind of thing you see only in five-year-old boys mother-dressed for school pictures. I couldn't imagine this child-man handling weapons in the army.

“Oh, I thanks you for your compliment, but I have much to learn,” he said. “I want to speak like the American.”

The waiter set my kiwi juice in front of me. I'd ordered it because I liked the look of the black-dot seeds suspended in brilliant green slush. In my mouth, it made my teeth feel squeaky, like when you eat raw spinach, and the tiny seeds stuck in my gums.

“We can commence in English?”

I nodded, not knowing he was going to use words such as “homolog” and “ontogenesis” for English practice. English was supposed to be
my
native language, but our exchange quickly took on a peculiar quality, like grabbing a 500-pound bull by its nose ring, as Jun-Ho led the conversation around the subjects of nuclear reactors in North Korea, his favorite American movies (anything with Meg Ryan in it), prostate cancer, dead French writers. From his knapsack he produced some ancient
Newsweek
s, their articles striated with fluorescent highlighter marks, and he asked me how to pronounce such words as “Buttafuoco” and “(Long Island) Lolita,” “sphincter,” and “epididymis.”

“Lo-LEE-tah,” I said.

“Okay, now we will commence with Korean?”

Jun-Ho asked me about my siblings. How many?

“I am the younger sister,”
I replied.
“Her name is Amanda.”

He paused.

“The way you say it, you are saying ‘I am the younger sister.' I think you mean,
‘I have a younger sister
.'”

After that, my mind went blank. I couldn't think of anything to say except “thank you,”
komapsumnida
, what I habitually and automatically said to the 7-Eleven clerk after I bought my ramen.