Fox Girl

Table of Contents

 

 

 

VIKING

VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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First published in 2002 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

Copyright © Nora Okja Keller, 2002

All rights reserved

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Keller, Nora Okja.
Fox girl / by Nora Okja Keller.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-0-142-00196-7

 

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

 

My deepest thanks to the following people:

My sisters Myung Ja Dawn, Lisa, and Lynn and brother Keum Sik for the stories and memories that form our childhoods and friendships we've built as adults.

My mother,Tae Im Beane, for nurturing her grandchildren, feeding their minds with Korean ghost stories and their bellies with mandoo and musubis. Your help made it easier for me to finish this one.

My father, Robert Cobb, who taught me to love the written word.

Diane Lee and Grace Yoon Kyung Lee for “Camp Arirang,” J. T. Takagi and Hye Jung Park for “The Women Outside,” and Kathy Moon for their extensive research of American camp-towns in Korea. Like shamans, you see the invisible.

Jeff Johnson, Pete Thompson, and Katherine Loo for allowing me to pester them with questions about immigration history, law, and loopholes. I owe you all another lunch, or ten.

Judge Patrick O'Connor and Sergeant Robert Rawlins and Officer Jesse Victorino of the Honolulu Police Department for answering my nitty-gritty legal questions and escorting me through booking and into the jail cell.The ending has changed, but I'm confident that what I learned will one day find its way into another story.

The National Endowment for the Arts for its generous and timely support.

Susan Bergholz for her faith in the story and for her vision of its possibilities.

The Bamboo Ridge Study Group for their patience and enduring belief that there would be an ending, even when I had given up hope. I kept writing because you all asked, “What's next?”

Lois Ann Yamanaka for being an auntie to my girls, for reminding me to find the light, for a karaoke party with several glasses of merlot when I most needed a night out.

Leslie Bow and Elena Creef, my Santa Cruz sisters, for your intense readings and insightful criticism, but most of all for your friendship through the years.

And Jim, you are my rock. I love you.

I dream of her still.

It's been years since I've seen her, my oldest friend and truest enemy, but she drifts through my sleep almost nightly. Though her face is usually hidden, my heart recognizes her. “Sookie,” I call out, voiceless as if underwater. She turns and all I can see are her teeth gleaming white in the blackness. Her mouth stretches wide, smiling, as if she is happy to see me. But even in my dream, it doesn't seem right, her joy doesn't fit. And then I notice how pointy her teeth are, how they are fangs, really, and how through the slightly open mouth, they are glistening, as if about to take a bite.

When I wake, I try to envision her face, but her features melt into one another; I see a smudge of black hair, dark eyes, a smear of mouth as if through churning waves. Or as if through several layers of photographic negatives: Sookie at eight when we fought Lobetto in the ditch behind her apartment; at fourteen, peeking out from under the paper bag she had put on her head when we went to Dr. Pak's VD clinic; at seventeen when, with her mother's makeup smeared over her face, she taught me about “honeymooning” in the backbooths of the GI clubs; at twenty when she pushed a wet and wailing Myu Myu into my arms and told me, “She's your daughter now.” In every memory I have of her, I can hear her words, see her gestures, but her face remains a fragmented blur.

I've written to her—postcards, a line or two on the back of photos of Myu Myu, who wants to be called Maya now. I indulge the child to make up for the beginning of her life, watching her carefully for signs of developmental delays, erratic behavior, eccentricities that could be blamed on me. I am the only mother Maya knows, but for me, in the shadows, there will always be another. These letters are my guilt payment, I suppose, and one day I will send them, these years' worth of notes, to her, care of Club Foxa Hawai‘i.

One day, when it is safe, I would like to see Sookie again, once more, face-to-face, so that I can reconcile her in my memory and banish her from my dreams. Maybe after enough time has passed, I could see her clearly, without money or love or other people's vision clouding my eyes.

When we were children, everyone in Chollak thought Sookie was ugly; this is what I loved most about her. Her ugliness—bulbous eyed and dark skinned—was greater than mine and shielded me to some degree.
“Gundong-hi, ssang-dong-i,”
the neighborhood boys teased as we walked the path from school. “The Butt Twins,” they called us. Sookie covered her ears—bony elbows sticking out like a kite—and I tucked the stained side of my face into my shoulder. Reasoning that they couldn't call me ugly if they didn't see the birthmark, I turned my good side toward the taunting and let the teasing fall on my friend.

“Blackie, black dog,” they shouted at her. Sookie, hands still over her ears, would recite the alphabet.

“Your father must be a U.S. darkie!” the boys spat at us. Even Lobetto, whose father
was
a black GI and whose skin was darker than Sookie's, teased her since at least he had a father.

“Eh,
chokka!
” I screamed, stooping to pick up a broken piece of concrete from the sidewalk. “I'm gonna kick your penis!”

Young Sik and Chung Woo swiveled their hips and “ooohooohed” us. Lobetto yelled back, “I doubt you'd even know where to find it, you pile-of-shit-face! What did your mama do to make you born so ugly? Eh.
Hyung
Jin?” He pronounced the first part of my name with a hard “g” at the end, changing its meaning from
wise truth
to
scarred truth.

“At least we're pure Korean, not like you, half-half.” I jutted out my hip and shook the chunk of concrete at him. Back then, I was the bolder one, secure in my family's station, our relative wealth. I thought we were rich because we never had to worry about rice and once a week we ate meat. Chicken, pork, even beef sometimes.

My mother's family, who had lived in Chollak generations before the start of World War II, owned the sweet shop we worked and lived in. We had an actual house—two rooms with an inside kitchen—not like the
piramin
shacks that the northerners or the GI girls from America Town lived in. Not like the dump Sookie and her mother had lived in before they found an “uncle” from the base.

“You are pure Korean, hah, Sookie?” I asked under my breath, testing the heft of stone in my palm. I was pretty sure if she wasn't, I would have been forbidden to play with her, just as I had been forbidden to play with Lobetto and Chosopine, before her father had taken her but not her mother to America.

“Ka na da ra!”
Sookie continued to sing the alphabet, still holding her hands over her ears. I could see the muscles in her thin arms quivering.

“Hana, dul, set,”
I growled, and on “three” I whirled and let the concrete fly. Since I never bothered to aim, but threw blindly at the group of boys, I didn't think I'd hit anyone. That day, though, I hit Lobetto in the face, opening a gash across his forehead. “Aaah, good luck!” I cried as I grabbed Sookie's arm to run.

“No, bad luck!” Sookie gasped as the boys, leaving a dazed Lobetto sitting in the middle of the street, swarmed after us. “If Lobetto tells his daddy, my mother will have a hard time getting on the base. Then I might have to be hungry again!”

We cut through the narrow winding alleys toward America Town, jumping over piles of chili peppers laid out on mats to dry, dodging an old
halmoni
who carried her colicky grandson on her bent back. “Excuse me, Tong Su's Grandma,” I called over my shoulder before she began yelling about ill-mannered children racing through the streets like criminals. With luck, the boys would crash into the grandmother and be taken inside to be punished with a lecture and some ear pulling. We bolted into my father's store before Lobetto and his gang turned the corner.