Somebody's Daughter by Marie Myung-Ok Lee

the half-breed sons of Western princesses.”
    â€œWestern princess?”
    â€œYeah.
Yang kongju
, a Korean woman who’s hooked up with an American GI. It’s a synonym for prostitute.”
    â€œUm,” I said.
    â€œIn a way he hit the nail right on the head. My mother was a bargirl at a bar that serviced American GIs, and I am half white.”
    â€œSo … Um.”
    â€œBut unlike some bargirls, after
Umma
met Hank, my dad, she had sex with him exclusively—and they did marry.”
    I blinked. So casual, as if he were discussing something suitably public—a stock trade, maybe—not a trade in his mother’s body.
    â€œWhat led her to that, um, life?” I ventured.
    You probably would have become a prostitute if you’d stayed in Korea
.
    He shrugged. “She was a peasant. She was really smart, but being the fifth daughter of the village junkman who called his kids One, Two, Three, Four, and Five and who liked his rice wine a little too much, being sent to school wasn’t an option. Working the bar scene was.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œSo how old were you when you were adopted?”
    â€œEighteen months, I think.”
    â€œWere you born in Seoul?”
    â€œI guess. That’s where my parents lived.”
    â€œWhat happened to your Korean parents—do you remember them at all?”
    â€œThey died in a car accident. I don’t have any memories of Korea at all.”
    â€œTell me about being an adopted Korean, then. What’s that like?”
    My metal chopsticks scraped against the stainless steel bowl, my rice a half-eaten, ruined sphere. Why had no one ever bothered to ask me that, until this guy Doug, two steps away from being a complete stranger? Why was my being in the Thorson family presumed, assumed normal, and anything else was not?
    â€œWhat’s there to tell?” I chewed and chewed until the rice disintegrated to liquid, my jaws clenching.
    Sundays were our “family day.” We went to church together, we hunkered down at home for a big midday meal, before which we said long graces about how grateful we were. Grateful that Ken made tons of money so we could have our nouveaux-Victorian palace in this place that had no sidewalks. Grateful that Christine could buy all this food at Lund’s. Grateful. Full of grate. I hated that word.
    Don’t talk to your mother like that! Don’t you know that when you first came, she stayed up all night, night after night, trying to feed you? You might have died, otherwise.
    I was aware I refused to eat when I first came to America. But was that my fault? I was eighteen months old.
    You don’t know what it is you have, don’t you know what your life would have been over there? You should be grateful
.
    Sundays. In Korea, that’s the day families emerged from their homes. Saturday, still a workday, but Sundays, mother and fathers, sometimes grandmothers and grandfathers, accompanied children to parks, to Lotte World’s skating rink and Bavarian Village, to museums. Sometimes they even outfitted themselves in identical clothes, say red-and-blue polo shirts, like some traveling athletic team. My greedy eyes would devour them.
    The Motherland Programmers would also regroup. One girl always greeted a sun-browned uncle who drove a “Power Bongo” pickup truck filled with turnips or potatoes. Bernie Lee met a white-gloved chauffeur, one who had been known to wait for him for hours, wiping nonexistent specks of dust off the sleek black car with a feather brush. Sometimes even mothers and fathers visiting from the States arrived.
    In the evening, everyone returned, logy from huge meals, toting shopping bags stuffed with persimmons, fried honey cookies, rice cakes, and boxes of canned fruit drinks with names like SacSac. As they said goodbye to family, ballasted by edible tokens of care and affection, I watched them, chin on my fists,