A Placid Shore
By Ali McNally
Liza’s daydreaming started when she was around five years old, shortly after her babysitter spilled the beans about her adoption. She was playing with a baby doll in the kitchen, holding it like a real baby and feeding it bites of imaginary soup from a plastic Fisher Price bowl.
“Was this how big I was when I was in my mommy’s belly?” Liza asked her babysitter, Edna, who was heating a pot of water on the stove.
“You didn’t come from your mommy’s belly,” Edna said, crunching up a bag of ramen noodles with her hands.
“But all babies come from their mommy’s bellies,” Liza said, displaying her authority on the matter by pushing her chin up as high as it would go.
Edna pointed at Liza’s upturned chin. “Yes, but you came from some other mommy’s belly,” she said. “Then, she sent you to live with your mommy now.”
“What other mommy?” Liza asked, trying to ignore the world crumbling around the spot where she stood in the kitchen. Liza had never heard of this other mommy, not from her parents or anyone.
“Eat your Oodles of Noodles before they get cold,” Edna said, as she lifted Liza up to a booster seat and placed a Corelle bowl filled with goldenrod-colored broth and short curls of noodles in front of her.
Liza peppered her parents with questions that evening. Instead of answers, Liza was met with reticence.
Liza’s parents were told by the adoption agency’s social workers to treat their daughter as if she was born to them, but they didn’t offer guidance around conversations about her actual birthplace in South Korea.
“They didn’t tell us anything about who she was,” Liza’s mom said, shaking her head while her large blue eyes peered over her Danielle Steele novel. Liza’s father said nothing, instead fixing his eyes onto the TV.
In lieu of answers, Liza made up stories in her head about Other Mommy. Once, she imagined Other Mommy was actually the lady who owned the Chinese takeout booth at the mall food court. She always gave Liza an extra fortune cookie on her tray of chicken and shrimp stir-fry along with a quick wink, sending Liza into a spiral of more questions she couldn’t ask.
She found some answers when she was in middle school. They were in a box on the top shelf of the spare bedroom closet, which she could only reach while standing on a chair. The box contained an old pair of tiny booties, a passport with strange characters on the front, and a packet of yellowing papers. The papers contained the same strange characters as the passport, but with some English words, too.
She took in what she could read:
Name: Park, Eun-Ah
Sex: F
Date of Birth: 15/09/1986
Birth Mother Name: Hwang, Jeong-sook
She ran her fingers over the characters—circles, squares, and lines that she couldn’t decipher. They looked like the alien letters from a Nickelodeon cartoon. Was that Other Mommy’s name? she thought. How do you say that? Did I have another name?
Suddenly, Liza felt the same world-crumbling feeling from years ago. For a second, she thought she was watching some other girl with a long black ponytail nearly fall from a chair next to the closet of the spare bedroom. She righted herself, felt the soles of her feet reach the carpet.
Liza never told her parents about the papers she found. Instead, she tried finding answers on her own, late at night after everyone went to sleep. She’d stare at a spot in her bedroom wallpaper, where the seam came together unevenly. She imagined picking at the seam to reveal a secret entrance that led her to Hwang, Jeong-sook.
Hwang, Jeong-sook took on many forms in Liza’s teenage brain. There was Hwang, Jeong-sook, a famous South Korean politician who sent Liza to live with Americans in order to avoid raising her in the spotlight. Then there was Hwang, Jeong-sook the assassin, who reluctantly sent her baby away so she could continue her life’s mission of taking out criminals. There was also Hwang, Jeong-sook, president’s daughter; as well as Hwang, Jeong-sook, nuclear physicist.
Each night, Liza would lie in bed, stare at that wallpaper seam, and imagine diving into a world where she always found answers. She tried hard to imagine what Hwang, Jeong-sook looked like, but could only come up with a blank, brown oval of a face behind a floating black bob. Their conversations never had a clear beginning or end, just an imagined dialogue of whatever questions were in her mind at the time.
“Why can’t we live together?” Liza would ask.
“Because I work with dangerous chemicals everyday, and I don’t want you to get cancer.”
“Because I was afraid someone would kidnap you.”
“Because I was afraid you’d be ashamed I was an assassin.”
“When are you coming back?”
“I don’t know,” they always said.
The dreams persisted into adulthood. When she was in college, she met other Korean adoptees who found their birth families by writing to their adoption agencies. After lots of nervous pacing around her dorm room, Liza dashed off an e-mail to Eastern Social Welfare Society, in Seoul, South Korea. A few weeks later, a social worker replied and sent English translations of the yellowing papers Liza had found as a preteen. Liza learned that Hwang, Jeong-sook was neither a politician, nor an assassin, nor a physicist. The real Hwang, Jeong-sook was a seamstress, born in Busan, South Korea, in 1942. She met a man from the wild coastal area of Jeollanam-do. They dated for a short time and then broke up. After that, she found out she was pregnant with Liza.
“Is there anything in my file that says why she put me up for adoption?”
“No,” read the sterile reply.
“Did she leave a note or a way for me to get in touch?”
“Unfortunately, no.”
“What about my birth father?” she asked.
“No,” they said. “But I’m sure they pray for your good life.”
Over time, Liza’s nightly questions to Hwang, Jeong-sook eroded. Instead, she funneled her curiosity into a nursing degree, and then a career as a nurse scientist. She bought a modest-sized home, fell in love, and traveled. Her daydreams and night inquiries of Other Mommy became a distant memory when she gave birth to her first and only birth relative she had ever met.
After her son arrived, Liza no longer questioned her existence, but rather relished in the simplicity of it. On her days off, she’d awaken next to her toddler and nuzzle the soft pocket between his chin and chest. They’d lie there, snuggling to the soft soundtrack of city sounds: the chirping of sparrows, the chug of the neighbor’s car starting, the whir of garbage trucks in the alley. She’d throw on a hoodie, run a comb through her black hair flecked with translucent white strands, then make a simple breakfast and start the day.
On one particular morning, after Liza finished cleaning up breakfast and let her son out to their back yard to play, her phone buzzed. It was a text from her partner:
Look at this, babe. Isn’t this the name of your adoption agency?
Liza opened the link and read the headline: South Korean adoptees and families rocked by fraud allegations*. She stood in her kitchen and scrolled the paragraphs over and over:
after a series of stories and a documentary made with Frontline exposed how Korea created a baby pipeline, designed to ship children abroad as quickly as possible
systemwide practices that routinely changed babies’ origin stories
revelations of abuses so systemic that even the Korean government likened it to “trafficking.”
Liza set down her phone. She depressed her French press, poured the hot coffee into a mug and stepped out to her back yard, where her son was soaring back and forth on a swing. She inhaled the earthy steam that curled around her chin.
Liza found herself focusing on a glittery fleck in the concrete sidewalk that led to her driveway. She pictured her fingers poking at the fleck, working the threads around it loose, and easing them apart until she made a space large enough to slip inside, feet-first. She pictured that space a placid shore where she could ease in her body, face, the crown of her head.
*Galofaro, C., Tong-hyung, K. (2025, January 6). South Korean adoptees and families rocked by fraud allegations. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/south-korean-adoptions-investigation-united-states-europe-fa035f2b7b57358f71e0b7cca4c20f85
