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

huh.”
    Before we left, Doug returned with more Lotte gum. These came with a suspicious picture of a flower on the label, but they had a sweet coffee flavor that lasted about three chews before the whole thing became a tasteless wad. Outside, the peony globes were covered with ants, like moving black sprinkles on spumoni ice cream cones.
    â€œWould you like to take a walk?” he said, when we were back on campus.
    â€œUm, sure.” I was realizing I hadn’t done much exploring beyond the Language Institute, the 7-Eleven, and the Balzac coffeehouse. I kept forgetting that our school was just one tiny building occupying a corner of a huge university filled with Korean students.
    Some of the Chosun Daehakyo students were passing us now. The girls walking arm-in-arm in tight jeans and platform shoes, the guys in sweater vests, hair greased back à la Ken’s high school pictures, some also arm-in-arm.
    We veered to a path that led behind a dingy building, test tubes crusted with frosty white precipitates airing out in the open windows. The dirt path ascended directly up a mountain—a random peak erupting in the middle of campus. In a few minutes of upward hiking, I could smell pine. I could also see smog padding the city below.
    â€œWhere are we going?”
    â€œYak-Su,” Doug said.
    A noise, like the cackling of chickens. From behind us, a dozen octogenarian Korean men and women gained on us. They were clad in some serious Sound of Music hiking gear—Tyrolean hats, wool pants held up with suspenders, knee socks with alpine patterns, hiking boots, gnarled-wood walking sticks. They were all carrying empty plastic jugs.
    â€œThey’re going to Yak-Su, too,” Doug said, as the group, amazingly, pistoned past us up the steepening slope, their happy chatter unabated. Soon, they disappeared beyond a bend in the trail.
    Doug stopped where the trail continued up to the summit and another trail broke off to the left. He pointed to the sign.
    Two simple syllables, no diphthongs, even. Yak and Su.   and  .
    â€œOh, Yak-Su,” I said. “We’re here.”
    He nodded, then started down the left-hand trail, which ended abruptly at a lone metal pipe emerging from a rock. It was dribbling water into a rusty drain; a middle-aged Korean woman squatted like a frog next to it, alternately filling up a pink plastic dipper and drinking from it. By her feet sat a plastic jug, filled to the brim with water.
    â€œThe Stamp
ajuhshi
told me this is some of the best
yak-su
in the city.”
    â€œOh, um, really?” I said, suddenly realizing that
yak-su
was a thing, not a place.
    â€œYou’ve never had
yak-su
?” I shook my head. From his voice, I felt as if I should have, or at the very least, should know what it was. I just stared ahead blankly.
    â€œYou know, ‘medicine water,’ the spring water that flows off the mountain.”
    â€œOh, yeah.”
    The woman placed the huge water-filled jug on her head and began to amble down the slope, even singing as she went. Doug bent down by the dribbly stream, his body folding quite naturally into the lady’s same squat. He picked up the pink dipper, which she’d left on top of a rock.
    â€œYou’re not going to drink from that, are you?”
    He looked at me, then laughed. “Of course I am. We’re all Korean. We can share germs.”
    â€œBut—”
    â€œAt home, don’t you all eat from the same bowl? You see at the restaurant how the
ajuhmas
put our leftover kimchi and stuff from the tables back into the pot, right?”
    I wish he hadn’t told me that.
    He took a draught and then handed me the dipper.
    â€œI think I’ll pass—I’m not that thirsty,” I said, my tongue folding like cardboard in my mouth.
    He shrugged. “Use your hands if you don’t want to use the cup. I mean, we came all this way. And hurry, the