Somebody’s Daughter

Cooking Oil Auntie moaned, swinging her considerable ongdongi around on the bench.

“Aigu, what’s going to happen to poor Okja?” she said, wringing her hands. At the bottom of the TV screen: LOYAL VIEWERS, PLEASE TUNE IN NEXT WEEK AT THIS TIME.

“Damn!” Cooking Oil Auntie pounded her ﬁst on the bench. “Why do they always do this—how can I wait until next week to ﬁnd out what happens?”

Kyung-sook didn’t know why Cooking Oil Auntie let herself become so sucked in by cheap, sentimental soap operas like this one, The Date Tree. Cooking Oil Auntie, the most tight-ﬁsted businesswoman in the market, wept and exulted over these paper characters as if they were members of her own family.

In the late afternoons, when customers were scarce as frogs in winter, Kyung-sook occasionally accepted Cooking Oil Auntie’s invitation to watch the soap operas because watching TV was such a novelty for her. And the previous soap opera, The Dark Yushin Era and Beyond, had been based on the true history of President Pak Chung-Hee’s so-called Yushin, “Revitalizing Reforms.”

The drama had been beguiling, following the story of two friends who make their way from a small, dirt-poor village to Seoul. One man becomes a hired thug for the strongman government, the other—embittered because his teacher father was executed as a suspected Communist sympathizer—gains entrance to the famous Seoul National University and becomes a prosecutor, ﬁghting the corruption of the government. The plot twist was that both friends fall in love with the same Seoul girl who joins the underground student democratic movement. But when she is killed in a police raid, the former rivals-to-the-death join forces to exact revenge.

Watching the show brought Kyung-sook back to that time of the roaring army trucks, the soldiers and policemen running on the streets.

… GIRL LOOKING FOR KOREAN BIRTH-GIVING MOTHER NEXT ON THE SEARCH FOR MISSING PERSONS!!…

“Hm, ﬁnally, something new and different on that show,” Cooking Oil Auntie remarked. “Usually it’s just wailing harlmonis.”

“Well, maybe if you’re going to keep the TV-machine on, I’ll stay, too—if that’s okay.”

Kyung-sook did have some baby-ﬁnger shrimp as well as some spiced squid and boiled peanuts that she had purchased for Il-sik, her husband, who liked eating light snacks and drinking beer at night, sometimes relieving Kyung-sook from the duty of making him dinner.

“I’ve got the shrimp you like so much,” she said, taking it out of her wrapping cloth and handing it over.

“This show is all stories about the human condition,” Cooking Oil Auntie explained, as if she were a schoolteacher and Kyung-sook her student. “First loves, people with crushes on their elementary school teachers, things we’ve seen a million times before right in the village, unh? But they’ve never had a foreigner on the show before—that should be really interesting.”

The hosts, an older, squat man and a young woman much taller than he was, came out smiling and joking with the audience. They greeted a middle-aged woman and a shrunken-looking ajuhshi.

“Shucks. Figures they save the interesting one for last. Say, d’you have any more snacks?”

“Holding out the best stuff, huh?” Cooking Oil Auntie ripped off a huge leathery piece and stuffed it into her mouth. Then she made a face and gagged.

“Pwah! There’s an ocean’s worth of salt in this stuff—I told you not to buy at Oakla’s snack stall. Urrr! Now my throat’s a desert.”

Kyung-sook sighed and took out a can of POCARI SWEAT, one she had bought as a treat for herself, to drink while keeping Il-sik company.

“—Wasn’t that wonderful, seeing all the people who called for our honored guests, Dr. Shin and Mrs. Choi?” The female hostess’s voice ﬂowed like honey, so reﬁned and smoothed by a perfect Seoul accent, quite discordant with the shock of her low-cut top and short skirt.

“It sounds like we have another heartwarming reunion in the works, thanks again to The Search for Missing Persons!”

The squat male announcer moved in front. His hair, Kyung-sook thought, was too black. A man his age should have at least a touch of gray, or white, like Il-sik had.

“For our next honored guest, we have someone who came a-a-a-all the way from America,” he intoned.

“This girl was abandoned here in Korea as a baby,” the woman announcer added, from behind him.

Kyung-sook’s throat tightened. The woman had used the same word for “throw away the garbage.”

“… She was sent away from Korea and adopted by a white family in America. But now she has returned to seek her lost truemother. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s listen to her touching story and see if we can help her.”

The hostess waved her arms at a closed door as if she were a shaman imploring a spirit to come out. The door opened, and a girl of maybe twenty or so walked out. She was wearing a pretty purple dress and she stood very tall and conﬁdent as she walked out.

“Hmph, look at that, she’s grown up on American food and see how tall she is—if she were a Korean man they would send her straight up to the DMZ for her military duty, show those North Koreans what giants we’ve become,” Cooking Oil Auntie commented. “And look at that hair.”

The girl’s hair was so black and shiny that in the camera’s lights it looked alive, the way animal fur looked alive. Kyung-sook’s own hair had grown thinner over the years, with age and too many troubles, but when she was young, she, too, had such an abundance that no matter which way you pulled a clump of it, you couldn’t see even a sliver of white from her scalp.

The male announcer asked the girl how she was doing, was she happy and at peace to be there? Now the girl looked scared. She stared back, frozen.

“Do you understand Korean?” he asked her. The girl coughed, screwed up her face.

“What a riot,” said Cooking Oil Auntie. “That girl looks Korean, but out of that mouth comes the exact yabba-yabba of those missionaries who could never learn to speak Korean properly. So strange, like watching a puppet or a retard, isn’t it?”

The girl started to speak English, reading from a piece of paper. Kyung-sook wasn’t surprised to ﬁnd that she didn’t understand a word anymore.

“I’ll tell you the story, dear audience,” said the translator. “This girl, Sal-Ah, doesn’t know anything about her Korean truemother or truefather. Her white American parents adopted her even though of course there was no blood connection—isn’t that a nice Western custom? She has come to Korea and is studying in the Kyopos-come-back-to-Korea program at Chosun University. Her adoption records say she was abandoned on—”

“Welcome, please enter!” boomed Cooking Oil Auntie. Kim Grandmother, one of the maids at the wealthy Merchant Pak’s house poked her head into the stall like an inquisitive turtle.

“… She was raised in the care of the Little Angels orphanage until she was adopted. Truemother, if you are out there and want to atone for your deed, or if there are any other family members, or anyone knows anything about this girl, please be so kind as to call us now at the station. 02-332-8175.”

Cooking Oil Auntie inserted a cork in the bottle of rich, brown sesame oil and sent Kim Grandmother on her way.

“Unh? No. But she looks like she’s in her early-adult season, doesn’t she? That would make it sixties? seventies when she was dumped? Sounds about right: that was the time when women were starting to work in the factories with men—and of course, getting in trouble. Remember how that police box in North River Village added that window you could push a baby through if you wanted to throw it away?”

“Well, I’m not sure all the babies were ‘thrown away,’” Kyung-sook said, that horrid word sharp on her lips. “I’m sure there were reasons.”

“Reasons, sure. These mothers all have their reasons. Like the mothers who abandoned their kids right after the 6.25 War. Some of those kids wandering the streets were true orphans, of course. But the biggest bunch of them were mixed-blood U.N.-soldier spawn—I saw that on the Evening Garden news program. I guess their mothers found it pretty convenient to just ditch ’em and start fresh, huh?”

Kyung-sook thought of the proverb, “If you keep your mouth closed, you cannot bite yourself,” and she did just that. She kept her eyes on the TV screen.

In the TV studio in Seoul, there was silence. A silence that ﬁltered all the way to Enduring Pine Village, to Cooking Oil Auntie’s stall. Kyung-sook couldn’t even hear a cock crow in the market.

“Aigu, nobody’s calling for that sorry child.” Cooking Oil Auntie began to polish her blue-green oil bottles, the same beautiful color as the ﬂies that buzzed around the dungheap. Kyung-sook felt the heat from the roasting sesame seeds searing her face.

“We’re sorry, folks, but no one called for this lost American girl. Maybe the caller is just too shy. At the bottom of our screen we’re going to run our studio number again. This girl is going to stay in Korea for the rest of the summer, so if you know anything, be sure to give us a call. Once again, it’s 02-332-8175. And keep watching The Search for Missing Persons especially to see if the woman from Mokp’o who called today is really Mrs. Choi’s sister! If so, that means we have two sisters from the North separated by two wars ﬁnally reunited here in the South—it promises to be a very touching reunion. So stay tuned and kamsamnida ladies and gentlemen till next week!”

“That poor kid,” Cooking Oil Auntie muttered as she ﬂipped off the set. “Talk about children who suffer for the sins of their parents. How could a human mother ﬂing her child to the four winds like that? A half-nigger GI baby I could see, maybe. But a beautiful Korean girl like that? I don’t care what the circumstances might have been—if she were my child, I would have become a beggar, done anything to raise her. You do that for your own child.”

She looked at Kyung-sook for conﬁrmation. Kyung-sook was looking the other way. The girl on the screen, she looked to be of pure Korean blood. But was it possible? The foreigner-man, after all, had been tall and he’d had his yun-tan coal-black hair.

“Those women, especially those so-called ‘modern women’—their attitudes threaten our whole society!” Cooking Oil Auntie went on. “They should have abortions instead of heaping so much shame on us as a nation—it makes us look so backward, having Korean kids raised by foreigners. Part of the fault is that it’s too easy—they can just pretend to forget the kid on a park bench, as if a child were a package of green onions—”

“That girl probably would have had a terrible life growing up in Korea!” Kyung-sook suddenly exclaimed. All the blood in her body seemed to have found its way into her face, which threatened to burst like a child’s cheap rubber ball. “You shouldn’t make judgments on situations you know nothing about!”

“The same could be said for you,” Cooking Oil Auntie said, slowly scanning Kyung-sook’s face. “I at least know what it’s like to have a child, don’t I?”

Kyung-sook rose quickly from where she’d been sitting. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep the tears inside. Her mouth ﬁlled with a warm taste of iron.

“Look here, Sister, it took me many years to have my son, I know too well the pain of being barren—it was even worse than having my husband die on me.”

“If it helps, I’ve heard that wanton women get pregnant much more easily than dutiful wives like you, or me with my one son. Maybe there’s something to that—the merciful Lord Buddha will reward us with a hundred male children and ﬁfty daughters in our next lives.”

SARAH

No Kyung Hee? Korean names, endless combinations of strange syllables. Kyung/Mi/Jae/Ho/Jun/Ok. Did I know her?

SARAH

The woman’s name was Mrs. Lee. Lee Ok-Bong. My mother. She lived here, in Seoul. All this time. And now I had her number.

When I informed Doug of the news, he shouted, lifted me off my feet and spun me around like the Tilt-a-Whirl at the State Fair.

“She ﬁnally called the station,” I gasped, giddy, a whole new world of possibility spiraling out before me.

But then I didn’t call her. I woke up the next morning, a leaden lump in my stomach.

Doug seemed almost irked by my sudden recalcitrance. He practically tore the number out of my hands, spoke tersely to whoever answered, and set up a meeting. We were going to meet at the Little Angels Orphanage, Doug’s idea. Kyunghee Noh had been pushing for an on-air meeting at the station—she was sorely disappointed with me, she said.

KYUNG-SOOK

“What is this number?” Il-sik said to his wife. Kyung-sook looked to see a tiny scrap of paper held in his good hand. Had it fallen out of her skirt pocket when she was bending over the wash?

“Oh, it is nothing.” She took it back from him. “Cooking Oil Auntie told me about a supplier in Seoul who could get me the storage tins for the shrimp paste more cheaply—no one on this earth knows more about saving money than she.”

“Are you all right?” he asked. “It seems like you’ve been very tired lately.”

Kyung-sook looked at her husband. His right hand, less like a hand than a crabbed piece of old gingerroot.

“I tire in the dog days of summer, that’s all,” Kyung-sook told her husband. “All day in the market listening to those squawking customers and then coming home to take care of Father, changing his diaper like he’s a baby.”

“I am fortunate in marrying you—I have no in-laws who would forbid me to do this,” she said.

Kyung-sook patted her hair. She never looked in the mirror anymore, she could tie the strands into a married-woman’s bun without one.

No one wants to grow old, Kyung-sook thought. When she was a child, her maternal grandmother and grandfather had seemed of a completely different, if friendly, species. They had skin like rice paper that had gotten wet and dried again. Their voices were tentative and quavery, like someone who had once been sure of himself but had now grown to doubting.

She was beginning to see the same lines on her face, hear her own voice sounding strange to her ears. But was that so bad?

She gave her husband a caress in the privacy of their inner room. She thought with affection how they had eschewed both a folk wedding and a Western-style one at the wedding hall, instead opting for a simple ceremony under the watchful eyes of Christo and the rough-hewn beams of the church. That is what Il-sik had suggested, and Kyung-sook was so grateful to him. When he reached for her in the dark, she did not see his disﬁgured hand, nor did she see his wrinkles. In fact, their bodies ﬁt together as nicely as the yin-yang symbol on their country’s ﬂag. She was disappointed on the nights he didn’t touch her.

“That’s the way we will be, then, two old mandarin ducks,” she said quietly. “Hae-ro, swimming in slow circles, old together.”

In her pocket, she could feel the number, the weightless scrip of it. She wondered if anyone else had called for the girl. She didn’t know why she hadn’t just done so right away to ﬁnd that most likely she was wrong, and could put her mind at ease. But Cooking Oil Auntie had made her so upset, she couldn’t think. And then she had returned home to Il-sik and realized she had more to consider than just her ease of mind—there was also her husband and the entire life she had built up for herself, hanging on that slimmest thread of possibility. What was the right thing to do?

SARAH

“You have a lot of babies here.” Doug peered through the ofﬁce’s window at the rows of cribs, lined up like shoeboxes. “Do you get a new delivery every day?”

“You amaze me, Sarah, how you managed to ﬁnd this place and get your ﬁle without help, without anyone translating for you. I guess if you set your mind to something, nothing can stop you.”

The door to the ofﬁce opened. An ajuhshi in a chartreuse polo shirt walked in, leading a doughy woman with short, permed hair that was a matte, shoe-polish black.

I was frozen. The ajuhshi pointed at me and muttered. I stared at the freckles on this woman’s face, the color of bruise spots on apples. I had moles, brown moles, soft as gumdrops—but no freckles. What did this mean?

Miss Park said something to them in Korean, and they sat down. The woman kept staring at me.

A slim teenage girl walked into the room. She put her Louis Vuitton bag down on the table.

“Sorry,” she said to us. “I got hung up in trafﬁc and the battery in my cell phone died.”

“Julie Koh. My mom’s HeeJung Koh, the director of Little Angels. I’m here to translate.”

I was about to say that I had brought Doug to translate, but then I decided that would be rude, she’d come all this way. Doug hadn’t said a word in Korean yet, anyway.

“Your English—” I began. I didn’t know how to put it—I hated it when ignoramuses in Eden’s Prairie praised me for speaking English so well.

“Oh, I go to the Seoul Foreign High School where it’s all expat kids, and only a few Koreans, like me and my sister.” She checked her watch, a Swatch. “And we watch Armed Forces TV all the time. I love All My Children.”

The woman was indeed “Mrs. Lee.” The ajuhshi was Mr. Lee, her brother—my uncle. They both lived in Seoul. Mrs. Lee asked me again, “Agi-yah?” which Julie translated as Are you my baby?

I hugged her. Something about her felt right; Christine was all corners and angles, honed by hours and hours of tennis and feel-the-burn Jane Fonda leg lifts. But this woman was all loose, warm ﬂesh that seemed to envelop me. I started to cry, too.

Someone tugged on my arm. Miss Park. She handed us both some Kleenex she whisked from a shiny, satin-quilted box. She took one for herself and turned away and discreetly dabbed at her eyes.

“I want to know why,” I said. “Julie, could you ask her why she gave me up?”

“She says she had to give you up when her husband died suddenly, just after you were born,” Julie said.

Mrs. Lee looked at me searchingly—I didn’t know what kind of expression I had on my face—and added more words. Dae-hak, you-hak, words that had to do with school.

“She didn’t think she could give you any kind of life, being poor and without a husband. She wanted you to go to college, study abroad.”

“I was covered with ddong,” I said to Julie. “Ask her about that, ask her why she did that.”

Mrs. Lee sucked at her teeth. When Julie translated my question, she seemed taken aback. It took her a few seconds to answer.

“It was such a long time ago, she doesn’t remember, she said she’s blocking a lot out. She must not have had time to clean you up properly. She says she’s sorry.”

I didn’t know what to do now. I was with the woman who gave birth to me, but the urge to cry out “Um-ma!” didn’t happen. She was a woman with a bad dye job, a thick waist, polyester pants. Her brother had shifty, nervous eyes and slicked-down hair, which made him look like a weasel. I wanted to automatically feel love for these people, my blood family, but I didn’t feel anything except numb.

“Don’t be too hard on your mother, is what Miss Park said. I know it might be difﬁcult to understand as Americans—” Julie looked signiﬁcantly ﬁrst at Doug, then me. “But bringing a child you can’t care for to a police station, or to Little Angels is a caring act. It’s not abandonment. These mothers do it so the baby can have a better life.”

I was thinking of a story I’d read in the paper last summer, of a girl on Long Island who had given birth in a public restroom at her prom, cut the umbilical cord on a metal toilet paper dispenser, thrown the kid in the trash to die—then went back out onto the dance ﬂoor. Or the Hmong girl in Minneapolis, only nineteen and already a mother of ﬁve, who somehow left three of the children out in the car on a subzero night. Two froze to death, the third lost all the ﬁngers on her left hand. Suddenly, the Korean way seemed more humane, enlightened, civilized.

“This is a lot for me,” I murmured. “Maybe we should meet again, alone.”

Mrs. Lee liked this suggestion. She smiled at me enthusiastically, crescents of gold in her teeth smiling along with her.

“She says she’d like to spend some time with you, also. She wants to invite you to her house.”

I wasn’t sure how to say goodbye to her, so I sort of half-bowed and mumbled an-yong-ha-say-yo, which I realized, too late, was “hello” and not “goodbye.” Mrs. Lee waved at me.

SARAH

When I had received the materials for the Motherland Program, I had eagerly ﬂipped through the pages explaining the language and cultural programs, the instructions on what to bring. Then I got to the last page, which said:

A physical examination proving good health is mandatory for all Motherland Program applicants. Please have your doctor ﬁll out and sign the attached form.

I didn’t want to have to see our family doctor, Dr. Solvaag, the creepy guy with too-warm ﬁngers, the one Ken and Christine always chatted up at the Eden’s Prairie Country Club parties. Then I realized, I’m almost twenty years old. I can have my own doctor. I searched in the phone book, called the ﬁrst GP listed. Dr. Susan Aas.

When I got to the ofﬁce, a receptionist had handed me the forms on a clipboard that said PROZAC on it, a pen thoughtfully velcroed to the top.

Name. Address. Social Security. Insurance. Whom to contact in an emergency. Occupation.

Do you exercise regularly? Have you ever had the following (Please check yes or no):

Alcoholism. Cancer (check type). Cataracts. Heart Disease. High Blood Pressure. Kidney Disease. Surgery Requiring Hospitalization. Urinary Tract Problems.

No and no and no and no. I had felt like a conscientious student who has prepared well for a test.

Have you ever been pregnant? (list children’s ages and delivery type, code V-vaginal, C-caesarean). Miscarriages? (list date and gestational age). Abortion? No, no, no, no.

Is there any family history of the following: Alcoholism. Cancer (list type). Heart Disease. Thyroid Disease (Graves’, Hashimoto’s). Multiple Sclerosis. Hemophilia. Depression.

Is mother or father known to be a carrier of the Tay-Sachs gene? Are either of your parents Ashkenazi Jews? Is there a history of diabetes in your family? (list type: juvenile onset, adult onset, gestational onset).

Allergies? Sickle cell anemia? Do you know if your mother took DES when she was pregnant with you?

My hand began to shake, ever so slightly. Ken had had a mild heart attack two years ago. Christine was allergic to penicillin. Nana had died of a combination of breast cancer and old age.

Are any parents or siblings deceased? Please list date, age, and cause of death.

I went back to the white spaces that stared at me, forever blank, and I scrawled NOT APPLICABLE in huge letters, so hard that the ballpoint ripped through the pages. I handed the mutilated forms in, pen neatly reattached to the velcro.

Dr. Aas asked me in a clipped tone if I had “issues” about disclosing my family’s medical history. I shook my head, too angry to speak.

“Does ‘Anyang-dong’ mean ‘car neighborhood’?” I asked Doug. This neighborhood where Mrs. Lee lived was rows and rows of storefronts with metal car parts spilling out: hubcaps, bumpers—various amputated metal pieces lying helpless and dying on the sidewalks. The air was ﬁlled with the whizzing noises of welding torches, bright showers of sparks, the petroleum smell of burning metal and rubber.

Doug and I went around and around. At one point, we found ourselves back at the subway station (had they moved it in the last hour?), and had to start again.

A legacy of the Japanese imposing their queer addressing system on Korea during the colonial period, Seoul was laid out by vague neighborhood names but no numbered addresses or street names. Adding to the confusion was the laissez-faire way the alleys and walkways were constructed, meandering ﬁrst up then down the hill or merely ending for no discernible reason.

We were faced with dozens of narrow alleys that broke off, capillary-like, into more alleys. The houses were hidden behind tall gates and smudged walls, the only proof of their existence crooked TV antennae breaking up the dull color of the skyline.

Julie had written out Mrs. Lee’s instructions in English. We located the neon green cross of the pharmacy (the correct one, this time) and entered an alley that led us up a hill. Sharp left at DIE SCHÖNE dry cleaner’s. Take right fork at video store. Straight up the hill past the HYUNDAI apartment building.

Another residential neighborhood. A combination of pollution-stained stucco shacks and high-rise apartment buildings with futuristic translucent tubes enclosing their stairwells. The alley was clogged with both rusty handcarts as well as compact cars parked head-to-tail like the colorful segments of a tapeworm. As we stood, taking this all in, several little kids in billowing karate uniforms whizzed by us on clattery bikes. When they saw Doug, they yelled, “Hello! A-me-ri-ca! Hello!” and waved, grinning with sharp, pointed teeth. Doug waved back.

Mrs. Lee waited outside the small, unmarked gate of her house. Her head was haloed in a pastel, shimmery light.

“She’s asking if you have a cold,” Doug said. I constricted my throat, searching for a tickle.

“She wants to know if I, the ‘American,’ understand what she’s saying. Do you want me to be translating?”

I shook my head. My mother. I would need to learn to communicate with her myself.

Mrs. Lee opened the gate and made a motion, hands down, ﬁngers wiggling like squid tentacles, inviting us in. Doug had told me that the American overhand sweep of the ﬁngers was a disrespectful gesture, one you’d only use with a dog.

At the top of the gate, light refracted through shards of colored glass embedded in the cement. The effect was artful, almost beautiful.

“Doduk-i,” Mrs. Lee said, when she saw me looking. I opened my Korean-English dictionary: Thieves. The glass, from broken soju bottles, was low-rent razor wire.

We entered a cluttered courtyard. Around a single spigot in the middle orbited the detritus of daily Korean living: plastic tubs, laundry stiffening to cardboard on wire racks, leggy plants leaning out of plastic tofu containers, a weightlifting bench—and two child-sized bicycles lying on their sides.

Then I realized this courtyard was shared by three families; each entryway had a raised concrete platform where battered leather shoes and ﬂip-ﬂops were lined up like the clearance shoe rack at Dayton’s.

Mrs. Lee led us to the middle dwelling. Doug slipped off his sneakers in a smooth motion and walked right in, but I had to sit down and untie my shoes. Mrs. Lee gazed fondly at me and helped me pull them off. She was wearing white canvas tennie shoes, Keds knockoffs with the backs smashed ﬂat by her fat heels so they had become, in essence, sneaker-clogs. She carefully arranged our shoes in a row, toes pointing out.

Inside was that same yellow linoleum ﬂoor from the yuhgwons. It curled upward at the corners slightly, and I saw that it wasn’t linoleum at all, but layers of some kind of oilpaper pressed together.

Her “house” was a single room with a phone-booth-sized kitchen that was lower than the rest of it and half outdoors, the stove powered with cannisters of propane. Mrs. Lee gave us some oblong pillows that looked like giant ﬂuorescent-green-and-pink after-dinner mints, and then she disappeared.

Doug and I sat on the ﬂoor, our elbows propped on the pillows. On the windowsill sat some green bottled lotion called ALOE ESSENSE 54 and a plastic squeeze bottle of some cream-colored stuff that bore a picture of a big-eyed doll and read KEWPIE in English. A skeletal wire rack held clashing peacock-hued ajuhma blouses and trousers.

Mrs. Lee returned lugging a small table chopped off at the knees. It contained a metal teakettle, two plastic cups (the kind little girls play tea-party with), an apple the size of a softball, tangerines, a roll of toilet paper. Inside the cups was what looked like brown sugar, but when she poured the hot water, I smelled the familiar pang of ginseng. She sat herself down and peeled the apple with her left hand, shaving the freckled brown-gold skin into a coil that eventually dropped to the table. She cut the apple into boomerang-shaped wedges.

I glanced over at Doug. He was looking a little bored, a stark contrast to my tense, braced student-driver posture. What was I supposed to do, how was I supposed to act? Like a guest? Like a daughter? Like a stranger?

That weekend, when Doug and I had been having sex, afterward, he rolled up and said to me, “Sarang-hae.”

My breath quickened, not because of him, but because I was suddenly thinking of Mrs. Lee, my mother. I was thinking that maybe the next time I saw her, I could use those words. I was crazy with wanting to use those words I’d saved for so long, just for her.

I watched the woman arranging the fruit on a cheap plastic plate. She impaled a piece of apple on a toothpick and held it up to my mouth, a hand solicitously cupping underneath.

The apple was sweet, with the cold, grainy texture of a pear. Mrs. Lee retrieved the KEWPIE bottle, uncapped it, and liberally squirted the creamy goo—which, I had to say, looked uncomfortably like semen—all over the fruit. After surveying her work, she gave it another fart-sounding squirt for good measure, then set the bottle on the low table as if she were contemplating a third pass.

Idly, I glanced at the squeeze bottle. The way the Korean letters under KEWPIE were situated, in a long, strange sequence, I knew the word was a rae lae oh, some kind of transliterated foreign word: ra-di-o, el-e-ba-tor, stu-ress-u.

She speared a piece of tangerine through the goo, and held it out to me again. To be polite, I ate. The white stuff was sticky and warm and didn’t have much taste—it was more like a lubricant, the ALOE ESSENSE lotion, maybe.

That bottle, sitting unrefrigerated, in the warmth of the sill. Gag reﬂex. I took a huge gulp of the tea, grown lukewarm, not hot enough to sterilize my mouth.

Mrs. Lee offered me another piece, apple this time. I shook my head. I asked her where the bathroom was.

She sent me to a corner of the courtyard. It wasn’t an outhouse, exactly, but more like a freestanding shack. The standard porcelain trough of a Korean squat toilet (thank God they had Western toilets at school) with a pull-chain ﬂush, the dingy water in the plastic tank looming dangerously overhead. The wastebasket in front of me overﬂowed with used, brown-smeared TP even though there was nary a square in the holder. The bad smells and the warm, queasy feeling of mayonnaise suddenly overcame me and I vomited.

When I returned, we sat around the table again. Mrs. Lee had brought out a box of chocolate-and-marshmallow-covered mini-pies called OH YES!, each wrapped individually in plastic. Again, to be polite, I ate one. Sugar and chemicals, completely boneless, like biting into foam.

When we left, she gave me a bag of tangerines and the OH YES! pies, then stood outside the gate, waving until we were out of sight.

SARAH

I visited Mrs. Lee again, with Doug, then every free afternoon. I even missed music class once, but Tae Sunsengnim yelled at me, and I had to promise I wouldn’t do that again.

But that left three, maybe four visits a week. I left Doug behind to force myself to speak only Korean. But my Korean words didn’t come rushing back. Whenever Mrs. Lee said anything to me besides Did you eat rice today? (another motherly greeting, Doug told me), I didn’t understand her.

By my fourth, ﬁfth visit, our communication was still facial expressions and hand-patting, but I had decided I didn’t need words to communicate with her.

Each time I arrived, her face broke out in a smile, so wide it turned her eyes into black tildes that might grace a word like mañana. She helped me with my shoes (even if I was wearing slip-ons), waved me into the house, where she would have the low table set, some kind of treat waiting. The ﬁrst time, a sandwich: two perfectly square, perfectly white pieces of ﬂimsy bread hugging some kind of roasted meat, grated carrots, green onions, plus a layer of sliced bananas swiped with strawberry jam.

Her face looked so expectant, I had to eat it. But after, I said to her in Korean something like Me Korean. Eat Korean food.

She was delighted to discover that I liked ddok rice cakes. She bought me ddok in the colors of the Italian ﬂag, ddok with a crusty layer of sesame seeds, ddok that tasted like cinnamon toast. She began insisting I stay for dinner, and she made dumpling soup with pillows of chewy rice cake ﬂoating in it, tofu stew, ﬁsh fried in eggy batter, always anxiously watching my face as I ate.

The last time, she had purchased her own Korean-English dictionary. After dinner, she opened it and pointed to a word, sleep.

I nodded back eagerly. She set out some bedding, a pillow stuffed with some kind of rustling husks. She covered us with a thin quilt made of linen. The piquant smell of mothballs rose from her shoulders. She lay half on the ﬂoor to give me more room. In minutes, she was snoring. At one point, she threw a leg over me possessively, something Doug did when we spent the night together.

In the morning, she came in with a stew and some vegetable side dishes on that low table. She also produced a bottle of psychedelically colored fairy orange pop.

She handed me chopsticks, left hand to left hand. The knot I always had inside me seemed to loosen. Her other-handedness, my true inheritance. Back in Eden’s Prairie, it had been an abnormality, an asymmetricality, like a chiral molecule, one that has the same basic structure as others, but doesn’t ﬁt in anywhere. Christine wrote SARAH in indelible marker onto all my scissors.

I took sips of the soup, which had a pungent, old-sock smell. I ate heaping spoonfuls of clean, white rice that remained in a homogeneous clump, didn’t fall apart and scatter like Minute Rice or Uncle Ben’s. I even ate a few pieces of the kimchi, stippled with semicolons of hot red pepper that burned and radiated to all parts of my body as it ﬁlled my stomach. The orange pop was the only thing I didn’t ﬁnish.

At school, I announced to Choi Sunsengnim that she should call me by my Korean name Lee Soon-Min.

“…Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee…” Bernie hummed at me as we left class. “You know, your name has the word ‘Soon’ in it. Koreans like to give abandoned girls the name ‘Soon’-something as a joke—it means ‘Jane Doe.’”

He countered, “How about the Woody Allen and Soon-Yi scandal? She’s an adoptee.”

Even these small, tattered Korean things I had won for myself, Bernie had to take them away, like a bigger kid taking candy from a smaller one.

“Bernie, why don’t you leave her alone?” Doug was suddenly behind me. “Why do you have to be like that? She’s never done anything to you. Why be such an asshole?”

“You know, I used to spend summers as a little kid with my cousins who live in Songt’an, right outside Osan Air Force base,” he said. “Our thing to do for fun was to go to the gate by the PX when the shift was letting out and sing to the shop-girls as they left:

Yankee whore, yankee whore,

Where are you going?

Shaking your ass, where are you going?

Off to sell your stinky poji-cunt, that’s where.

Doug’s expression didn’t change, but his nostrils ﬂared and turned white. His body began to lean, almost imperceptibly at ﬁrst, in the direction of Bernie.

Doug continued to lean. Bernie took a step back, assumed a martial arts stance. He had been taking tae kwon do as his elective class.

I yelled at Doug to stop, but he was like a tipped-over boulder, gaining momentum, hurtling, lunging at Bernie.

Bernie cocked his leg. Doug barreled past and landed a plain old barroom-brawl punch right into the round PRINCETON seal of Bernie’s T-shirt. We could all hear Bernie’s wind leave his body in a sharp sound like a kite ﬂapping in a stiff breeze.

“The stomach doesn’t leave marks,” Doug said, to no one in particular. “That’s one thing the old man taught me, at least.”

SARAH

Mrs. Lee set a plate in front of me. An overlapping stack of pancakes. Instead of Mrs. Butterworth’s, there was a dish of soy sauce. She showed me how to cut the pancakes by crossing my chopsticks in the middle and levering them in opposite directions, like scissors. I dipped a piece in the sauce and lapped up that dark, saline taste. The pancakes were ﬁlled with something that looked like grass that would later make my shit bright green. She smiled approvingly.

I thought about calling her Omoni, Mother, today, but I didn’t. That time would come. She called me “Soon-Min-ah.” I had thought, weirdly, that she was calling me “Minna,” which was Nana’s name, Norwegian, of course. But later I caught on that ah was a sort of diminutive, sort of the opposite of the formal ssi we added to our names in class, to signify “Mr.” or “Miss.” Mr. Bernie Asshole Lee.

To Jun-Ho, I had written, I found her—can you believe it? And her name is Lee. Do you think perhaps that means I might be a Chunju Lee, descendant of the great King Sejong?

I moved to help Mrs. Lee clean up after dinner, but she playfully pushed me away. She ﬂipped on the tiny TV set and motioned for me to watch as she took the remnants of our dinner back into the indoor/outdoor kitchen.

Outside the sliding rice-paper door, my sandals and her tennie-shoe-clogs sat side-by-side on the cement steps, announcing to the world that she and her daughter were spending time together.

I was excited to think I was slowly becoming Korean. I had come to regard her house as my own. When nature called, I made my way through the cluttered courtyard to the toilet, squatting over the porcelain trough as if I’d done this all my life. Sometimes, I imagined oh-so-proper Christine balancing the alabaster globes of her ass over the bowl, and it set me to evil giggling.

Besides that, I didn’t even think about Christine and Ken much any more. Not even about calling them up and confronting them. Some kind of hole in me had been ﬁlled, and I felt newly radiant, my blood thrumming and singing, like driving on new asphalt, a sensation that ﬂowed over everything, even the small, green need for revenge.

Lee Ok-Bong came back with the low table and peeled us some yellow fruit with a hard rind and soft, slippery insides lined with tiny oval seeds. She said it was called a cham-weh. We ate the pieces, un-mayonnaised, with tiny silver doll forks.

When it was time to leave, I slid open the door and sat on the steps, putting on my shoes. She disappeared back into the house, then pushed a bag toward me. You weren’t supposed to open a gift in front of the giver, so I carefully folded down the neck of the paper bag.

“Komapsumnida, Omoni,” I said. Thank you, Mother. There, I’d said it. Her tilde-eyes turned moist.

She shufﬂed behind me in her tennie-clogs up to the gate, held my hand, and wished me “Chal mok-oh”—eat well. She didn’t let go of my hand when I walked away, instead, she extended her arm until our physical connection broke, and then she kept her arm outstretched, as if preserving some kind of invisible force that connected us.

Half-way down the lane I peeked into the bag. A six-pack of tiny yogurt drinks, each of the plastic bottles hardly bigger than a spool of thread. I didn’t know if I should tell her that Julie Koh from Little Angels had called suggesting that we get a DNA test to conﬁrm everything.

Under the yogurt drinks were some rice crackers, baked so crisp that later, in my room, they would crackle in my mouth like shattering pottery.

KYUNG-SOOK

Kyung-sook had decided that life itself was an unfathomable, unreliable puzzle. You looked at it from a certain angle and you felt one way, looked at it from another and you would feel differently.

Of course, anyone who knew of her past would be astounded to learn that she had married at all.

Hyun Il-sik was ﬁfteen years older than Kyung-sook, and everyone regarded him as the village cripple. His father had deserted the family after he saw Il-sik’s deformed hand, but his mother raised him just the same as if he’d been whole. Indeed, Il-sik learned to do skilled woodwork, his father’s trade, with just one hand.

Il-sik’s mother died when he was twenty-ﬁve. Since their family wasn’t originally from Enduring Pine Village, Il-sik had no kin. He left the village, and by the time he came back, Kyung-sook was working at her job in the market, her own mother had died, and she was taking care of her father.

Kyung-sook didn’t take much notice of Il-sik except that he had bought a small patch of worn-out land, and he busily refurbished the old granary, relic of the times of rice and barley, that stood upon it. Somewhere along the line, he, like Imo, had become a Christo-follower.

Christo himself, he announced to the villagers, had told him to return to the village and start a church.

A few people began attending. Kyung-sook saw them making their way to the old granary in their best clothes, carrying their books of the Christo-word as well as books of Christo music. Kyung-sook found herself intrigued. When she peeked into the building during the week, she saw nothing special: a raised platform, a few simple wooden benches.

Kyung-sook had always been struck by the way the Christo religion could be represented so simply. Looking at this spare but unmistakable symbol of Christo gave her an odd but natural feeling of calm, the way coming upon song-hwadang, the piled rock pagodas, deep in the mountains ﬁrst startled her—the hand of man, here in the mountains!—then made her feel reassured. Each passing traveler had added a stone, carefully selected to ﬁt with the others, placed atop the delicate balance of the column with a prayer, his personal entreaty adding to the countless prayers for safety and well-being that had come before.

When no one was looking, Kyung-sook slipped into the church again, and again. Day of Water, Day of Fire, Day of Gold. Every day except the Day of Sun. The stillness encompassed in that old granary reminded her of the chapel at the missionary school. She used to sneak into that space, reveling in that clear, silky silence for as long as she could. If someone came upon her, she’d duck her head and pretend to be praying to Christo. But she hadn’t been there for Christo, or any other deity. She loved being able to sit in one place, and just be. Other than her favorite places by the Three Peaks Lake or the Glass River, nothing else offered her this solace.

Il-sik had come up behind her one day when Kyung-sook was peeking into the open door of the sanctuary. He invited her to the Sunday’s service and Kyung-sook, embarrassed, could ﬁnd no way to gracefully refuse.

“There is something wrong, dear wife,” Il-sik said. Worry had carved a new wrinkle deep into his brow.

You cannot vanquish your past, Kyung-sook thought. Even though her belly was the soft, useless one of a middle-aged lady, it still had the memory of being stretched tight as a drum, the baby inside rolling and tapping to her own rhythm. She remembered how she used to tickle her navel—that place where she had ﬁrst been connected to her own mother—and how the baby would kick.

Il-sik began asking her again what was wrong, really, was she sick? She said no, but some days she could barely get up, she would have such shooting pains in her stomach. At night, she shivered under the covers as a fever raged. Il-sik urged her to see the doctor. Finally, he carried her on his weakening back all the way to the hospital. The doctor listened to Kyung-sook’s pulse for many minutes and then proclaimed that she had hwa-byung, the ﬁre sickness.

There is no medicine, the doctor said. You have to ﬁnd the source of the ﬁre and let it burn—until it is ﬁnished. If you insist on containing it inside, it will continue to destroy you.

“Please,” Il-sik said to his wife, as he gazed upon her laying on their yo. “You must tell me the source of your torment. I will wait here, forever if I must, until you tell me.”

Kyung-sook struggled to remain calm, cool as summer fruit. But the ﬁre, which had been raging for almost twenty years, jumped within her. Sweat boiled out of her pores. Kyung-sook felt so very weary. She was no ﬁrekeeper, not anymore. She needed to let it out, endure the scorches from the outside instead of the slow incineration from within. She told Il-sik everything of her past. Everything.

“I cannot judge,” Il-sik said. “Only Our Father can do that. For us on earth, we need to forgive, the way Christo forgave even his betrayers and doubters, that is His grace.” But Il-sik did not speak in his conﬁdent church voice; it was more in the manner of one who, by repeating something over and over, hopes to convince himself that something impossibly foolish may yet be true.

“Yobo, I don’t know what to do—about the child. If that is the same child.”

“You do what you have to do, Wife,” Il-sik said, and he turned his tear-stained face away.

SARAH

A spatulate, toothpick-like stick swabbed painlessly on the inside of my cheek, that’s all it took. Miss Park had convinced me to go through with the test, Little Angels would pay for everything. I was the ﬁrst successful “reunion” they’d ever had, and now they were struggling with what kind of protocol they should have in place, if others should follow my same journey.

I didn’t mind. In fact I would be reassured to have all this conﬁrmed through the quantiﬁable conclusions of science, to know that I shared with Mrs. Lee the one-in-ﬁve-billion pattern of DNA that marked us, irrevocably, as belonging together.

KYUNG-SOOK

“September 3, afternoon, that’s when the baby was dumped, according to the orphanage records the American girl provided us with,” the voice on the phone said. “Do you know anything about this girl?”

“No,” Kyung-sook said, clutching the phone’s receiver. “She is the wrong girl. Thank you for your effort.” And she hung up.

September 3, her daughter’s seng-il, the day she had fallen into the world so inauspiciously.

Some years, the date passed without Kyung-sook noticing it, a blessing. But most years, she revisited the smell of excrement, the red curtain of pain, her empty arms and breasts that cried milky tears.

But was that girl the child? How many women that day might have been weeping as a child left their arms?

“I’m going to go to Seoul,” she told Il-sik. “I’ve arranged for Song Grandmother to take care of Father for a few days, to come in and cook for you.”

SARAH

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PLEDGE, “WE’LL KEEP THE FLAME ALIVE FOREVER”? The newest scandal, according to the hodgepodge, sometimes ungrammatical Korea Herald (put out by American expats), was that despite heartfelt vows to keep the ’88 Olympic torch burning into eternity, the ﬂame had ﬁzzled out, and no one had noticed for over a week. As Lotte World added Lotte Swimming, Lotte Folk Museum, and the Lotte Magic Island to its vast complex, the Olympic Stadium, which was next to it, languished. It hadn’t seen any action since the Reverend Sun Myung Moon united 35,000 Korean “Moonie” couples in marriage last August. I hadn’t even known that the Moonies were Korean.

I put the paper down, glanced at the clock. It was time to head to the school’s auditorium for the Talent Show. I had invited Mrs. Lee, and I wondered if she’d be there. I had vacillated about asking her—at the time it seemed so seventh-grade piano recital—but now I wondered whether I’d be disappointed if she didn’t come.

A strange thing happened there. Stranger than the sight of Bernie Lee doing tae kwon do moves set to opera music. Stranger than James Park (“Jam-EZ is how I pronounces it,” he said), a gangsta-rapper-wannabe who sang an original song from his soon-to-be-released Korean CD, “Yellow Niggah.” Maybe even stranger than the girl who took off all her clothes, spit milk on the audience, and rolled around, naked, on a bed of rice. Our own Korean Karen Finley.

I was supposed to play the changgo, which in itself wasn’t so weird, but at the last minute, the Traditional Drumming Group of Chosun University had commandeered Tae Sunsengnim’s puk drum and kaenguri for some anniversary performance, so instead of playing as part of a group, I was told I was going to perform an impromptu drumming solo.

Tae Sunsengnim informed me of this maybe half an hour before the performance. I felt like a trained donkey, and I balked. Tae Sunsengnim merely shoved me out on stage with her mighty ham-hands. I couldn’t remember a single thing I was supposed to do—usually I just followed the beat mashed out on the gong.

Then, it was as if I’d brought two charges together. My whole body shuddered. The room started spinning. What was that Korean phrase about spinning?

… bing! bing! tol-myun-so…Like the Fourth of July when Amanda handed me a live sparkler and it exploded in my face, all I could see was light. My feet were moving on their own. My arms were moving on their own. I was a puppet jerked by some spastic puppeteer. I was crying. I was laughing. I could hear people speaking Korean, and I was shouting back to them. I could hear other drums pounding out an insistent beat that drowned out my pulse. I couldn’t breathe. I was going to collapse right in the middle of the stage.

Pinwheels of pistachio-colored light were still twirling in front of my eyes when my body ﬁnally slowed. My arm dropped, I stopped frenetically beating the drum like those toy monkey drummers. The light was replaced by faces in the audience.

Then, for the smallest second, I thought I saw her, although it wasn’t Mrs. Lee. It was someone with a sad, sad face.

“Sarah,” she said. “I’ve never seen such an inspiring solo. You must come back to Korea and perform with our traditional drumming group.”

“No shit, man,” called Jam-EZ, as he fussed with his American-ﬂag do-rag just before he went onstage. He turned and called over his shoulder, “That spinning split at the end woulda given James Brown a hernia!”

Someone was behind me. I turned quickly, wondering if I might catch another glimpse of that ﬂeeting, sad face.

“Agi-yah.” It was the happy voice of Mrs. Lee. She clapped her hands and looked at me, as if particularly moved, and said, “Chotta!”

SARAH

I shrugged. The octopus stir-fry had actually been pretty tasty, suckers and all, and I’d even ordered it myself by hollering, Ajuhma! Nak-ji bokum hana ju sae yo! I made a big show of slurping up the last rubbery tentacle.

For dinner he took me into the Chosun neighborhood to ﬁnd a pudae chigae restaurant.

Wasn’t that what Bernie et al. had been clamoring for, that ﬁrst week of class?

There was a pudae chigae restaurant a stone’s throw from Chosun’s arched stone gates. At six o’clock in the evening, most of the tables were packed, college students poking chopsticks into a communal well, drinking cheap soju.

The waiter lit a small butane warmer at the bottom of the giant wok built into the center of the table, and then he returned with a block of ramen, some rice cakes that looked like extruded white Play-Doh, a handful of weedy-looking greens. He put them all into the depression and poured boiling water plus hot pepper paste over the mixture. Then, Benihana-style, he diagonal-sliced some hot dogs and a few good chunks of SPAM and ceremoniously dumped it all into the wok’s maw. When the whole mess got to boiling and gurgling, he added a few blaze-orange panes of American cheese.

Doug ordered us a ceramic pot ﬁlled with soju. He showed me how to drink it Korean-style, the younger person pouring it into the shot glass for the older person, using two hands to show respect. You toasted, shouting “kom-bae!” and then you were supposed to knock the incendiary liquid back in one swallow.

We drank as we waited for the pudae chigae to cook. At the next table, some drunk male students screeched and gave each other noogies, knocking their purses off the table.

“They’re hopeless young romantics talking about azaleas,” Doug said. “Azaleas. My mother said when she was young, she used to eat them.”

“How fancy-schmancy,” I said, feeling pleasantly blurred around the edges. That had also been Christine’s thing. For a party, along with smelly mold-encrusted French cheeses, plates of baby vegetables, she always ordered edible ﬂowers. Violets, ﬂamelike nasturtiums, yellow-and-purple brindled pansies in clear plastic containers from Byerly’s. She had gotten the idea from Ladies’ Home Journal.

“It was that or die waiting for the ﬁrst barley to ripen,” Doug said. “There’s a month in spring the lunar calendar calls the ‘month of hunger,’ when the winter supplies run out but nothing’s ripe yet. She said one spring, the mountainside looked like it was still the dead of winter because so many families had gone out and stripped it bare of every green thing.”

“Oh,” I said. Doug ladled out some of the soup, the texture and color of molten lava. The sweet, spicy, syrupy goo was delicious. It reminded me of back home, how I would make ramen noodles: throw out the spice packet, make my own soup out of crushed garlic, one dash Tabasco, spoonfuls of La Choy soy sauce, squeeze of ketchup, and last, a single drop of honey. Noodles hot and sweet and salty, totally unlike the “Oriental Seasoning packet” but eerily like our pudae chigae. Was this craving, then, part of my Korean genetic code, tattooed on that winding helix of DNA?

But Koreans also ate plenty of strange things that I would gladly pass on. Crickets, sightless sea slugs, and something called pundaegi, silkworm larvae that looked (and smelled?) like prehistoric trilobites. On campus, girls carried black-and-gold-chain Chanel bags in one hand, greasy paper cones of pundaegi in the other.

Once, I was watching Doug eat some kind of seafood stew from which he pulled out nacreous shells like coins. I impulsively reached out with my long-handled spoon (Korean spoons made expressly for this purpose?) and stole a sip of broth. The broth was scalding, and so spicy, it made tears jump into my eyes. The taste was ﬁshy, hot, horrible, and I was glad I hadn’t known about the slimy ﬁsh-egg sacs, lying like amputated thumbs beneath the opaque broth.

But there was something in the taste that drew me to it—I took another sip, then another.

“You’re Korean,” Doug said simply. “That soup is too salty and spicy for Westerners to handle—it’s called ‘spicy soup’ in Korean. On the base they used to make the newbies eat it, as a joke.”

“Cut open a Korean and that’s probably what you’ll ﬁnd: salt and hot red peppers,” he said.

Was I really this Korean? I wondered. In Minnesota, cinnamon is too spicy for some folks. And nothing on the Scandinavian menu is pickled in salt—even luteﬁsk is pickled in lye. When the ajuhmas made kimchi at the Rainbow, they dragged giant plastic trash barrels outside the restaurant into which they’d mix limp cabbage with hot red peppers, thumbs of ginger—and entire bags of rock salt, the size of the bags Ken used to de-ice the driveway.

But, yes, Ken. When we used to go to Sand Lake in the summers, he would always make sure a bag of spuds—and three different kinds of salt—were on the grocery list. At the cabin he would slice the raw tubers into discs, whose starchy whiteness he’d dip ﬁrst into onion salt, then double-dip into regular salt. He also stole pinches of raw hamburger before he put them on the grill, rolling them in coarse salt the way Nana rolled cheddar cheese balls in nuts at Christmastime.

Was there anything better than cramming a hard piece of oniony potato into my drooling mouth? It was our Sand Lake tradition, just the two of us. He would always start it by saying, “Madam Sarry-Sar, how about some po-tah-toes?” with a snooty lockjaw accent like Mr. Howell on Gilligan’s Island. Or, “We’re having hamburgers tonight, how about starting with some hors d’oeuvres?” which he would pronounce as “horses’ doofuses” in that same accent, which always made me giggle.

“You know how pudae chigae originated?” Doug said. “During the Korean War, people were starving, so they would bring back garbage from the American army bases and boil it to make soup.”

“You always tell me these things after I’ve eaten them,” I said, but then I got to thinking. What was my mother’s life like during the Korean War? Did she, like hundreds of other people in Seoul, hover around the garbage pile of the Eighth Army base, wishing for a piece of meat-fat or bone that had already been in someone’s mouth so she could make some soup?

I cashed some of my travelers’ checks and brought them the next time I went to visit Mrs. Lee. I offered it respectfully with two hands, but she didn’t make a move to receive them, so I pushed them into her hands twice, three times, explaining that I felt bad about how she was spending a small fortune feeding me. She cried and ﬂung the bills back at me, so when she was in the toilet shack, I slipped them in the mini-root-cellar box she kept in the corner of the kitchen. When she ﬁnished with that ten pounds of garlic, probably in a day or two, she would ﬁnd the money.

I wanted her to accept my help, to have her know that I didn’t feel the least shred of anger toward her any more, now that I knew her. I hadn’t had a terrible life with Ken and Christine. Materially, it had been a resounding success.

That night after we’d gone to bed, I looked at her pillowy face and wondered what her expression had been right after I was born. Happy? Sad? Dismayed? Did she see bits of herself or her late husband looking back at her?

I recalled going out with Christine and Amanda to the Magic Pan, maybe a year ago. I’d noticed how Amanda and Christine had eaten their crepes in an identical way, wielding forks and knives as precisely as gem cutters, picking out the pieces of meat and leaving the shroudlike crepes behind. Even their similarly shaped mouths pursed the same way, like drawstring bags, lapidary movements, invisible threads connecting bone to bone, ﬂesh to ﬂesh.

I remembered thinking: I’ll never have that, someone to compare myself to. But now, of course, I did.

Only the tiniest bit of doubt remained. A dusty dark seed that looked spoiled and old and dead—unlikely to sprout and cause its trouble.

But if it did crack open, extend a tentative root, I would be forced to follow that pale thread to its very end.

SARAH

There are things, Doug told me, that only exist for Koreans, that aren’t explainable in the English language.

Like han, that wrenching, incurable feeling of regret. Or nun-chi, the ability to size someone up without even talking to them.

“Like that ﬁrst day you asked me to eat lunch with you,” he said. “My nun-chi nudged me, told me you were someone I’d want to get to know—even though after meeting the other Motherland Programmers I doubted there would be a single person on the program I’d want to be friends with.”

The DNA test results had come in. Miss Park wanted both me and my omoni, my um-ma, to meet in the ofﬁce. I was sure if the DNA didn’t match, she would have said so on the phone. Now, I was so excited and relieved that my mother and I were going to be ofﬁcial.

The wind was rushing in to ﬁll parts of my brain that had suddenly gone blank.

“The DNA tests conﬁrmed it.” She showed me the report. The samples had been sent all the way to America. The results were in a language I could read and understand. My name, hers. NO MATCH. I stared at Mrs. Lee. Why? My eyes burned. Had she been pulling some kind of scam?

“Could you ask her why—” I had to pause, then went on, “why she was so sure I was her daughter?”

“She said she just knew when she saw you on TV—you look a lot like her late husband when he was a boy. She also said you two like all the same things: you’re both left-handed, she used to love to play the changgo drum when she was your age, too.”

Mrs. Lee gripped my hand. A warm, familiar feeling. But I gently slipped it out. I felt a sudden, unaccountable loyalty to Christine, of all people. I would never let her hold my hand—or even touch me the tiniest bit—the way I had let this woman, countless times.

“She said she was a little troubled hearing you say you’d been found at a ﬁre station, because she had actually brought you to the Little Angels orphanage herself. But she thought that perhaps someone had miswritten in your ﬁle, because after she had placed you on the steps, another baby was brought in, not long after, and the two of you were taken in together.”

I blinked. The other baby was probably me, brought in shit-slimy from the ﬁre station. That meant there was yet another, shadowy woman out there that I needed to ﬁnd. And there was some other Korean adoptee, perhaps in America, who was Mrs. Lee’s daughter.

“Agi-yah, mi an hae,” Mrs. Lee said, still crying. Child, I’m sorry. That much, I understood.

“I don’t think she’s lying,” Julie said. “We did once have a woman who came here claiming to be a mother, but you could tell she was wrong, right off the bat. She acted, I don’t know, cold. We had doctors examine her and it turned out she’d never had a baby at all, I think she just wanted to get some money or something.”

I thought of the bills lying under the papery heads of the garlic. I could feel the weight of the han.

“They’re saying ‘I’m sorry,’” Julie said, looking at Doug, a touch condescendingly.

KYUNG-SOOK

“Excuse me,” Kyung-sook said to a passerby, the third person she had approached. “But is this Han-Mi Dong?”

The young woman’s hair was cut so short, it looked like a feathery cap twirling around her head. She scowled at Kyung-sook, who had stepped in front of her to make her stop.

Kyung-sook looked around, then around again. She didn’t recognize anything. She was sure that the dumpling house had been right in front of her, but instead of the corrugated tin roof she searched for, she was greeted by a modern apartment building rising straight up from the widened street. Colorful quilt-covers airing on balcony railings ﬂuttered like ﬂags from different nations. It hurt Kyung-sook’s neck to try to peer to the very top.

The country accent was music to Kyung-sook’s ears. A woman taking out a bound plastic sack of garbage was looking at Kyung-sook with friendly curiosity.

“I think I used to live in this neighborhood, many years ago,” Kyung-sook said. “Do you remember if there used to be a dumpling house right here? The neighborhood folks called it ‘King’s Dumplings.’ There used to be a silk store down the lane, Jade Moon Real Estate on the corner.”

“Oh, my, I remember the silk store,” the woman said. “But that was an awful long time ago, even before they tore down the neighborhood.”

“Oh, yes. This neighborhood was designated an ‘eyesore’ by the government—they used to call it ‘Shit Alley’ because of the sewage stench from the shanties—so they razed the place to tidy up for the Olympics.”

“Well, those awful mud shanties certainly wouldn’t have made Korea look very admirable to the outside world. ’Course, no surprise we didn’t have any foreigners visit the neighborhood, being so far away from the Olympic Stadium and all.”

“So do you remember the establishment that was right where this apartment building is? A tiny restaurant, it had a sign that said ‘noodles and dumplings’ out front.”

She shook her head. “I don’t have the faintest recollection of a noodle house, here. Sure could use one, though.”

How could this be? It was as if she’d never been here, nor Sunhee, nor the cook-owner, nor Old Bachelor Choi. Their diner, the teahouse, the Chinese restaurant she’d gone to with him, all these things were gone, replaced by sharp-angled buildings, shiny glass enclosures where men and women sat casually together drinking coffee right in view of anyone. A woman even began smoking—in public!

Kyung-sook felt as if she were in a foreign city. Seoul Station was still in the same place, but when she made her way to where her imo had lived, she found a giant building, “One-Hundred-Kinds-of-Things-Store,” occupying the entire block. Crowds of people were going in and out of it, carrying colorful shopping bags that said “New Generation.” No one stopped to ask if she was lost, they only pushed roughly past her, stamped on her feet.

Imo gone, as well as the sealmaker. Along with the houses with the terracotta tile roofs that curved up like wings. Now everything was boxes, all sharp boxes.

SARAH

“There’s this place I want to take you,” Doug said. “My mother told me about it—we always had plans to go there, but somehow never did. She said it’s a village that time forgot.”

“A Korean ‘Land of the Lost’?” I teased. “Will we see dinosaurs, giant ferns?”

“Maybe,” he said. “It’ll deﬁnitely be different than this—” He gestured around the café we were in, the Doctor Zhivago. Inside, it was highway Americana—Route 66 signs, license plates, diner menus. Plastic saguaro cacti on the tables, a Confederate ﬂag hanging over the door. From multiple speakers, Whitney Houston belted the theme song from The Bodyguard, which had, in the last week, become a kind of garish aural wallpaper plastering the interiors of all the cafés and stores.

Doug and I took a bus going north, an hour out of Seoul. Then we took a cab ride over an unpaved road that led to a place where the ﬂat plains of rice seemed to meet the jutting mountains. A shallow, grass-green river meandered almost completely around the village, giving you the illusion that it was an island, a ﬂoating raft of rice.

We rode hapsung in the cab with another young couple and their toddler. The driver doubled his money by collecting the full fare from both parties. We were ferried across the water by a sullen ajuhshi poling a crude wooden craft.

Was this place was for real? The alleys were lined by long earthen walls covered by morning glories and four-o’clocks, creeping vines with gourds hanging off them like decorative light bulbs. Behind the walls sat old-time houses with thatched roofs, an occasional tiled one with edges curved like wings. The people walked around wearing the baggy farmer clothes that the actors had worn at the Folk Village, a Korean Colonial Williamsburg, that we had visited for a class trip.

The Korean couple had similar expressions of awe on their faces. The village folk ignored us.

“The villagers decided they wanted to keep living the old way,” he said. “In the seventies the government instituted this ‘New Village Program’ where they forced modernization of all the country houses, but the government ofﬁcials probably didn’t want to muddy their shoes with ox shit to get out here, so they left them alone.”

On our way here, we had passed another isolated mountain hamlet, but it couldn’t have looked more different: paved roads, a medieval castle-esque WEDDING TOWN with crenelated towers. In the town square, kids in Nike basketball shirts squatted outside MOTHER’S STORE eating ice cream. A train depot moldered outside of town.

“Modernizing isn’t necessarily bad,” Doug shrugged. “When I was younger, I was darker, more Asian-looking. Kids used to call me ‘rice paddy boy,’ and teachers used to ask me if Koreans were dumb slant-eyed peasants like in M*A*S*H. It’s kind of nice now to see Americans driving Hyundai cars and drinking OB beer in fancy restaurants.”

“You know that little town we just passed? The one with WEDDING TOWN? I believe that’s the village my mother came from. It has the same name, at least.”

“No,” he said coldly. “You can’t go back to a place like that, when you’ve become what my mother became.”

We ate a dinner of rice mixed with mountain vegetables, side dishes of dark-brown mook made from acorns. Bitter with tannins, it quivered like jello, but I didn’t foresee Bill Cosby endorsing it anytime soon. Next to the restaurant was a rice wine house. We sat outdoors on a raised wooden platform papered with that yellow oilpaper they used on the ﬂoor. The waitress brought us some of those grassy pancakes that Mrs. Lee had made me, plus a big pot of milky white liquid that we shared using a hollowed-out gourd as a dipper. Doug said it was a traditional farmers’ rice wine called mac’oli. It didn’t taste like milk at all, it burned like a shot of tequila. A few of the village men were drinking and smoking from long pipes next to us, the breeze carrying the smoke and their voices away from us.

The rice wine went straight to my head. The moon was rising into a ﬂung-out sky, and shy stars were emerging, one by one, to keep Venus company.

For dessert, the waitress brought us some irregularly shaped rice cakes, steamed on a bed of pine needles, which gave them a resiny taste-smell that brought me back to many summers ago.

“We used to rent this cabin on Sand Lake,” I told Doug. “In northern Minnesota, there are so many lakes, they just give up and name half of them ‘Sand Lake.’”

“The cabin was nothing special. It didn’t even have indoor plumbing. I used to have to tell Christine when I needed to go to the bathroom at night, and she would go out with me.”

I was afraid of spiders, so Christine would whack around the privy ﬁrst with a broom, then she’d wait outside. Sometimes I could hear her gently singing, her voice carrying through the crescent-moon ventilation cutout on the door.

“Well, we would go up to the sticks, from Minneapolis. Ken was originally from the north country. He remembered a lot of stuff from growing up, like how to take the bark off birch trees without killing them. He used to make little birchbark boats down in the basement.”

“I was seven or maybe eight,” I said. “They later bought a place on Bass Lake, closer to the Cities. That lake, ironically, is a ‘dead’ lake, without ﬁsh in it. I think there’s some movement afoot to change its name to Lake Gitchigumee, you know, the whole Hiawatha story.”

I nodded, recalling my child-sized Zebco, its clear ﬁlament, the red-and-white bobber, lead sinker shaped like a tear. Like any true Minnesota child, I caught sunﬁsh by the stringerful. Even the ones hardly bigger than my child’s palm, Christine prepared. I admired her courage as she slit open the ﬁshes’ bellies and pulled out their soft, silvery guts, scaling and cutting until she had a row of neat white ﬁlets which she would dip in a mixture of cornmeal, ﬂour, and black pepper and pan-fry.

We would sit on the deck at twilight, squeeze slices of lemon over the crunchy-coated ﬁsh and watch the sun go down, while in the background, mosquito coils burned like incense. When the mosquitoes donned their teeny-tiny gas masks and made their way through the smoke, we would go back into the cabin, shut the screen door, and Christine and Ken and I would play endless games of Chutes and Ladders or Parcheesi, as many times as I wanted.

“I like hearing that,” Doug said. He was smoking again, and he exhaled a cloud that remained for a few seconds like an apparition before fading into the sky.

It became too late to secure a taxi back, but a passerby showed us to a place where a woman would rent us a room in her house. The room had a clean wooden ﬂoor and bedding that smelled like rice starch and sunlight. We lay down, naked, then realized there was only one pillow. Doug gave it to me.

After making love, he fell asleep. I, as usual, stayed awake. I stared at him in the muted light from the moon. He looked like an angel when he slept, one arm protectively around me, the other curled under his chin, ﬁngers extended as if he were secretly waving at me.

I gently worked the pillow under his head. He gave a sigh, rubbed his eyes in a childlike gesture, and I saw the baby he had once been in the adult he was now.

The idea of escape was a ﬁction, I realized. You could travel to the other end of the earth in an airplane, but you wouldn’t get too far from yourself and your accretion of all your secret histories, the sins and curses and mercies that ever touched you. People entered and disappeared from your life, but they irrevocably left parts of themselves, the way that soft candy prayerfully pressed by Korean mothers onto the gates where their children were taking their college entrance exams eventually hardened and became part of the gate itself.

Perhaps I’d ﬁnally learned, from this strange twisted language, the answer to my question, Why am I I? In Korean you rarely used the “I,” nae-ga. Instead of “I’m going to the store,” you just said “Going to the store.” You only needed to say “I” in situations where you needed to distinguish yourself, “I—not Doug, not Bernie, not Jun-Ho, not Jeannie—am going to the store.” I felt too insecure, however, about when an “I” was truly needed, and so I sprinkled nae-gas all over my sentences the way a desperate cook keeps adding salt, even as Sunsengnim kept scolding me, saying, “Sal-ah-ssi, we know it’s you.”

For our morning rice, the ajuhma presented us with a full country breakfast: bean-sprout soup, a pile of sesame leaves washed in the morning dew, searingly hot chili peppers she expected us to dip in hot pepper paste before eating, cubes of radish kimchi, fried tofu, a bundle of wild onions, bowls and bowls of rice. And from somewhere, she had procured a warm bottle of fairy orange soda.

We took the bus back to Seoul, the subway back from the Express Bus Terminal. Doug held my hand the whole way. I couldn’t stop smiling at him. The subway doors opened at our stop, Cho-Dae—short for Chosun Daehakyo. I jumped out the door ahead of Doug, and we almost clotheslined a countriﬁed ajuhma running past, bundle in hand, head wrapped in a towel. She burrowed into the crowd on the platform to bemused cries of Hey, what’s your hurry, Auntie? She was a strange, almost anachronistic vision, as if we had inadvertently brought her back from the River Circle Village with us, a seed hidden in our clothes.

We took the long way back to the Residence so I could stop for an ice cream. It was a Sunday, with shoppers, young families out in force, giggling junior-high girls crowding two, three at a time into photo-sticker booths. As we strode along, me chewing my General Yi’s Turtle Boat Ship ice cream, I found myself starting to look, that hopeful gaze, again. I looked at the shape of eyes, the curve of bone, the way hair fell off a part. I looked and looked. For chocolate-chip-colored moles and thick hair. At every woman d’un certain âge who walked by, all the way until we entered the Chosun campus.

KYUNG-SOOK

That had been her real destination all along, of course. The place where they said the girl would be.

But how to get there, the other side of the city? There were no trolleys anymore. Instead, buses in all sorts of colors and numbers went every which way. A kindly passerby told her that the “underground-iron-train” was the best way to go to the Chosun neighborhood, and he pointed out that the station was right there, under their feet!

Kyung-sook descended stairs that gave way to a long corridor that ran under the street. A faded, neglected sign said “Emergency Shelter”—it must have been part of the network of old bomb shelters from the 6.25 War. She followed the corridor to the end and found herself in the middle of a clot of people, whooshing trains, shoe stores, newsstands, underwear places, seaweed-roll vendors, machines spitting out money. The posted map revealed a jolly knot of bright-colored worms, the names of the stations unfamiliar. Great East Gate Stadium? Air Port? South of Han River? Poyang Satellite City?

When she bought her ticket, she asked the ticket ajuhshi how to get to Chosun University, but the man, bathed in a haze of smoke from his cigarette, mumbled a contemptuous reply and waved at the next person in line to step forward.

Clutching the colored bit of paper she had received, Kyung-sook wandered among the different lines: green, purple, red, yellow. Everyone seemed to know where they were going and were in a rush to get there.

Ironically, she ended up asking a whiteman for directions. There seemed to be a goodly number of foreigners in Seoul now. The Westerners were sauntering around with bulky rucksacks and short pants that shockingly bared their furry legs. They looked like nothing in their lives had ever troubled them.

But since none of the Koreans had stopped to help her, she tried a man leaning against a pillar, reading. He had a warm, brown face-hair and he smiled and answered in perfect Korean, “I would be pleased to help you.”

He pulled out a book that had a map of the subways in its center, and he showed her which line to take, where to get off. He even marked the stop Cho-Dae with a pen, then tore the page out and handed it to her.

“You’re very polite for a foreigner,” she said, wondering about the meaning of a station called chodae—“invitation.” An auspicious sign? “A thousand times, thank you.”

“A thousand times, you’re welcome,” the man said, nodding his head the Korean way before returning to his magazine.

Kyung-sook watched the other riders feed their colored bit of paper into the little machine, and she did the same, and boarded her train.

“Lady, what do you think you’re doing?” The policeman gripped her roughly by the elbow.

“I-I—” Kyung-sook had arrived at the correct station with no difﬁculty. But at the exit marked “To Street,” she hadn’t known what to do at the machine on the way out. Everyone else was putting in those little scrips of paper again, which the hungry machine gobbled up and let them pass with a green light. She didn’t have her ticket any more—hadn’t the ﬁrst machine “eaten” it? Then it was the ticket ajuhshi’s fault for not giving her enough tickets. She had shrugged and started to crawl under the bar.

“It’s illegal to jump the turnstile,” he said. “Really, you should know better, ma’am, especially since you know we’re instituting a strict new crackdown policy on farebeaters like you.”

She knew what happened at Seoul police stations from watching The Dark Yushin Era—people sat tied up in dark rooms under a single harsh light and were beaten and tortured with electric shocks. Some of them never were seen again. She couldn’t do that to Il-sik!

Kyung-sook yanked her elbow with all the strength gained from years of slogging heavy barrels of shrimp, and she ran pell-mell back down to the platform.

Kyung-sook ran on. Another train had arrived, and waves of people poured onto the platform and up the stairs, tangling the policeman in the crowd. Kyung-sook could hear the man swearing, but then his voice was swallowed up in the rest of the din of the station.

…PLEASE DON’T SMOKE. PLEASE USE CAUTION WHEN THE TRAIN COMES INTO THE STATION. PLEASE DON’T SPIT ON THE PLATFORM. LOST ITEMS…

She pushed her way through the people, almost breaking up a couple holding hands—holding hands! She couldn’t stop to look back and marvel at such a scandalous sight. Instead, she ran on.

Thank goodness she had brought only the smallest bundle with her! She made it to the end of the platform and through another corridor. It led to a different train, the signs were a different color. Was the man still in pursuit? As she stood, trembling, among the people waiting, she tore off her headscarf—she noticed no one in Seoul wore those. She looked at herself in one of the large mirrors mounted on the wall. She was still so terribly conspicuous. That policeman was going to ﬁnd her and cart her off to be tortured and Il-sik would never know what happened to her. He might even think she had found her daughter and then abandoned him!

“Oh Dear Heavenly God,” she prayed. Could he hear her up in Heaven when she was praying from so far under the ground? “Help me! What should I do? Please give me a sign.”

Down the tunnel came the sound of the train. Without looking up from their newspapers or pausing in their talking into their little boxes, the people moved to the designated yellow-painted areas that said “The Doors Will Open Here.”

Kyung-sook glanced over her shoulder. She would have to take this train, wherever it was going, just to get out of this station.

The doors opened with a whoosh, and she boarded, pushing, shoving with everyone else into the crowded car. A man with heavily oiled hair seemed to be leaning a little too close into her chest, so Kyung-sook pinched his arm, hard, through his suit that was shiny and gray like ﬁsh scales. The man swore and moved to a different part of the car.

“Where is this train going?” she asked a student in a navy middle school uniform. The girl was grasping the pole with one hand, holding her English textbook up to her face with the other.

Seoul Station, where the train would be waiting to bring her home to Enduring Pine Village—to safety, away from the ills of this horrid city. She wasn’t meant to ﬁnd the child, was she? God had given her an answer, Kyung-sook thought, although she couldn’t help being a little peeved that the student had called her “grandmother”—she wasn’t yet even ﬁfty years old!

KYUNG-SOOK

“Only a day,” Kyung-sook said, and added, “It was just a little kamgi, a snifﬂy summer cold. I feel better now.”

“You were gone somewhere,” Cooking Oil Auntie repeated. “I saw Song Grandmother go to take care of the house.”

Kyung-sook hummed, pretended not to hear her. She became very interested in watching the machine press the dark sesame oil out of the roasted seeds, drop by bulging drop.

“You know, the Mothers’ Association started their own general store,” Kyung-sook said. “They have sundries, even an electric freezer for ice cream—the little kids go wild for that kind of stuff.”

“I said, you were gone somewhere,” Cooking Oil Auntie repeated, a bit louder. “Where?”

Kyung-sook blinked. There was a spot, exactly round like a changgi chess piece, covering Cooking Oil Auntie’s face. Not unlike the one that had appeared before the cook-owner was killed.

Kyung-sook nodded and blinked some more. Maybe it was this bright sunlight ﬂooding the morning market that was making her eyes play tricks.

“Well, while you’ve been gone, it looks like Okja is going to marry Sun-Woon after all.”

“Unh, it seems that her rich girl rival had one big deﬁcit …” Cooking Oil Auntie paused dramatically. It took Kyung-sook a second to remember she was talking about characters from her soap opera, The Date Tree.

“Eun-ju, that little vixen, couldn’t conceive! Her frantic parents tried everything: deer antler, breath-holding, prayers to the Birth Goddess—but she’s barren as a rock, hee-hee! Of course Sun-Woon, being a ﬁrst son, must fulﬁll his ﬁlial duty. So remember how Okja found out she was pregnant and had decided to kill herself? Well, Sun-Woon’s parents gave him permission to divorce the vixen and marry Okja because two separate fortunetellers predicted he would have a son by the next Autumn Harvest Moon festival—that’s exactly when Okja’s due to deliver!”

“Well, after all that waiting for those two to get together, now I’m sad this soap opera’s going to end—” Cooking Oil Auntie began to cough. One cough bled into another, and then another. She spat on the ground. A spidery tentacle of red ﬂoated in the mucus. Kyung-sook sighed.

“Haaaargh,” Cooking Oil Auntie said, wiping her mouth on her sleeve. “These damn summer colds are the worst, I need to get some tonic from the Chinese herbalist—he was out of Siberian ginseng last time I was there. My son? He just started a new job—Samsung Incendiaries and Explosives—he certainly couldn’t take any time off for at least a year.”

“You might want to have him come up as soon as he can,” Kyung-sook said, and she sighed again.

SARAH

Our classroom’s air conditioner, which never worked well in the ﬁrst place, had given up the ghost. Smack in the middle of the sam-bok, the thirty hottest days of the lunar calendar.

Bernie, hot and irritable, began needling Jeannie about her eyes, which were ﬁnally starting to look more normal, so to speak.

Absent a week, Jeanie had returned for the last days at school with tiny, Frankensteinian stitches on her lids, which were swollen and red as if she’d been attacked by bees.

“Mein Gott!” Helmut had practically jumped out of his seat when he’d seen her. “You had the ssan kop’ol surgery!”

Jeannie nodded, even gamely answered some questions—no, it didn’t hurt, no it wasn’t dangerous—but then declared the subject off-limits.

Now healed into their more-or-less permanent shape, her eyes did look different. She reminded me of Katharine Hepburn in The Good Earth; Hepburn’s eyelids, ﬁxed with tape, had looked neither Western nor Eastern, only strange.

“Did you go to a real doctor?” Bernie continued. “Or to a tol p’ari surgeon? I’ve seen their ads, for boob jobs, hymen-restoring surgery, too.”

“Just tell me, Jiyoung-ssi,” Bernie said, leaning almost longingly toward his former lover. “Why did you do it?”

“My aunt kept bugging me—okay?” Jeannie spat. “She kept saying, you’ll look better with ssan kop’ol, you’ll look better with ssan kop’ol. She even paid for it—I had it done at HanYong University Hospital—the best hospital in Seoul. It’s not the big fucking deal you’re making it out to be. I had droopy eyelids before, I felt like a fucking Shar-Pei dog. So now I can see better—okay? Even Gloria Steinem’s had plastic surgery on her eyes.”

“I read in the paper,” said the nun (and we knew she meant the real Korean paper, like the Dong-Ah Ilbo—those Chinese-character skills of hers!—and not the Korea Herald), “that one awful aftereffect of such a surgery is that sometimes, the lids do not close completely, when it is time for sleep.”

That was when the word ddong was brought up in class. It started when Helmut ﬁnally said something in Korean. He spoke of eating something called boshin-tang.

“What is poe-sin-dang?” I was reduced to asking, still the worst student in ill-gup.

“‘Health tonic stew,’” said Helmut. “Sunsengnim, why do they call it that?”

“Because of tourists,” Choi Sunsengnim said, inadvertently slipping back into English. “During the Olympics, the president, he makes all the restaurants put up signs that say ‘health tonic stew’ over the ones that say ‘dog stew.’ If you go out in the country, though, sometimes you can still see the signs that say ‘dog soup’ or ‘dog meat.’”

“Don’t you know anything?” said Bernie. “It’s a fucking sacred tradition. My uncle and I do it every year during the sam-bok.”

“But you eat cow-meat, right?” said Choi Sunsengnim. “American hambuh-goo?”

“Pets,” said the nun, obviously pleased with her knowledge of this English word.

“Oh-moh! We don’t eat personal dogs!” Choi Sunsengnim said with horror and offense. “We only eat ddong-dogs.”

“That doesn’t sound very appetizing,” Bernie commented, once again shifting the class back to English.

“Stray,” said Doug, although later he would tell me that the best-looking dogs on the army base—the big, beautiful German shepherds in particular—had a habit of mysteriously disappearing.

“That’s it, stray. Belongs to no one. See, no one eats another person’s dog! But stray dogs, they are the most delicious.”

“Sal-ah-ssi, your pronunciation has gotten quite a bit better,” Choi Sunsengnim commented. The others nodded.

KYUNG-SOOK

The end of a seventeen-year cycle already. The buzzing would go on for days without ceasing until some people would swear the insects were nesting in their brains, others would be lulled to sleep by the steady hum. The government had begun a program of spraying poison on the trees in Seoul, saying that the noise disturbed the foreign tourists.

She went to the Three Peaks Lake so she could be among the gentle sounds of the water, the cooling color of summergreen oaks and white pine, where she could let the buzz-sound of the cicadas ﬁll her veins with their unending thrum. She had been not-so-old the last time she heard that sound. Seventeen years was time enough for a tree to grow tall, for a baby to grow into an adult. Those years had just washed away like silt.

Il-sik’s look of utter relief when she returned safely from Seoul had touched her to the core. Somehow, during the time she was gone, he had found a way to take his anger and disappointment and bury it like a pot of kimchi. It was true that in a marriage, each spouse knows exactly where the other’s tenderest, softest secret spots lay, and that words could be sharper than a policeman’s worst torture instrument.

But then also, resisting the temptation to use secrets as a weapon, that was the truest kind of love.

The child, her ﬂute, had been lost to her. But she was able to see how she had gained things as well—her life, the one she had built for herself, Il-sik, her dear father living in her marital home, cared for by her own hands. She had to admit, she loved this life.

My daughter, I want to tell you about your mother, and I want to say this prayer for you …

She had begun this letter, and it had run to many pages, until her hand had knotted up so painfully it looked like her husband’s. At the market, she had purchased sheets of the nicest pounded mulberry-bark paper, brought those pages all the way to the lake.

She cleared a small space in the grass, drew a ring of dirt as if she were a geomancer, and put the papers in the middle. In the background, the mountain peaks waited. She did not know the child’s name. The girl on TV had been called “Sal-Ah,” which she was sure was a mistake on the part of the translator. Kyung-sook knew in her heart, the girl’s American parents would not have given a baby a name that meant “child to buy” in their country’s tongue.

She put a match to a corner of the papers and stood back as the ﬂames consumed the small pile. The edges of the bark paper writhed and danced joyfully as the smoke swirled up into the sky. Soon, all that was left were a few silky ashes, which Kyung-sook rubbed into the earth with her hand. Part of the prayer for her daughter would remain in the earth, the rest gone up to Heaven.

SARAH

The time to go had crept up and pounced like a stealthy animal. We Motherland Programmers were packed and ready to leave.

I had been tempted to stay with Doug, who had decided to extend his Korean stay for a few more months—it was easy to get English-language tutoring jobs anywhere in the city. For me, all it would take to refresh my visa for three months would be to follow him down to Pusan, hop on a ferry to Fukuoka, Japan’s closest port, and return to continue things as they had been, in Seoul, the two of us. Pudae chigae and karaoke bars, watching the lavender-pantsed men at T’apkol Park, eating samkyupsal, the three-layers-fat pork that you wrap in a lettuce leaf and stuff, whole, into your mouth.

Yet something was pushing me away from Korea. Jun-Ho had written a hastily scrawled letter in which he said,

Sarah, Jun-Ho Kim is here to say that I wish for you that you will make a beautiful future. I know you will come back to Korea so that our minds can meet again in happy intercourse uninterrupted. Post crypt: every Lee in Korea claims they are descended from the famous Chunju Lees. The paterfamilias could not possibly have sired so many descendants. But ask your Omoni. Who should know?

Choi Sunsengim gave me a gift wrapped in bright purple Mylar. I didn’t open it until later, when Doug and I were killing time in the TV room.

Underneath the wrapping was a skinny metal object, cigar-sized. Fake glass gems glued onto it. At ﬁrst I thought it was a very ornate pen, but when I took off the hidden cover, I saw it contained a small blade, notched at the top, like a bowie knife.

I had been there, another class trip. But after seeing so many gold crowns, jade chopstick holders, and replicas of the Turtle Boats, I’d become too dizzy with Korean things to remember them all.

“This is the chastity knife. The one women wore on the blouses of their hanbok. If you were ever raped, you were supposed to kill yourself to preserve the family honor.”

“Uh huh.” I tested the point of the blade on my ﬁnger. It made a dent, but didn’t break the skin.

“But see, the blade is very short. You seppuku yourself, but you can’t hurt someone else with it.”

I looked at the veins running under the thin skin of my inner wrist, the color suddenly inviting. “You sure remember a lot from that museum visit.”

I put the whatever-it-was into my bag. Its jaunty red tassel glowed in the darkness of the interior of my purse.

Another commercial. Meg Ryan in a white nun’s outﬁt, patting a horse. Hawking SEXY-MILD.

The big story: a bank holdup. Grainy security-cam footage of a bank. The perp—identity disguised not by the usual nylon stocking or hood but by a surgical mask, as if he were a doctor running amuck—wielding a gun (although Korea has very strict gun-control laws). While the male employees cowered behind chairs, a beslippered ajuhma jumped over the counter and started wrestling with him. He awkwardly pointed the gun, seemed confused as to how to use it, then gave up and hit her on the head with it. They showed her later getting some kind of citation from the mayor of Seoul, a white bandage wrapped around half her head.

“Michael Jackson will be in Korea with his friend, Liz Taylor!” Doug translated. He was going to be in Cheju Island, relaxing, looking to perhaps establish an Asian outpost for Neverland.

“The Korean people have always been very gracious to me,” he said, in his wispy little-girl-man voice.

“I heard Liz Taylor is getting married again,” said Doug, who kept up on American goings-on by going to the USIA to read People.

“I’m hungry,” I said. “Let’s go to one of those noodle-salad places.”

We were about to ﬁnally summon the energy to shut off the TV. But then we both recognized the word adoptee. And the word Minn-ah-soh-ta.

“My name is Brian Muckenhill,” he said, in a familiar Midwestern voice. He was from Blue Earth, Minnesota, population ﬁve hundred and three.

“Because of ahm,” Doug said. “Cancer of the blood. He needs a bone marrow transplant and no donors could be found in the States. A biological relative would have the best chance.”

Thousands of Koreans had come out to help, plastering posters of his picture in the crevice of every tiny hamlet. Makeshift marrow testing centers sprang up everywhere. Entire military units came out. I strained to see the screen, as if I might see Jun-Ho within the masses, which looked so alike, short haircuts and uniforms. Like a set of toy soldiers.

“The Koreans are impressed,” said Doug, translating a reporter’s words, “that a non-Korean family could love this boy so much, someone who is not of their own blood. So Koreans want to come out and help, to get their marrow tested and help him ﬁnd his family.”

“He’s a cadet at West Point, so the U.S. government’s paying for the best treatment. But if he doesn’t get a bone marrow transplant, he’ll most likely die by the end of the year. He was a quarterback on his high school’s football team. That blond girl you just saw—that’s his girlfriend back in Blue Earth, Minnesota. Man, how come you Korean adoptees all end up in Hicksville, Minnesota?”

“Something to do with the churches. The adoption agencies all have some kind of name like Catholic Charities or Lutheran Services,” I said, distracted. “So how about his birth family, did they ﬁnd them?”

“Mm, they went to the orphanage and searched the ﬁles, like you did, and they found a baby picture, so next they’re going to broadcast it on TV and in the newspapers.”

I wanted to claw and rend, hear the scream of fabric tearing. I stretched out the neck of Doug’s T-shirt until it hung down like loose skin. I was aware that Brian Muckenhill had terminal cancer, but all I could think of was that he was going to meet his birth mother—and I would never, ever know mine, never have that hand to touch. It occurred to me suddenly that I didn’t even know if my birthday was September third, the day I was found, or September second—today. Jun-Ho said that the exact time and date of one’s birth was very important in Korean astrology, that fortunetellers could tell you your entire destiny from those two pieces of information, which most people have. Christine and Ken managed to skip that thorny issue by doing the cake and presents on the anniversary of the day I arrived in Minnesota, my “Gotcha day” they called it, March 17.

Gotcha meant nothing. A human-set date chosen by others. Not like my birth, the date and time that I, by that eternal and mysterious baby instinct, decided to leave the womb. No one should be without this knowledge. But it wasn’t forgotten, or unclaimed at the bottom of some dusty ﬁle. It was, simply, gone. Like her.

I wanted to scream so loud that every person in Korea, in America, in the world beyond would cover their ears and grimace.

KYUNG-SOOK

On Saturdays, when she was done with her time in the market, she went over to the church to prepare it for the next day’s service. Small Singing had left her stall with a smile because Kyung-sook had mentioned that the bone-shaped birthmark on her son’s neck was an auspicious sign.

Shrimp Auntie works so hard, said some of the observing villagers. She takes care of a husband and a father, her business, and the church.

Do you remember her mother? She had the best singing voice in the village. No one could sing “My Hometown” like she could—she wouldn’t leave a dry eye in the place!

Oh my, no. The girl was tone deaf—her singing voice was like a couple of cats screeching.

Shrimp Auntie? I don’t think so. She’s just been a wife and daughter, for all I know.

You’re getting too old to be the village gossip—you can’t keep your facts straight. It’s a pity Cooking Oil Auntie has passed on—now, she knew what was what. You’re getting Shrimp Auntie mixed up with her childhood friend, last-one daughter of the ﬁve daughters of Kim the junkman. That girl ran off to North River County to the Yankee army base, not Seoul.

Oh, perhaps you’re right. Aigu, but these old bones ache! But probably not as much as Shrimp Auntie’s are going to, after she spends all evening bent under those benches. Then on Sundays she plays on that Western pi-a-no so the parishioners can sing their Christo ballads—she has that much musical talent, at least.

Kyung-sook opened the door to the church, its familiar woody, slightly musty odor rushed to greet her.

Saturday nights she cleaned, all by herself. Her soft cloth would slide noiselessly across the pews, in perfect rhythm to her breathing. She would quietly straighten the things on the humble pulpit, all the while receiving her peace in this walking meditation.

September third had come again. Her daughter’s coming-out-to-the-world day. This time, she did not force her mind to other things. Instead, she merely moved about in gloomy silence, shed a few bitter tears during the lull time in the market. Soon it would be Chu-sok day, the day she needed to make obeisance to her mother and her other ancestors for three generations back. She would thank her ancestors for her proﬁtable year at the market, she would tell her mother, again, I’m sorry for what I did to your dreams of having a college-educated daughter. Please forgive me.

Il-sik, as he did each year, would rebuke her for her adherence to these ancient rites. In his sermons he preached that the Korean people needed to move away from ancestor worship, fortunetelling by the chom chengi, shamanism, and Buddhism—these things were all sent by Satan to distract people from the True Way, Christo. Il-sik encouraged churchgoers to even physically restrain their friends and relatives when they headed out to the chom chengi or to the Buddhist temple.

But old ways are not so easily changed. He had to know that even the most fervent churchgoers had their prophecies read, made offerings to the mountain gods “just in case.” And no one Kyung-sook knew would make a marriage match for their children without having an astrologer make sure their zodiac signs and blood types were compatible.

For her part, honoring her ancestors through the Chu-sok rites were something she could not, would not, end. It was something she had done all her life, her mother had done it all hers, all the way back through the many generations delineated in the pages of the chuk-bok. She would again, on the preceding day, leave her market stall and spend the whole day shopping for and cooking a feast of her mother’s favorite dishes. This she would spread out in front of her esteemed mother’s burial mound, and she would implore her mother’s spirit to return and enjoy this repast made by her daughter’s hands.

Thus, the cycle of life. She had left the village and come back, and to some eyes, it was as if she had never left—she was the same.

But because of Il-sik, her husband, she had become a Christo-follower. Because of that other man, she had borne a child, one that she had not raised, one whose fate was—and would be—unknown to her.

In many other ways she had come back to the village changed, and she would continue to change. All people did, like a snake that sheds its skin: at some point the new skin becomes old, the old becomes the new.

Yet life was not a circle, as the Buddhists and Confucius thought. She would not be reborn at sixty to start a new life. No, her life was winding, winding, following the coil of a spring. At each point she was able to see behind her to what her experiences had been, but at each point, a little further up the coil, her perspective was a little bit different.

It would be like this until she reached the end of the coil, the time when she would go up to Him, if He has deemed her faithful.

She moved her cloth along the wood of the pews. The rough-hewn wood was slowly, slowly taking on a bit of a burnished glow, and this pleased her.

The coming of Chu-sok would also mean the night of the fullest autumn moon. The night of the Harvest Moon Festival, where all the village women would gather for the kangkang sullae. Girls, women, and grandmothers would all join hands, they would become an expansive circle that would slowly unwind. Then, one by one, each dancer would be lifted toward the sky for her chance to sing out her story, framed in the light of a luminous moon.

SARAH

“Hello, you’ve reached the Thorsons. Sorry we can’t take your call but we’d love to talk to you, so please leave your number and have a wonderful day!” There were various noises of the bird and the cats and the dog in the background. Yip. Arf. Meow. Skrrech.

At the beep, I informed them only of the day of my return. I didn’t want Ken and Christine and Amanda to meet me at the airport, to rush back into my life. I would make my way home, make a gradual adjustment back through the layers of my Minnesota life: English words, greenbacks, Viking-ish faces. Slowly, slowly I had to be debriefed, depressurized, to avoid a fatal case of the emotional bends.

Doug and I rode in silence to the airport. In the rice ﬁelds on the way, bareheaded men drove motorized harvesters, spewing blizzards of straw in giant arcs toward the sun. The big yellow billboard that greeted me almost a year ago, HYUNDAI—FOR BETTER LIFE had been corrected to HYUNDAI—FOR A BETTER LIFE.

At Kimp’o Airport, I saw some program-mates debarking from sleek black cars aptly named Princes. People kept coming out the doors endlessly: grandmas, uncles, cousins, aunts, like in the cartoons.

The airline people said to come two hours early, and we did. There was nothing to do but wander around a huge oval-shaped, arched-ceilinged room that reminded me of a hockey arena—I almost expected to hear the drone of a Zamboni.

At the center of the room, people slumped on the plastic-and-metal chairs, KNN blaring from TV monitors above their heads. Doug returned from a gift shop with a keychain that had a bell with a drawing of Hodori, the Olympic tiger mascot on it. A smiling neonatal tiger—in a land where all the native tigers had been killed for their penises (a supposed aphrodisiac)—Hodori wore a traditional Korean cap with the long propeller-like ribbon on it. Tae Sunsengnim had worn such a hat at the music performance for her group, Sa-mul Nol-I, to which she had invited me. Even though the kaenguri position was traditionally reserved for a man, she had been the one to play the shining gong. While keeping perfect time with her chang-changing, she had spun her head around so fast that the twirling white ribbon eventually formed a perfect, breathtaking circle.

The bell tinkled in my hand as we settled onto the uncomfortable chairs. Something smelled like old, ripe kimchi.

The departure board trembled, like leaves catching a breeze, and the ﬂap-ﬂap-ﬂap revealed a BOARDING sign next to my ﬂight, a red light blinking urgently next to it.

Doug didn’t say anything. He grabbed my bag and carried it to the line. He had assembled a collection of my favorite snacks: an ear of midget corn, ddok rice cakes, squares of roasted seaweed, and yes, o-jing-o, dried squid—I’d developed a taste for that salty, smelly, leathery stuff after all. I’d better ﬁnish everything before I landed, he advised, or customs would probably take it away. He had also written the address of his new boarding house in Seoul.

It was at once easy and hard to think of leaving Doug. The way his eyes could look so deeply into my truest self. His angular face, with that sweet spot under his chin, the little frog’s belly of softness that perhaps only I knew about. I would miss him. But now that we’d found each other, we could go on, no matter where we were. I looked at him, my Doug, the features of his long-gone American father impudently pushing to the surface of his face.

I showed the attendant my ticket, my passport with the eagle stamped on it in gold. She gave it a cursory glance, then handed it back, put her hand out for the

10,000 “departure tax.”

Then there was only Doug’s hand on my arm holding me to this place. In just a step, Korea would be receding to that place where my Korean mother was, the place just inside my eyelids, on the cusp of a dream, where we could not speak or touch.

I looked back into the waiting area, past Doug’s shoulders. The fantasy image I’d had of my mother—the long black hair, rosy lips, slender hands—those varied pieces ﬂattened out and joined together to form a paper doll, its edges curling as the form caught an invisible breeze and went twirling, twirling, up to the high, domed ceiling of the airport, then out into the sky beyond.

I waved one more time to Doug, then entered the long tunnel. Because it curved, ten steps in I saw only wall when I looked back. In front of me, a large Caucasian man, a jarhead, toted an overstuffed Adidas bag, the counterfeit logo looking like marijuana leaves.

“Never coming back!” he said, to no one in particular. “Never coming back to this stinking country. The U.S. Army can fuck this country!”

In the plane, the stewardess spoke to me in Korean, asking me if I wanted something to drink.

“Neh,” I said. “Coke-ah col-ah chu sae yo.” She didn’t blink, poured me a Pepsi from its red-white-and-blue can.

The guy across the aisle looked familiar, Korean American. Military crewcut, slightly pale, thin, a Confederate-gray uniform banded in black.

I stared at the ice in his Coke. Where had I seen him before? I needed to say something more to him, before the hole of cordiality closed and we became strangers once again.

I sat bolt upright, sloshing some of my drink. He laughed. “I can always tell. I am, too.”

A heavyish blond woman strode up the aisle, smiled at me, then carefully navigated herself through the narrow airspace between the young man’s lap and the seatback, to dock in the middle seat.

“Gretchen Muckenhill,” the woman said. Now seated, she leaned over him to shake my hand. Our ﬁngers could barely meet over the distance.

Mrs. Muckenhill’s face softened, like warmed wax. “And what are you doing in Korea, all by yourself?”

“Studying Korean,” I said. I remained quiet a few seconds more, then asked the young man, “Did you ﬁnd your family?”

He laughed. “Wow, your Korean must be great if you can understand Korean TV,” he said. Then he shook his head. “No, we had some leads, that was it. There was someone who thought she recognized my baby picture, but no dice. But geez, we met so many nice people while we were here.”

His mother nodded in agreement. “Oh, for sure. The Koreans are the most warmhearted, generous people, really. So many people gave blood. Such a shame there wasn’t a match in all that.”

“I’ll get my marrow tested, if it will help,” I said. I stared at him. There was always the chance, I supposed, that we were related. Maybe my birth mother’s sister also had a pregnancy she didn’t tell anyone about, and then this guy and I were cousins. Maybe I was related to any of a zillion Koreans I saw. Maybe I had been related to Doug, whom I had slept with. Or Jun-Ho.

“That’d be great,” the guy said. “I’ll give you the number of the Cammy Lee Foundation, a marrow registry for Asian Americans, where you can get it done.”

There were no outward signs of the cancer cells ravaging his body. Except for his thinness, which wasn’t exceptional, he looked untouched by disease. I wondered how many cancer cells, lurking in secret, somatic places, would mutate and divide on this twenty-hour ﬂight home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PART III

KYUNG-SOOK

SARAH

SARAH

KYUNG-SOOK

SARAH

SARAH

SARAH

SARAH

KYUNG-SOOK

SARAH

KYUNG-SOOK

SARAH

SARAH

SARAH

KYUNG-SOOK

SARAH

KYUNG-SOOK

KYUNG-SOOK

SARAH

KYUNG-SOOK

SARAH

KYUNG-SOOK

SARAH