Somebody’s Daughter

“Goddam pompous ofﬁcials,” someone muttered, as the crowd pressed closer. The two men in shiny Western-style suits seemed not to hear. With each hand’s-width of the paper they exposed, a shout of joy or a sob of disappointment could be heard. The two men with fancily oiled hair kept to their own rhythm, neither speeding up nor slowing down for the hundreds of names.

For months before the exam, her mother had stayed up with her, every night, pinching the tails off soy sprouts or sewing up the covers on the just-washed sleeping pads. Whenever Kyung-sook’s head began to nod, her mother would bring her a bitter-smelling herbal elixir. Sometimes, she just pulled her daughter’s hair.

“A person who sleeps more than four hours a night has no hope of passing the entrance exam!” She oftentimes shouted this famous proverb in Kyung-sook’s ear.

The year before, a boy who had once been a beggar had achieved the highest scores on the entrance exam to Seoul National University, the best college in the land. Kyung-sook’s mother had taken it as an example that even if you started with nothing, with enough studying, one could accomplish everything.

Kyung-sook’s mother prayed every day. Once, she went up to the mountains and came back scratched and black-and-blue, with leaves and twigs caught in her hair. She mumbled that she had become possessed by a spirit while praying. Her husband quickly shushed her and brought her inside the house.

The spirit had told Kyung-sook’s mother to keep Kyung-sook from eating slippery things, especially seaweed soup, lest her mind “slip” on the exam, and every morning, a dish of the day’s ﬁrst pure water from the well needed to be placed outside the door to remind the gods to make Kyung-sook’s mind similarly lucid.

On the testing day, Kyung-sook’s mother had waited outside the school all day, counting out prayers on her Buddhist rosary with one hand, pressing pieces of taffy onto the bars of the school gate with the other.

“I went to the market and bought the best kind of yut they had to entice the benevolent spirits,” she recounted proudly to the neighbors.

Other mothers afﬁxed pieces of taffy on the gate, too, to help the answers “stick” in their children’s heads. But Kyung-sook’s mother was extra-vigilant and made sure that a piece of hers was always on top of everyone else’s.

Her mother went home and immediately prepared a thanksgiving offering to the Grandfather Spirit and to a special spirit she called The Lonely Saint.

“It is all arranged: we will be sending you to Seoul,” Kyung-sook’s father said.

“Yes, to live with your imo,” her mother conﬁrmed. “Imo has agreed to take you in. Now, don’t let her be ﬁlling your head with her absurd notions about Christo. Your job is to study as hard as you can so you can return as soon as possible and get married.”

“Of course,” her mother said, noting Kyung-sook’s puzzled look. “We need to marry you off. Having ‘college graduate’ on your side will put you in an entirely different class with the matchmaker, as it should, considering our lineage.”

Kyung-sook couldn’t question her elders, but she didn’t understand. Why bother to go to college when in the end it would all be the same again? The former beggar boy at Seoul National University would probably become an important judge, a member of Parliament. But what would happen to her—become someone’s wife and mother, no different from the most illiterate woman in the village? Why be shown all the wonders that lay beyond the ﬁelds of rice only to have to return as a country wife? It would be like showing a hungry child a sweet, then giving her a bowl of stones.

I will ﬁnd a way, Kyung-sook decided. I will become a famous musician—so famous that people will beg me to perform in front of important dignitaries, maybe even abroad. So famous that I will be able to support my parents in their old age.

The day Kyung-sook left, meager belongings stuffed in her travel bag, she walked stifﬂy and slowly.

Ah, my daughter is sad to leave her home village, Kyung-sook’s mother thought. It was just like in the sad song, “Arirang”: … before you walk ten li away from me, your foot will ache …

Kyung-sook bowed deeply to her parents before she boarded the train. In her bag were some clothes, a few new pairs of underwear, money for tuition and books.

Kyung-sook sat in her seat on the train, looked out the window at her parents, who waited, still as statues, as the train began to pull away.

They kept waiting, waiting, growing smaller and smaller until they were just two small shapes in the past.

Kyung-sook let her shoulders slouch a bit. From under her skirt she pulled out the ﬂute and sighed.

SARAH

The phone lines from Korea to America run from continent to continent. Through all those miles of dark ocean—how? Did a plane ﬂy its many hours, unspooling gossamer ﬁlament as it went? Did people have to work underwater, inch by laborious inch, in diving suits and anonymous masks? The cables certainly can’t be buried—the ocean would be much too deep in places for that. So does it just hang, a clothesline in Atlantis, draped with its seaweed laundry?

I considered this as I stood in front of the phone, contemplating how a phone call needed to be made. There were pay phones all over the Residence, but the lobby had a special one where you could just press the button of your carrier, AT&T, Sprint, MCI, and you would be connected to an international operator who would answer the phone in good old American English, hello?

All this time, there had been a reason. Some small piece of my brain had scavenged this truth, doggedly preserved it, perhaps sent it wraithlike into my subconscious: your Korean mother is still on this earth.

That’s why for all those years I had refused, on pain of death, to say I-love-you to anyone, least of all Christine and Ken. It had been diagnosed as abnormal, a sickness, a “bonding disorder,” “attachment disorder,” by their hired guns: psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers. Normal kids tell their parents they love them, they said. My failure to meant there was something wrong with me.

No divine destiny, no master plan. Not even a heavenly homicide to explain things. Only a conspiracy of adults bending my hapless life into a mold of their own pleasing.

Now that I know the truth, I must tell them, Christine and Ken, have them know that I know. Catch them ﬂat-footed, and see what their pathetic excuses are.

The air had grown uncomfortably warm in the booth, there was a line, three people long, the ﬁrst person tapping her foot impatiently.

I pushed open the folding doors and stepped out, gasping, as the other girl stepped in. She didn’t shut the door, probably to clear the funky air. As I walked away I heard her tell the operator the number, and seconds later, she said, “Hello, Mommy, Umma? Na ya,” in a voice that broke my heart.

I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of this earlier: I would ﬁnd her ﬁrst. When I called Ken and Christine, I would push the receiver toward her, urge her to speak.

We can’t understand a thing this woman is saying, Christine would complain. She must be speaking in Korean.

That’s my mother, I would tell them. I found my mother here in Korea. A living ghost.

SARAH

“Don’t forget, this afternoon you start your elective classes,” Choi Sunsengnim reminded us.

I walked out with Doug, then remembered. I sent him on to the Rainbow, went back into the school. Choi Sunsengnim was sitting at her desk in front of a styrofoam takeout container of kimbap—American cheese, SPAM, Korean pickles, and rice wrapped into seaweed rolls that she was poking with a toothpick. She was going to teach the advanced newspaper-reading class in the afternoon.

“There are not enough students who have an interest. You should choose between tae kwon do, ceramics, and traditional music.”

I sighed. I didn’t have any particular interest in any of these. All I knew was that Bernie Lee was taking tae kwon do, so I told Sunsengnim I’d take music.

“I think you will learn a lot,” she said, and she instructed me to show up at the rec room of the Residence at one o’clock.

“However,” she went on. “I have regrets that there aren’t enough students for the parum class.”

KYUNG-SOOK

Arriving at her imo’s, Kyung-sook realized that if you wanted to live in Seoul, you had to learn how to make yourself small. The city was all buildings and people and roads packed together, especially in this rundown section of the city by the old Japanese neighborhood. Imo lived in the room in the back of her store, Arirang. In this one room sat a butane burner, a one-person rice table, bedding folded in the corner. A single pot and a stirring spoon hung from nails on the wall. Imo owned only two pants-and-blouse outﬁts, one she was wearing, the other soaking in a bucket, waiting to be washed.

What took up the most room was another low table on which sat a picture of a bearded whiteman with long yellow hair—Yesu Christo—and a string of magic Christo beads that Imo would stroke long into the night, her body swaying, rocking, sometimes crying as she did so.

During the day, Imo sat on a worn cushion behind the store’s small counter, reading her red-covered Christo book, the gilt long worn off by her faithful ﬁngers. At night, she ate the barest meal of rice and kimchi behind the rice-paper door—but she was ever willing to slide it open and tend to anyone who came in saying, “Anybody here?” A few cents gained from some gum or soap powder would mean a few more cents for the church’s coffer, no matter what it meant to Kyung-sook’s sleep.

As Kyung-sook’s mother had predicted, Imo immediately nagged Kyung-sook to abandon Korean gods and follow Christo. An unusually bright look passed through Imo’s face as she explained how this man Christo was a king, so powerful that even after he was executed, he came back to life and was waiting for his followers in Heaven.

Kyung-sook wondered why the white people would want to kill their god in the ﬁrst place, as she fought drowsiness to listen to Imo. Finally, a customer banged on the door. While Imo tended to him, Kyung-sook snuggled deeper into the bedcovers hoping for some sleep until the next interruption.

SARAH

“I thought Choi Sunseng wanted you to take pronunciation,” Jeannie said when she saw me enter the rec room. I noted how she’d cheekily left off the honoriﬁc “nim” in Sunsengnim.

“Hello, class,” she said in a barely accented English. Her name was Tae Sunsengnim, our music teacher.

“I’m a graduate student here at Chosun,” she said. “I went to the conservatory at Oberlin College for violin, but then I decided I wanted to study Korean folk music instead.”

She unzipped some nylon bags and took out an hourglass-shaped drum, a tom-tom-shaped drum, a mini-gong the size of a saucepan lid, and a wooden ﬂute.

“This is the changgo,” she said, holding up the hourglass-shaped drum. “It’s a staple for farmers’ music and p’ansori.

“This is the puk, the barrel drum, two striking surfaces. You can hold it like this, or strap it on.

“This gong is the kaenguri. The kaenguri player sets the rhythm for the others.”

“This is a taegum, the Korean transverse ﬂute. Six ﬁnger holes, a membrane hole for the vibrato, the seventh hole just for show.”

“Ceremonial value, for Ch’ilsong, the Seven-Star Goddess,” Tae Sunsengnim said, as if she were a bored docent in a museum.

She spent the rest of the time scribbling music on the blackboard and teaching us rhythm patterns that we tapped out, ta-ta-ta-tta-tta-tta, with pencils. I knew nothing about notes or bars or measures or rests, while all the other students seemed to be mini Yo-Yo Mas. So intent on following the music, at least, that they seemed not to notice, or care, how lost I was.

SARAH

Jeannie’s voice ﬂoated down the hall, yobosayo? When she spoke Korean, her voice turned soft, lilting, so feminine that she suddenly became a courtesan in a long-ago Korean kingdom, not the girl who had screeched expletives at Bernie.

“Sarah? It’s the Stamp ajuhshi downstairs. He said there’s an international call for you.”

The Stamp ajuhshi handed me the receiver of the phone at the watchman’s station. It was heavy, like a dumbbell, and smelled of hair oil.

“You know, Daddy and I have been trying to call you forever, but the person who answers the phone doesn’t speak any English. We haven’t known what to do for weeks!

“So this time, I just kept saying, ‘Sarah Thorson, U.S.A., Sarah Thorson, U.S.A.,’ and I guess we got through.”

“No, your father’s working late at the ofﬁce. So are you okay, how is everything?”

“Are your accommodations okay? Are you ﬁnding things to eat? Do you need me to send you any more snacks?”

“Everything’s ﬁne,” I said. “In fact, food here is cheaper than in the States—a chunwon can buy you ramen, a whole tin of mok kehndi.”

“We’ve been so worried about you, sweetie. We didn’t even know if you’d gotten there okay.”

“My Korean birth parents—” I said, half statement, half question. I thought I heard her suck in her breath. This wasn’t the right time to let it slip, I had to hold back. But the questions still came.

“So if it was in the ﬁle, did they have the names of my biological parents, or any relatives?”

“I don’t think so. When a child is given up for adoption in Korea, parents—even dead ones—relinquish all rights. So they don’t keep a record of these things.”

“Sarah, I just wanted to call to see how you’re doing over there, not get the third degree. I’ll look for your paperwork—but I’m not sure we still have it.”

“It’s okay. I love hearing your voice. Are you sure there’s nothing else I can send?”

An “awk!” in the background. Hubert the macaw must be on Christine’s shoulder. His feathers would be glinting red like a new paint job on a sports car. I pictured his beak, two cashews coming together, gently nipping Christine’s ear.

The Stamp ajuhshi, leaning back into his ﬂimsy chair, staring dreamily at a package plastered with about twenty “love” stamps, jerked his head up at the sound of the receiver crashing down on the battered body of the black phone.

KYUNG-SOOK

Maybe none of that tragedy would have happened if she had never left school. But Kyung-sook couldn’t ever know for sure. In life, it was impossible to spin out all the possibilities.

She thought of the case of Pumpkin Grandmother. Her parents had been very poor, so they had sent her as a child to a house in River Circle Village. She went as a minmyunuri, a future daughter-in-law who would grow up in the household as a servant. Pumpkin Grandmother missed her family terribly and the house’s owners worked her to the bone and made her sleep in the stable with the animals. But the worst indignity was to come years later: being married to the youngest son, the one with the gaping cleft palate and an even uglier temper. The ﬁrst night after her hair was put up in a married-woman’s knot, he ﬁlled up on wine and tore off her clothes—she was only thirteen.

After he blacked out from the cheap rice-alcohol drink, she jerked her clothes back on and ﬂed. She had no bribe for the ferryman, but the man said he would take her across the river for free.

But it turned out the man was also an agent for the Japanese, one who earned a bounty for each young girl he kidnapped. Instead of ferrying her across the river, he took her to the local police station, where she was beaten senseless, thrown into a truck, and shipped to Manchuria where she was raped night and day by the barbaric Japanese soldiers. After the Japanese lost the war, they abandoned the “comfort station,” and she had to make the slow, agonizing journey back to Korea on foot.

“If only I had stayed that night with my husband, as bad as he was,” she sighed to anyone who would listen. “I probably would have had many children to comfort me in my old age.”

Now she was an old woman with a useless arm from being broken so many times. At the bathhouse, one could see poxlike burn scars covering her back. Too ashamed to return to her own village, she had settled in Enduring Pine Village, where, without family to help her, she eked out her living by selling the pumpkins that grew on the roof of her small hovel.

Kyung-sook wondered what other course her own life might have taken had she not left school—would she have become a teacher in the village? But she had been bored by the classes. And her professors were aloof, her classmates snippy girls from Seoul who spent hours in beauty salons getting their hair permed and marcelled, the acrid smell of their wormlike hair sickening her.

Kyung-sook had wanted to talk about music, about her dreams of playing a san-jo in front of hundreds of attentive people. But no, these girls, intent on achieving the newest “beehive” hairstyle and little else, snubbed Kyung-sook, especially once they heard her country accent. One senior girl whose father was an important government ofﬁcial claimed that she could smell manure on Kyung-sook, and she called out “Hey pigshit!” whenever she saw Kyung-sook coming.

SARAH

We had been divided into four groups. Our group: another girl named Jeannie, a guy named Kevin.

Up close I saw the instrument was made of bamboo, its joints swollen and awkward, like an old person’s arthritic ﬁngers. Tae Sunsengnim had randomly handed the instrument to me, but the Other Jeannie reached past my open hands and grabbed it.

“This isn’t like any ﬂute I’ve ever played,” she declared, after blowing out a ﬂat whoooooo of a dysenteric owl.

Around us, whump-whumps of the drums, brittle chang-chang-changs of the gong: crazed, shrill noises of some kind of orchestra in hell.

“We can’t all play the instruments at once.” She walked to the group with the hourglass drum.

“I’m going to play a san-jo, a solo piece in the improvisational style,” she said, in her bored docent voice.

My scalp prickled. It was as if some physical presence had wrenched me off the ﬂoor, sending me ﬂoating toward this odd music, almost atonal yet unsettlingly beautiful. The notes dug straight for the marrow of my bones.

Tae Sunsengnim rolled the ﬂute a degree away from her mouth, put more of her ﬁngers on the holes, and the notes climbed higher, higher.

She continued up the unorthodox scale until the notes teetered maddeningly on the edge of disappearing, like the exquisite urge to sneeze.

“Ugh, that sounds like the beginning of a kung fu movie,” the Other Jeannie commented. When Tae Sunsengnim handed the ﬂute back to her, she passed it off to Kevin.

“Taegum,” Tae Sunsengnim said. “Don’t just sit there,” she told Kevin, pushing his ﬁngers onto the holes.

He blew, emanating a mufﬂed, diluted whine. He whoofed again, and again. The ﬂute began tipping to and fro as if he were playing on a pitching ship. Tae Sunsengnim made a face when he returned the instrument, an elastic cord of spittle stretching out between them.

The bamboo was thick, heavy-looking, but when I put the mouthpiece to my mouth, my arms felt like they were going to ﬂy away with the taegum.

“Rest it on your left shoulder.” Tae Sunsengnim roughly pushed on my shoulder to form a vise. “Reach around with your arms and cover the holes with your ﬁngers.”

My ﬁngers, nail beds ﬂat as spades, ﬁt perfectly on the holes. Tae Sunsengnim nodded approvingly when she saw this.

“So remember, it’s not a ttu-ttu blow like for a Western ﬂute,” Tae Sunsengnim said, then added with disgust, “that’s spitting. For the taegum you make your breath a breeze that ﬂows through the instrument. You manipulate this breeze with your ﬁngers.”

The breeze of my breath ﬂowed through the instrument—then out of it, making nary a sound.

I blew. And blew and blew and blew. The air continued to ﬂow out tracelessly, the same disconcerting feeling when you ﬁrst learn to snorkel: you expect to feel the resistance of the water as you exhale, but there is none, so you try again, harder, harder, until you hyperventilate, the air in your lungs scrabbling for traction.

I started to feel dizzy, as if I were breathing nitrous oxide through this wooden tube. No sound. In desperation, I even resorted to ttu-ttu spitting. That did nothing, except make the mouthpiece wet and slimy.

SARAH

I hope you are passing time well. What’s shaking? I am sorry I do not have my dictionery with me right now so I will create many mistakes. I hope you will forgive.

I like Camp Ozark and my soldiers friends. We have started joint exersizes. This is ﬁrst time I meet the blacks. One guy here wears this net on his hair when he sleeps at night. He is a funny guy, always making jokes.

But American guys are not always liking about meeting Korean. Some of them like tae kwon do, but most are not too interested in Korea and of course none of them can speak any Korean like you can. Not even anyonghaseo. The American guys, they are not so joyful toward fraternizing with Korean, so I am not practicing my English as much as I liked, not even as much as when I used to meet with you.

I also have a question for my English. Some guys will be using this word, fagot. My dictionary says it is a word meaning ‘bundle of sticks.’ When I ask the American commander, he (she?) says she (he?) is not telling me what this word is going to mean. Is this something of American slang? Please explain when you write me the next letter.

I hope your Korean studying is going well and that you are passing your time enjoyably.

Postscript: American guys here call me “Jim.” You can call me that, too, if you like.

“How come I never see you on Sundays?” I asked Doug, over noodles at the Rainbow. “Does a little chauffeur guy come whisk you away, like he does for Bernie Lee?”

“Yeah, ghosts. Not kwisin, those ﬂour-faced Korean ghosts, but ghosts of the living.”

“Different places. But mostly the Yongsan Eighth Army Base. I have a friend I visit, and he lets me go ghost hunting.”

He shrugged again. “Fried food. I don’t know. It just smells like a place.”

Doug was slipping away again. Sometimes when we talked, I’d inadvertently say a word, make a joke about some experience we’d shared, and then all of a sudden, his face would blank out, and I could see him descending into some kind of toxic hell of memory. There was no telling what would trigger these moods, or what could be done to dispel them.

“I went bowling once, with my dad. They had a bowling alley in Libertytown. I thought it was so funny to be wearing shoes on those pristine wooden ﬂoors—and someone else’s shoes.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Dad would bring Mom stuff from the PX. American pancake makeup, some brand the Korean ladies were all nuts about—Cody? Nylon stockings, peanut butter, Marlboros—she loved to smoke—Johnny Walker Red. She used the whiskey as a bribe for me to get into a local school. If being mixed-blood wasn’t bad enough, Hank technically wasn’t my dad then.”

I held my breath, waiting to see if he’d offer me any more of himself, his history. “For a few years, it was pretty good. They loved each other. Dad was this Polish-Irish punk who’d grown up in a tough black neighborhood in Queens. He decided to change his last name—Osciewicz to Henderson—and go into the army before he ended up in jail. And you know what my mom was. Not exactly Romeo and Juliet, those two. More like Bonnie and Clyde. She also married him because she knew we needed a ticket out of there, she didn’t want me growing up in Libertytown. But being back here in Korea, it’s making me remember, one by one, all the terrible things he did to her. I think if I ran into that bastard on the street, I’d kill him.”

He sighed. “You know, I’ve actually been thinking that I want to go back there. Just to see what’s there, what’s changed.”

“Why,” he said, “do you want to go so badly? Are you thinking this is somehow going to help you with your own little identity search? If so, I doubt it. You’re from a Seoul family. Your mother died in a car accident and with your father. Two decades ago, only upper-class people had cars in Korea. Going to the place where I grew up has got to be the farthest place to search for anything about your birth family.”

“I just want to go,” I shrugged. “I’m offering to keep you company, that’s all.”

“We’ll see,” he said, ﬂipping his cigarette into his half-eaten bowl of noodles, where it extinguished with an extravagant hiss.

KYUNG-SOOK

The school refused to give her the tuition money back. Kyung-sook tried saying that her mother was sick and she needed the money for her hospital expenses, but the answer was still no.

Despite this setback, Kyung-sook decided she would still strike out on her own. There was no place for her to play her ﬂute at Imo’s. And Imo, between her harangues about Christo, would want to know what she had learned about pedagogy, and it was becoming harder and harder for Kyung-sook to make things up. That night, Kyung-sook bundled her things up when Imo was sleeping, and she set out, as usual, the next morning, as if going to school.

A job would be easy to come by for a hard worker such as herself, she thought, as she headed toward the city’s center.

In the neighborhood by the Myung-Dong cathedral, she stopped in a Korean dress store that had a headless mannequin wearing a hanbok out front. She politely inquired about a job as a shop-girl. The owner shook her head.

She stopped next at a bookstore, the Chosun, named promisingly after one of the great old dynasties of Korea.

“I’m a hard worker,” she told the owner, who was sitting amidst a pile of yellowed books, some with the covers torn off. A musty-pleasant smell, like snifﬁng in the corner of an antique chest, pervaded the entire place.

“I’m a college student and I know my han-mun Chinese characters well,” she added. “I could help you with cataloging your titles.”

“No one wants to read the classic texts anymore,” he said, as if talking to a third person in the room. “You used to need to know a thousand han-mun characters just to read a newspaper decently. Now we have to carry those things—”

He gestured toward a stack of cheaply bound books by the door. Goodbye, Weapons, it said in Korean, written by someone named Ehl-nest Hae-ming-wae.

“—and I can barely make my key money even carrying those. The newest Western translations are what people want to read.”

Kyung-sook decided she wouldn’t want to listen to the man complain all day, anyway. She liked books, but she could do almost anything.

She went into the one that said live fashion in English. A few store signs here and there appeared this way, so she was glad she had learned her English letters in school.

The ﬁrst thing she noticed when she entered was how clean and uncluttered the store was, not like a Korean dress shop. There were only a few dresses displayed, not packed as many to a rack as possible. There was soft Western music playing in the background, a tune so engaging, it would make you want to hum.

Kyung-sook was shocked at the saleswoman’s tone, her use of the intimate style of Korean.

“You obviously can’t afford these clothes.” The woman set her jaw. “Please leave—we can’t abide loiterers. And man-chi-jima!—don’t touch!”

Kyung-sook tried to shake off her disappointment as she left, walking past all the dress shops. Their hard, glass façades all seemed to shout at her, “Don’t touch!”

She wandered down an alley. It was a thread-alley, winding around and around until she found herself in an older section, not unlike Imo’s neighborhood, where the houses had cracked roof tiles and red chili peppers or squash slices drying on straw mats right out in the dusty street.

After Kyung-sook had passed the same street a few times, a well-dressed woman who had been watching her wander about, suddenly stepped from the shadows of a doorway and approached her, asking her if she was looking for work.

She smiled. “I must be a fortuneteller, yes?” She said she was out seeking likely candidates for a position in her coffee shop as a “coffee lady.”

Kyung-sook was intrigued. This woman in her vivid green-and-pink hanbok seemed to be rising like a phoenix out of this drab neighborhood. How difﬁcult could work in a coffee shop be? She followed the woman down yet another thread-alley past Heavenly Real Estate and South Mountain Tailors, past a row of closed, gated homes, to the Spring Fragrance Coffee Shop. On the wooden door, a handlettered sign read “closed.”

The coffee ladies worked for tips, the woman said, ushering Kyung-sook into the one-room shop. A few round tables crowded haphazardly in a corner, some with their legs pointing toward the ceiling. On the walls hung some old-time Korean paintings and gourd dippers; an electric gramophone sat in the corner.

The proprietress brushed by Kyung-sook to retrieve a pitcher that said “coffee.” She poured some brownish liquid into a china cup that had a handle on one side, like an ear, and as she set the cup in front of Kyung-sook, she gave off a powerful, but pleasant scent, like ﬂowers and ginger. Kyung-sook was excited: she had heard of coffee, but like most people in the village, had never had a chance to sample this exotic Western beverage.

The proprietress perched decorously on a stool, her shoulders forward, as well-bred ladies were taught to do.

“As I said, it’s just tips, but most of the enterprising ladies I employ earn quite a nice living,” she went on. And this was what most young women on their own in Seoul were looking to do, wasn’t it?

All the job entailed was getting men to buy cups of the house’s coffee. Each cup sold meant a few won for the coffee lady, but the real money came from the tips they received from their customers. Of course, if Kyung-sook was going to work there, the proprietress said, she might want to get a loan from her to go out and buy some jazzier clothes, and some makeup.

“You could start this very afternoon if you like,” she offered. “I’ll put your clothes and makeup on your tab.”

“But why,” she wanted to know, “would the men pay tips for coffee?” She was disappointed to ﬁnd that the coffee tasted like brine-water, nothing special at all.

“Don’t be coy,” the woman said impatiently. “Do you think men come into these places to overpay for coffee that’s mostly burnt barley? The smart regulars skip the coffee and just get their feel before they have to go back to work.”

“Where in the world are you from?” The proprietress’s face suddenly bent into an unbecoming sneer. “Hm, I should have known from your country-clod accent and awful clothes. This is a coffee shop, yes? Men come here to relax and have a nice conversation with a nice lady and feel her nice breasts, her titties, if you will. And no dating customers—we want steady customers, but not that steady.”

Kyung-sook’s mouth fell open, like a ﬁsh. She had never heard such language coming from the mouth of someone who spoke in such a respectable Seoul accent.

The woman was staring at her with cold eyes. Her lipstick looked as if she had spread red chili paste on her mouth.

Kyung-sook didn’t know what to do. She had a strange urge to cry out, “Mother!” Without thinking, she grabbed her bundle and ran for the door, wondering why she hadn’t noticed that although the shop was romantically named “Spring Fragrance,” all the windows were completely covered in black paper and the entrance was hidden several paces off the thoroughfare.

“Hey, you owe me ﬁfty won for that cup of coffee!” the woman roared, the intricate tasseled ornament on her silk jacket swinging wildly as she leaned out the doorway. “Come back here you devil-bitch! Thief!”

Kyung-sook ran and ran, veering up a different alley, then another, until she had run up the summit of a hill. There, she stopped, panting. Was anyone pursuing her?

She was in front of a decrepit dumpling shop in an alley that smelled of old grease and bean curds. In the hills a short distance beyond lay a shantytown. Amidst the mud shacks were a few opulent creations made of cardboard and ﬂattened soda cans that glittered in the light, the cans no doubt scavenged somehow from the Yankee army base.

NOODLES + DUMPLINGS said the crudely handpainted sign propped outside the door of the shop.

A toadlike woman emerged and dumped some gray water into the dirt. Kyung-sook glanced over her shoulder, quietly asked the woman if, perhaps, they needed a serving girl.

“C’mon in—our regular girl ran off with some fuckin’ bastard hoodlum this very morning.” The woman identiﬁed herself as both the cook and the owner of the establishment. In her accent, a North Korean dialect was still perceptible.

Kyung-sook followed the woman into the restaurant, throwing one last, worried glance over her shoulder. She certainly hoped the coffee-shop owner had given up on her pursuit.

“Hm, but you sure you can do this work?” The cook-owner stopped to scrutinize Kyung-sook, reached out a water-wrinkled ﬁnger and poked her, as if testing a ﬁsh for freshness. “You look a little frail, your hands look like the hands of a schoolgirl.”

“I am a girl from the country,” she reassured her, exaggerating her country accent a little. “I have spent many seasons planting rice.” Her hands had stayed soft and white because for the last year she had mostly studied while her mother’s hands were exposed to the sun and wind and water.

“I admit, I went to high school,” she told the cook-owner. “But I am also a hard worker.”

“All right, Professor. We’ll soon enough see what strength you’ve got in those limbs.”

She motioned for Kyung-sook to follow her into the back room where she returned to a basin of uncooked rice on the ﬂoor. She squatted next to the bowl, a rosary of farts trailing out from between her thick thighs. Kyung-sook immediately bent down and helped her clean the rice, picking out pebbles, bits of straw, small black rice bugs, a few mouse droppings. The cook-owner poured a pitcher of water into the rice, swirling it around with her hand. The water became cloudy as the powdery talc rose to the top, her hand disappeared into the grains of rice the way Kyung-sook’s feet used to disappear into the mud of the rice ﬁeld.

When the water ﬁnally ran clear, the cook-owner rose and dumped the whole load of wet rice into the iron cooker.

Then she handed Kyung-sook a tray ﬁlled with heavy stone bowls. “Get ready to sling some fuckin’ dumpling soup!” she yelled, her hot breath ﬁlling the air like boiling soy sauce.

By the end of the day, Kyung-sook couldn’t even lift her hand to scratch her nose, her arms hung like weights. As the cook-owner banged the restaurant’s sliding doors shut, Kyung-sook approached her and shyly asked her if she might have a place to stay, perhaps in the back of the restaurant.

“Great, I get rid of one headache and I promptly get another, curse you fuckin’ gods and ancestors!”

“I’ll have to sleep out on the street if you don’t let me stay here in the restaurant.”

“The police will arrest you if they ﬁnd you on the street after curfew, especially these days—don’t you know anything?” the cook-owner said irritably. She glanced at Kyung-sook’s ﬁngers, bruised from banging on the serving trays.

From the look on the cook-owner’s face, Kyung-sook knew that no one had ever addressed her by such a respectful title before.

“Well, lessee. On the other hand, I suppose if you slept in the storage space, you might drive the mice out.”

In the closet in the very back of the restaurant, there was barely enough room to unroll a sleeping mat amid the bags of rice and ﬂour and rock salt, but this was exactly the kind of thing Kyung-sook was hoping to ﬁnd. It was quiet, and she could play her ﬂute as much as she wanted. During the day she could palm a few dumplings or ﬁngerfuls of rice when the cook-owner wasn’t looking, perhaps take a few spoonfuls of anchovy broth off the tops of customers’ soups, and thus save up for her career.

That night as she lay down in her new space, Kyung-sook found a needle of regret working its way into her heart. She was troubled by thoughts of her imo: she had spent weeks eating her imo’s paltry food, sharing her threadbare bedding, and she had left her without a word of thanks, only a note saying she had returned to the village.

Perhaps if she had gotten to know her imo better, she could have explained to her about her plans and dreams, her hopes of becoming a famous musician. Maybe Imo, who had herself gone away from the village in order to pursue her destiny, would understand. Kyung-sook ﬁngered her ﬂute. She loved the way the wood warmed under her hand, until the instrument was like a living thing unto itself. She consoled herself with the thought she would indeed see her imo again someday. But right now, she had her year laid out before her, like empty bowls waiting to be ﬁlled.

SARAH

I looked to his face to see if an invitation was there. His eyes had that curious, blank look like those abandoned houses with boarded-up windows.

“Clever idea, going to him. Someone already in the army.” I kept my voice noncommittal.

“He gave me this—and some other stuff.” Doug showed me a military ID. His friend had blond hair. And glasses.

“The best cover for you would be pretending to be my prostitute girlfriend.”

I just needed to ignore the irony, I decided, treat this more like Halloween. Doug was right, of course: a Korean girl from a suburb of Minneapolis was going to be a lot harder to explain than a Korean ho from a nearby village. From my wardrobe I fetched a skirt whose waistband I could hike up, plus a CALVIN KLEEN tank top, purchased from a street vendor.

The bus seats were capped with white covers, like dentist’s chairs. People continued to clamber on and on. The combined exhalations of the passengers swirled a reek of digested kimchi into the air. A stumpy ajuhma boarded the bus carrying a bunch of dried squid impaled on a wooden pole. The squid were football-sized, squashed ﬂat enough to fold and mail. A dozen hands extended chunwons, and soon there was a stuffy, ﬁshy smell added to everything else, even as the loop of a recording told us in a breathy woman’s voice (as Doug translated):

For the comfort of your fellow passengers, please do not bring strong-smelling food on the bus.

The bus lumbered into the street like a large animal waking. I pressed my face against the window. The Seoul bus station, not unlike the bus station in Minneapolis, was situated in a not-so-nice neighborhood. My eyes took in the buckling tin-roofed shops, people squatting in the shade of the few urban trees, slices of zucchini drying on rooftops, thousand-year-old men with wispy snow-capped beards spitting into the gutter.

This was the real Korea, devoid of white people, or even Korean Americans like Bernie Lee. She could very well be out here, I thought, in front of my face.

After unsnarling ourselves from Seoul trafﬁc, almost like a dream, we were on the highway, open spaces rolling out before us. A few tiny shacks dotted the landscape, as if planted there by the hands of giants, but it was mostly rice ﬁelds. The fortresslike mountains around Seoul gave way to gentle hills, rock peaks softening to the shape of a woman lying on her side.

I turned from the window to say something to Doug, but he was asleep, oblivious to the roar of the bus’s engine, the gay chatter in the seats around us. He seemed to be lost in that magical deep-sleep of childhood.

I rooted in the 7-Eleven bag, pulled out a crunky chocolate bar, a cartoon of a smiling, big-lipped African with a bone through his nose on the wrapper. I wished I could nap, too, but I’ve never been able to. I’m not a good sleeper at night, either.

Back when I shared a room with Amanda, I always marveled at her ability to drop off to sleep the minute her head hit the pillow.

On TV commercials for Nytol, the wild-eyed insomniac was always a man or a lady, never a child. Children always slept peacefully, effortlessly. Some nights I managed to push myself down into a shallow dozing, barely skimming the tops of my dreams. But what I yearned for was to tumble into a thicket of logy black sleep, the kind where Amanda would sigh and giggle and snore and fart with abandon.

So while Amanda snuggled safe and secure at the foot of the Thorson family tree, I stared into the blackness for hours until I swear I could see atom particles bouncing to and fro.

Why am I I? I wondered, over and over, a ﬁst of unease knuckling my stomach.

Until the morning light, when it was time to get up, wash, don the Fabulous Sarah Thorson face. At least during the day I had a role to play, and I knew the lines. At night, it was all chaos. Especially after I turned thirteen and started having The Dream, the one with her in it. After that, I wanted to sleep, and sleep deep, more than ever. This desperation, of course, kept me awake, a water-stiffened rope that kept me ﬁrmly moored on this side of consciousness.

We were approaching a town. Motorcyclists clad in plastic slippers passed us on the shoulder, stacks of toilet paper rolls on the back of their bikes towering over them like cresting waves. Power Bongo pickups, the size of riding lawn mowers, transported even more magniﬁcent loads of cabbages, TVs, bed frames, and cardboard boxes held to the back by faith and straining black bungee cords.

I was wondering if I was going to have to wake Doug, but his eyes snapped open when the driver called our stop. He leaned over me and gazed out the window at the same scenes, in the dying light. If we stayed on the bus, we could go all the way up to the mountain seacoast resort of Sorak-san, which, by some whim of geography, was situated slightly north of the thirty-eighth parallel and therefore technically in North Korea. I guess that most of the Diamond Mountains, a chain of peaks that were sacred to Koreans, were in North Korea, but this tail end had somehow been left in the South, and the South Koreans had developed it as a national park. Jeannie had been there and described it as incredibly touristy—souvenir and ice-cream vendors no matter how high up the mountain you climbed—but also vaguely ominous, with heavily armed soldiers patrolling the fenced-off beaches, the tall machine-gun-equipped towers from which grim soldiers watched the expanse of sea for telltale traces of an encroaching North Korean submarine.

As we made our way up the aisle, there was an anonymous mutter of contempt that seemed to be aimed at Doug, his green uniform, his father’s face. But he didn’t respond.

In the bus station’s bathroom, I exchanged my sneakers for heels, rolled the waistband of my skirt until I felt it swishing my thighs. Then I troweled on some makeup, although in the dim one-bulb light, I wasn’t sure how accurate my painting was.

Doug donned some horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like Clark Kent. He pulled the cap tight over his hair.

“Nice,” he said, looking at me, his eyes lingering a moment longer than usual. He stashed our civilian stuff behind a bench.

A lone taxi idled outside the bus station. The driver, back slumped against the door as if the car were a giant Barcalounger, fuzzily paged through a newspaper as high-pitched Korean folk music squeed through his radio. Doug leaned in the window, told him in English we were going to Libertytown.

The man turned to look at us. His gaze stopped on my bare, knobby knees. He spat, then gave us the universal “hop in” sign, a backward nod of the head.

Five minutes later he dropped us off in front of a compound, stone fence topped with razor wire. He opened his palm for a twenty-dollar fare, shrugged about his broken meter. The arch on the gate read WELCOME TO LIBERTYTOWN.

“Riberteeton,” the driver cackled. He cracked open the door, as if to accompany us, but then I heard a faint trickling sound and realized he was peeing.

A Korean guy with an armband that said MP guarded the entrance. Doug saluted smartly and said some things about name and rank in plain English that somehow made him sound dumb.

The guard narrowed his eyes when he looked at me. I tried to smile back coyly. He barely glanced at Doug’s I.D. and waved us on through.

As Suzy Bargirl, I tried not to gawk as we walked into the compound. Drunk GIs, red-white-and-blue faces, Nike T-shirts and Levi’s jeans, stumbled in and out of neon-lit clubs with names like THE ALAMO, LAS VEGAS STYLE, HUBBA HUBBA, CHERRY’S. Farther inland, an electric sign rose above the low buildings, a familiar-looking red-pigtailed cartoon-girl’s face aglow. Wendy’s.

This was America, yet it wasn’t. The gentle hills of the countryside weren’t the same, the far-off smells of cooking ﬁres made the place smell like Korea. Libertytown was a foreign version of America, a U.S.-land that they might have at an offshore amusement park.

“Which one’s where your mother worked?” I wasn’t supposed to speak English, but I couldn’t help it.

Doug shook his head violently, didn’t answer. He just tugged me along, a ﬁsh on a line. We headed down a dirt path, away from the lights, toward a row of corrugated tin houses.

I could see through their glassless windows: a bed, a mirror, maybe a dresser, and usually a canvas army-issue duffel. A few of the occupants were home. Under the light from bare bulbs, the women primped, skirts so short they made my thigh-high mini look like a muu-muu.

I began to imagine Doug’s mother getting ready for work. The seducing followed by manipulating those pussy-whipped farmboys into raiding the PX for her so she could sell her goods on the black market for some extra cash. Doug, Du-sok, would be shooed away to play outside, or would cram himself into a far corner, shutting his ears to his mother’s love cries.

Stop! I wanted to slap myself. I had no right to construct Doug’s life out of whole cloth—as I did my own. I was the Korean princess, somehow abducted and sent out of the country by evil relatives. I was the treasured child of my mother, but she had died defending me from muggers. The car-accident story had never been enough, it was only a hurried, distracted mercy like the way they put stun guns to the heads of cows before they slaughter them. But now that I had kicked apart that ﬂimsily constructed lie, what was underneath was much, much worse.

Doug looked at me. He reached over and gently touched my ﬁngers, which had become numb and clenched around his arm. When I opened my ﬁst, I felt better. We started walking back the way we’d come.

From the shadows between two lean-tos, a grubby little kid emerged. He was playing with a pink plastic sliding whistle. On closer inspection, I saw it was a tampon applicator. He put it down for a second to dig in his pocket. He held out a ﬁstful of wilted Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit.

“You wanna gum, sol-jah?” he said. Doug gave him a few coins, left the gum. The boy shrugged and resumed playing with his “whistle.”

The streets were even more packed now: burly guys with no necks next to smooth-cheeked kids whose ears stuck out like dried apricots. Many had startlingly beautiful Korean women on their arms. When we passed another club called, not too subtly, AFRICA, I saw some Korean ladies who’d transformed their straight hair—somehow—into cottony Afros. Doug had told me that if a woman so much as accepted a single dance with a black soldier, that was it for her. She would have to start working the black clubs because white soldiers would reject her.

Doug pointed to HUBBA HUBBA, whose lights pulsed suggestively. I decided I was done with this place. It was time to go back to Chosun University. But how could I let Doug know this without blowing my cover? He wasn’t looking at me anyway, he was entering the club. I had no choice but to follow him.

Inside the hollowed-out building, a strange kind of pink lighting gave everyone a hideous, irradiated glow. On the dance ﬂoor, a few tease-haired Korean women were slowly gyrating with soldiers, more stood waiting at the bar.

Doug purchased two drinks, one he handed to me. I sipped it. It was warm, tasted like canned Delmonte orange juice.

The woman next to me was exchanging meaningful glances with a GI, whose jungly eyebrows I could see from across the room. The woman sported a huge white cardboard badge on which her picture, a number, and her name, Mi-Ja Choi, were clearly visible.

Doug had explained the badges to me one night, after a few shots of soju (lemon-ﬂavored, an improvement on the usual acrid formaldehyde notes) that we’d bought from the 7-Eleven. The badges were part of some system worked out by both the Korean and American governments for controlling VD outbreaks, a potential threat to the strength of the U.S. Armed Forces. When Doug’s mother had worked, VD-infested GIs had to rely on their memory of whom they had slept with, which usually resulted in a virtual crowd of women with the last name Kim being sent off to the “Monkey House,” a shack halfway up a mountain near the base, with bars on the windows and steel U.S.-military-issue beds lined up in a row.

Jungle-brow approached the woman, his eyebrows even more magniﬁcent up close. She giggled, tipping a little on her high heels. He put his hand on her buttock, squeezing it like a bicycle horn.

He leered one more time, then bought her a Delmonte orange juice. Before she had a chance to take her ﬁrst sip, he kissed her. I could see his sluglike tongue working its way into her mouth. She didn’t back away, but her face took on its own abandoned-house look. When he disengaged himself, she laughed and then took a swig of the juice.

Something dry and scratchy landed on my arm, like an insect. A slightly cross-eyed GI had clamped a hand on my upper arm and was smiling crookedly at me, as if he’d just lifted a rock and found a coin.

“Juicy girl?” he said. His thumb reached out and brushed against my breast. I was ashamed to feel my nipple harden and push against my ﬂimsy bra.

“What’s wrong with me buyin’ her a little juicy, punk?” he sneered. “I don’t see no ring, so she’s here for alla us.”

As the man pushed by me, he took another look at my chest. I hoped against hope that my nipple had smoothed itself.

“Where’s your badge?” he yelled again. “Bet you’re the one been spreading the clap to everyone!”

Doug grabbed my arm. We headed for the exit, me tottering on my ridiculous heels. People were following us.

We made it out the door, where I tore the shoes off, my bare feet hitting the dirt.

Outside it had become even darker, the light from the neon signs and outdoor lights canceling out the stars. For a second, we weren’t sure which way to go, but Doug’s head turned toward the compound’s gate, sure as a homing pigeon. No matter how long he’d been gone, the landscape of his childhood was branded into his brain.

KYUNG-SOOK

It had, of course, been many years that had come and gone like guests at a funeral, but Kyung-sook knew she would never forget the cook-owner. A short woman, rounded as a soybean-paste pot, who swayed her hips from side to side as she walked about the restaurant. She told Kyung-sook she had been left stranded in Seoul as a thirteen-year-old at the end of the Japanese colonial period.

“We had no idea what was going on after the war ended,” she said. “The Russians came in, and they seemed to be a better sort than the Japs—gave us food and medicine, let us speak Korean. But just in case, I started making trips south to peddle some gold things—our family was quite wealthy and my daddy wisely had buried most of our gold so it wouldn’t go to the Jap war effort. It was dangerous work, of course. Once, I ran into a Ruskie soldier. My guide, who had been paid handsomely to see me to the other side, ran away, that bastard. I heard shots pow!-pow!-pow! from the direction he’d gone, so I ran the other way, swam through a creek, and hid in the woods. At daybreak I crawled out, came upon some farm lady tending a plot and I said, ‘I beg of you, in heaven’s name, where am I?’

“She said, ‘You’re in the South, dear,’ and that’s all I needed to know, I was safe.

“One day, on my way to the border town where I normally crossed, the man next to me on the train said, ‘I hope you don’t think you’re going north, child.’

“Of course, I had no idea who he was—he could have been a Commie spy, so I just kept my mouth shut.

“‘I can tell you are,’ the man went on. ‘You don’t even have a little bundle—traveling light, yeh? Well, take heed: the Reds have sealed the border. If you don’t believe me, go see. You’ll see wire fences and big guns waiting to shoot right at your heart.’

“And it was a good thing I did do that,” the cook-owner said. “If I’d tried to cross that night, I’d’ve met my ancestors.”

Kyung-sook listened politely as she stuffed some dumplings. They were advertised as “hand” dumplings, that is, with handmade skins, but only the most naive customer would believe that. Real dumplings, like the kind her mother made for the Lunar New Year, had skins that were thick and irregular and bore traces of her mother’s ﬁngers and the taste of her hand. These premade skins were thin and perfectly square, tasteless as pieces of origami paper.

“So from that day on, I was permanently cut off from my family. How it kills me not to have seen my beloved mother and father into their old age—and now I don’t know whether to do the chesa rites for them, because I don’t know if they’re alive or dead, and it’s all because of those fucking Commies and Americans who sliced our beloved country in two!”

Kyung-sook made a compassionate tsking noise, but Sunhee, the other serving girl, rolled her eyes behind the cook-owner’s back.

The cook-owner went on to recount how on her own, she elbowed her way into the Great South Gate Market, ﬁrst selling heads of pickling garlic, then her own soft tofu that she made at night, squeezing out the bag of curds with her huge hands.

“I came from an aristocratic family, but I’m no weakling—I could carry a whole day’s supply of the tofu in a giant soup pot on top of my head,” she bragged. “I just had to move my hips from side-to-side like this to keep it balanced. See, I still walk that way, I got so used to it.”

“Yah, so aristocratic, our yangban boss,” Sunhee sniped, when the cook-owner went into the storeroom for more rice. “The reason she waggles her ass like that is to try to catch the eye of Old Bachelor Choi. He’s ﬁlthy rich, owns the Jade Moon real estate ofﬁce, but he orders the cheapest noodle dish here every day. Watch the cook-owner, she’ll make sure to pass his table beating her breast—‘Aiiii-gu, my poor parents! Aiiiigu, my poor husband killed in the Korean War!’ Don’t buy it for a second. She has a northern accent, but you can hear some southern Cholla dialect slip into it from time to time. Her story’s not what she says it is.”

Kyung-sook only smiled as she spooned some more ﬁlling into the ﬂour square that felt dusty in her hands. She dipped her little ﬁnger in egg yolk, then spread it on the skin’s edges as if she were gluing an envelope. She pressed and crimped the edges together until she made a crescent moon.

No one knew her true story, either. That was the wonderful thing about being in the city—you could be who you wanted, you merely had to spin out some story, and no one cared. Today she was a serving girl in a dumpling house, a rotten place where, when the wind blew a certain way, the smell of sewage from the shantytown reached their noses. But tomorrow she would be a famous musician, asked to perform for the President. Who could say?

“Aigu!” yelled the cook-owner, from the kitchen. Had she burned her arm on the stovepot again? Found another mouse-mess next to the rice? She stood framed at the door to the kitchen, staring at the front of the restaurant.

They all blinked. And blinked again. They all knew there were Westerners in Seoul—but how could this one have found his way to this place, at the end of a maze of winding alleys, channels so narrow and twisty that two people with handcarts could not pass going in opposite directions? And their restaurant was just one of a number of shacks, marked only by a small sign in Korean, NOODLES + DUMPLINGS, not even DUMPLING SPECIALIST or the KING’S DUMPLINGS—the name the regulars jokingly gave their little dump.

This man, he was the ﬁrst paek-in, the ﬁrst whiteperson any of them had ever seen for real. Kyung-sook could barely stiﬂe startled giggles upon seeing the man’s nose—it was like the prow of a ship. His eyes were strangely round and pale, his skin so pinkish it reminded her of the stupid pale skin on a dog’s belly.

The man had to duck to enter the restaurant. He was wearing a soft hat, and the bits of hair sticking out from under it was black, the color of cooking coal. He pointed to an empty table and made eating motions, as if he wanted to be served some kind of stew that he would eat with his hands.

“Okay, you fucking gods and ancestors,” she bellowed. “What kind of joke have you got in store for me today?”

“Kyung-sook-ah, make that creature sit down,” the cook-owner ordered. “A foreign bastard, he must be rich.”

The cook-owner eyed Kyung-sook for a second, then came over and slapped her on the rump, as if she were a recalcitrant horse or ox.

“You’re the only one here who went to high school, Professor. You expect anyone else here can understand foreigner-speak?”

The cook-owner shoved her, propelling her like those little eggshell boats they used to sail on the river on Lord Buddha’s birthday.

The man didn’t seem to know any Korean; he barked a command in English and pointed to the water-dumplings that Old Bachelor Choi was masticating with his ill-ﬁtting dentures that occasionally slipped out of his mouth.

The cook-owner noted this, and perhaps to celebrate the arrival of the ﬁrst Westerner to her diner, added an extra three “king” dumplings onto the plate of water-dumplings. Old Bachelor Choi yelled for more of their free mussel soup. Kyung-sook fetched it for him. Then she served the foreigner.

Everyone was puzzled. Even Old Bachelor Choi, delicately ﬁshing around in his soup with two ﬁngers, stopped to consider the scene, his mouth puckery as a mended sock.

“What’s he waiting for?” grumbled the cook-owner. “Is he one of those Christo-followers? I heard they have to say all this mumbo jumbo around their food to cleanse it before they eat.”

“Not mine, not mine.” His barking had turned to yapping, and she still didn’t understand him—his English didn’t sound anything like the English she had learned in school. He was pointing at the three fat dumplings. “I didn’t order these. No order. No pay.”

When Kyung-sook looked at the king dumplings he was pointing to, they seemed to rise before her eyes. They levitated a few centimeters, switched places as if in fun, then settled back onto the plate. English words then rose to the surface of her brain like bubbles in a pond.

“Oh, ho,” the man said, beginning to smile. He ignored the chopsticks and instead picked up his soupspoon and balanced one of the dumplings on it like a weight. “So I’m a king—” He took an enormous, sucking bite of the dumpling. “Okay.”

“O-kay,” she mimicked back teasingly. She wondered if he could see in her face how repulsive she found him.

Everyone in the restaurant was still looking at the foreigner. Even Old Bachelor Choi, who had ﬁnally caught his teeth and was busily returning them to his mouth. He smiled, chimplike, as broth dribbled from the corners of his mouth.

The cook-owner removed the cover from a pot of boiling water, releasing a ghostly cloud of steam. She looked like she was laughing about something.

SARAH

How great it was to be back amidst the cherry trees of the Chosun U. campus. I gave Bernie Lee such a wide smile that he narrowed his eyes and said, “You’re freaking me out, Twinkie.”

His eyes narrowed further, to threadlike slits. “Uh huh. You go somewhere or something?”

“Maybe.” I almost looked over at Doug, but I didn’t dare. Instead, I just smiled again. How great it was that it was spring. How great, everything.

Outside, everything smelled pink. Pairs of college boys armed with cameras roamed the campus, cajoling girls to stand for photos under the clumps of blooms, the photographee often slipping a hand on a feminine shoulder or tender upper arm while the girl was immobilized under the camera’s eye.

The next day, the cherry trees were just normal trees with leaves, not a single petal left. Then the weather turned hot, and azaleas and forsythia, blazing yellows and fuchsias, exploded from bushes, as if unleashed by the heat. The sun became a physical presence, a punishing hand. People walked as if beaten, heads bowed on wilting stems of necks. At the Rainbow, diners paradoxically ordered spicy soups bubbling in their own black cauldrons. They would slurp and sigh until they took a shower in their own sweat. I preferred neng myun, a mound of cold buckwheat noodles in iced broth, topped with a slice of fatty beef and a hard-boiled egg balanced on top like a maraschino cherry. When the ajuhma carried it, it looked like strange, precarious island rising out of a sea of cloudy broth.

Not chang-ma again. The little animals that fall from the sky and pulled out your hair.

Bernie grinned at me, as if he had a delicious prank with my name on it waiting. “The monsoon season. It rains every day, buckets and buckets of rain, but it doesn’t cool things down. It just makes it really humid. You’ll feel like you’re wearing a suit of moisture, bathed in sweat. Your laundry will always be damp. You’ll grow mold.”

Doug nodded. “I remember one summer the rains were so bad that people living near river banks got washed away or killed in mudslides. The Han River rose so much it took out the bridge to Seoul.”

“It’s coming later this year,” Bernie said. “That’s a sign it’s going to be bad.” His tone was now merely informative. Friendly, even.

After lunch, we made our way down the alley toward a yuhgwon, one of those tiny boarding houses marked with an electric sign that looked like a cup of tea with waves of red steam rising off it. That meant it had hot water. Yuhgwons, a.k.a. “love hotels,” were plentiful in our neighborhood, for horny students as well as itinerant travelers, of which Doug and I were both.

The stout yuhgwon ajuhma with warts dotting her ﬁngers didn’t give us another look as she took Doug’s money and placed a key on the low table in front of her. The key opened up a vaultlike room that had a clean yellow ﬂoor, a single window, and little else except for some bedding stacked in a corner and a calendar on the wall that had a generic Korean country scene on it. I’m sure in Korean it said something like, COMPLIMENTS OF EDWARD DIEHL, YOUR STATE FARM AGENT, LIKE A GOOD NEIGHBOR.

It had come to this: Doug was going to be the one to receive my slightly outmoded virginity.

Two nights ago, pursued by whiskey-slurred voices and heavy footsteps, life’s thread grew unbearably thin and taut. We had hidden among the trees by the side of the road, struggling to mufﬂe our ragged breaths as shafts of light from ﬂashlights poked all around us.

“I thought that motherfucker was weird, right off, he was in his cami’s—who wears their uniform out for a night on the town?”

“Well, the girl, she was a gook chick, but there was something funny about her, too—I told you she didn’t have her badge. And they ran out like bats out of hell when I called you guys. This ain’t no pink goddam elephants we’re talking about.”

“Well, I don’t see anything out here now, soldier. Go home and sleep it off, would you?”

When the realization came that yes, we came, we saw, we outsmarted the U.S. Army, exhilaration welled up inside me, so crystalline and powerful that I wanted to shout. When I looked at Doug, I could see his eyes shining in the dark.

We walked all the way back to the bus station, where we waited for the next bus, which delivered us back to the Residence just as dawn was breaking, just as the dorm’s night watchman, twig broom in hand, was opening the doors to a new day.

“I want to sleep with you,” I had whispered into Doug’s ear on the bus ride back. He had appeared to be sleeping, but obviously, he had heard.

I wasn’t the Virgin Mary, I told him. If I had to describe myself using associative words, as I had in those endless psychological tests of my childhood, virginal, chaste, untouched, were not words that would appear on the list.

I was a virgin, I explained, because I was. No action verbs involved. In high school, when life begins to revolve around that pulsating star of sex, that’s when I discovered that I hated absolutely everybody. So I did things like dye my hair unnatural colors, hang around with the most despised geeks and druggies, and I didn’t ﬁnd myself in those situations—prom, overnight ski trips—where sex usually occurs. True, once I was invited to a party being held at an Eden’s Prairie three-car-garage-and-indoor-pool home while the parents were away. I’m not sure why my presence had been requested. The jocks and jockettes who called me “chink” or “jap” by day ignored me at night, which was worse.

I stood clutching a beer in a ﬂimsy plastic cup while everyone else around me danced, necked, smoked pot, or guzzled beer from plastic funnel “beer bongs.” I was relieved when Spleef Murphy, the redheaded boy who’d later end up as my AP chemistry partner, pointed to a dark bedroom and raised his eyebrows. Though he would always screw up the molarity of our reagenting solutions, that night, the touch of his hand as he groped my breasts, the enthusiastic way he sucked at my crotch as if he were gulping down draughts of punch, the lucid gaze of his pea-green eyes—all this comforted me. I was being felt and seen and tasted in a cavernous bedroom among posters of a blond vixen bent in a racing crouch, naked except for her Nordica ski boots, an ancient poster of Farrah sitting on a Mexican blanket, her famous toothy smile-scream, her nipple winking at us through her swimsuit’s ﬂimsy fabric.

I was aware of Doug patting my back, the way one might do when trying to burp a baby.

“I don’t think of it as losing,” I said, looking into his eyes. “It’s gaining. With you, it would be.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a foil package, ﬂat yet with bones in it, like a kite.

On TV and in the movies, post-sex rituals differ, but they seem to always include cigarettes. Doug, perhaps to not disappoint, also lit one up and leaned back languidly onto the yuhgwon’s lozenge-shaped pillows.

I found a strange reassurance in the small spots of blood spattering my thigh. I had crossed the line. And with Doug. No emotional aftermath, my secrets tucked safe inside his boarded-up house. The smell of the smoke was an incense, like being together in the tender anonymity of a hazy opium den. Doug put his free hand on my hipbone, his ﬁngers spread wide, as if claiming territory. My tongue loosened. I found myself telling him about my trip to the orphanage. An even more intimate detail than contained in all the folds and crevices in my body that he had explored.

“Shit,” he said, softly. “I had no idea.” He removed his cigarette from his mouth, began spinning it around the bridge of his thumb, something bored Korean students did with their pens.

“Can you believe the people who call themselves my parents have lied to me, basically my entire life?”

“Well, to play devil’s advocate, it’s possible the car-accident story originated with the orphanage. Koreans like to fudge, make nice. People with terminal cancer are told they have an ulcer. The doctors don’t want to upset them.”

I had always asked about my biological parents as soon as I was old enough to understand. And they had that story pat and waiting. Often, Christine would change the subject, tickling me or doing something else to get me animated.

“And whose sweetie pie are you?” she might ask, gaily sticking her ﬁngers in all my tickly places. “Whose little pumpkin face?”

“You’re my mommy!” By this time I would be screaming with involuntary laughter.

“I always felt like Christine was hiding something, she had that guilty dog-who-peed-in-the-corner look. When I told them I was going to Korea, Ken was reluctant, but okay. Christine went batshit.”

“She actually ripped up the brochure and chucked it in the garbage, saying the Motherland Program was only for true Koreans, people with Korean last names.”

I remembered looking around the table: Amanda emotionally detaching by pretending to check her hair for split ends. Ken’s comb-shaped mustache quivering. Christine, bottle-blond hair, the thinning patch on top exposed in the harsh overhead light of the kitchen table. Her scalp blazed red, like her face. I remembered thinking, joltingly: these people are not my family. They’re just some random people.

Doug continued spinning the cigarette, now a dangerous, glowing stub. Each time it stopped, the live end pointed at me.

“She was obviously worried you were going to go back to Korea and stay there,” Doug said. “Leaving her.”

“But don’t you see? That means she knew.” My voice rose. “She was scared I was going to ﬁnd my birth mother, and, and—”

“Yes, I am,” I said. “But doing this search would have never occurred to me, had I not gone out on my own and found out the real story. I mean, they fucking told me my birth mother was dead.”

“So you seriously want to search for your Korean parents, like an all-out search?”

“There’s this show. It’s called something like Missing Persons. People go on there and try to ﬁnd their lost relatives and friends.”

“It’s a popular show, mostly these old ajuhmas and harlmonis who’d had some ﬁght with their sister or something and want to get back in touch. And the missing person often does call in. Maybe you could try to get on it.”

My heart leapt at the thought of the studio’s phones ringing. Of a woman’s voice. Someone who will say, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, over and over again. Let me tell you what happened. And: I want you to come home.

“But you know,” Doug went on. “It’s possible your birth mother’s married, with a whole family who doesn’t know about her past, so it could get messy. Do you think you could handle the consequences?”

I didn’t tell Doug how I’d been walking all over Seoul, looking. I couldn’t help myself. Yesterday I’d gone to the Lotte Department Store. Twelve ﬂoors, plenty of Korean women. I almost got lost in a haze of silk scarves, jewelry, and perfume before I realized she wouldn’t be there. She wouldn’t be among those beringed ladies in French designer suits, scarves cleverly knotted about their shoulders, big jade rings on their ﬁngers, Burberry raincoats draped on their arms.

Rich people had abortions, easy as one-two-three. Doug said that the ﬁrst question the base doctor had asked his mother about her pregnancy with him was, Do you want to keep it?

So I had ﬂed the opulence of the Lotte and her brethren—the Hyatt, the Swissôtel, the Intercontinental—for a place only a few blocks behind these behemoths, a neighborhood of shacks huddling in the shadow of the sleek skyscrapers like fungi at the base of a tree. I kept going until I got to Hoei Dong, where I was supposedly found. I found a ﬁre station—was it the one? Miss Park at the orphanage had told me that my mother probably set me outside the door and watched from some hidden place until someone took me in. My mother cared about me, she insisted. She did what she did out of the purest form of mother love: sacriﬁce.

As if Miss Park or anyone could know. Why was everyone so quick to offer me cheap words, when all I wanted was the truth?

I placed myself on a little bench across the street. For the hour I sat, I never saw a single baby laid on the neat stone steps of that building.

Doug nodded. “There’s a Korean saying, ‘Don’t let the fear of maggots scare you away from making soy sauce.’”

KYUNG-SOOK

Kyung-sook found herself wondering if the visit from the Westerner had all been a peculiar dream. Sunhee didn’t mention it. The cook-owner only complained about ﬁnding new holes in the rice bags made by mice, which Kyung-sook could feel running across her feet at night.

Later that day, the cook-owner returned from the market with a good-sized cat. It had rich brown fur the color of tortoiseshell, a nose that was half pink, half black like a Korean mask.

The cook-owner didn’t bother giving the cat a name other than Mr. Kitty, and she was pleased when it immediately went into the storeroom and came out with a mouse, its neck neatly broken.

Two days later, though, the cat looked sick, and it lay down right in the front entrance of the restaurant. That was the day the Westerner showed up again. He entered carrying a black hourglass-shaped case, which he placed in the seat opposite him, as lovingly as if he were seating a venerated relative. He made his barking noises and pointed at Old Bachelor Choi’s cheap noodle dish.

Then he took off his soft hat, which he had not done before. Black hair tumbled out past his ears, almost touching his shoulders.

“Aigu!” exclaimed the cook-owner. “Is he a man or a woman? These fuckin’ Westerners are so perverse.”

Kyung-sook had never seen a man with long hair, except in Imo’s pictures of Christo, but he was a god from olden times. However, she thought the foreigner actually looked better with the curtain of coal-black hair framing the sharp angles of his face. In fact, there was something in the man’s face that kept drawing her eyes back to it. The cook-owner, so fond of old proverbs, might have said, “In time, it is possible to develop a taste even for sour dog-apricots.”

What place did this man come from, where he could grow his hair out like a woman’s with no shame? she wondered.

Mi-guk. “The beautiful country,” America’s name in Chinese characters. She was thinking of something to say about that when there was a shout from one of the customers—“Look what that dirty cat has done!”—which sent the cook-owner running from the kitchen to see what was the matter.

In a dark corner of the restaurant, the cat had had kittens, six of them in all sorts of different colors: ginger, tortoiseshell, white with spots, black. She was proudly licking them clean as the cook-owner came upon her. Bloody afterbirth was smeared on the ﬂoor.

“That damned crook!” she yelled. “That man at the market, I gave him a whole bottle of good sesame oil—not perilla oil—for that cat that he assured me was a male. She’s a good mouser, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to raise her saekkis.”

The American, amidst all the hubbub, ate quickly. But he gave Kyung-sook another frank look that made Old Bachelor Choi choke on his soup and scandalized Sunhee before he left. Kyung-sook threw salt on his path to express her outrage at what he had done. But for some strange reason, she was also just a little bit thrilled, as if her drab life had suddenly taken on a few new, unexpected colors. She was even more thrilled to ﬁnd that the man had left a few coins behind at his table. These she scooped up before anyone saw.

“Kyung-sook-ah! Pick up these goddam dumpling soups before they grow icicles!” the cook-owner bellowed. Kyung-sook hurried back into the kitchen. The cat was lying on an old rice sack on the ﬂoor, next to her was a bowl of miyuk-guk, the blood-replenishing seaweed soup that was traditionally given to new mothers—not animals. How strange the cook-owner was, Kyung-sook thought.

When Kyung-sook returned for the next order, she found the cook-owner gently crooning to the drowsing cat as if it were a child. She must really love that stupid, dirty thing, Kyung-sook thought, until she stopped, startled, hearing what the cook-owner was singing:

Kitty fucked a rat, fucked a rat. Out came six little saekkis, six pink rat bastards, naked rat bastards. Oh oh Kitty get rid of those disgusting pink rat bastards.

The next day, the cat was prowling the storeroom as usual, pink teats poking out of her belly-fur like soft squash candy. The kittens and the rice sack were gone. Sunhee asked where the babies had gone. The cook-owner, for some reason, looked at Kyung-sook, not Sunhee, when she replied, smiling a strange smile: “I think Kitty ate them for dinner. Yum. Yum.”

Sunhee sighed. “Is that the kind of gross humor you northerners are so proud of?” She grabbed her tray, mumbling how at least at the sieve factory, she didn’t have to talk to people while she worked.

Kyung-sook bent to look more closely at the cat as it slunk around the bags of rice. At the corner of its mouth, it indeed had a smudge of blood.

SARAH

The dusty console sparked to life in the dorm’s TV room. Bouncing breasts and buttocks. Women and men running on a beach. It was Baywatch—the last person had left the TV on AFKN, the Armed Forces Korea Network, which made sure that the American servicemen and women didn’t have to miss a single episode due to their military duty. Doug turned to Channel 12, SBC, Sejong Broadcasting. A mélange of tearful faces embracing. A smiling cartoon phone ringing. Game-show music. People talking in Korean.

Cut to a commercial. “Lotte custard-ﬁlled cakes—so good they’ll make your ancestors come back from the dead!”

A middle-aged man with thick square glasses and an Elvis pompadour emerged with a willowy young woman. They waved to the audience as confetti rained down.

An ajuhma and a woman in her twenties waited at side-by-side podiums. Both of them looked grim, despite the bouncy music, smiling hosts, cheering audience.

The young woman was looking for her childhood piano teacher. She had hated taking lessons, she said, as the hosts listened and murmured well-timed, sympathetic neh nehs, but she had loved her teacher for continuing to teach her for free after her father had deserted the family in favor of a “small wife,” a mistress. She and her mother had fallen into destitution, but the fact that she was still taking piano lessons, a vestige of their former middle-class life, had kept her despairing mother from committing suicide. Her mother had rallied, begun selling nylon stockings at the pedestrian overpass near a famous women’s university. By being a ﬁxture there—rain or shine—she had been able to amass enough money to send her daughter to that very college on scholarship. In the rush of college life, however, the young woman had lost touch with the teacher.

“Please, if you’re out there, Seo Yoon-Ju Sunsengnim, let me hear from you. I so wish to thank you for all you’ve done for me and my mother.”

Instead of cutting to the phones, though, the hosts turned, smiling, to the ajuhma, leaving the young woman crying into a hankie.

The ajuhma wanted to ﬁnd her sister, who had eloped against their parents’ wishes years ago.

The cameras cut to a phone. Nothing moved except a small ticker at the bottom that broadcasted the phone number.

The ﬁrst call was for the young woman! A disembodied voice said yobosayo? then broke the news that the piano teacher had been killed with her husband and son in an auto accident. The studio ﬁlled with the sound of the woman’s wails as two pastel-suited women materialized out of nowhere and discreetly led her off the stage.

Our Madam Auntie, she’s received several callers as well, the host said, a bit too cheerily.

One caller asked, “Does your sister have a crimson butterﬂy-shaped birthmark on her arm that also grows a small patch of hair?”

“‘Yes,’ she’s saying,” said Doug. “Her sister has such a birthmark—her childhood nickname was nabi, butterﬂy. The lady is telling her she thinks her sister lives in her apartment building in Taegu. The lady says she’s going to give her sister’s number to her.”

The audience clapped wildly. The ajuhma, howling into her hankie, mumbling “Nabi-yah, nabi-yah,” was also led off the stage.

Two little boys in identical bowl haircuts were ushered onto the stage. They looked to be about ten and four. The older one put a hand on his brother’s thin shoulder when the hosts drew close. The smaller boy shrank, like a smaller ﬁsh hoping not to be noticed by a larger, hungry one.

“Aren’t they cute?” she said, as if she were selling them. “Whose heart wouldn’t be crying for two such lovely little boys?”

“This is a weird one,” said Doug. “They’re from Kyong San Province—their accents are so thick I can barely understand. Their uncle brought them to Seoul to visit a distant relative but he never showed up to bring them back.”

“I guess when the relative called the parents, she was told they’d moved—”

“No forwarding address,” Doug spat back at me, almost snarling. I looked at him, surprised.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “That’s what happened, wasn’t it? They moved—poof!—without a trace.”

He nodded, mute with anger. What I had done, I couldn’t guess. Was I too ﬂip and hurt some hidden, vulnerable part of him? Did I interrupt him? Something else? He was still so much a puzzle to me, a Rubik’s cube of endless facets, that to manage one side’s solid comfortable color would leave the others hopelessly parti-colored and obscured. Irritation, petulance papered over darker mysteries. Only when we were having sex were things simple and deﬁned.

We waited, along with the two little boys, to see if the phones would ring. The cameras closed in on the boys’ humiliated, miserable faces, revealing the incompetent asymmetricality of their haircuts, the ill-ﬁtting clothes that were obviously not theirs. Then, mercifully, the cameras pulled away to show the audience, mostly grannies with tight, kinky perms and cardigans that bagged at the wrists.

“Um-ma yah,” she said, shrieking as if she’d been poked with an electric cattle prod.

As if simultaneously prodded, the boys started to cry, “Um-ma! Um-ma!” The audience cheered.

“It’s their mother, isn’t it? Um-ma sounds like the way a cow would say ‘mommy.’”

“She said they had to leave the boys because they were in ﬁnancial trouble. Their turn came up in the local rotating credit pool, and they lost all the money in some real estate swindle—some ten million won. They couldn’t pay it back, so they ran away.”

“Bet there are some other people who’d also love to get back in touch with them. Ring-ring.”

“She says she’s going to ﬁnd a way for them to meet. As you can probably hear, she feels terrible. The kids are all saying, ‘Mommy, come get us. Cousin’s wife isn’t feeding us.’”

I sat up. “It’s a sign,” I said. “Those kids found their mother. Let’s do it.”

“Okay, it’s worth a try. The fact that you were covered in ddong would be hard for someone to forget, I think.”

“Do we have to bring that up?” I said. “I mean, what if Choi Sunsengnim watches that show? Or Bernie—I’ll die.”

“Sarah, why the hell do you care so much what other people think? Bernie Lee is dirt. Choi Sunsengnim is your teacher. This is your life. If they don’t like it, tell them to go fuck themselves.”

Next week! Impatience rose up like a wave, then subsided. Doug moved closer to kiss me. His thin lips felt surprising full on my mouth.

The door to the TV room swung open, knocking aside the ﬂimsy metal chairs we’d set against it. Bernie Lee walked in, eating sloppily from a box of Captain Crunch that must have been sent from home. He observed the two of us and eyed me smugly. He was probably thinking that now that Jun-Ho was gone, I had a new lover already, slut that I was.

“What’s ‘twiggy’?” I asked Doug. “Korean for ‘you-are-sleeping-with-a-ho’?”

KYUNG-SOOK

No matter how much the foreigner ate, he stayed thin. The rims around his eyes were pinkish, like a rabbit’s, the rest of his skin transparent like skimmed milk.

“The sun could shine right through that big-nose,” the cook-owner muttered. “Those foreign bastards sure have a nice life. But with that life comes softness. He can’t even eat a chili pepper without screaming—what does that mean about his pepper, hm?”

The man had come to their dumpy little restaurant again and again. He grew tired of the water-dumplings and noodles and then gamely agreed to try whatever food the cook-owner would make him, even though it would often make him gasp and sweat with the heat or pucker with the salt.

He also had extremely strange eating habits. He never drank his soup, even when the cook-owner subjected him to two-day-old dumplings, dried-out pasty things that would surely clog in his throat like cotton balls.

“I want water, wa-ter, w-a-t-e-r!” he howled to Kyung-sook after eating some hot radish kimchi.

Kyung-sook brought him his water, ﬂavored with burnt barley so he would know it had been recently boiled.

“I want water, not scalding hot tea,” he groaned, but he gulped two, three, four cups of the liquid and asked for more. Korean people would never waste so much stomach-space on ﬂuid at a meal. Sunhee giggled and called him mul-gogi, “Fish,” or mul-gogi-ssi, “Mr. Fish.”

Today, Mr. Fish had managed to communicate to them that it was his birthday. At the market that day, one of the cook-owner’s anchovy suppliers had added a nice bag of pundaegi, silkworm larvae, as a reward for her loyalty and also because it was silk-making season, and so the brownish wads, shaken from their precious cocoons, were quite abundant. To celebrate Mr. Fish’s birthday, the cook-owner prepared a gigantic plate of them doused in sweet sauce. As Kyung-sook served him, a few of the fat pundaegi levitated off the plate like bees before a ﬂowering bush, but no one seemed to notice. The man, perhaps knowing that they expected him to ﬁnd the food strange, bent his head toward the overﬂowing plate and quickly ate it all, the sight of his pink tongue lapping like a dog’s astonishing and disgusting them, making Old Bachelor Choi’s dentures ﬂop into his soup once more.

“Cook-owner says he make you real birth-day food next time,” Kyung-sook told him. She couldn’t help being a little pleased at how her high school English was coming back to her. “He make miyuk-guk, seaweed soups.”

“Me-YUCK-GOOK. Oh, goody,” the man said in a sarcastic voice. Kyung-sook didn’t understand sarcasm.

“I’ll show you,” the man said. He opened it and took out a Western guitar. It was made of a beautiful, whorled wood that reminded her of her taegum—which she had not played in ages, her ﬁngers bent with fatigue after a day’s worth of serving.

The man sat back casually, extending his legs as if he were in the comfort of his own house’s living room. He plucked the strings of the beautifully curved instrument. The notes came out soft, much more liquid and melodious than the tones of a Korean harp.

“Then let me take you out to a restaurant for a change. And you can hear some more.”

Kyung-sook wasn’t fully sure she understood the man’s words, but she did want to hear more music.

SARAH

“Your hands seem to be made for playing the taegum,” Tae Sunsengnim remarked. “I have no idea why you can’t play it, then.”

Instead of glissandos and silvery notes, the ﬂute hissed at me when I picked it up, or even looked at it. It also required reading music, adding another set of foreign sticks and signs to my already bursting brain even though Jeannie from Korean class had kindly shown me a mnemonic to help me remember the notes: E/very G/ood B/oy D/eserves F/udge.

“Your turn,” said the Other Jeannie, the Julliard know-it-all I’d dubbed “Evil Genie.” Our group was trying the last instrument, the changgo hourglass drum. So far, no one had been able to play that drum well enough to be considered for the upcoming talent show.

Tae Sunsengnim sighed in despair, seeing that it was my turn. She picked up the kaenguri and started bashing out the beat on its polished brass surface.

I had the drum strapped on by a cotton sling, not unlike the ones New-Agey people carried babies in. The drum was balanced on the point of my right hip, I had the two different drumsticks—one like a chopstick, the other with a ball at the end. You were supposed to sway the top half of your body back and forth while you hit both sides of the changgo, sometimes hitting as if you were playing a snare, and sometimes hitting the two sides separately, sometimes switching lightning-fast between the two. While all this was going on, your feet were supposed to move at a slower beat.

I decided the best chance I had was to just play, not think. Bang! Bang! Thump! Whump! Tok! I let my arms ﬂy away like birds.

“Hm,” Tae Sunsengnim said, lowering the gong to watch me bang away. “Not bad.”

KYUNG-SOOK

Before that day, she had never eaten going-out food in her life, unless you counted the time she and her friends had spent all day plucking chickens for Widower Rhee, and then had gone to the market and gorged themselves on bowls of steaming ﬁsh-cake soup and sweet-bean-ﬁlled goldﬁsh bread.

But to go someplace to eat when you had perfectly good food at home seemed unthinkable—an option only for the rich, the fat people who weren’t satisﬁed with nourishing Korean food but who also had to acquaint their lips with the foods of France or China. The food in their restaurant was not so much going-out food as it was sustenance for old bachelors who had no one to cook for them, the occasional student, the hurried businessman looking to put something in his stomach before a night of drinking. Dumplings and noodles, rice, and only two or three side dishes. It was never anything special.

“Go, go,” the cook-owner had urged her. “I’ll do the serving for a few hours, no sweat. Go stuff your belly till it explodes.”

Kyung-sook had felt shy, and slightly absurd, but the two of them made their way through the alleys to the main street. Kyung-sook rarely ventured this far from the restaurant: only if she had to run to the market when they were low on this or that vegetable or if they needed more roasted barley. But each time she had been in such a hurry, she had never really looked at what was going on in the street.

Today she saw the street through a foreigner’s eyes. The gorgeous colors of a silk store. The legless man wheeling himself belly-ﬁrst on a rusty-wheeled plank as he held a cup out for coins (and the foreigner even dug out some ten-won pieces and gently placed them in the man’s cup; she had never known someone who would treat a stranger—a beggar, no less—with such respect). She noted the dinginess and promise of the closed door of a teahouse, felt the regretful han of a man sitting next to his bucket of squirming eels as he sang.

I loved her so much

that when she left me

I spread azalea petals

on her leaving path

They were standing in front of a Chinese restaurant. Its façade was painted a gaudy red and gold, various Chinese signs for health, happiness, and prosperity circling the door. Kyung-sook had heard the word “food” and guessed he was asking for approval, so she nodded.

It seemed strange that a foreigner could teach her so much about her own country, but he did. For one, who would have known that going outside to eat could be so pleasant? Or that Chinese food prepared by Korean hands could be so delicious? The foreigner knew just the things to order, saying the dishes’ names to the waitress in a way that Kyung-sook knew he had sampled them before and found them to his liking.

Chinese food, she found, had a subtle, slightly sweet ﬂavor so unlike the garlic-red-pepper-ginger heat of Korean cooking. He had ordered some black noodles called jia-jia-myun, a dish called Seven Tastes: rice mixed with bits of vegetables and seafood, glowing like treasures. The man even spooned tiny shrimp, pink and curled like a baby’s ﬁnger, right into Kyung-sook’s mouth. She was shocked by his audacity, but still, she obediently opened her mouth for a sliver of meat which he said was Peking dalk, but its meltingly silken taste told her it wasn’t chicken, but some other kind of marvelous meat.

“Next time, we’ll have pork chops,” he said, as they ﬁnished with tea, fragrant and slightly bitter, the same amber color of his eyes. The man seemed so worldly, although Kyung-sook was a little taken aback when he left his chopsticks sticking up in his half-eaten bowl of rice—didn’t he know that would attract the dead?

The man took out a thick wad of won to pay. His dress and bearing was that of a poor student, yet he had paid for a meal she hadn’t even had the capacity to dream about. So perhaps it was true that everyone in America was fabulously rich. That money practically grew on trees and all one had to do was pluck it where it hung on low branches, not even having to strain, the way one did for persimmons, which stayed coyly out of reach.

“We’re not done yet with our date,” he said to her. She didn’t understand what he said, so she just smiled, remembering to cover her mouth.

He took her to a teahouse, the Moon River. He must have been a regular customer there because the teahouse auntie barely gave him a glance, and the old men at a table did not break their concentration from the grid of their paduk game when the foreigner walked in.

“Shall I play you a real song this time?” he asked, as he unsnapped the latches on the hourglass case.

He didn’t wait for her reply, just cradled the instrument in his lap and began to play, a melody that unspooled, ﬂuid and supple, like a bolt of ﬁne silk dropped to the ground.

Kyung-sook’s heart seized. How could she have foreseen such beautiful music entering her life?

SARAH

“You know, Sarah, with practice, you have the potential to excel at playing the changgo,” Tae Sunsengnim told me after the next class.

With practice, I could do the same with sex, Doug told me, the next time we went to a yuhgwon together.

So Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I took an extra hour to play the changgo under Tae Sunsengnim’s instructions. The other days, under Doug’s, I practiced making love.

I practiced so much, my ﬁngers blistered from holding the drumsticks in my sweaty ﬁngers, the drum wore a hole in the skin of my hip.

Doug’s supply of rubbers ran out and he had to buy some Korean ones. He went to a pharmacy, a yak-guk, and came back with a handful, which he spilled onto the yuhgwon’s bedding like coins.

When he was a little kid, he and his friends would ﬁnd used rubbers crushed in the dirt street, and they would blow them up to make funny, cucumber-shaped balloons. That is, until some old ajuhshi informed them as to a condom’s real function.

Once, when we had been making love for a long time, something funny started up within me. At ﬁrst it felt like I had to pee. Then it grew to something more. I grabbed Doug’s backside and ground myself into him, and I started yowling, a long screech. In its own terrible way it felt good to just let myself scream.

But I couldn’t help thinking of Bernie Lee’s words, how my birth mother must have been a whore to have had me. Or Christine’s words, about the future awaiting me, had I stayed Korean-Korean. Prostitute. Juicy Girl.

“Do you think I’m a slut?” I asked Doug, after a session that had been so energetic and noisy that the yuhgwon ajuhma had banged on the door and told us we were disturbing the other patrons. “Bernie Lee said only whores give their kids up for adoption.”

“I hope you don’t ever take seriously anything Bernie Lee has to say—didn’t we have this discussion already?”

“I know. But the one time my adoptive mother got really mad at me, she said that if they hadn’t adopted me, I would probably have become a prostitute, because people without family in Korea are rejected by society, it’s that whole bloodline thing. I guess boys become street cleaners and girls become streetwalkers.”

“But maybe my birth mother was a prostitute—maybe that’s why they made up the story about the car accident.”

“It doesn’t matter who your mother was—or is,” Doug said. “What matters is who you are.”

“That’s the trouble,” I said. “I don’t know who I am. I don’t know who I should be.”

“Well, you’re making it worse by letting other people tell you, especially when they don’t know shit.”

I felt suddenly empty, scooped out, as if I were hungry, but I knew that wasn’t it. I’d gone from the mind-exploding heights of orgasm to being depressed at the sight of our drab rented room, slightly nauseated by the earthy, ﬁshy after-aroma of our lovemaking. And for some reason, I was depressed by Doug’s face, his round brown eyes, his sharp nose. I squinted hard to try to construct a face for him that was holistically Korean—slanted eyes, high cheekbones, black straight hair—but I failed.

Doug caressed my hair, leaned in to kiss my ear. His breath stank faintly of kimchi.

I don’t know why I felt like crying. Maybe it was because I had a premonition that our Missing Persons project was a pipe dream, that I was never going to ﬁnd out anything more about me or my mother. I was running in circles again, and eventually I’d just go home to Minnesota, to Christine and Ken and all the malarkey of my life there.

“Did you call Missing Persons?” I asked. Doug looked like he was about to fall asleep, an “88” cigarette still burning between his ﬁngers.

“Yeah. They don’t handle requests during the live show. I’m supposed to talk to someone in their ofﬁce this week, or next.”

The air was dense with humidity, like a synthetic ﬁber blanket pressing over us. This room didn’t have a window, so I couldn’t tell if outside it was rainy or clear. The smell of cheap ﬁllers in Doug’s cigarette burned in my nose.

What was going to happen, tomorrow and the next day? I wondered. And would I be able to stand it?

KYUNG-SOOK

So many sad Korean ballads were about chut sarang, “ﬁrst love.” Kyung-sook wondered if she would recognize such a thing.

A number of unmarried young men, mostly day laborers and low-level clerks, frequented the restaurant. In between bursts of bitter complaining about a government and a society that made no place for hard-working men as themselves, they called her and Sunhee all sorts of vile names like nymphomaniac and bitch, saying that any woman who worked in a place where they had contact with men obviously had questionable morals.

The next morning, however, these same men would slink back, inquiring meekly if the cook-owner might be able to make them a little bit of hangover soup, to take the edge off.

Men like that were pathetic. They inﬂated themselves with rage and drink, but the next morning would whine that the tails on the soybean sprouts had been pinched off, so that it wouldn’t make a proper post-drunk soup.

How about her friend Min-Ki? She and he used to play together at the edges of the rice ﬁelds until they were seven, when Confucian custom made them separate into their spheres of male and female. From time to time they managed to steal away and meet at a secluded spot on the banks of the Glass River.

One time they had rendezvoused after Min-Ki had returned from a trip with his uncle to Seoul. As they idly sucked on wild cherries and shared a pine-needle cake Min-Ki had stolen from his house, he had excitedly told her about the Western movies he had seen.

“There is a place they call a kuk-jang, a dark place where you actually sit on Western chairs, and you watch these moving pictures of people who walk and talk—a movie, it’s called,” he said, going on to explain that you could eat snacks while you watched, and a man, a pyon-sa storyteller, stood in front of the screen and explained what was going on. Sometimes, he told jokes, too.

“In the movie, the American man and woman, they went like this.” Min-Ki added, grabbing Kyung-sook by the ears and pulling their heads together. He sucked on her lips like a calf at its mother’s teat. Kyung-sook remembered that his mouth had been warm and slippery and tasted spicy and bitter like herbs.

“Yeah, kiss-u. Doesn’t it feel weird? The Western man and woman in the movies did this forever!”

“Really? Westerners do that?” She had never seen her mother and father—or any man or woman—do this. It was both horrid and exciting at the same time.

Min-Ki, in any event, had married early, for he was a ﬁrst son and had a duty to produce an heir as quickly as possible. Kyung-sook wondered if he did the kiss-u with his wife.

Now, this foreigner-man was inﬂicting a kiss-u on her. It tasted of rust, of the time when she had swallowed a one-won coin as a toddler.

Today, she had actually gone back to his ﬂat, a small room in a boarding house. Kyung-sook had wilted a little under the stare from the landlady, who was out in the courtyard hanging up laundry, but then Kyung-sook thought to herself, why did she care? It wasn’t Enduring Pine Village, where news of her behavior would be sure to reach her parents, to the village elders. She stared back a little rudely at the woman, giddy with her newfound freedom.

“Come in, come in,” the man said, sliding open his door. She and Sunhee now called him Yun-tan as well as Mr. Fish, because his black hair reminded them of the yun-tan cooking coal. Kyung-sook waited for him to take his shoes off and leave them on the concrete steps, but he didn’t. He went right into the room without taking off his dirty shoes! She kicked hers off and followed him.

Yun-tan asked her to play her taegum. She sat cross-legged on the ﬂoor (even though it must have been dirty with him wearing his shoes inside!) and she played a short san-jo for him. He watched her as she played, his eyes all moony.

“That’s so beautiful,” he said, and he took out his guitar. As Kyung-sook continued to play, he strummed along with her.

Then he put his guitar down and gave her that kiss-u. He also pawed at her body in a way that didn’t seem too decent, but she didn’t know what to do—maybe it was normal and customary in his culture. She wanted to show the man that she was a sophisticated woman, not some silly serving girl, so she pretended she had done all these things before.

“I told you to go stuff yourself with the foreigner’s money,” the cook-owner scolded, when she returned. “But don’t be such a brazen hussy. Remember the old saying: You let your tail get too long, it’s gonna get stepped on.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Kyung-sook said, noting that her elongated countriﬁed vowels were now bending into the sharper corners of Seoul dialect, and this pleased her.

SARAH

The note in my box contained only a beeper number. I’d never used a beeper before; they were supposed to be for doctors and drug dealers, but here in Korea, they were as common as rice.

I dialed the ten-digit number. Someone’s mechanized voice speaking in Korean. I was about to hang up when a different voice said, “Hallo Sarah, this is your friend Jun-Ho Kim. Jim Kim. I am hoping we can meet while I am here in Seoul.”

We ended up spending a Sunday together at the Great East Gate Stadium watching a pro baseball game, Hyundai vs. Lucky-Goldstar. Unlike the pro basketball teams, which consisted almost exclusively of white and black players recruited from the States, the baseball teams were all Korean.

I had to laugh: in Korean baseball, a lot of bowing went on—greeting bows from the players to the fans, contrite bows after a strikeout, players bowing to the coach, coach bowing to the fans, and the pitcher actually bowed in apology when he beaned the batter. In the background, ﬂat-chested cheerleaders in short skirts attempted to shake their booties, accompanied by a people on the sidelines beating changgo drums.

Soon the fans, bored by a no-hit game, started throwing empty Pocari Sweat cans and pieces of dried squid, all of which landed harmlessly on the ﬁeld. They hadn’t yet learned the American custom of throwing full beer bottles.

The game ended with no runs scored. The teams lined up and bowed to each other, bowed to each other’s coaches, bowed to the fans.

Afterward, Jun-Ho and I strolled around the food carts on the street and stopped for some Korean sushi and shrimp chips.

“Americans, they are funny. They are always yelling and shouting and laughing, so happy.”

“We Koreans look at them and think, how can America have such a great army? There is no discipline!”

“These guys, they talk to me so fast in their fucking English and then they curse and call me fucking stupid when I not understand. Of course none of them know any motherfucking Korean, not one word, and we are here, in Korea, no?”

“Jun-Ho,” I said. “I haven’t heard that kind of language since I left the navy.”

“Oh, I make joke. I’m sorry—I didn’t know you were having such a hard time.”

“Those soldiers, they are not trying any Korean foods, not even plain noodles. At messy hall, there is only fucks, so I’m always getting stuffs on my shit.”

Those long lists of arcane words—curator, crepuscular, urinary sphincter. I longed to hear them.

“See, I never use fuck before,” Jun-Ho said, holding his ﬁst as if he’s grasping a garden trowel. “So the food drops down onto my shit.” He tented his shirt out.

He joined me. He went on to tell me he was going on a Meg Ryan boycott because she had been caught on Letterman saying derogatory things about Korea.

“She said to that man, ‘Well, if Chinese or Japanese or whatever are so dumb they buy things just because my picture is on them, then that’s their problem not mine.’ And she make complaints that our country—she don’t even know which one she is in!—smells bad. That i-nyun so stupid she don’t realize we can see American TV over here!”

“Of course Koreans angry—Koreans make an idol of Meg Ryan. She realize this, realize she is going to lose bunches of monies, so she sent a very apologetic video, saying she was just kidding, what she said, that she knew all the time she was in Korea.”

I sighed, wondering how many things I bought just because some celebrity told me to.

“And thank you for telling me about ‘fag,’” Jun-Ho went on. “I looked in another dictionary, and this one says ‘cigarette.’ I was so confused. Now, why are American soldiers so stupid to be calling me that? Everyone knows there are no homosexuals in Korea.”

“Don’t ever say ‘fag’ out loud,” I said. “Someone is deﬁnitely going to take it the wrong way. And that other expression you asked me about, it’s ‘nip it in the bud,’ not ‘nip it in the butt’—maybe you should just skip saying it altogether, it’s kind of old-fashioned.”

He sighed. “I know my family is going to be angry, but I quit KATUSA program.”

“I thought being with Americans, it would be like being with you, but that was not so. Anyway, the Americans and Koreans, we kind of keep to ourselves, uri kiri, our own two groups, so I’m not learning that much Englishes anyway. I applied for transfer and was granted. I am coming back to Seoul to be in the riot police.”

“Oh, a demonstration.” I remembered seeing a bunch of men in Darth-Vaderish helmets carrying shields and clubs massed along the main gate of Chosun University one day—apparently Chosun Daehakyo was famous for having political ﬁrebrands for students, government ofﬁcials were always urging the professors to give out more homework to keep them busy. But that time I had seen the demo, the police had just stood there, and I hadn’t seen them on campus since.

Jun-Ho ate even that last little end-piece of Korean sushi with a toothpick, his little ﬁnger delicately raised as if we were at high tea at the Waldorf.

He checked his watch and said he needed to get back to see his parents around dinnertime. It was three o’clock.

He shook his head. “I will be in my military duty for the next six months, no exits.”

He nodded. “My furlough is only three days, and my parents, I have a lot to do for respects for them.”

“I don’t know.” I couldn’t think, it was so crowded—people from the baseball game, shoppers, vendors. The sidewalk was narrow and people were shoving us aside like rag dolls, the bent-over senior citizens the most insistent.

Maybe I’ve ﬁnally become part of the many-legged Seoul organism, I was thinking, with equal parts resignation and amusement. Before, I used to shudder when a stranger in a crowd would touch me, as if my body was merely an extension of their own. Now I just took it in stride, being tossed about like anyone else, occasionally pushing back and being amazed that no one even glanced back, much less stopped and yelled, “You want a piece of me!?”

With Jun-Ho, in his green-speckled army uniform—a very common sight in Seoul—no one even seemed to notice we were speaking English.

“There is always yuhgwon around,” he said. He was staring at me, as if I were changing shape before his eyes.

“Let’s ﬁnd one then.” Old buddy, old pal. There was something about the thought of being with someone who was of my race, a mirror image of me, that had gripped me just then—and it was rapidly being translated into sexual desire.

In an ironic coincidence, the yuhgwon Jun-Ho chose was the Edelweiss, straight out of The Sound of Music, dark strips of wood hammered over the pollution-stained stucco in an admirable attempt to create an alpine chalet. Inside, it was the usual place, yellow linoleum ﬂoors, a pile of bedding with fraying covers in the corner, the free calendar.

We were out of our clothes in a few minutes ﬂat. I had on a new bra, a Korean one I’d purchased at a department store. A regular nylon-and-lace jobbie, but it had a picture of a teddy bear in the middle. Everything in Korea, from drugs to gasoline, had to come with a cute mascot. I had been planning to wear it as a joke, for Doug. I hurled it to the ﬂoor.

Jun-Ho didn’t seem surprised to see my body, but I was in awe of his—his torso was completely smooth, like a statue. He had a dusting of hair on his legs, even on his toes. But his chest was some kind of soapstone, lacking pores or follicles. When I leaned in, I smelled nothing, not a whiff of that rank animal odor I always smelled on men back in Minnesota. Smelling Jun-Ho was like smelling a rock.

Jun-Ho kissed me on the forehead, but didn’t attempt to kiss me on the mouth. He even ignored my breasts and went straight to the sexual act, performing it as dutifully as he used to switch from English to Korean during our language exchanges.

I knew I should feel guilt or shame, knowing that I was also sleeping with Doug, who told me he loved me every time he reached orgasm.

When we were done, ﬁve minutes later, Jun-Ho put his uniform back on, including his hat, lacing and double-knotting his boots. I lay naked on the bedding, feeling a drop or two of his semen make its way to my thigh.

Am I fertile right now? I thought suddenly, counting back to the day of my last period. Shit.

“I will have to return to my parents’ house soon,” he said. Outside, the shadows had shifted.

My clothes had been discarded in a heap, petals from a daisy. I gathered them up.

“You go, then,” I said, covering myself with the jumble: pants, shirt, bra, underwear. “I don’t want you to be late. I’ll just sit here for a while.”

“I cannot leave you, Sarah,” he said. “I must at least accompany you to the subway station, that is the Korean way. When I leave to the army, my mother says she accompany me as far as the front door, only, but then she was going out all the way to the front gate. And then she was going down the alley. I tell her to go back into the house, again and again, but she keeps coming out, farther and farther, until I think she will walk all the way to the base with me.”

“Now, you know your way around Seoul a little bit, Sarah?” Jun-Ho asked, as we wound our way around the vendors and their wares massed at the mouth of the station: pantyhose tied in bundles, penknives, a tiny toy that did somersaults. We stopped in front of the turnstiles. “Chal ka,” he said. Go in safety. There was a change in the tone and timbre of Jun-Ho’s voice. Then I realized that during our weeks of language exchange, he had always used the formal-polite level of speaking. Now he was speaking in the intimate style, which had its own vocabulary, also dropped the formal sentence endings. Chal ka yo became chal ka. As if it were now understood that we could ﬁnish each other’s thoughts.

“Well,” Jun-Ho said. He looked at me, then he bowed. A gentle incline, not the P.T. Barnumesque ﬂourish he had greeted me with that ﬁrst day at the Balzac. I hesitated, then bowed back, mimicking his posture, the way his head bent ﬁrst, followed by a slight rounding of the shoulders. Somehow, the gesture of bending toward each other, of exposing the tops of our heads seemed even more intimate than if we’d shared a tongue-smashing soul kiss as a goodbye.

Every time I turned back, he was still there standing, a rock in the river, as other commuters ﬂowed around him. Even as I walked up the stairs, which would cut me off from his view, he remained. I was tempted to scoot back down and see if he was still there, but instead, I let the tide of people carry me up the stairs to the platform.

Five stations into my trip, I noticed that the station-numbers were decreasing. They were supposed to be going up. I was going in the wrong direction.

My ﬁrst reaction was to panic. But then I remembered that the green line was one sinuous circle. If I stayed on long enough, I would get to where I was going.

At the next station, a man who looked to be about two hundred years old and partially mummiﬁed, entered. He was clad in a traditional vest, lavender pants tied at the ankle, and he held a cane as he tottered aboard. I offered my seat, as Koreans always seemed to do for the elderly. He grunted and settled into the sea-green velveteen seat, rested his gnarled hands atop the burled wood of his cane. An anachronism next to men in sharp-cut Western suits, women carrying designer handbags, the kind that would be too fancy even for Dayton’s. But no one gave him a second look.

I held onto the pole and looked out the window—this part of the green line was above ground. I watched the tall buildings with twinkling lights, the red neon crosses atop church steeples just starting to glow in the dark, bowling alleys with gigantic bowling pins mounted on their roofs. Then the train rushed into the blackness of a tunnel.

Back in our subway car, no one was staring at me. I was a part of this scene, this Korean tableau. For the ﬁrst time, I felt, even if ﬂeetingly, like I belonged somewhere.

KYUNG-SOOK

The foreigner’s name was “David.” He was in Korea through an American group he called the “Peace Core” that was somehow supposed to help Koreans. This Peace Core had sent him to the countryside on the mountain seacoast to live for two years, but he hadn’t liked it, so he had quit and come to Seoul to take an English-tutoring job with a wealthy family.

“I was planning on going back to America right away, but I’m glad stayed,” he said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have met you. Eventually I need to get back to America to go to graduate school—I deferred into an ethnomusicology program.”

“No, I’m serious,” he said. “In America, you could make a living playing your wonderful ﬂute. If you would just wear your Korean kimono, put your hair up, people would eat you up. You could become famous. There was a group called the Kim Sisters who dressed up in their Korean kimonos and sang ‘Arirang’ on the Ed Sullivan Show—apparently they were a riot.”

“Americans like all kinds of music,” he said. His voice became fast and excited. “Like the blues, which is a kind of music that has its roots in tribal Africa. It’s secular music, derived from folk traditions—you know, it’s like your Korean opera, where the woman sings and the man plays the drum.”

He was talking about p’ansori—long, lugubrious ballads sung by a lone singer with nothing to accompany her except the faraway sound of the changgo or the puk. Kyung-sook couldn’t believe a foreigner could be so interested in her country’s music.

“Is it true that in order to do that kind of opera, the singer has to sing until her throat bleeds?”

Kyung-sook knew very little about p’ansori, so she only nodded, to acknowledge that she had heard his question.

“That’s fascinating—to be so dedicated to your art that you destroy your body. Now, let me play you a song of the people.”

Yo soy un hombre sincero,

de donde crece la palma.

Y antes de morirme quiero

echar mis versos del alma.

He sang it in a different, melliﬂuous voice, in words of an English dialect he called “Spanish”: I am a truthful man from the land where palms grow/I want to share these poems of my soul before I die./With the poor people of the earth I want to cast my lot …

There was much she could learn from this man, Kyung-sook thought. How she wished that she could stop the hurtling movement of her life. But eventually, her parents would expect a return visit to the village when the school year ended in July. It was possible they might even have a match for her by then.

Her bright dreams—what had happened to them? She hadn’t anticipated Seoulites’ attitude toward traditional music: that it was unsophisticated and sentimental. To ﬁnd other folk musicians, she had had to search out ratty bars, where men would raise their eyebrows at her, thinking she was a kisaeng girl. The musicians she found guffawed when she mentioned her dreams of playing solo improvisational pieces of hyang-ak, native music, in front of an audience.

They scoffed, “This isn’t the Chosun Dynasty any more. Koreans want the operas of Verdi and Mozart played on their new electric gadgets. Even the teahouses play only Debussy waltzes these days.”

Just as the stone walls of the Western churches were beginning to edge out the wooden Red Arrow gates of Buddhist temples, Western music was beginning to take over the Korean consciousness. When Kyung-sook saw a place that advertised itself as a “music school,” she would see well-dressed children making their way up the stairs carrying sheets of music and Western violin cases.

Sometimes, the traditional musicians invited Kyung-sook to their ﬂats, where they lived four, ﬁve to a room. They ate only cheap fried noodles because that was all they could afford.

“And you have to learn popular tunes, so you can play at the rich people’s parties—to survive,” they told her morosely.

That Kyung-sook could not do. She couldn’t trap her music amidst the lines and stiff wires of this Western scale, submit them to the nasty-sounding conventions, “sharps” and “ﬂats.” When she played a san-jo, she improvised what her spirit moved her to play, which was the very purpose of this kind of music—what in nature was scripted and bound by wires, broken down into a calculus of notes and measures?

“There’s nothing for you here,” the David man said, tugging her down toward his bedding, which he let sit on the ﬂoor all day. “Let me take you away from all this.”

Kyung-sook recalled the day she had deﬁantly sat herself down in front of Seoul Station with her taegum and begun to play. If people would just hear, she believed, they would be reminded of this ancient instrument’s power: how its music was so beautiful it had been said to stop wars and heal disease in the ancient dynasties.

A small, curious crowd had immediately gathered. The younger people stepped over her, hufﬁng about her being in their way. The people who stayed exclaimed how they hadn’t heard that kind of music in a very long time. A granny even wiped her eyes and gave her a whole bag of just-roasted yams to take home. A bent-over old man donated all the coins his daughter-in-law had sent him off with that morning.

As the shadows grew long, people drifted away, and a police ofﬁcer came up to her and told her there were laws against panhandling. The number of coins she’d received were barely enough for a trolley ride home.

“Better watch out, little sister,” he warned. “Bad things happen to people who are out at night, after the curfew.”

Kyung-sook wanted to hear the song about the man from the land of green palm trees again. She lifted her ﬂute to her lips and began to play. The man strummed his guitar, their notes weaving together as easily as two small rivers become a larger one. Kyung-sook at last began to relax, letting her mind become tangled in its own melodies, going to a place where there were no worries.

SARAH

“Why don’t we do something different?” I said to Doug. “Why don’t we try to ﬁnd the Doksuri teahouse, the one they keep talking about in our textbook? It’s supposed to be the ofﬁcial teahouse of Chosun University.”

“Pabo-yah,” Bernie leaned in before Doug could answer. “Our textbook is obviously about a hundred years old—it has stuff like ‘don’t take me on a ﬁve-won plane ride.’ You couldn’t ﬁnd a teahouse in this neighborhood if you looked for days. Everything is ka-peh, like the Balzac ka-peh where you go with your army guy.”

“I didn’t ask you,” I said, and added, knowing he hated his American name, “Ber-nard.”

At the Rainbow, I choked on guilt as well as noodles, so when Doug suggested going “somewhere,” I readily agreed, even though I had music class. To further assuage my guilt, I handed him a key to my room that I’d just had made by an ajuhshi who had a little tent-stand full of keys on the street. I thought he’d have a noisy vibrating machine, like the one at Ace Hardware, but instead, he glanced at my key, sat down, cross-legged and barefoot, took out a blank and began shaping it with a simple metal ﬁle, smoking a cigarette, looking as inattentive as if he were trimming his nails on a boring afternoon. But in short order, the key was done, and I went back to the room and tried it—it worked.

“Mi casa es tu casa,” I told Doug. “By the way, what does pabo-yah mean?”

“He doesn’t hate you, he’s like the ﬁfth grader who throws rocks at the girls he likes. He’s obviously attracted to you, your nice face, your double eyelids—”

“The fold,” he explained. “Only a few Koreans naturally have that. Most people have to get surgery.”

Korean women—and some men—apparently had surgery to make their eyes look more “Western.” In the Korea Herald, I’d read an article about a famous young movie actress who had refused to get the surgery before playing Ch’un Hyang, a Korean folk heroine known for her beauty and steadfastness. The surgery had been mandated by her contract—“Whoever plays Ch’un Hyang has to have beautiful eyes,” a studio executive had been quoted as saying. The actress wasn’t working anymore.

“And your hair,” Doug went on. “I’ve never seen anyone with such thick hair.”

“My hair,” I snorted. “When I was in sixth grade, I wanted a Dorothy Hamill wedge like everyone had. It looked like the bottom of a broom after it was cut.”

I smiled. The Fabulous Sarah Thorson thought she looked great in a wedge, the gold colors of her hair ﬂowing in creamy waves. In reality, my hair would do only one thing: point to the ground. Even when soaking wet, each strand stayed true to itself, separate as sand. I found myself wishing for a snarl, a comb-stopper that would make me smirk and grimace as I tried to jerk it out, something that would give me a reason to use No More Tangles, like Amanda.

“You’re so strange,” he said. “It’s as if you can’t see yourself.”

Who can truly see themselves? Mirrors, ﬁlm, only project in two dimensions. We live in a world with three. Maybe the closest was having someone else see you. I was thinking of the time I was caught digging in the cat box.

Christine had asked me to fetch something from the basement, and underneath the pegboard that held the ﬁshing rods, cross-country skis, tennis rackets, I came upon a sand-ﬁlled tray. My fear of the dark had kept me out of the basement (four-year-old Amanda somehow used to be able to shut off the light and slam the door, trapping me in eternal darkness with spiders), but now the sand caught my eye with its minty color, how it was level, almost groomed, inviting as a pan of cool water. I stopped, plunged my hand in, liking the way the sand felt dry and granular, not gritty and creepily damp like sandbox sand.

First, I saw her feet. Slim, tanned ankles in white canvas Tretorn tennies, white cotton bootie socks with pom-poms sticking out over the edges.

“Dirty!” Christine’s chest reddened over the V-neck of her tennis whites. “Are you crazy? Did you learn that awful habit over there?”

The blue in her eyes, the white of the pearls circling the base of her neck. She looked improbably beautiful, even as she was screaming at me. How was I to know that the Persians peed and crapped into this box? I thought they were creatures that didn’t go at all; I saw no evidence of them going outside, like our neighbor’s black lab, Captain Midnight, who was always crouching around, tail in a question-mark, leaving cigar-shaped sticks all over our yard.

“Look at me,” she said, pulling us nose-to-nose. “You. Do. Not. Dig. In. The. Cat. Box.”

Her irises expanded and contracted, a camera’s shutter clicking. Flash-frozen in her gaze, I saw her seeing me: a dark, foreign object, denizen of the basement, deﬁler of the cat toilet.

Then she swept a strand of blond hair from her eyes. Her eyes their normal cerulean blue. Her lips curved up in a smile.

“Let’s go wash our hands, honey. Why, it’s almost time for lunch, isn’t it?” She paused to carefully enclose the round head of her tennis racket into a square, wooden press, even let me, slowly, fumblingly tighten the screws.

Doug unrolled the cotton yo piled in the corner and pulled me down on it as if it were a blanket on the beach.

“I called the TV station, Sejong Broadcasting, by the way,” he said, into my hair.

“Yup. The show’s actually called The Search for Missing Persons—dramatic, eh?”

“So I told them you’re American, only here until the end of the summer. I called and asked them again and again. Oh, maybe ﬁfteen times in the last two days.”

“You’ve got a slot, two weeks from Tuesday. Sejong Broadcasting is in Yoido, which is this little island on the Han River where all the TV stations are.”

“It might take an hour to get there by cab if there’s trafﬁc. So get ready to take a little trip after lunch two weeks from Thursday. I’ll go with you—if you want me to.”

KYUNG-SOOK

Yun-tan, he never stopped talking about America. Soon the word itself, A-me-ri-ca, played like a song inside Kyung-sook’s head.

The other day, when Kyung-sook had gone to his ﬂat, he had had a present waiting.

Kyung-sook didn’t think she could accept such a costly gift. Just the other day, he had taken her to a Western restaurant where she had eaten breaded pork cutlets and corn salad for the ﬁrst time—she had never had anything so delicious before. The man told her the bananas were for her. After she recovered from her shock and disbelief, she carefully wrapped the golden curves in her wrapping cloth to take back to share with the cook-owner and Sunhee. The man David, he just laughed at her, saying that in America one could eat bananas all day if you wanted, like a monkey.

“Wah!” said the cook-owner, back at the restaurant. “I’ve never even seen a banana before.”

The three of them stared at the fruit as if it were made of pure gold. When they ﬁnally ventured to try it, they carefully shaved tiny, sweet bits off one banana, left the rest on top of the little table by the counter as a luxurious decoration. After a few days, however, they turned brown and rotted, spreading a sickly-sweet smell through the restaurant.

“You need to consider your happiness for a change,” the foreigner–man said. “I know that in Korea, women sacriﬁce as daughters, then as wives, then as mothers. They never have anything to call their own.”

Kyung-sook was irritated with the man’s tone—he seemed to say that he understood her country the best, and that she needed him to explain it to her. Still, she couldn’t help recalling Bong-soon, the girl named after the pink balsam-ﬂower, who was the prettiest, most sought-after girl in the village. Even after bearing her husband Hyung three sons and taking meticulous care of his elderly parents, Hyung had gotten the wind in his blood and had taken a mistress—one that he married shortly after Bong-soon killed herself by ﬁlling her apron with stones and wading into the Glass River. She had barely reached thirty.

Kyung-sook spit out the sticky squash candy she had been chewing. Stuck inside it was one of the lead ﬁllings from her teeth. The man looked into her mouth with alarm.

The famous HanYong University had been founded by an American missionary family, the Overtons, so the school was particularly prized by Koreans. It was one of the most difﬁcult ones to gain entrance to, second only to Seoul National University.

Kyung-sook found herself among the stately stone buildings, square courtyards, groomed topiaries, the digniﬁed statues of various Overtons that stood erect as if overseeing the ﬂowering rose gardens.

“The architecture is modeled after Harvard, a famous university in America—they even imported this ivy that’s growing on the walls,” the man said, then added, “Harvard, that is where I’ll be going to graduate school.”

Of course all Koreans knew about Harvard, the school that was famous even in A-me-ri-ca, land of famous schools.

“The descendants of the ﬁrst Overtons still live in Korea. Hargrave Overton had a party for all the Peace Corps workers before we were sent to our various postings,” he said. “He had his family there—he has a beautiful Korean wife and three children, one of them an adopted orphan. And you know what’s funny? None of the kids—not even the Korean orphan—speaks a word of Korean!”

“You’re always teasing me about not learning much Korean,” he said, pinching Kyung-sook’s arm playfully. “Okay, I still haven’t picked up hangul, your Korean alphabet, which you claim your wonderful King Sejong devised so that it can be learned in an hour. But you know, Overton said that old-time missionaries used to call Korean ‘the devil’s language.’”

“Because the devil purposely made the language so hard to learn in order to keep the missionaries from Christianizing people. Overton himself comes from a family that’s been in Korea for three generations, but he doesn’t speak any Korean himself, either. He sends his kids to the Seoul Foreign School, where they only speak English.”

“Well, she speaks a little English, although it’s not as good as yours. She’ll just have to learn it better if she wants to communicate with her children and husband.”

David led Kyung-sook to a large white building. The university’s hospital—fully Western, he said. “If you want to get that stuff with the needles or the burning herbs treatment, you have to go somewhere else.”

Inside the building was a place called the Foreigner’s Clinic. It was spacious and orderly, not at all like a Korean clinic, which was usually as noisy and raucous as an open-air market. Here, Westerners sat quietly, neatly lined up in chairs, while Western doctors strode the halls looking extraordinarily tall.

At the dental hall, a Korean nurse in a white uniform and a stiff, starched hat curved like a paper lantern greeted Kyung-sook so politely, she was taken aback; as a waitress, she was used to people using familiar language with her. David showed the nurse a blue book with a gold eagle stamped on the cover. She nodded and asked them to wait.

Kyung-sook needed to use the bathroom, and she was impressed that there was actually one right inside the building. However, she was dismayed to see the Western toilet.

It was built like those chairs that Westerners were so fond of. Westerners seemed to like to inhabit that strange middle space between sitting and standing—but what a waste of the ondol-heat from the ﬂoor! And now, this pyonso, she couldn’t think of a more repulsive contraption. She made sure to keep her ongdongi from touching it, but because the seat was too high to let her squat, her urine sprayed everywhere.

So strange! she thought to herself. At least there was paper for wiping, right there. She gathered up an extra wad of it and stuck it in her pocket, for later.

She and the man were ushered into a stark, white room. She was told to sit in a chair that looked like it was made to hold a giant. A man with gold-red hair covering his exposed forearms like fur looked into Kyung-sook’s mouth. She was scared when he started up a machine that gave off an awful whine, but the Korean nurse told her not to worry. Before she knew it, the hole was ﬁlled. Not like last time when the tooth-doctor spent almost an hour clumsily chipping at the tooth, spilling bits of metal in her mouth. The Western doctor handed her a mirror. She was surprised to see that she had a gold—not lead—ﬁlling. Kyung-sook smiled at David the foreigner, wishing she could smile wider, so that everyone could see the glitter.

SARAH

Later in the week, it began to rain. And rain. Every morning the Seoul sky groaned gray and swollen, seeming to release its liquid burden in exhaustion. Six-inch-long earthworms slithered out, then drowned, bloated and pale, on the sidewalk. Rivers of dirty water slid down the hill by the Residence, carrying twigs and garbage and once, a child’s plastic shoe. The mornings were damp and clammy, the small respite of noon sun was followed by an afternoon downpour. Garish orange squash blossoms appeared everywhere, the thick, trumpet-like blooms drooping heavy with collected rainwater.

Doug was right. I didn’t have to ask when the chang-ma, the monsoon season, started.

One week, rain poured straight from the sky without rest. We were wet all the time, the Residence’s halls became cluttered with umbrellas, damp pairs of shoes. Sopping socks draped like Dali watches over every available piece of furniture. The girls went to the HYUNDAI Department Store and bought colorful rubber boots.

“It’s like living at the bottom of a fucking toilet,” Bernie Lee grumbled, as the very existence of the sun became an unsubstantiated rumor. “The sky is vomiting water.”

I enjoyed the steady patter of fat drops, the dust-colored light that made two o’ clock in the afternoon seem like evening. The chang-ma drove me inside, the perfect place for me to wait. For her. I used that time to dream about meeting my mother. How she would have blacker-than-black hair like mine. And she would wear it youthfully long, so when she bent over to kiss me, it would brush my face.

Her hands, elegant and agile. Every morning of her pregnancy she would have tapped out a little welcoming tattoo, a reveille to me, her pressing ﬁngers a kind of embrace.

She would have a soft voice. Not like Christine’s, which tended to get tense and shrill as if she didn’t believe people were listening to her. No, my real mother’s voice would be soft, so soft that people would pause, incline their heads toward her, because they wanted to hear what she had to say.

I had begun seeing ﬂashes of her, her face this time. Sometimes in that precarious space between sleep and waking. Or her proﬁle might materialize in the steam ﬂoating off my rice, sketched in a bowl of noodles. Once, when I was playing the changgo drums, her whole self appeared, ﬂoating. But she only appeared on the edges of things, like those ﬂoaters that exist in the vitreous ﬂuid of your eyeballs; when I tried to look at her dead-on, she’d vanish.

“Who do you think my mother was?” I asked Doug after we made love in my room, his hand clamped tightly over my mouth to keep me quiet. “You know. When she had me.”

“You can’t take too much stock in these things, but you don’t have the face or the coloring of a peasant,” he said. “My guess is that your mother could have been a college student who’d had a ﬂing, or a high-class hooker who chews ﬂower-gum.”

“How about your birth father? It could have been he who abandoned you. In Korea, the fathers get custody. Maybe he was divorced and wanted to get remarried. It also could have been a case of a poor couple with too many mouths to feed.”

I knew this was just a game, a create-your-own-identity game. But lately I’d been playing it solitaire for hours, meandering on journeys all over the known universe, but ultimately going nowhere, caught on the endless surface of a Möbius loop.

“No.” He seemed shocked, so I explained: “With my mother, well, I started dreaming about her when I was thirteen. If I shut my eyes quickly I can just catch a glimpse of her inside my eyelids, or sometimes I see this shadow just as I’m falling asleep. Even though I’ve never gotten a good look at her face, she has a presence. Not so with my birth father.”

Maybe that was just the way of fathers: one’s language was the mother tongue, one’s country the motherland. Take Ken. In the realm of our family, he was the marginal ﬁgure forever in the penumbral shadow of Christine. Christine was the one who decided what we had for supper, where we went on vacation, and generally any and all decisions regarding The House and The Children.

So to Amanda and me, Ken remained two-dimensional: law-school diploma, meal ticket, a portrait on the wall. He didn’t protest his secondary status, on the contrary he accepted it, maybe even enjoyed being free of those messy emotional encumbrances that sometimes caused dishes to be broken, doors slammed, children to be told they might have become prostitutes in an alternative life. And, like the portrait on the wall—the one that had eyes that moved only when certain people were looking at it—Ken had his own ways of getting things across, of letting his daughters know he loved and cared for them.

KYUNG-SOOK

“How do you like it, Karen?” David the foreigner asked eagerly. He called her “Karen” because, he complained, “Kyung-sook” was too hard to remember.

“In America, you could have pizza every day if you wanted,” he told her. “There’s a pizza place on practically every block.”

This pi-ja might be more palatable, she thought, if she could add a pinch of sugar and a goodly amount of sweet-hot red pepper paste, maybe some ﬁsh or kimchi. And if she could scrape off the cheez-u.

It was amazing to her that Koreans paid handsome sums of money to eat this kind of food. Some Western foods, like the fried pork cutlets, were perhaps more delicious than Korean foods. But Westerners seemed to assume their things would always be better, more civilized, and Koreans seemed to silently agree by slavishly copying their ways. Take this pi-ja for instance. That stuff they called cheez-u that they were so proud of smelled like human shit—no other way to describe it. And then, you ate the pi-ja with your hands. Sunhee had whispered to her that she heard that Westerners indulged in a puzzling practice of sitting in their own dirty bathwater.

Was that why the foreigner-man always smelled a bit rancid, as if he’d washed with water only and not soap? Not scrubbed the old layers of skin off with a pumice? When Kyung-sook was a child, her mother considered her clean only once pea-sized balls of ﬂesh rolled off her arms and legs in profusion.

Kyung-sook put those thoughts out of her mind as she forced herself to eat the rest of the pi-ja. She wondered if she was going to be in Seoul or back in the village by the next Harvest Moon Festival. Or, was it even possible, she might even be in A-me-ri-ca?

She thought about autumn, the season that traditionally made Koreans melancholy—the leaves dying, the cold winter coming. But autumn was one of Kyung-sook’s favorite seasons. To her, it was the time for the leaves to hold nothing back and bask in their blazing glory, for the moon to grow so fat and bright the sky could barely contain it. The drummers in their ﬂowing white, red, and blue clothes would dance up and down the dirt paths, pounding out the familiar rhythms that would set blood jumping, giving strength to the farmers to cut, bundle, and thresh their harvest.

The next day Kyung-sook complained about her stomach. The pi-ja seemed to be liquefying and ﬂowing out of her. She collapsed at the restaurant, sending trays and dishes ﬂying. Sunhee helped her up, dragged her to the kitchen, where the cook-owner waited with a sharp sewing needle in hand.

“They say that if one of the body’s heavenly gates gets jammed up, you have to break it open,” she said. She grabbed Kyung-sook’s thumb in a viselike grip, wrapped the knuckle tight with a string, and then plunged the needle deep into the bulging spot right above the moon of the nail. Kyung-sook screamed as blood spurted everywhere.

“See, the blood is dark, corrupted,” said the cook-owner with satisfaction. “Once it ﬂows out, it’ll clear up the congestion in your innards.”

At around dinnertime, David the foreigner came to the restaurant. He looked at Kyung-sook’s wan face and said she should stay with him because she was sick. Kyung-sook agreed; she couldn’t imagine laying her aching bones on the cold cement ﬂoor of the storeroom, even though the cook-owner tsked loudly when she saw the two of them leaving together, and Sunhee said incredulously, “Oh-moh—you’re going to go stay the night with Mr. Fish?”

At his ﬂat, David had her lie on his yo in the warmest part of the room. He told her he was going to make juk, the rice gruel Koreans eat for upset stomachs. He said he had watched his “country mother” make it many times.

Kyung-sook, despite her queasiness, was amused. No one besides her mother and Imo had ever prepared food for her before. So even though he forgot to wash the rice, resulting in lumpy yet watery mush—“not quite rice, not quite gruel” as the saying went—she ate it as enthusiastically as her upset stomach would allow.

When Kyung-sook felt better, he entertained her with photos of his family. Mixed in with these photos was one of a woman with hair the color of barley straw, her eyes the strange, immovable gray of slate. This photo he did not explain, sliding it quickly back into the pile.

Kyung-sook did not feel jil-tu, jealousy. Instead she felt charmed that someone else had loved this David man before her. When he left to use the outhouse, she ﬂipped the picture over.

To David,

Friends always,

Annie Borchard, Wilton High Class of ’68

He showed her the rest of the pictures: his family posed against a background of a blue ocean with white sailboats—it looked like a painting. He said the place was called “Cape Cod.” Kyung-sook replied that she thought it was strange to name such a beautiful place after a ﬁsh.

Kyung-sook sat up. Her stomach lurched, although she didn’t know if it was from being sick or from being anxious. Thoughts of her future increasingly ﬁlled her with dread. When the man left Korea, could she try to return to college? Should she go back to the village? Keep working at the dumpling house? This foreigner had brought so many strange colors and sounds and sensations into her life, she feared that when he left, everything would become unbearably dreary.

“I love you, Karen,” he said. “You must see that Korea isn’t big enough for your dreams—your music.”

“Yes, your music, your country’s music. Your people have let themselves be swept up by Western capitalist values, letting valuable traditions languish and die. I see it everywhere: people would rather listen to some third-hand recording of Beethoven instead of merely stepping outside and experiencing true Korean music, the kind that has sustained your people through the ages.”

“I want to give you everything America has to offer, Karen,” he said. “I know what your life was like, I lived out in the country. I could hardly believe the primitive conditions.”

“The shit and piss from the outhouse went right into the pig’s trough,” he said, with evident disbelief. “And one morning when I’d gotten up early, I saw the country mother collect the chamber pots and then pour their contents into the ash-house—and then use the ashes for fertilizer in the vegetable garden! Can you believe it, Karen?”

“We Korean, we dunna waste,” she said. Anyone fortunate enough to own a pig let it eat waste, everyone else used the night soil for fertilizer—some enterprising farmers even put lean-to privies right in their ﬁelds to beg for more from the passersby.

He shook his head and muttered something about how whenever he—and no one else—used the outhouse, the pig would get excited and run over, grunting and squealing, and the villagers would gather and laugh at the spectacle.

“In America, it’ll be so different. You’ll have sanitary ﬂush toilets, you’ll be able to take a bath every day, not just once a week at the bathhouse. You’ll have TV, telephones, vaccines, you’ll be able to drive a car, even.”

A car? She didn’t know anyone who’d even ridden in, much less driven, one. But the man had brought her bananas, gold for her teeth, delicious, rubbery chewing gum that he called Wiggly.

“Most importantly, in America, it’s a democracy, not a military dictatorship. The president doesn’t order the police to shoot people on the streets. We have honest elections, women have equal rights. We call it ‘women’s lib.’”

“We’re going to have to work on your pronunciation,” he said. “Women’s l-l-lib.”

Kyung-sook sighed. This man, in all his time here, knew little Korean other than give me this and I know. Sometimes, he called her his “yobo,” as if they were married, or his “saek-ssi lady,” obviously not knowing he was just redundantly calling her “lady-lady.”

“And my name isn’t Da-bid, it’s Dav-v-vid.” He crunched down on his lower lip with his teeth and instructed Kyung-sook to do the same.

“I want you to be able to say the name of your future husband,” he said. He took Kyung-sook into his arms and kissed her, pushing his tongue into her mouth, crushing her onto the yo. In the back of her throat, Kyung-sook tasted the man’s peculiar smell that rose off him like vapor—it reminded her of stagnant water, that kind lotuses and the giant red carp grew well in.

The next day Kyung-sook told the foreigner she would go back to America with him.

“Groovy,” he said. He told her to wait while he went out. He returned smiling, his hands hidden behind his back. He teased her, making her guess which hand held the surprise. She tapped his left arm, then his right arm. Both wrong, it seemed.

Finally, he presented her with a closed ﬁst, which he opened with excruciating slowness. Resting on his dry palm was a jade ring, moss green and dark all the way through. It wasn’t the translucent almost-white of their country’s ﬁne jade, but she smiled and let him put it on her ﬁnger. It was a sign of his promise.

The next time she looked through his pictures, she found, with much satisfaction, that the photo of the woman with the slate eyes was gone.

PART II

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