I

Star of the Sea

November 1973 was when I first got lucky. I was a scrawny three-year-old sitting on a bench in a South Korean marketplace waiting for Omma to come back and take me home. My omma, my mother, had left me a tiny fistful of food that had crumbled in the three days and nights of waiting—endless hours of darkness with huge shadows and no promise of return.

When local policemen finally brought me into the station, I shook my clenched fist at them. As they proceeded with abandonment papers, I scrambled to the ground to gather the crumbs, insisting: She told me not to leave. She promised she’d be back.

Of course, I don’t remember everything. The policemen, for example—shady contributors to my first days as an orphan—are figures I am told existed, like in any ordinary fairy tale. But I wonder how they could have left a child alone for three days and nights. I imagine it was a time of survival for most. It was the early seventies, in a country still searching for an identity after decades of war and division. There were lots of us, abandoned or lost, and perhaps many, like myself, still questioning where it is we’re really from.

Although memories are distorted, there are true sensations one doesn’t forget, like fear and hunger, deep rumblings echoing in a cavernous heart and belly. I still see rat-colored streets, try to focus in on market vendors, the swift movements of street cooks; I am forever trying to decipher a familiar face. I want warmth and a mouthful of hot fermented cabbage, a bowl of plain rice.

My adoptive mother keeps changing the story every time I ask her. I don’t think she does it on purpose, but she has repeated the circumstances of my adoption many times over the years and always with discrepancies. Sometimes she insists I was never in an orphanage and stayed with an American serviceman and his Korean wife. But according to certain documents, I was also at the Star of the Sea orphanage.

I’m sure I was there because there are photos—I’m wearing an oversize polka-dot dress, sitting on a tattered sofa, squeezed between an Asian boy my age and a little girl much younger. There’s another picture of me with other children who look as hollow as I do. Lined up like rows of fruit for sale, we’re looking not at the camera, but beyond, as if expecting someone, anyone, to come and press on our skins to test for ripeness and cart us home.

The few papers I do have—documents from this period—state “Dap Dong, Inchon City, Republic of Korea, Special City of Seoul,” the address of an old woman who is “Superior of the Star of the Sea.” Not much else is really decipherable.

Nightmares sometimes help discern what’s true and false. My Korean brother, I remember as younger but taller, huddles over me as we look out over the busy streets of our village. His skin is smooth and warm and glows golden, like the color of the moon in cold months. Below, women waddle back and forth, carrying baskets of fruit on their heads all day long. We take turns standing guard, searching for our omma among them—we are convinced our mother is one of the fruit ladies. But it gets dark fast, and the house fills up with damp shadows before we can even sense her shape.

In a letter dated 1973 or 1974, my adoptive mother writes to her family back in New Orleans that she and my father, on leave from Okinawa, have decided to adopt an infant girl. A newborn, abandoned on a doorstep. But, she writes, there is also another child who comes every day and jumps in our laps. I am the other girl. My mother continues to explain that I was found on a bench in the marketplace, cigarette burns stamped into my arms and shoulders. When the policemen finally brought me into the station, I told them defiantly that I was three years old, that I was called Chong Ae Kim and was waiting for my mother to return. I held up a scarred fist smeared with soot and starch and shook it at them. “She’s only twenty-three pounds, but perhaps she is older, because they say she speaks a strange yet beautiful Korean.” The curious thing, my mother concludes, is they reported that I never cried.

Somewhere in the world is a man who sized me up, measured me, and estimated my bones—a type of carbon dating for lost children. I imagine him with pen and paper, arriving at the Star of the Sea to count heartbeats, trace circles, check teeth. Maybe he added up the number of burns and bruises on my upper arms and neck, calculated that I wasn’t missing too many pounds, before deciding I was fit for adoption.

“Born between January and June,” the doctor announced to my soon-to-be parents. Maybe a Pisces?

He validated me and decided my place among the stars. My birth date is a compromise, my beginnings a constellation of in-betweens and connect-the-dots. Since the approximate age of three, I’ve been a fish and swimming upstream ever since. There is no room for tears. Instead, I swim holding my breath. I’ve learned to ration the air, so vital for when I return to the surface of the sea, when it is safe to drift near the coastline of a warm and secure body.

QUICK-FIX KIMCHI

Korean cuisine—hearty, rustic, and beautiful—shines as the unsung hero of Asian cooking. A variety of vegetables, pickled, packed, and buried in the earth, is a traditional accompaniment. I could never pretend to prepare them the way Korean cooks do, but I make this express version of cabbage kimchi—sometimes adding or substituting for the cabbage sliced cucumbers, zucchini, or bean sprouts—whenever I long for a spicy hit of Korea.

1 small head Napa cabbage

¼ cup sea salt

1 (4-inch) piece fresh ginger, minced or grated

1 garlic clove, minced

3 to 4 tablespoons hot red chili paste (or Sriracha or sambal oelek )

1 teaspoon hot red pepper flakes

1 tablespoon sesame or walnut oil

1/3 cup rice wine vinegar

1 teaspoon fish sauce or 2 crushed anchovies

1 tablespoon sugar or honey

3 to 4 green onions, thinly sliced

1 small head escarole, frisée, or Romaine, torn or chopped

Remove outer leaves of cabbage, quarter lengthwise, core bottoms, and cut across into 1-inch pieces. Place in a colander in sink and sprinkle with salt. Let sit 45 minutes to 1 hour. Rinse and dry cabbage thoroughly, preferably using a salad spinner (otherwise the kimchi will be watery). Whisk together ginger and next 8 ingredients in a large bowl. Add cabbage, escarole, and toss to combine. Pack kimchi in a glass jar or bowl. Cover and refrigerate 2 hours and up to 2 weeks. Serve with steamed rice, grilled meat, on sandwiches, or stirred into soups.