Somebody's Daughter by Marie Myung-Ok Lee

for me—when I was growing up, my dad beat me every time he caught me speaking Korean to any Americans.”
    I caught my breath.
    â€œHe couldn’t stand seeing me, his kid, open his mouth and have gook-speak come out. Once, I accidentally greeted one of the staff sergeants in Korean—that’s how this happened.” He gestured toward his left eye, the one that looked “sad.” When I focused on it, I saw how it hung slightly lower than the other, a gem jarred from its setting.
    Oh moh!
I wanted to say. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” I said, instead.
    He smiled the beginning of a wicked smile. “You’ve got to work on your accent. You sound like the goddam base chaplain who learned his Korean from Berlitz.”
    â€œYou know,” I said. “There actually is a word I can say with a proper Korean accent.”
    I knew he wouldn’t believe me. My inability to correctly pronounce any Korean word had become legendary in the Motherland Program. The language turned like meat in my mouth, the sharp corners of the letters rounding, proper intonations breaking free of their moorings. What came out of my Americanized, hybridized mouth was both comic and grim, a Babelized language of loss that would cause Choi
Sunsengnim
to sigh in despair, Jeannie to giggle behind her hand, Helmut to say “Ach!” The nun, I hope, prayed for me.
    But there was a word,
ddong
—the word for crap, merde, shit—that I could pronounce. I had few opportunities to say
shit
in class, but in the safety of my room, I would sometimes say
“ddong, ddong, ddong”
to the walls, wondering how was it that I could say
ddong
when I couldn’t even manage the
dd
sound: in my mouth, the word
ddal
, “daughter,” weakened to
dal
, “moon,” or even further to
tal
, “mask.”
    It was only when I said
ddong
that the sound came from someplace else, from a Korean-run sound factory that produced that exact
dd
sound, the resonance of a church bell in the moment right after its tense and waiting surface has been struck. In this way, the word for “shit” stayed itself and didn’t become the word for “East.”
    â€œDdong.”
I said, expecting a laugh.
    â€œYou said that perfectly, you know.”
    He was deadly serious.
    I shrugged.
    â€œYou must have memories,” he said.
    I shook my head. Where
ddong
had come from, I hadn’t the faintest clue. Looking into my past was like looking into dark water. I wondered what Amanda’s memories from eighteen months were like. But then it didn’t matter: she had flash photos, home movies, eyewitness stories giving light and color and shape to the murk.
    â€œSometimes, I’m afraid I’m going crazy here,” I told Doug. “I don’t know what’s real, what’s not real, what’s memory, what’s pure projection. I have these flashes:
mandu
dumplings, I
know
these from somewhere. But if I really sit down and think, I know the dumplings from General Tsao’s, this Chinese restaurant in Minneapolis. Same way, that day we were up on mountain, I had this flash—I’ve been here before—but we don’t have mountains in Minnesota and I’ve never been out West to see the Rockies—isn’t that crazy?”
    â€œNo, that’s not crazy,” Doug said.
    My fingers, grown slippery with sweat, couldn’t contain my metal chopsticks. They hit the table, then slid to the floor. The
ajuhma
glared when I reached over to the container for a new, possibly clean, set. Doug showed me again the proper way to wrap my fingers around them, his hand covering mine like a paw.
    â€œSo what are you going to do about contacting the orphanage?”
    I bit my thumbnail.
    â€œDo you think if I studied really hard this week, my Korean could get good enough to do the calling myself?”
    His answer: a