Read Online Somebody's Daughter by Marie Myung-Ok Lee - Free Book Online

Ken’s hemming and hawing over having children while her twenties spooled away. Her thirties brought years of painful fertility treatments and bloody miscarriages before she gave up and decided to adopt. Then she got pregnant just months after I arrived.
    â€œSo, Sarry, where are you hankering on going?” Ken asked. They both leaned forward, straining to hear, as if they were only going to be told once. Amanda rolled her eyes.
    â€œKorea,” I said.
    No one moved. The air crackled. We’d suddenly been turned into a glassed-in diorama at the Natural History Museum.
    AMERICAN (?) FAMILY, circa 1990.
    Ken and Christine, frozen. The air was so iced over I could almost see the hairline fractures. Amanda was the one who moved, her head rising off the notches of her arms to regard me with shock and disgust, and behind it, a kind of unhinged admiration. Christine made a vaguely keening noise before she grabbed the treasonous brochure out of my hands. In the background, there was another sound, even higher. It was the screaming sound of cloth being rent, of the shoddily woven fabric of our family coming apart more easily than anyone ever imagined.
SARAH
    Seoul
    1993
    I was surprised to find Doug Henderson waiting for me, just outside the classroom door. We walked to the restaurant in silence, a pattern we would repeat many times.
    We sat at the same battered plastic table, ordered something called
kalguksoo
, safe, white noodles.
    In class today, Doug had known the word
t’angol son-nim
, “regular customer,” a word that Bernie Lee hadn’t even known. This had sent Bernie spinning into a terrible mood.
    â€œSo how’d you learn Korean so well?” I asked, emboldened.
    â€œMy mother,” he replied, just as it hit me. “She’s Korean.”
    His hangdog eyes were the color of weak coffee, an acceptable Korean shade, but they were round as marbles, so the Korean in them was lost. His cheekbones—two swelling cliffs near his eyes—seemed somewhat Asian, but they were negated by an aggressive, pointed nose. His skin, the pale alabaster that I knew Koreans consider “good,” the way blacks determine “good” hair, was all thrown off by his copper hair. Clearly, the American Doug had been formed first, and the Korean genes had had to scramble to fill in wherever they could at the end.
    But now that I knew this about him, I was a little spooked.
    â€œSo you grew up in Korea?” I asked him.
    â€œTill third grade. I grew up in a camptown near a U.S. army base.”
    I noted that star, which he was wearing again today on the neck of his T-shirt.
    â€œSo you came to the States after your dad’s tour in Korea ended?”
    â€œIt was a little more complicated than that, but yeah. How about you? You were born here?”
    I nodded without elaborating.
    The waitress, bumping up the narrow aisle, knocked over our container of metal chopsticks and spoons, spilling them onto the concrete floor in a chorus of chimes. She paused to pick each one off the filthy floor and put it back into the container.
    With a sigh of
“Ai-gu,”
she plunked the container back on our table, midway between Doug and me, in its former place. She walked away. Earlier, I had caught a glimpse of a waitress busily dumping diners’ remains of the ubiquitous little side-dishes—kimchi, little dried minnows, seaweed dredged in salt—back into a communal pot that then went into the refrigerator for reuse. I had decided that what I’d been seeing was a mirage, a misreading of the situation that was a product of my paranoid Western imagination that immediately assumed that everything in the Orient was dirty.
    â€œYou’re not hungry?”
    â€œUm, my stomach’s a little upset all of a sudden.”
    He laughed. “How can your stomach be upset? Korean food is the only thing that will settle my stomach.”
    â€œUh