Love Love by Sung J. Woo Page A

fingernails grimed with grease and dirt, walking straight from the front door to the den without a word to anyone. He drank his scotch in that room, alone, not enough to brand him an obvious alcoholic but enough to methodically destroy his health. In Korea, he’d been a train engineer, driving a thirty-car freight that ran seven daily round trips between Seoul and Incheon, until two people stepped onto the tracks of his train.
    His mother hadn’t wanted to tell Kevin, but eventually she did, when he was old enough. His father had yanked on his horn and flashed his lights, over and over again, but the figures did not move. The impact wouldn’t even be felt by him, no different than a bug splattering on the windshield of a car. Mother and daughter. That’s what he saw as he drove toward them, the mother wrapped in a black shawl, the child in a red dress, couldn’t have been more than three or four years old, barely tall enough to come up to the middle of her mother’s thighs.
    His fellow engineers told him that these things happened, it was a part of the job, but Kevin’s father never recovered. The police told him the woman was insane, her daughter an unfortunate victim. His father had nightmares for months, probably still had them even now.
    Soo returned with a manila envelope in one hand and a Korean-to-English dictionary in the other. She held out the envelope for Kevin.
    â€œ Chaang-nyuh ,” his father muttered.
    Chaang-nyuh ? That sounded like it could be a name. Inside was a letter-size piece of paper. It was glossy stock, and at one point it must’ve been white, but now it was yellowed with age. It was blank on both sides, and as Kevin fingered it, he noticed it was actually two sheets stuck together. At the bottom was a date, 3-14-1973.
    â€œIs that his name? Chaang-nyuh?” Kevin asked as he peeled the sheets away from one another.
    Soo shook her head and flipped the Korean dictionary to look for the word so she could show him its meaning.
    They were actually three sheets connected to display one long pictorial. The first crease was below her naked breasts, and the second crease was above the shock of black pubic hair. It was a centerfold of an Asian woman.
    The black and white pages of the Korean-American dictionary slowly invaded the field of Kevin’s vision. Soo’s fingers pointed to the entry, a noun, with two possibilities: whore and prostitute.
    â€œ Jin-cha um-ma ,” his father said.
    â€œOkay,” Kevin said, though this was not okay. It was not okay that no one told him his father wasn’t his father, and it was furthermore not okay that his birth mother was staring back at him without any clothes on.
    Soo tapped the back of the centerfold, her finger poking the belly button. Kevin turned it around and recognized his mother’s handwriting on a piece of tacked-on white paper. The old brown tape around the note fell away when he touched it.
    Dear Kevin,
    You’re right here, sleeping on my lap, as I write this. It’s the night of your dol , your first birthday. In Korea, rice cakes are devoured, gifts are lavished, and many cups of soju are drunk in your honor. None of those things happened today because we’re in America, so your father and I held our own small celebration instead. Our neighbor lent us his Polaroid, so years from now, you’ll see yourself on this day as I saw you.
    Except a picture cannot tell the entire story. Looking at this centerfold in front of me, all I know is what I see. I don’t know who she is, her name, her situation. This woman is your mother, Kevin. I’m sorry that it’s not me. It is one of the greatest sorrows of my life.
    I’m not able to have children of my own, which I found out about a week before I found out about you. A friend of a friend knew an ER nurse out west, and that’s where she saw you. She knew how to make it happen for us. So I got you and brought you home. We