LOST IN TRANSLATION

It would be evening on the other side of the world when the children took their break-of-day run past my window, around the orphanage and up the front steps, where they paused to leave their small shoes lined up on either side of the door before coming inside for breakfast. Sometimes, when the dust had settled, a ringing bell, a nodding ox, and a farmer on a hitched cart passed the orphanage gates in slow, revelatory order. The road they took was usually deserted. The occasional traffic passed on foot, provincial buses, or black iron bicycles. The pace of life was so slow in Hunchun, China, that it seemed almost an organic stillness.

 
Twelve years ago, when this essay begins, I had decided to become a writer. This was not the happiness I had supposed. I had spent the previous, unfunded year at New York University thinking about writing and despairing over my writing but rarely actually writing. The only project I completed during that mute, stricken year was an application to a second MFA program: one with the perspicacity, or blind faith, to recognize me as the writer I planned to be.

It was my mother who solved the question of how to fill that transitional summer between my first failed workshop experience and—what would turn out to be—my second. A vacation in Asia! she suggested, cannily. That Asia was just the thing I had spent my entire writing life trying to avoid. I did not want to be an Asian writer, whatever that meant. I wanted to be Tolstoy and Cheever. For that, I blamed my mother:

When she had first set foot in America, my mother looked around at the Fisher-Price toys, the jars of peanut butter, the miracle of aluminum foil, and swore that she would raise her children in this place. And so my sister and I had grown up in Long Island, New York, by her express design, surrounded by dogwood and gilt-edged Eaton Press editions of “the classics.” We read Gone with the Wind and Anna Karenina. We practiced Chopin preludes under a pretty framed Renoir (Young Girls at the Piano). We shopped for royal blue cheerleading briefs at the Walt Whitman Mall.

On reflection, however, I suspect that my mother may have begun to regret certain aspects of our studied upbringing. With two daughters at famous American universities—articulate, discontented girls who stopped by the Long Island house just long enough to rotate books and argue in rapid-fire English about whether Hemingway still mattered (“shala-shala-shala,” she called it)—she may have found that her achieved reality did not deliver. Perhaps she had been too successful in cutting her daughters loose from the Korea of their birth, setting them adrift in the land of opportunity and easy-access student loans. Perhaps there was too little in all this Western culture that was relevant to them. Perhaps there was such a thing as too free.

So: Join me in Seoul, she offered the broke daughter with time on her hands. Dad and I will fund a three-week vacation in Europe if you do.

 
It was the Europe of textbooks and dreams. And then to touch down in Seoul! To be stuffed with all your luggage into the backseat of a Tico and driven by your fourth aunt on your mother’s side to your grandparents’ apartment in the outskirts of the city. To see in one fell swoop all those relatives—even the ones you can’t remember—who had known you as a child. To hear them decide amongst themselves that you’ve grown so much or changed so little, that you are just like your mom or are the spitting image of your dad.

Nobody here was at all interested in the writer I planned to be. Here I was always someone’s child or grandchild, featuring witlessly in memories that were not my own. Even my mother, who had seemed nothing but content with the America of her making, was immediately lost to this loving din, slipping into the banter and nuance of the family narrative as though she had not been gone for the past twenty years.

To my relief, I learned that my mother did not intend for us to linger with relatives in Seoul. The alternative, however, turned out to be worse. She had located a group of South Korean volunteers headed for an orphanage in the rural outskirts of China. She had had to pull some strings (and play the American citizen card) but we were in!

 
From Beijing, we traveled north by bus over the course of a few days. As we jostled along, the other volunteers, a boisterous group of retired men and middle-aged women, swapped snacks of dried cuttlefish and cracked jokes that my mother claimed were lost in translation. They were determined to make a holiday of it, buying—with a tourist’s undiscriminating greed—bulging bags of omija tea and dried chili peppers, and gustily eating a diet of pork, pork, and more pork. My mother and I, neither big talkers nor eaters, were mostly left to our own devices.

We traveled through the landscape of another time, looking out in reverse provincial awe at the rice paddies, thatched villages, and roof-high sunflowers; the corrugated iron roofs cluttered with bricks and bike tires; the unsmiling party officials wearing ill-fitting olive uniforms with red tabs and gold stars. I could sense my mother struggling to make this panorama personal, to make it communicate a history that was relevant to me. But mostly, I found her attempts to erect a makeshift, retroactive education unconvincing. First of all, as an American grad student, I had no idea what China had to do with anything. Weren’t we ethnically Korean? Additionally, I was hungry and constipated, dreading the fresh indignities of each bathroom situation, craving bagels and Snickers bars.

Toward evening one day, we came across a river. There was nothing special about it as far as I could tell. Just a harmless habit of the landscape. But the bus fell silent. And then, in the fading light, a lone voice, then others, one by one, joined in singing—what? I had never heard the song before and still I recognized it. It was a song whose complaint ran in its very tonal bones. It was a song that was the very opposite of optimism, and whose vintage resignation had something very, well, Korean about it. It was a song that could only come of a people who had been invaded and occupied, invaded and occupied, and finally divided by forces beyond their control. I do my best to translate:

Your grandparents, my mother said into my ear, once crossed this very river.

 
The Tumen River (Doo Man Kang, in Korean) traces the uppermost border of the Korean peninsula, separating what is now North Korea from China. Since China’s era of plenty, the river has run between two unlike countries, between farmland and wasteland, harvest and famine, under heavily guarded bridges and one half-a-bridge—the landscape’s standing joke since the Korean War. Up close, the slender Tumen does not seem up to the task of bordering the most closed-off country in the modern world. It is not so wide that the distance does not seem shout-able, swimmable, or that you can’t easily spot North Koreans beating laundry on the far shore.

As the bus sped on and the river came in and out of view, I idly wondered what might happen if one were to plunge into the water and make for the opposite shore. Nothing in the can-do-ism of my American education told me that it couldn’t be done. Here was a river, just a river. For me, the salient facts about a river were how shallow it was, how narrow, how rapid the currents, how crossable. If it was crossable, well then it was crossable. Even if it were uncrossable, the American in me would find a way.

Before 1945, many ethnic Koreans had in fact freely crossed the Tumen, seeking economic opportunity in the émigré communities on the Chinese shore; and during World War II, with the turn of the political tide, these émigrés—my grandparents included—had taken this same river on the way home. Then history intervened. World War II would end, followed by the Korean War. The river would become politicized, militarized; it would become a manmade thing: a border instead of a corridor. Those who remained on the Chinese side would become chosonjok, ethnic Koreans whose Korean sounds foreign to Koreans and whose Chinese sounds foreign to the Chinese. The Da-il orphans are their children’s children.

The Da-il Home stands behind closed gates—a hodgepodge, ranch-style house with a blue pagoda roof and flower murals on the walls. There live thirty or so orphan girls and boys, supervised by South Korean missionaries and rotating teams of volunteers. In that history-stricken village, the orphanage seems to generate its own little engine of a present tense. It is a largely hopeful place. The vegetable garden is all brightness and order. Cherry tomatoes, sesame leaves, scallions, and purple-flowering eggplants ripen in turn. Choco-pies and hard candy arrive by the containerload from Korea. Class time, mealtime, playtime, and bedtime fall in line each new day.

Because I was from America, I was given the most important job and the best room. I stayed inside and taught English while the other volunteers tucked towels under their hats and scythed the tall grass in the lawn. They would sing to the sickle’s rhythm the old Korean folk songs, and their singing would come through the open window of the single classroom, where my students and I struggled through “Old McDonald” and the alphabet. My charges were, on the whole, a robust lot, full of the little wants, great needs, and idle aspirations of childhood: getting to wear make-up, winning the latest round of Duck Duck Goose, becoming the president of America.

Then there were children like Rim, who was small for his age (thirteen) and too young for the expression on his face. Dark confusion reigned except when he studied dragonflies. At the opportune time, he’d pinch them from the air, and for a moment, his face would clear as though he’d nabbed sense by the wings. He’d always let the insect go unharmed and retreat into his expression.

One morning spent distinguishing r and l for my l-less class of three, I watched as a dragonfly flitted in to be caught, admired, and carefully returned to the open air.

“Dlagonfry,” my students repeated after me before reverting to their native word, which, on their untied tongues, was a word with wings: jamjari.

Na, then fourteen, was the oldest by a year and stood a head taller than the others. Her manner seemed to apologize for being the oldest and the tallest, and for having the thickest accent in the class. But she had the cleverest hands. They could, in a few deft motions, render the tricky shapes of an origami menagerie, or fashion a particular dangling flower into ruby teardrop earrings. She delighted in my long hair, my watch, the size of my wrist, which she would circumference with her fingers and pronounce “ganulda.” A wisp of a word that doesn’t quite withstand translation, it literally means “thin,” but is used protectively, as in “vulnerable.”

Indeed, my mother and I must have looked that way in her singular point of view: we two American volunteers, the only mother-daughter pair. Together, we could barely manage the basics. The orphanage shower was just a hose, bucket, dipper, drain. We would duck into the bathroom during the nonsensical hours when others were unlikely to walk in and crouch beside the bucket of cold water, washing with little lapping motions of our hands, our pants partially on, our bras unhooked but dangling. I had not been so exposed in front of my mother since, as a teenager, I insisted on getting a lock for my bedroom door. But here, on the other side of the world, we would wash together, eat together, lie side by side in the same high narrow bed together as my mother told stories. She told of when she was a girl, and when my grandmother was a girl, growing my memory back now that I was all grown up:

The first time my grandfather, Young-Shik Kwon, left the little farming village of Un-Jib, his mother gave him what she could: three fistfuls of unseasoned rice and her blessing. It was the time of the Japanese occupation and many ambitious Koreans immigrated to their occupying country, seeking economic or educational opportunity. Others, chafing under Japanese rule, participated in nationalist movements and underground campaigns, fighting for the right to speak their own language in their own schools or—like my husband’s maternal grandmother—getting sent to prison for practicing a Western religion. To them, these young émigrés were no heroes. But people like my grandfather colluded with their occupiers in pursuit of something more practical than nationalism, more personal than principle: a better life, the immigrant dream.

My grandfather wanted to become a pilot. Once in Japan, however, he found his immigrant dream met with an immigrant’s welcome. He was an ethnic Korean, provincial and undereducated, without even a second set of underwear to keep him decent when washing the first. Pilot? He couldn’t even get a job as a driver. Instead, he became the driver’s helper, loading and unloading luggage and passengers and saving what he could for pilot school. Just when he had accumulated a serviceable sum, he received word from his father: Brother dying. Antibiotics needed. Family in debt. Send money home.

Under the circumstances, what could he do? The oldest of four boys, he had been schooled from birth in the practice of hyodo, or filial piety, raised in a country that made such devotion the center of its national identity. He sent money home. Then, duty fulfilled, he went to the sea. It was a dark evening but the moon was bright. As he stood on the shore, he had on his person all his earthly possessions. Sadly, stoically, he removed his shoes. He entered the dark water. He had no reason to live . . .

 
We hear the stories of our ancestors without suspense, with us, ourselves, as the happy endings. At the dinner table, my grandfather’s own six children would have been more than impatient as they waited for their father to tell that tale, drink his drink, shed some tears, and then leisurely raise his chopsticks, at which point they could also partake of the meal. They could see no connection between the desperate young man at water’s edge and their solid merchant father, who ran a fairly lucrative trade in rubber shoes. The father they knew was kind but indelicate, blatantly favoring some of his six children over the others, scattering cigarette ash over the bedding that his wife had spent the better part of the morning laundering. There was nothing in this man of hope or doubt or longing. He was the archetype. He was father. He was fate. Perhaps this is why neither my mother nor grandmother can explain why my grandfather did not drown himself in the ocean that dark night, why he turned back to face another day, another life, another incarnation as a businessman, a family man, and eventually, an American citizen. They don’t know because they never asked, never thought to ask, although in their recollections, the bright moon always shines as though by way of explanation.

And so we continue the story with holes intact.

My grandfather returns from Japan to Korea a moderate success, having worked his way up from driver’s assistant to driver. He marries my grandmother, a pretty young girl eight years his junior from a neighboring village. She is “ox” to his “winter snake,” industrious and devoted, running, from dawn, to keep up with each day’s disorder: the heavy silk bedding that must be beaten, the fires that must be stoked, the boiling rice that must be attended, whereas he is just as likely to take meditative drags of his cigarette while waxing philosophical on the life cycles represented in a grain of rice.

Not long after he is wed, my grandfather plays the immigrant again, seeking opportunity in Manchuria. There, the young couple begins to build a life together. They find aspects of this easier than anticipated. My grandfather’s experience in Japan has suddenly become an asset, enabling him to pass an exam that gains him a position with the Japanese police. At a time when that small nation has much of the Asian continent either in its sights or in its grip, it is useful to have a member of the family wearing a Japanese uniform. They prosper.

Then, August 1945: Japan surrenders. The news spreads rapidly through the Asian continent and beyond, catching from town to town and province to province, to all the reaches where the diaspora has taken those fleeing Japanese oppression. Celebrations spontaneously erupt; flags are unfurled; Liberators fly in V-formation over surrender ceremonies.

But on the rural roads of northern China, a young man races home. Get your things, he tells his wife. As he buries his Japanese policeman’s uniform and gun, she sews paper money into the collars of the Korean hamboks that they will now wear and dry-roasts rice so it will keep during the long journey home.

At the time of the crossing, the Tumen River is so low that women and children sit in boats while men push them across. My grandmother holds her first living child, my aunt Man Kang—named for the river. Months they travel by boat, on foot, by train, trying to reach my grandfather’s hometown. The trains are so full that some men ride outside, lying flat on the rooftops. Sometimes the trains speed into low-ceilinged tunnels and you find that some of the men have not been lying quite flat enough. There are bodies everywhere. You step over them as you slowly make your way south.

 
Hearing these stories at the orphanage that summer was an uncanny experience. For lack of a better word, I’d say there was almost something nostalgic about it, although it was a nostalgia for something I hadn’t known to miss. In that sense, the orphans of the Da-il home were twice orphans, without home, without narrative past. In fact, whatever lingered of the children’s memories was regularly housecleaned from the premises, swept out in the morning, along with any traces of God, religion, or institutionalized hope. (Once, a Korean youth group toured the house, bringing gifts of a few used books—novels and a biography of Albert Schweitzer, a handful of pens, a pencil case, a box of women’s panties, two T-shirts, and a load of brand-new, burgundy vinyl Chinese Bibles. Before the party official’s scheduled arrival, the Bibles were swiftly, silently carried out in stacks.)

We only learned the children’s sad stories late at night. The volunteers would form a circle in the common room and listen to the orphanage “mom” tell of how Rim’s father had killed Rim’s mother with an ax. How Rim had witnessed the murder. We would sit close and keep our voices low, conspiring—for the sake of those sleeping heads—to hold back the speeding night and the conscious morning.

Thinking of these little ones, I wondered whether what we learned of the children’s pre-orphanage past was best forgotten. Perhaps it was better to start each new day in the bright present tense, in this bright place, where flowers bloomed seasonally in the gardens and off-season in painted murals on the walls; where the past was past but the future was a time when anything was possible—even becoming the president of America.

Such thoughts only contributed to my sense of dislocation and ambivalence. I couldn’t wait to return to America, where I could be free as only an immigrant can be, as my young grandfather had been, free from the titanic drag and undertow of the historical past. I would make my solitary way, I thought. I would start this new MFA program. I would commit to five hundred words a day. I would become a published American author. My grandfather’s mistake, I thought, had not been in choosing to leave Korea but in choosing to return, to let the claims of family draw him away, forever, from his pilot’s dream. I would be more “American” in my choice.

 
When my mother and I returned to Korea, history was being made. Over half a century earlier, on the eve of Japan’s surrender, two junior American officials under a thirty-minute deadline had cut the Korean peninsula roughly in half. In the confusion and chaos that followed, ten million Koreans were separated from their families. Now, forty-seven years after the ceasefire that ended the Korean War, the two Koreas had negotiated a rare and temporary reunion of family members separated during the war.

The numbers themselves told a poignant tale. Seventy-five thousand applicants from South Korea alone had applied for the hundred available spots, which were to be determined by lotto. Of these seventy-five thousand, nearly a quarter were over eighty years old. The age of this fragile population was both a reason for urgency and caution. As if to make this very point, two days before the reunion, one lotto winner, age ninety-three, would suffer a heart attack and die.

Everyone in this small nation knew someone who was affected. Everyone was affected. Even I was caught up, sitting beside my grandfather—who was wheeled into the living room every morning and parked in front of the single TV—watching the news, the interviews, and the talk shows that had superseded all regular programming. We fixated on the moment of reunion, when the buses would pull in, the doors would open, and they would emerge, these senescent guardians of a fast-sinking memory, clutching old photos and letters, garbed in traditional clothes.

Something of that scene continually put me in mind of China, that first glimpse of the Tumen River at twilight. There it was, across the water: North Korea—a distinction that was geographical, political, historical, but in the hearts of many Koreans, nonetheless incomprehensible. There it was, the inscrutable shore, which had taken in so many loved ones when the borders closed, when fates were sealed and parallel lives commenced, never to converge. There, right there, was the land from which these one hundred North Koreans would emerge—pale and dazzled, or so we imagined—for this August reunion, only to vanish in the ghost of an hour.

Then what? I couldn’t help but wonder. After that momentary satisfaction, when the notice of the world turned to the next urgent thing and the next, was anything recovered in having faced the husband who had remarried or the child who now had grandchildren? Gazing forty-seven years later on that grown child whose infant face had floated in the formaldehyde of your mind, what would you see but the face of fate, the cruelty of lost time? I thought also of the Da-il children, who would never reunite, however briefly, with the parents they had lost. Here were ones who would never gainsay from the past. Or perhaps this was their blessing: that their dream of family would never meet with correction, would remain personal, accessible, and intact.

Reunions, it seemed to me, could only call attention to those things that couldn’t be reunited, those borders that could no longer be crossed, those bridges that had already been burned. I wondered, then, whether it wasn’t all ganulda—all love, hope, and memory, even outrage and regret, all the obligations of the conscious mind.

 
After I left Asia in the fall of 2000, I began my second MFA program. There I wrote the first paragraphs of this essay for a nonfiction class I had little interest in taking and left it unfinished. In the ensuing years, the world continued to turn and history continued to be made: a South Korean naval ship sank near the maritime border with North Korea; North Korea became the world’s eighth atomic power; the great leader, Kim Jong-il, passed away. As for me, I met someone, settled down. I did not become a writer. In fact, I never wrote. There was a time when I would not have recognized the person who could so cavalierly write these last lines.

Still, every now and then, I would open my computer. Scrolling through the dated files, I would invariably return to this essay: that early image of the children’s un-housed shoes, those tales about a grandfather who had long since died. For all my pessimism upon leaving Asia, for all my desire to escape the past and to make my own way, I still found this story compelling. It was as though, traveling east and north where my grandparents had long ago fled south and west, a satisfactory circle had been described through time and space; as though, of the many big questions we ask of the universe, this small answer had been provided to me.

And then I became a mother. You never quite hear the word “orphan” in the same way once you’ve become a mother. Delighting in my own growing Emma, I often thought about those mothers and fathers in Korea who had, for half a century, cherished the memory of their lost child. I knew now that however much the real child, the grown-old child, the child who would not reach for you in spontaneous affection or even spot you in a crowd, however much the obstinate strange fact of this child jarred with the image you had treasured in your heart, yet still, compulsively, obsessively, you had to fight all odds to reunite, however briefly, with this child. You had to love this child, even at the death of the child of your making.

And then my thoughts would turn to the children in the Da-il orphanage.

 
An insignificant stream runs behind the Da-il home; a crate-net contraption catches silvery quick fish, and there’s a lean-to on the closer bank. To get there, you leave the house by way of the back, past two mangy dogs that guard the litter of the yard, and wade through an insect-and-sun shimmering field of waist-high grasses. The setting is either charming or grim, depending on the light and perhaps on what you, the viewer, have invested in the scene.

The night before we were to leave, the volunteers were thrown a second farewell party by the stream, long after the children were put to bed. We went feelingly through the dark grasses, the lights on our “miner’s hats” projecting tall hellos into the deep night. The lean-to was lit and we could see hunched figures inside casting long shadows as they went about the business of cooking something—what—it gave off a brown, over-rich, earthy and intimate smell:

Boshingtang, I was informed. Dog.

The others tucked in with gusto. Rice wine—after a sidelong glance at the shrugging pastor—was added to the mix. Faces reddened, voices rose, and the little lean-to was filled with heat, breath, sweat, and strident laughter. Sitting a little apart, I imagined the smell spreading like something contagious. That night, I dreamed of bubbling pots of human flesh, and that smell clung like a second skin, smelling of death and denial.

The bright morning, though, found the two mangy backyard dogs still alive. We took to the dusty road the farmer and the ox had first taken. And while Rim wouldn’t look up, furiously intent on making a model rocket fly, the rest of the orphans came up to the very gate, smiling and waving and crying a little.

 
I always meant to write Na—but didn’t. My written Korean was a phonetic, elementary thing, and her written English consisted of a handful of verbs and the names of a few barnyard animals. I thought she wouldn’t understand, that my idiom wouldn’t translate, that there was no idiom for failed good intentions. To a twenty-two year old, these had seemed to be very good reasons.

Now, over ten years since I’ve seen her last, I still think of what I ought to have done. I ought to have sent her letters she couldn’t read and American treats she’d have to divide by eighteen. I ought to have given her the watch she’d admired, then and there; I ought to have taken it right off my wrist. I ought to have made an effort.

Perhaps it is that I now have a different experience of time. I no longer feel that I want to be free from my personal past, to make like an immigrant for the uncolonized future, where—I had naively thought—my real life was in store. Perhaps this has made me a little more tolerant of the blessings and burdens of the past, a little more receptive to the child’s sense of the present moment. To cross those borders that chance to open, to take the river where it leads, to make the wasted effort, to consent to regrets, to create, however briefly, what meaning there is to create, moment by moment, while it can be created.

Words, you see, are not the only things that are lost in translation. In the end, aren’t we all orphans of time?