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

hiking club will be coming back—they’ll be here all day filling up their jugs.”
    As if on cue, a yell of
“yaw-HO!”
drifted from down the summit. Where did those old people get their energy? Maybe there really was medicine in the water …
    I stuck my index finger in the stream, which was freezing. The water looked clear, but I knew that didn’t mean anything. At the Motherland Program orientation, they had warned us about the water. More than half the country’s people lived in Seoul, we were told, so the overtaxed, outdated water system was teeming with bacteria. They told us to buy the two-liter jugs of purified water and keep them in our rooms, even for brushing our teeth.
    Don’t drink water in restaurants unless you know for sure it’s been boiled. Don’t drink anything with ice in it, don’t eat ice cream from a street vendor, no raw fruits or vegetables that aren’t peeled, don’t eat at a
neng myun
restaurant unless you know for sure it’s clean
.
    â€œIn July, watch out for
chang-ma
, too,” Bernie Lee had added. “When it comes, don’t open your mouth or let it fall on your head or you’ll go bald.”
    Everyone had laughed in recognition and appreciation, except for me, who didn’t know what
chang-ma
was. I worried that it was some kind of malignant animal that fell from the sky—a rain of Wizard-of-Oz monkeys that pulled out your hair. Only later would I find out that it was the monsoon rains that came in the summer. The black exhaust from the belching buses, the industrial smokestacks, all this stuff that gave Seoul its odd, sulfurous light was sent back to earth in this impure rain.
    Who knew where this
yak-su
water was coming from, how much acid rain it had absorbed? Upstream, there could be any number of animals adding fecal matter and
E. coli
bacteria. And what about the microbial dangers, parasites? Amoebic dysentery? Even the thought of allowing benign but wiggling organisms—hydras, paramecia—into my digestive system made me feel woozy.
    The voices drew closer.
    â€œMan-sei!”
    â€œYaw-HO!”
    I cupped my palms and drank. The cold water thundered down to my stomach, my fillings jackhammered into my jaw. I opened my mouth to gasp, and an
aaahhhh
sound—the same one Ken makes when he drinks a cold beer in August—emerged. I plunged in again, drinking until I thought my stomach would burst. The taste was pure, primordial, as if I was resting my tongue on a cool, clean slab of granite.
    Further up the mountain, we sat at a bench, a split log.
    A gazebo-like wood structure was perched on a cliff a few hundred feet above us. I saw no paths leading up to it. Painted in muted greens and browns, it looked like a part of the mountain itself. I wanted to ask Doug Henderson if he knew what it was, but then decided I wanted to preserve my cover as a “normal” Korean for a little longer.
    A warm breeze blew across us.
    â€œSo if you were born here, what’s the deal with your Korean?” he said.
    â€œWhat do you mean, ‘what’s the deal’?”
    â€œYou sound like you’re completely unfamiliar with it.”
    I thought I had been getting better. The last time Jun-Ho and I had met, he had complimented me on my pronunciation. I had had a wild thought of henceforth telling people my name was Sarah Kim and trying to “pass.” But reality was intruding.
    â€œI’m adopted,” I snarled. “It wasn’t
my
decision to grow up in a white family in the fucking Midwest.”
    Doug fumbled in his little rucksack, so I couldn’t see the reaction on his face—shock, pity, recognition? He handed me a
mok kehndi
.
Mok kehndi
, “voice candy,” were basically just cough drops, but I loved their sticky, weedy taste. Doug ate them constantly, he said, because the pollution made his throat scratchy. They were only a chunwon, a