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

behind a row of bottles in which obscenely forked ginseng roots floated in amber liquid. Others lay on stacks of burlap packing bags or nested in a pile of coats they were selling. Even the market’s chickens and cats scrounging in the garbage seemed to stop for a nap.
    Except for Kyung-sook.
    Even as a child, you hardly ever slept, her mother had told her once. When we brought you to the fields, you sang with the birds, all day. That’s why your milk-name was Chatterbox, my daughter.
    She should have been a son.
    There had been a son, born a year before the 6.25 War. Her parents had named him Jae-song, Having All the Brilliant Stars in the Sky. So overjoyed by his birth, they didn’t even give him a milk-name, like Dog Shit, which would have hidden from the gods how very precious he was to them.
    When the family had fled south, away from the onrushing North Korean soldiers, they, with a group of refugees from another mountain village, had had to ford the Glass River at night. It was rumored that the area was infiltrated with enemy soldiers.
    Someone had procured a makeshift raft, and a dozen people clambered onto the listing platform, two men in the back carefully poling it through the water.
    Halfway across, Having All the Brilliant Stars in the Sky began to cry.
    Kyung-sook’s mother attempted to give him her breast, but as she fumbled at the tie of her top-blouse, hands snatched the child away from her.
    You want to get us all killed?
    Keep the baby quiet!
    Kyung-sook’s mother had wanted to scream
Where is my baby?
, but there was no sound in the moonless night except for the
slup-slup
of the river against the banks.
    A flash of light on the other side, a sharp report.
    Soldiers were indeed there.
    Someone shoved the child back into the mother’s arms when the raft hit the opposite bank, the people scattering into the night amid gunshots.
    Kyung-sook’s parents hid among the trees as shadows of soldiers came within meters of them. Kyung-sook’s mother kept her hand tightly over the child’s mouth.
    We can’t all die this way, like dogs, she vowed.
    Only later, under the safety and light of a refugee camp, did she see that Having All the Brilliant Stars in the Sky had been smothered. By her hand, or by another’s on the raft, she would never know.
    â€œMadame Shrimp Auntie, my mother has sent me to pick up half a kun of shrimp paste!”
    A little girl in pigtails stiff as calligraphy brushes stood at the entrance of the stall.
    â€œCome on in, Child,” Kyung-sook said, getting up from her crate. She shook out the folds in her apron. “My aren’t you chak-hae, a good girl, helping your mother with the errands?”
    The girl bowed modestly, and Kyung-sook took advantage of her averted eyes. The girl’s hair was dark as night, making the white sliver of a part look all the more tender and sweet. Her hands were grubby, but well formed, each fingernail an exact miniature of an adult’s.
    Kyung-sook measured out the shrimp paste, making sure to add in a little extra, and gave it to the little girl. Then she glanced at her unfinished lunch.
    â€œHere, why don’t you take this?” she said, palming her red-bean bun. She expected the girl to take an impulsive bite out of the sweet, as children were wont to do, but this girl received it respectfully with two hands, then placed it in her pojagi, which already had a bundle of Chinese chives sticking out of it. From a hidden pocket, the girl took out some crumpled bills and smoothed them before handing them to Kyung-sook.
    â€œYou’re not hungry?” Kyung-sook asked, disappointed. The girl’s clothes, she noticed, were slightly worn, but bleached clean and ironed. The bits of colored yarn tied to the ends of her braids attested to someone’s love and care.
    â€œI want to share it with my mother and my little brother,” she said. “They like