Somebody's Daughter by Marie Myung-Ok Lee Page A

elbows sore from being pressed into the windowsill for hours.
    I realized then that I had been misguided in my envy of the people in Eden’s Prairie, thinking it was merely their whiteness I wanted. No, it was their knowing their place in the world, a complacency the Motherland Program students shared. In Korea, Bernie Lee became Lee Jae-Kwan. Then he could return to America and Princeton and being Bernie, for he had parents whose faces mapped where he had come from, his life made perfect sense. So, too, the lives of Jeannie from Illinois, Helmut, the Gallic nun. They all carried with them the solid stones of their past in one hand, and bright, shiny futures in the other. For me, everything was vapor. I had to take it on faith that my past even existed.
    â€œWhat about your Korean family?” Doug said. “You must have had relatives, an extended family, siblings maybe.”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œYour adoptive parents never told you anything?”
    â€œI don’t think they know much more than that, either.”
    â€œWell, now that you’re in Korea, don’t you want to find out?”
    You’re afraid to face your feelings of being different
, said the social worker (the self-righteous one, for whom I decided that “MSW” stood for Minority Savior Woman).
And then you lash out at those around you, making quite a mess for everybody.
    Sparing Christine and Ken’s feelings had never been foremost on my mind. I called them “Ken” and “Christine” (over their howls of protest) to show them I didn’t fully consider them to be my “real” parents. But I couldn’t fathom taking that next step, to consider being part of a
Korean
family.
    And really, I needed to be pragmatic: knowing the past wasn’t going to change the present. Some undiscovered nugget wasn’t going to suddenly make me wake up white, or in a different house, in a different country. I would still be Sarah Ruth Thorson, American citizen, of 27 Inwood Knoll, U of M dropout.
    â€œYou were born here,” Doug said. “In Korea. Your story begins here, not in America.”
    â€œTell me something I don’t know.” Someone else’s voice. Sounding snappish, juvenile.
    I looked down at my hands. Not the white, slender, cerulean-blue-veined hands I used to see. But ochre-tinted, almost tanned, the yellowish cast making the veins look slightly green, blue-green like the salty sea.
    His words had cracked something open. All my stated reasons for being in Korea scudded away, clouds unveiling a full moon of certainty. I had known all this time, hadn’t I, the same way I had seen the signon a calendar and known somehow that it was the Chinese sign for moon. Bright, spare, unmistakable.
    â€œMaybe I do want to try to find out what happened.”
    Me, Korean, for almost two years plus the nine months I was carried by my Korean mother. That made
years
of a history complete and separate from what I eventually became with Christine and Ken Thorson in Eden’s Prairie, Minnesota.
    â€œI especially want to find my mother.” I was suddenly breathless. “I mean, I want to find out more about her.” Had I ever consciously thought about her, talked of her, since that day I wondered if I’d see her in Heaven, or Hell?
    But I was talking about her now. Christine and Ken, an ocean away, couldn’t hear my treasonous words—nor I theirs. Amanda couldn’t say, as she had that day, in awe and wonder,
Sarah, you’re fucking disowning us! Thanks a lot!
    â€œOh my God,” I said. I looked at my watch. “I forgot that I was supposed to meet this guy, Jun-Ho, for our language exchange.”
KYUNG - SOOK
    Enduring Pine Village
    1962
    At last, the river of memory came to the flute, the taegum, which was where the story really began.
    Kyung-sook was thirteen when she had found it lying at the bottom of an unused rice