9/26/99 · Sunday · Hotdish

Mom and Dad drove down for supper. My apartment has one table and three chairs, so Dad sat on the step stool and said it was fine, which is what he says about everything, including the time he broke his wrist.

Mom brought tater tot hotdish in the blue Pyrex with the lid that doesn't fit, wrapped in two towels, the way it has come to every funeral, graduation and new baby in our county since 1965. I made bulgogi and rice and put out the kimchi, the second batch, the one Halmoni said was "almost okay."

So there it was on one table. Cream of mushroom soup and fermented cabbage. My whole life in two dishes.

Mom tried the kimchi. She chewed for a long time with her eyes watering and said, "Well, that's got some zip," which from my mother is a four-star review. Then she had more. Dad had three helpings of hotdish and one careful bite of kimchi and then said "uff da" very quietly into his napkin.

After the dishes Mom took an envelope out of her purse and put it by my plate. It was a check. On the memo line, in her church-bulletin handwriting, she'd written Korea — spring.

I said Mom, you don't have to. She said, "I know I don't have to." Then she said she wasn't going to ask to come along, but if I wanted her to, she'd get a passport, and she'd never had a passport. I said I think I need to do the first time by myself. She nodded like she'd already known, and fixed the towel on the Pyrex, and we didn't say anything for a while.

April, I think. After the restaurant's spring menu goes in.

9/24/99 · Friday · Chuseok

I stopped at the market before work and Halmoni was there in a pale pink jacket instead of her cardigan. She said today is Chuseok. The harvest festival. The big one, she said, like Thanksgiving, when everyone in Korea goes back to their hometown and the roads are full and you visit the graves of your grandparents and cook for three days.

She'd brought a plastic container of songpyeon, little half-moon rice cakes, steamed on pine needles, some filled with sesame and honey. She gave me four. She said, "You eat. You don't have mother here, I am here today." And then went back to scolding the stock boy about the radishes.

I ate one in my car in the parking lot. The pine smell. I don't have any memory of it. I don't know why I cried.

The moon is full tomorrow night. Somewhere in Korea, maybe, a woman who would be 47 now is making these for somebody else's table. Or not. I don't know anything about her. I know she was 19. I know she gave me a name.

9/16/99 · Thursday · The Letter

A letter from the agency today. I read it standing at the mailboxes in my building with my keys still in the lock.

They've sent my request to the agency in Seoul, and the Seoul agency will try to find and contact my birth mother. Try. The letter uses the word "try" three times. It says a search can take many months. It says records from that time are sometimes incomplete. It says some birth mothers never married, or married men who don't know, and have kept it a secret for decades, and may not be able to answer. It says I should be prepared for any outcome, including no answer at all.

I read it four times. Then I went upstairs and called Mom, and she said, "Oh, honey," and I could hear her sit down on the kitchen chair, the one that squeaks. She asked me to read it to her. I did. She said, "Well, then we'll wait."

We. She said we.

9/12/99 · Sunday · Sour

Double. Brunch and dinner. Too tired to write. The first batch of kimchi has gone sour, the good kind of sour, and I ate it cold out of the jar at midnight standing in front of the fridge. More soon.

9/6/99 · Monday · Hand Taste

Labor Day, and the restaurant is closed Mondays anyway, so I went to Halmoni's for my first kimchi lesson. She lives with her son's family in a duplex in St. Paul. Her kitchen is about the size of my walk-in cooler, and she had six heads of napa cabbage lined up on the counter like she was expecting a whole family, not one clumsy adoptee.

Here is what I learned, for the three people who have written to ask. You split the cabbage lengthwise and salt it, between every leaf, with coarse salt, and let it sit and wilt for hours, turning it. You rinse it three times and let it drain. Meanwhile the paste: red pepper flakes, lots of garlic, ginger, fish sauce, tiny salted shrimp, a little sugar, a thin rice porridge to make it all stick, and matchsticks of radish and green onion. Then you put on rubber gloves, because otherwise your hands will burn until Wednesday, and you rub the paste into every single leaf. Every leaf. Then you fold it and pack it tight in a jar and press out the air.

I've worked the line for seven years. I've cooked for four hundred people on a Saturday. She corrected me eleven times. My leaves were too wet. My paste was too shy. I pressed too hard, then not hard enough.

Then she tasted the paste off my glove and nodded. She said there's a word, son-mat. It means hand taste. The flavor that comes from the person who makes it, that you can't write down. She said mine was "still American." She said this is okay. Hands learn.

I drove home with a jar on the passenger seat, belted in.

8/29/99 · Sunday · Sunday Dinner

I told them. At the table after church, roast beef, Jell-O salad with the pears in it. I said I'd gotten my file and I'd asked the agency to help me search for my birth mother, and I was thinking of going to Seoul.

Dad said, "Well, good for you, Annie," right away, and I love him for it.

Mom didn't say anything. She got up and went into the kitchen and ran the water, and stood there with her back to us. Dad said, "Your mother just needs a minute." She needed about twenty. When she came back she asked if anybody wanted coffee, and I said yes even though it was ninety degrees.

She called me at eleven that night, after I was home. She said, "I have to ask you one thing, and then I won't ask it again. Were we not enough?"

I said you were always enough. This isn't about enough. This is about a blank space.

She was quiet. Then she said something I'm going to be thinking about for a long time. She said, "I think about her every year on your birthday. I've thought about her for twenty-eight years. I just never said."

8/26/99 · Thursday · The File

It came. A manila envelope, thinner than a restaurant menu.

Eleven pages. Most of them are forms: my shots, my weight at each checkup, the flight. The intake page says I was brought to the agency by my mother when I was three weeks old. It says she was 19, unmarried, and worked in a factory. It says she was "healthy and of good character." It says she named me Soo-jin.

Soo-jin. I said it out loud in my kitchen and it sounded like someone else's name, and then it didn't.

There's one photograph, a copy of a copy, a baby in a white knit hat, frowning at whoever was holding the camera. I have that frown. I make it at the ticket printer on Friday nights.

8/21/99 · Saturday · Wrong Pepper

Chef wants a kimchi fried rice on the late menu, so I went to the Asian grocery on University Avenue for cabbage and pepper flakes. An old Korean woman, maybe seventy-five, very small, in a brown cardigan in August, took the bag of pepper out of my hand and put it back on the shelf. She said something in Korean. I said I'm sorry, I don't speak Korean. She looked at my face for a long time. Then she said, in English, "Adopted?" I said yes. She said, "Aigo," which I've since learned is the sound Korean grandmothers make about everything from a dropped plate to the whole history of the twentieth century.

She handed me a different bag, coarser, darker red. She said the first one was "for tourists."

I asked what I should call her. She said, "Halmoni." Grandmother. Everybody does, she said.

8/2/99 · Monday · Mailing It

Today I mailed the letter to the agency asking for my adoption file. Notarized, two pages, a copy of my driver's license. I stood at the mailbox outside the post office for a long time with the envelope half in the slot, and a man behind me with a stack of bills said, "It's not going to mail itself," and I laughed and let go.

I'm starting this journal because I don't know who else to tell. My friends from culinary school are wonderful and mostly think this is about "finding my roots," like it's a craft project. My parents don't know yet. I'll tell them when there's something to tell.

For twenty-eight years I've been fine. I am fine. I'd just like to know whose face this is.

Mom found this page on her own, because she's smarter with the computer than she lets on. She reads it every Sunday after church. Hi, Mom. I left the part about the Jell-O in.

If you're an adoptee too, especially if you're searching, write to me. Two of you already have, one from Wisconsin and one from Oregon, and I read your letters on my break with my apron still on. If you'd like a note when I write something new, send me an e-mail that says "tell me" and I'll add you. Nothing else will come from me. Promise.

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