Somebody's Daughter

Beacon Press

Chapter One

When I was eight, they told me that my mother's death was preordained. She had been murdered.

One Sunday after service, our minister, Reverend Jansen of the Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd, bent down in a cloud of Aqua Velva to explain. We had been learning in Sunday school about Heaven and Hell, and in the middle of class I had fallen into a panic, wondering how I would recognize my Korean mother when I saw her in Heaven-or in Hell, if perhaps she and I both sinned too much.

Not to worry, I was told.

"God called your Korean parents home so that you could become the daughter of your mother and father," he said, his eyes sliding sidewise, for just a second. His breath smelled vaguely of toast.

"It was all part of His plan-you see how much your mommy and daddy love you? When the time comes, if you're a very good girl, you, your mommy, daddy, and your sister, Amanda-the whole Thorson family-will be in Heaven together, thanks to the Lord's wonderful and mysterious ways."

"That's why we named you Sarah," Christine and Ken added. "Because it means 'God's precious treasure.'"

God kills, I thought then. The same God who brought us Christmas and the Easter Bunny-he murdered my mother.

Shortly after that Sunday, I brought up my Korean mother again, asking about the car accident, how it had happened, exactly-was it like Phil Haag's father, who fell asleep at the wheel? Or like our plumber's teenage son who drove into a semi head-on?

"Sarah," Christine said patiently, looking up from the chopping board, where she was slicing carrot discs for pot roast. "We really knew nothing about her. I'm your mommy. Let's not talk about this any more, it makes me sad." She made little crying motions, pretending to wipe away tears, the same thing she did when I was bad, to show how I had disappointed her.

* * *

I had grown up in a house in which Korea had always been the oddly charged word, never to be mentioned in connection to me, the same way we never said "Uncle Henry" and "alcoholic" in the same sentence. It was almost as if Ken and Christine thought I needed to be protected from it, the way small children need to be protected from boors itching to tell them that Santa Claus is not real. The ban on Korea extended even to the aforementioned Uncle Henry, who was then deprived of his war stories at our Memorial Day weekend cookouts. Although he proudly wore his felt VFW hat with its flurry of pins, including ones from his tour "overseas," Christine or Ken would quietly slip him some of his favorite Pabst or Schlitz, and in return he'd set up residence in the lawn chair at the far corner of our yard, away from everyone.

Somewhere back in the fuzzy clot of my teens (now, I'm at the worldly-wise age of almost-twenty), the '88 Summer Olympics were held in Seoul. We couldn't buck the Thorson family tradition of watching absolutely everything (that winter we'd raptly watched curling, for God's sakes!). But I was aware that pains were taken to modulate voices, vocal cords twisted to an excruciating, studied casualness until Korea came out Korea, exactly the same way we'd say "Russia" or "Carl Lewis" or "Flo-Jo."

Then Bryant Gumbel invaded our living room with his special segment on how Korea, one of the four "Little Tiger" economic miracle countries, was so enterprising that it had even made an export product out of its babies. Since the Korean War, more than a hundred thousand children, Made-in-Korea stamped on their foreheads, had left the country, their adoption fees fattening the government coffers.

Top that, Singapore! Gumbel's cheery smirk seemed to say.

"Well, Sarah's really American, not Kor-," Amanda had begun, until the look on Christine's face-despairing, fierce-stopped her.

We invent what becomes us.

SARAH Seoul 1993

The plane had finally approached Kimp'o Airport three bad movies and five shrink-wrapped meals after I'd left Minneapolis. The video monitors had shown a graphic rendering of our progress, a cartoon of our plane inching its way over the Pacific Ocean toward the Korean peninsula. As we descended toward Seoul, the white cartoon-plane veered from its arcing trajectory to fly directly over some dot in the Sea of Japan called Tokdo. The Korean people on board cheered.

The twinkly-eyed senior across the aisle turned and smiled. He and his wife, matching canvas Elderhostel totes, clutched gnarled hands over the shared armrest, fingers tangling like brush.

"Glad to be home, eh?"

It took me a second to realize he was talking to me. Another second to step back and see me as he did: Korean girl returning to Korea.

I wiped at the corners of my eyes, fuzzed by no sleep.

"Oh yah, you betcha," I said, in my purest Minnesota-nice accent. His wife, whose name would just have to be Effie or Jean, leaned forward out of her husband's shadow to beam at me.

* * *

"We can still turn around and just go back home-Daddy and I don't care about cancellation fees." Christine's last words to me at the mouth of the jetway. "Sarah, you don't have to do this to yourself."

She made it sound like I was off to get a tribal tattoo, or maybe to go do that Sioux sun dance where you pierce your breast with a sharp spike attached by rope to a pole and dance around the pole in the hot sun for days, waiting for a vision.

"I'm just taking my slightly belated graduation trip," I'd said. In the waning days of my senior year, I'd been promised "a trip anywhere you like" if I could get myself off the Hold list and back into that stream of graduating seniors.

An extra credit report on plate tectonics (Earth Sciences), plus a record one week of resisting the urge to bolt while sitting in every class except maybe Chemistry, earned me my prize.

However, somehow, that subsequent summer oozed through my fingers, and I was still snoozing in my bikini when dead leaves and Ken and Christine's insistence that I take a try at college came raining down on me. I lasted not quite a year as a Golden Gopher at the U of MN, Duluth. I never knew the shores of Lake Superior could be so cold.

So here I was, taking my trip just a little bit late. It was just that no one expected me to choose Korea as my final destination.

* * *

My watch proclaimed it almost midnight, but a blinding sun was battering to be let in under the ovalette window shades, my tongue stung from the sugar-greased pastries and rank orange juice the stewardesses had foisted on us.

In the airport, the silver-topped heads of the Elderhostel couple acted as a beacon as I followed them to Immigration and waited behind them in the line marked FOREIGNERS. They seemed to know what they were doing. In line, the woman showed her husband something in Fodor's Asia. At the baggage claim, my things were among the last to arrive, and Effie and Butt, as I'd named them, went on without me. After that, the only Caucasian people I saw were a few shorn soldiers in camouflage fatigues and black boots that always looked too big.

The last set of opaque electronic doors spit me out, then hermetically sealed behind me. I found myself in an arrival area filled with clots of identically black-haired people leaning over metal barricades, as if at a parade. Grannies, children, every age in between. TV monitors placed overhead about every six feet-the scene of me standing bewildered multiplied about eight hundred times-occupied the attention of the people on the fringes of the crowd. It appeared that some dignitary, or maybe a movie star, would be coming through. But if I could read Korean, I would have seen the signs plastered throughout: Because of the increasingly hazardous congestion at our beloved country's national airport, please send only ONE family member to drop off or pick up the traveler. In actuality, the government had already secretly broken ground for an additional airport on the other side of Seoul, acknowledging how obdurate and unbreakable, the Korean custom of deploying the entire extended family to greet or send off a sojourning family member.

The travelers behind me grunted their impatience and so I moved on. At the taxi stand, the snoozing driver didn't respond when I tapped on the window. I opened the back door, feeling like I was breaking into his house. But he didn't object, he readily accepted the Korean directions the school had provided. He lit a new cigarette, jerked the stick shift, and we began to make our way down a drive snaking between two giant Coca-Cola and Samsung billboards, neon looking wan and strange in the light of day.

We were bound for open fields framed by a sky that seemed to go on forever. Low flames blackened the fields of dead stubble to our left. On the right, three solitary figures inhabited the landscape: a man guiding a primitive plow being pulled through the dirt by two women straining under ropes, towels and pink plastic sun visors wrapped around their heads. Behind them, a yellow billboard rose out of the earth: HYUNDAI - FOR BETTER LIFE.

As if entering Oz, the fields gave way to tile-roofed storefronts, clusters of office-type buildings, then glass-and-steel skyscrapers. A shiny Kia car dealership, a Printemps department store. A giant pagoda-like gate commanded its own concrete island as six lanes of traffic flowed around it (Seoul once was a gated city, like Troy). Taxis and sleek black cars, billiard-ball-striped buses jostled us for space. On the sidewalks, men in suits, women in designer outfits carried fancy ruffled umbrellas to shade their faces from the sun. How could this be? My teachers always said that Korea, despite parts of it being gussied up for the Olympics, was a poor country, one where people only had small fistfuls of rice to eat, where they ate dogs and cats.

And what about Nana, goading Amanda and me into eating mushy Brussels sprouts?

"Remember the starving children in KOREA."

Or had it been, "Remember the starving children in INDIA"? Both?

A multistory Pizza Hut whizzed by.

The driver shot through a majestic stone arch that said CHOSUN UNIVERSITY chiseled in English, somehow managing not to run down any of the students placed like obstacles in the street. We passed Gothic stone buildings, drove through what looked like a miniature forest, looped up a long driveway, then came to a stop in front of a building that looked like a Howard Johnson's: efficient, cagelike.

INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS RESIDENCE, it said, in English.

The driver dug some wax out of his ears with a pinkie, pointed at the meter with that same digit. [??] 23,000.

Then he left me there. I made my way into the International Students Residence, my luggage wheels squeaking and echoing in what I feared was a dark and empty building.

* * *

It had seemed, on the face of it, a clever plan to arrive a few days before the Motherland Program officially started (March 1, also the beginning of the Korean school year). The brochure had said the Residence would be open as much as five days before. But I was, indeed, the lone occupant of that dank building, save for the five-foot watchman who skulked around the halls like some Asian Quasimodo. From time to time, he experimentally lobbed some Korean my way, then muttered something like aiiieesshh when I didn't reply.

It hadn't occurred to me that most of my program-mates were already here in Korea, some had even come a full month early. But unlike me, they had Korean parents who had molded their young bodies with Korean hands, so that their hearts had a space for this place. They knew how to bow correctly, the polite way to receive a gift. They also had relatives who took them in, gave them comfortable places to sleep, and filled their plates at every opportunity.

I had gone a small ways into the neighborhood beyond the school's back gate searching for food. But each time, confronted with the sprawling signs, the hard, sticklike letters, my courage failed me. The days ticked off, one by one, until the third day had passed with nothing to eat but a single bag of airline peanuts.

By then, I even found myself longing for the baggie of tollhouse cookies that Christine had forced on me at the last minute, that I had left on top of a garbage bin at Kimp'o Airport. At the time it had been a kind of adolescent exuberance-I'm an ocean away from Christine! But now, dammit, I was hungry. I didn't want to admit that maybe Christine was right, that having never been in a foreign country before (unless you want to count fishing in Canada), I was ill-prepared to be here in Seoul. Korea is a Third-World country. Everything over there is very different than what you're used to here.

"Mwoy yah?!" the crone screamed.

I had approached her, and her wooden cart displaying some kind of golden steamed bread, on tiptoes. She was squatting next to the cart, leaning against one of its battered wheels, eyes closed. I stared at her face, fissured with wrinkles. Her hair, thinning, greasy, shrimp-gray, was pulled back into a tight bun that looked like it was made out of wire.

She opened her eyes with an almost audible snap, as if she had always known I was there. Startled, I did what I always do when I'm nervous: I made a fist and chewed on my thumb as it poked out, I've-got-your-nose fashion, between my fingers.

"Yah!" she screamed again, her thin eyebrows converging like birds.

My head, bulbous and light above my body. The bread seemed a brighter yellow, as if lit from within.

"I'd like to buy some," I said loudly, motioning with my fisted thumb.

"Mussen sori yah?" The woman leaped to her feet and began to slap the air around her as if she were fighting off a sudden swarm of gnats.

"Ga, Ga-GA!" she yelled, dancing.

Some passersby-students in primary-color track suits, housewives carrying plasticized shopping bags stuffed with giant leeks-stopped to titter benevolently.

"A-me-ri-ca, nambah wang," said one of the track suits.

"You like-u practice Ing-leesh with Korean mans?" queried his friend. His sweatshirt said CHOSUN UNIVERSITY in English over what looked like the Cadillac crest. LUX ET VERITAS.

"Na-GA!" the crone screeched again, now waving a rusty cleaver.

I considered grabbing a hunk of the bread and running like hell. But no, too Dickensian. Something a street urchin, a desperate orphan would do.

I walked back the way I'd come, smelling the strange, smoky air, noting a heavy blue sky that looked close enough to touch. I could scarcely believe it, that this place existed, and I was here.

SARAH Seoul 1993

"Neh is the word for yes," said our teacher, Choi Sunsengnim.

She made us go down the row, the five of us, repeating.

"Neh."

"Neh."

"Neh."

"Again, please," she said, when she got to me.

"Neigh," I repeated.

"Again."

"Neigh."

"Again."

"Neigh."

She stopped, flustered.

I have always had an affinity for languages. When I was ten and went to the weeklong Concordia Language Village, I learned Spanish so fast, Christine went around telling everyone I was going to be a simultaneous translator for the U.N. someday.

I had planned to pick up Korean just as quickly, and then leave the Motherland Program to strike off on my own. But this wasn't some camp in the north woods of Minnesota. And Korean wasn't Spanish.

I was at the bottom of eight levels at the Chosun University Elite Academic World Language Institute. Our class was referred to as ill-gup, as if we were sick. At the placement test, someone handed me a sheet of paper containing only the broken-stick Korean letters, not even anything as basic and familiar as NAME -. When the teacher saw my befuddled face, she said something to me in Korean. Then louder. When it dawned on her that I didn't understand a single word she was saying, she announced in a braying and modular English that anyone who knew absolutely no Korean should report to the ill-gup room on the first floor.

I found myself in a cramped room, a chilly breeze seeping through a cracked window patched half-heartedly with duct tape. The floor was unspeakably grimy, the blackboard had its corner cracked off.

Eventually, two Korean-looking guys, one squat and thick-necked, the other better looking and wearing a Princeton sweatshirt, walked in. Then, a pretty, willowy Korean-looking girl appeared. I thought I was imagining it, but the three of them began speaking to each other in Korean.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Somebody's Daughterby Marie Myung-Ok Lee Copyright © 2005 by Marie Myung-Ok Lee. Excerpted by permission.
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