Somebody's Daughter by Marie Myung-Ok Lee Page A

laugh.
SARAH
    Seoul
    1993
    â€œYou will pick an afternoon class for your elective,” Choi
Sunsengnim
told us in English, to make sure we—I—understood. “You can choose between traditional music, tae kwon do, ceramics, or remedial pronunciation.
    â€œ
Sal-ah-ssi
, I think it would be best for you to participate in the pronunciation class,” Choi
Sunsengnim
said, when the sheet arrived on my desk.
    I felt my usual irritation at her meddling, but then I reminded myself: the orphanage was there, presumably with some real, solid information for me. By the time we started the elective classes, everything could be different. Maybe I’d find some of my family, and I’d start living with them. Once I began sleeping in a Korean bed, eating Korean food made by familial hands, everything Korean about me would come back naturally, I was sure. Maybe I’d even leave the Motherland Program, come back as the best speaker in the class.
    I put my name under the pronunciation class and smiled agreeably at
Sunsengnim
.
KYUNG - SOOK
    Enduring Pine Village
    1963
    This flute would take her out of the village.
    She didn’t know where, or when, but she sensed a larger future waiting for her beyond the craggy mountains, beyond their flowering valley.
    Would she be like Yongsu and merely disappear?
    More likely she would leave on her own two feet, in the light of day, as her imo had done before her. But unlike Imo, she would return in glory and acclaim after having grasped her singular destiny as a musician.
    Kyung-sook’s aunt, her imo, had been the first of the Huhr clan to ever leave the village, and she had never returned. She had been driven out because of her love for the whiteman’s god, Christo.
    Imo was the only Christo-follower in all the generations of a clan that had always worshipped the Lord Buddha, kept up the ancestor-worshipping rites, and—something they tried hard to keep secret—occasionally dipped into the shrouded crevices of shamanism.
    In fact, when Kyung-sook’s mother was sixteen, she had fainted upon hearing some harvest-time changgo drumming. Suddenly, she had risen up and begun to dance wildly, foaming at the mouth and claiming in a guttural voice that she was the Sauce-Pot God. The local shaman, observing this, had remarked that she could become a shaman priestess, a mu-dang, if she allowed the gods to descend on her. Her parents were horrified. Most people thought of shamans as disreputable types who dwelled on the margins of proper society. Shaman priestesses were known to tear off their clothes or simulate sexual acts during a kut, they shamelessly extorted money from the sick, the desperate. Becoming a mu-dang was out of the question for someone from a respectable family.
    From time to time, however, Kyung-sook’s mother still experienced fainting spells marked by a strange voice muttering prophecies that people took careful note of—because they almost always came true. Sometimes when this happened, her parents would beat her or plunge her in water to make the voices stop. But when they did, her skin would bloom with an angry rash, as if the spirit were determined to come out somehow.
    In an attempt to break this cycle, both Kyung-sook’s mother and her sister, Imo, were sent to the missionary school, which had declared war against such earthy paganism and, as an added incentive, provided its students a free daily meal.
    Of course, the main mission of Our Holy Father School was to convert children to become Christo followers. Kyung-sook’s mother easily ignored the gibberings of the ladies in black-and-white robes that only showed their rubbery faces. They showed her a picture of a whiteman and said in bad Korean, “This is Christo, your Father,” and they slapped her when she laughed and said, “No, my father is the man out in the rice fields.”
    Sometimes the somber missionary man would come out and