Somebody's Daughter (8 page)

“You're not hungry?”

“Um, my stomach's a little upset all of a sudden.”

He laughed. “How can your stomach be upset? Korean food is the only thing that will settle my stomach.”

“Uh huh.”

Before we left, Doug returned with more Lotte gum. These came with a suspicious picture of a flower on the label, but they had a sweet coffee flavor that lasted about three chews before the whole thing became a tasteless wad. Outside, the peony globes were covered with ants, like moving black sprinkles on spumoni ice cream cones.

“Would you like to take a walk?” he said, when we were back on campus.

“Um, sure.” I was realizing I hadn't done much exploring beyond the Language Institute, the 7-Eleven, and the Balzac coffeehouse. I kept forgetting that our school was just one tiny building occupying a corner of a huge university filled with Korean students.

Some of the Chosun Daehakyo students were passing us now. The girls walking arm-in-arm in tight jeans and platform shoes, the guys in sweater vests, hair greased back à la Ken's high school pictures, some also arm-in-arm.

We veered to a path that led behind a dingy building, test tubes crusted with frosty white precipitates airing out in the open windows. The dirt path ascended directly up a mountain—a random peak erupting in the middle of campus. In a few minutes of upward hiking, I could smell pine. I could also see smog padding the city below.

“Where are we going?”

“Yak-Su,” Doug said.

A noise, like the cackling of chickens. From behind us, a dozen octogenarian Korean men and women gained on us. They were clad in some serious Sound of Music hiking gear—Tyrolean hats, wool pants held up with suspenders, knee socks with alpine patterns, hiking boots, gnarled-wood walking sticks. They were all carrying empty plastic jugs.

“They're going to Yak-Su, too,” Doug said, as the group, amazingly, pistoned past us up the steepening slope, their happy chatter unabated. Soon, they disappeared beyond a bend in the trail.

Doug stopped where the trail continued up to the summit and another trail broke off to the left. He pointed to the sign.

Two simple syllables, no diphthongs, even. Yak and Su.   
and  
.

“Oh, Yak-Su,” I said. “We're here.”

He nodded, then started down the left-hand trail, which ended abruptly at a lone metal pipe emerging from a rock. It was dribbling water into a rusty drain; a middle-aged Korean woman squatted like a frog next to it, alternately filling up a pink plastic dipper and drinking from it. By her feet sat a plastic jug, filled to the brim with water.

“The Stamp
ajuhshi
told me this is some of the best
yak-su
in the city.”

“Oh, um, really?” I said, suddenly realizing that
yak-su
was a thing, not a place.

“You've never had
yak-su
?” I shook my head. From his voice, I felt as if I should have, or at the very least, should know what it was. I just stared ahead blankly.

“You know, ‘medicine water,' the spring water that flows off the mountain.”

“Oh, yeah.”

The woman placed the huge water-filled jug on her head and began to amble down the slope, even singing as she went. Doug bent down by the dribbly stream, his body folding quite naturally into the lady's same squat. He picked up the pink dipper, which she'd left on top of a rock.

“You're not going to drink from that, are you?”

He looked at me, then laughed. “Of course I am. We're all Korean. We can share germs.”

“But—”

“At home, don't you all eat from the same bowl? You see at the restaurant how the
ajuhmas
put our leftover kimchi and stuff from the tables back into the pot, right?”

I wish he hadn't told me that.

He took a draught and then handed me the dipper.

“I think I'll pass—I'm not that thirsty,” I said, my tongue folding like cardboard in my mouth.

He shrugged. “Use your hands if you don't want to use the cup. I mean, we came all this way. And hurry, the hiking club will be coming back—they'll be here all day filling up their jugs.”

As if on cue, a yell of
“yaw-HO!”
drifted from down the summit. Where did those old people get their energy? Maybe there really was medicine in the water …

I stuck my index finger in the stream, which was freezing. The water looked clear, but I knew that didn't mean anything. At the Motherland Program orientation, they had warned us about the water. More than half the country's people lived in Seoul, we were told, so the overtaxed, outdated water system was teeming with bacteria. They told us to buy the two-liter jugs of purified water and keep them in our rooms, even for brushing our teeth.

Don't drink water in restaurants unless you know for sure it's been boiled. Don't drink anything with ice in it, don't eat ice cream from a street vendor, no raw fruits or vegetables that aren't peeled, don't eat at a
neng myun
restaurant unless you know for sure it's clean
.

“In July, watch out for
chang-ma
, too,” Bernie Lee had added. “When it comes, don't open your mouth or let it fall on your head or you'll go bald.”

Everyone had laughed in recognition and appreciation, except for me, who didn't know what
chang-ma
was. I worried that it was some kind of malignant animal that fell from the sky—a rain of Wizard-of-Oz monkeys that pulled out your hair. Only later would I find out that it was the monsoon rains that came in the summer. The black exhaust from the belching buses, the industrial smokestacks, all this stuff that gave Seoul its odd, sulfurous light was sent back to earth in this impure rain.

Who knew where this
yak-su
water was coming from, how much acid rain it had absorbed? Upstream, there could be any number of animals adding fecal matter and
E. coli
bacteria. And what about the microbial dangers, parasites? Amoebic dysentery? Even the thought of allowing benign but wiggling organisms—hydras, paramecia—into my digestive system made me feel woozy.

The voices drew closer.

“Man-sei!”

“Yaw-HO!”

I cupped my palms and drank. The cold water thundered down to my stomach, my fillings jackhammered into my jaw. I opened my mouth to gasp, and an
aaahhhh
sound—the same one Ken makes when he drinks a cold beer in August—emerged. I plunged in again, drinking until I thought my stomach would burst. The taste was pure, primordial, as if I was resting my tongue on a cool, clean slab of granite.

Further up the mountain, we sat at a bench, a split log.

A gazebo-like wood structure was perched on a cliff a few hundred feet above us. I saw no paths leading up to it. Painted in muted greens and browns, it looked like a part of the mountain itself. I wanted to ask Doug Henderson if he knew what it was, but then decided I wanted to preserve my cover as a “normal” Korean for a little longer.

A warm breeze blew across us.

“So if you were born here, what's the deal with your Korean?” he said.

“What do you mean, ‘what's the deal'?”

“You sound like you're completely unfamiliar with it.”

I thought I had been getting better. The last time Jun-Ho and I had met, he had complimented me on my pronunciation. I had had a wild thought of henceforth telling people my name was Sarah Kim and trying to “pass.” But reality was intruding.

“I'm adopted,” I snarled. “It wasn't
my
decision to grow up in a white family in the fucking Midwest.”

Doug fumbled in his little rucksack, so I couldn't see the reaction on his face—shock, pity, recognition? He handed me a
mok kehndi
.
Mok kehndi
, “voice candy,” were basically just cough drops, but I loved their sticky, weedy taste. Doug ate them constantly, he said, because the pollution made his throat scratchy. They were only a chunwon, a dollar plus change, for a whole green tin decorated with pictures of Korean medicinal herbs. I took the candy as an apology.

A shrill cawing from above us made me jump. I expected something big and black, Poe-ish, but a dove-sized bird, blue and white colors clean as a school mascot's, landed at our feet.

“Do you know what that is?” Doug asked.

“A bird.”

“It's a
kach'i
. They're a sign of imminent good fortune.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I suppose my mother must have told me.”

“It's funny.” The last vestiges of my anger melted away with the
mok kehndi
. “I never cared about Korea before. When I was in high school, they had these summer camps for adoptees to learn about Korean culture, but I never considered going. I mean, what did Korea have to do with
me
and my life? But now I kind of wish I'd gone, learned at least a little about Korea.”

“It's not too late to learn,” he said. “That's why you came on the Motherland Program, right?”

“I'm not sure why I came. Semester at Sea was a close second.”

“Well, here, I can teach you a song about the
kach'i
. No, wait, that's just for the Lunar New Year. How about
‘San Toki'
?”

“What's that?”

“The little mountain rabbit song. Every single Korean kid knows it.”

The third time, he asked me to join in. I tried, then stopped.

“What's up, don't you like the song?”

“I don't know what I'm singing.”

“
San
is mountain and
toki
is rabbit.”

“To-ki,”
I repeated.

“
O-di ro ka nyu nya
is ‘where are you going.'”

I repeated.

“Yeah. And
kkang-chung, kkang-chung
is the sound of the rabbit hopping.”

“Gang-chung.”

“Kkang-chung,”
he said. “Put a little more emphasis on the first ‘kk' sound.”

“Ggang-chung,”
I gagged.

“Better.”

He started again. Into my head came a picture of a rabbit hopping.

We sang together, softly at first, but then louder, finally with gusto, as if “Little Mountain Rabbit” were a sea chantey. The Sound of Music hikers stopped on their way to the
yak-su
to observe us, puzzled by two adults braying out a children's song. One of the old men, however, clapped approvingly when we finished.

O-di ro ka nyu nya?

I sat back on the rough-hewn bench, savored the breeze. So this was springtime in Korea, a place that was both polluted and beautiful, with the smells of industrial pollution mixing with that of a living earth warming, of flowers and fertile insects. I looked past the smog to the overhead sky: intense, Windex-blue, once again almost close and solid enough to touch. The sight of it set off an intense feeling of longing—but for what, I didn't know.

I glanced over at Doug Henderson, planning to make conversation to fill up the empty spaces. His face was also tipped up toward the wispy clouds. He was singing, silently, to himself and suddenly I knew he was no longer here, but somewhere far, far away. Had he, too, come to Korea to search for something? Was he like me and perhaps didn't even know what that something was and was hoping that in time, it would make itself clear?

Enduring Pine Village

1993

The river of memory flowed on. Its sights and sounds became particularly vivid to Kyung-sook in the quiet of the late afternoon, when a kind of calm settled over the market. By then, the most serious customers had come and gone, so the merchants, stomachs heavy from their lunch of cold noodles or dried-cabbage-leaf stew, stretched out for a nap. Cooking Oil Auntie snored from a bench in front of her black-and-white TV. The medicine seller ducked behind a row of bottles in which obscenely forked ginseng roots floated in amber liquid. Others lay on stacks of burlap packing bags or nested in a pile of coats they were selling. Even the market's chickens and cats scrounging in the garbage seemed to stop for a nap.