That afternoon, Umma dragged out the international luggage, the huge ones that went from Houston to Seoul. Then she made a third call, to the airlines. I had wanted to live alone in the bee-loud glade. How had I slid from taking a stand and leaving school to agreeing to work in Seoul and live with my aunt, uncle, and cousin?
Just then, Sarah tottered into the room. She was almost three now, and I didn’t love anyone as much as her. I patted my lap, and she came and sat on it. I smoothed the top of her head and stuck my nose into her glossy hair, which smelled pure, like a little kid’s, and wonderful. No matter how much power I tried to wield, I had never won against my mother. “Will you win someday?” I whispered.
But Sarah played with her doll and said nothing. I knew how Umma would respond though. “You’re nineteen! Nineteen-year-old girls don’t have power!” That power included the legitimacy and ownership of my own feelings. It was as if I were her doll, and she was grabbing me about the waist, swinging me upside down, emptying me of everything that lived inside. From the air, my pate creaking open, I watched my guts roll about every which way on the floor, like spilled and worthless marbles. I was emptied, so she could tell me what to put inside. Umma was the smartest person I knew, but if she didn’t want to see what was in front of her, then she doubted you and made you think you were crazy. Before you knew it, you’d placed yourself in a straitjacket of disbelief. The idea that I was an adult with power and will never crossed anyone’s mind, least of all mine.
PART V
BLOOD
1.
IT WAS NEARLY EIGHT IN the morning when I arrived at NAMCo’s headquarters. Judging from the settled-in state of the employees, mostly male and wearing company-issued puffers over starched shirts and ties, I was late. The receptionist showed me to the top floor, where I was to meet with CEO Nam and begin my first day as intern in the economic and business strategies group. I had been in Korea for two days and spent the early morning with my uncle, watching a story on Seoul Broadcasting Station about Korean housewives plopping their wedding bands into collection points around the city in an effort to shore up the bankrupt country. It was October of 1997, and the region was in financial crisis.
The door was closed to the clamor of the floor outside, and in the silence that fell like soft snow between us, I beheld the trim and bespectacled man behind the desk. Dr. Nam was the same as he had been in Texas when I was a child, despite his good suit and graying temples now. Studying the gentle but incisive humor in his face, I thought about how, unlike my parents, he had accomplished taking what he had set out to wrest from America, returning home, where he deployed his new American degree and old Korean connections to become a success. Meanwhile, in Houston, Appa sat in a cubicle, struggling to write a report in an adopted language he hadn’t mastered, while Umma made an octopus of herself trying to do a hundred things at once.
Finally, Dr. Nam spoke. “You will work directly for me. If you have any problems, tell me. I am the boss here.”
He said this in English, so I replied in English. “Thank you. I am sure there won’t be any problems.”
“We have a company-wide assembly this morning to discuss the future of the corporation given the International Monetary Fund’s certain arrival in Korea. Afterward, Director Ha will show you to your team.”
The assembly was a strange, gendered affair in which the male and female employees took their positions on opposite sides of the room and sang the company anthem with gusto, hands clasped at their backs. These people probably had families and worried about layoffs and salary cuts, yet in front of the company leadership, they sang the corporate propaganda with conviction. When the song was over, the men filed out first.
Whispers reached me as I trailed Director Ha, who found me lost in the male queue headed back to the floor. “Who is that?” “Is she new?” “Why are they hiring when it’s IMF?” “That can’t be a copy girl, she’s with Director Ha.” Meanwhile, I unleashed a torrent of self-reproach for wearing this magenta dress that stood out as an obtusely bright festival in the staid corridors of the building. I’d received similar stares on the subway and bus that morning and recalled what Keun Umma said the day before—that I walked like an American. “Too erect,” my aunt said, and my cousin Kang Dae had pried himself away from the television to nod.
Director Ha was a smiling Halloween skeleton—broad, bony, and sunken in all the right places. His ebullient personality came replete with a full-bodied laugh he loosed often on the tour. At each pod, I accepted the proffered business cards with both hands and examined each myeongham with the appropriate level of fuss, making a show of studying both sides—the front in Korean, the back in English. Carefully placing the cards in a folder, as if each were reputation, education, and relationship all in one, I retrieved one of my own and then bowed humbly, my eyes cast low. After a half hour of this cultural dance, everyone blurred together, and it was as if I had met a hundred Lees, Kims, Hans, Suhs, Kangs, and Chungs.
“Does she speak Korean?” my compatriots asked. Before the director could put in a word, I answered, “A little,” to show I should not be completely underestimated. “Ahhh,” an inquiring man said. “Daedanhaeyo.” What a strength, he was saying, to keep the flame for the homeland alive while growing up away from it. But his demeanor made it clear he patronized, while another fellow squawked, “How brash the innocent is! A true American!” Director Ha, unable to stanch his laughter, boomed, “Song Hyeseung-ssi will be working in the strategies group and reporting directly to CEO Nam.”
As we headed to the next pod, I attempted to adjust my “American” posture, currently sagging under the mortification of how ill-prepared I was to navigate byzantine Korean corporate culture. I vowed to do the Korean thing the next time someone asked the question: to self-efface and profess in Korean, “No, I don’t know any Korean.” Ruefully I recalled when I was eight when Tori Mailor asked whether I knew how to speak English.
Everyone in NAMCo’s economic and business strategies group spoke English well, including marketing associate Sohn Jemi, who was its sole female and also the most interesting person I met that day. Nearing thirty, she emanated a benign, sexy vulgarity and appeared to possess a personality in keeping with her tightly permed hair radiating like a lion’s mane gone through an electrocution. Director Ha mentioned she’d been an art major in college, a fact that was meant to put her down in my eyes but did the opposite. We bowed and in immediate sisterhood she took my hand, winked a small black eye, and declared adamantly in English, “I am a fucking party animal.”
I liked her immediately.
It was nearly lunchtime when I finally sat down at my computer. I was tasked to write a report on the economic factors leading to the current financial crisis, which I understood was busywork to gauge my handle on macro- and microeconomics. While I studied the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, I counted how many times Director Ha passed Jemi’s desk with a gargle cup of Nescafé on the way to the water cooler.
“What are you doing at the office every day, Sohn Jemi-ssi? You should be home, practicing your yori in the kitchen so you can find a husband. You’re an old maid!”
Jemi stopped tapping at her keyboard. Fluttering her fake eyelashes, she fixed her eyes on him adoringly, her face caked with foundation two shades darker than her normal skin in an effort to shrink its size. In a light, flirtatious tone she simpered, “I’m just here every day, waiting for you to propose, Director Ha!”
He threw back his head and roared with pleasure. Around the bullpen, a few functionaries bobbed up—Oh, it’s just Sohn Jemi-ssi and Director Ha, their bored looks said—before returning to their monitors.
“Oh, Sohn Jemi-ssi, you heartbreaker!” he boomed before strutting back to his desk in the corner.
Jemi caught my eye and stuck a finger in her mouth. “Barf,” she whispered.
I laughed.
The stores along the boulevard bustled that evening upon my return to Keun Appa and Keun Umma’s. As I passed in and out of the shadows of skyscrapers, on the street, in the cars, in the windows even, were Koreans.
I stopped at the tofu shop, thinking Keun Umma might want a block. In America, tofu came in refrigerated plastic packages filled with cloudy old water, but here, the shops made it in large trays from which thick cubes were sliced and sold by weight. The plastic bag steamed up with the fresh warm tofu.
Kang Dae heard me clomping up the stairs and leaned out the front door. He was thirty, already many years a man, but had never held a job on account of a physical disability. I wondered whether things would have been different for him in a country where homogeneity wasn’t as prized. The two of us looked most like one family, sharing the same open mien, and we both felt like misfits in our respective cultures.
“Give me a second, and let me take off these damn heels,” I said, chuckling. Both Kang Dae and his dog were panting—the dog because she was old or hot, Kang Dae because he was dying to know how my day had gone. “I had a hard time distinguishing names and faces. Everyone looks the same, or they’re all Kims!”
Keun Umma pulled the tofu from the bag. “Everyone looks so different in America, I don’t bother trying to tell anyone apart.” Brusquely, she handed me a piece of tofu. She had a grand, totemic head, redolent of an Easter Island moai, and no daughter. I felt she liked me, but couldn’t bring herself to be gentle, like my mother could when nothing was at stake.
I chewed the tofu and considered what my aunt said. I contemplated all the varieties of appearances, races, and ethnicities, the infinite ways of living together in the stew of America—how one person could have black hair, another green hair, another no hair, while in Korea you had to take care not to marry someone with the same last name in case you were distantly related.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You’re thinking you are American. And in many ways you are. But your blood is Korean.”
Kang Dae looked over from the TV, where he sat petting his dog. He loved that dog, which was more like a tired old cat and trained to poop on a newspaper in the vestibule. “If something goes wrong,” he said, “you think the Americans will own you? Only the Koreans will call you their own.”
They sound like Umma, I thought, going into my room to change out of my dress. I considered packing it away, but decided I might wear it again when I did not feel as conspicuous. This wouldn’t be the last time someone had an opinion about whether I was Korean or American. I had grown up bowing to my elders on Lunar New Year and eating kimchi every morning, which was more than I could say for real Koreans like my keun appa, who, it turned out, ate dry toast and yakult for breakfast. Did the diaspora ever know the truth about the home country?
I smoothed the wrinkles from the magenta dress, which I’d bought in a shop in Princeton. It had only been a few weeks since my meeting with Dean Kay in which I vowed to find the simple life, and that promise was now a dying light. Ever hopeful, I wondered whether Umma was right. Could I find it in my homeland? After all, my blood was Korean, wasn’t it? If I couldn’t find a place here, maybe I wouldn’t be able to exist anywhere.
2.
THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND DESCENDED on South Korea at the end of November. In return for its nearly $60 billion bailout of the country’s financial system, the IMF instituted wide-ranging austerity measures which cut public spending, opened the country’s market, and curbed the chaebol.
When I wasn’t threading a line between the country’s reckoning and my own soul-searching, I focused on my work for NAMCo, which shifted daily. Sometimes the work consisted of writing comparative reports on the health care systems of other countries; other times of researching US stock market trends. Occasionally I translated a report or letter into English, and throughout the winter, my Korean started to improve.
By then, Jemi and I were good friends. We often huddled to smoke Parliaments on the concrete steps of an unfinished building near the Han River while the wind threatened to blow out the fire between our fingers. Between hungry sucks, we crunched shrimp chips from the bodega near the office. I guffawed while she, frank and fast, shot punch lines of dirty jokes.
During the long winter nights, I tagged along with her and her group of friends. A powerful wind shrieked between the skyscrapers of Apgujeongdong, and in the glow of the gigantic screens, Jemi drew us in a drunken train from nightclub to nightclub. Spilling out of the last club before ducking into a soju bar at the final second, we sang, “Just one more drink, to warm us up.”
