Somebody's Daughter by Marie Myung-Ok Lee Read Free Book Online Page B

kitchen,
    â€œOnni! Lar-myun, dugae!”
    Maybe five minutes later, she came back and set two bowls filled with—of all things—ramen in front of us.
    She also unloaded tiny platters of lumpy things that collectively gave off a festering oceanic smell, like the beach at low tide.
    I waited to see what Doug Henderson, the copper-haired boy, would do with these meal components. The waitress thumped another bowl in onto our table.
    Kimchi: fermented spiced cabbage. Korea’s national food, as I had learned from our cultural activities visit to the Folk Village. You packed the raw materials—cabbage, hot peppers, garlic, ginger, shrimp paste, salt—in these ceramic pots big enough to cook a missionary in and buried it in the ground, like seeds. But instead of sprouting, it came back pickled and spicy and pungent as old socks.
    Doug speared a clump of the kimchi, smutty with burning-hot peppers, and ate. He huffed on his noodles and pulled half the bowl into his mouth, like the character in
The Five Chinese Brothers
, the brother who could slurp up the entire ocean into his mouth.
    We had yet to say three words to each other. Instead of eating, I watched the dust motes writhing about our heads in the ray of sunlight suddenly let in by one of the waitresses, who had pushed open a sliding rice-paper window.
    Doug picked from all the little side dishes as he ate, orchestrating the tastes together, the way Amanda and I used to play “breakfast smörgÃ¥sbord” as kids: place a forkful of scrambled egg inside mouth, insert half a stick of crispy bacon, add a blob of jam or marmalade or Mrs. Butterworth’s, top with a bite of buttered burnt toast, close mouth and chew until the sweet-salty-greasy contents are all deliciously mashed together. Repeat until Christine tells you that what you’re doing is disgusting.
    I tried the ramen. Oily red broth, delicious and MSG-y, the way ramen is supposed to taste. From the little platters of stuff, I ventured a strand of what looked orzo pasta.
    The taste, pleasant. Sprinkled with black pepper, but no pepper taste. I ate more. Sweet. Chewy. When I pulled a piece out, exactly two bits of pepper came with it. I looked closer, and almost screamed.
    Eyes.
    The pepper was eyes. This wasn’t pasta, but some kind of worm or fish that had bifocal vision. Doug grabbed a bunch of them with his chopsticks, placed them in his mouth, ate a bite of noodles and raised his eyebrows to me as if to say, “good, huh?” He unrolled a few squares of toilet paper and wiped his lips.
    When we finished—he didn’t ask why I left most of my meal untouched—Doug paid and returned with two sticks of Lotte gum that warned on the label, FOR LADY ONLY!
    Outside, we blinked in the bright sunlight. It wasn’t quite spring yet, but one of the restaurant ladies, who Doug said are called
ajuhmas
, aunties, followed us out and set a pot of peonies by the door. The buds were still closed tight as fists. Christine kept peonies in her garden at home, and I knew that they needed ants to eat off the sticky glue before the globes could open. Korean ants must know to do the same thing. This thought cheered me.
    I popped my gum into my mouth, hoping to get rid of the trace of some unpleasant metal-fish taste—from the worms?
    Perfume exploded in my mouth. Without thinking, I spat.
    â€œShit,” said Doug, returning from wiping his mouth. “What the hell kind of gum was that? I feel like I just ate a bar of soap.”
    I looked up from my own wad, glistening wetly in my palm, smelling chemically fragrant like room freshener.
    â€œIck, I assumed the FOR LADY ONLY thing was just the English gibberish they slap on everything,” I said. My 7-Eleven face soap, for instance, had Meg Ryan’s face beaming pixie-ishly from the wrapper over the bizarre brand name, SEXY-MILD.
    Now talking, I continued to babble: “But I guess the