Korean Quarterly

Giving Voice to the Korean American Community

Poetry

to my soul

by

Poetry by Woo Ae Yi (Winter 2021 issue)

Feelings have no rhyme.
Reason is always one thing.
Fueled by human need,
Ingrained in blood and memory,
You know of what I speak.
More than six or seven senses,
Beyond intergalactic battles
of the depths of reason versus…what else? Stretches past stretch marks,
Forgives past unforgivable,
Denies flaws in common
or not so common inadequacies,
Becomes…no, always is our substance,
our necessary needs.
It beckons to mind
complex abstractions of birth, death, afterlife.
What is this power?
Life…You…Love.

내 영혼에게   to my soul

감정에는 기복이 없어요

생각은 오직 하나

인간의 기본적 욕망이

우리 둘 혈액과 기억 속에 들어 있어요.

당신은 내가 말하는 것이 무엇인지 알지요

오감이던 육감이던

생각의 깊이 넘어

은하계 간 전쟁을 넘어,

뭐 다른 것이 있나요

조금 더 뻥어서

용서할수 없는 것들을 용서하면서

공통적인 결함을  거부하면서

아니 공통적인 것이 아니야

부적합한 것들이야

아니여 그것들이 우리둘의 실체였어

우리 둘의 필요한 욕망이었어

출생과 죽음, 내세의 삶이 추상적으로 복잡하게 얽여

마음에 와 닿았지만.

무엇이 우디 둘의 힘이었나?

삶, 당신, 사랑

When the white girl claims she is the epitome of an activist

by

Poetry by Calista Ogburn (Fall 2020 issue)

my white roommate
made sure to use hashtags when she tweeted

#blacklivesmatter
#timesup
#womensmarch
#abolishICE

kept them in the back pocket of her ripped mom jeans
peeping out with a slight wink

–

her white guy friend visits from an ivy league
sits on the flat beanbag
in our confined dorm
            so
            why is your english to good?  where is your asian
            accent?  did you escape from north korea?
            i don’t get it, where are you really from?

i look at her.
            she says

                        nothing

My Father’s Family

by

In honor of Passover | Poetry by Sun Mee Chomet (Spring 2020 issue)

“Walking through the concentration camps,

I thought of your father’s family,” he said. 

My

father’s

family.

These words spoken.

These words spoken after months

of conversations

with my lover,

explaining how connected I felt to Judaism.

“I always think it odd when adoptees claim their

American family’s religion as their own,”

he said.

These comments struck me odd.

The unspoken-

between-the-lines

suggested

somehow

that

my father’s family

was not my own.

Baruch Ato Ado-noi Elo-heinu Melech Ho-olom,

boray paree agohen…

See,

I digested matzo ball soup before kimchee jigae. 

I lit candles for Passover before incense for ancestors. 

Dipped parsley in salt before kimbap in sauce.

I watched my father put on his yarmulke

before I put on my first hanbok.

My father’s family.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

On this night, for as long as I can remember,

After Every Passover Seder, I Listened.

I listened ~

hours of talk about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,

about right and wrong,

politicking and compassion,

the value of land before life.

It’s brick houses in Chicago, menorahs,

It’s social justice, it is remembering,

It’s my tendency toward humor, sarcasm

It’s my draw towards intellect, music

It’s the joy I feel knowing that the rabbi at my brother’s school

does stand-up comedy on the side.

It’s the tenderness of watching my brother carry the Torah up the aisle.

It’s knowing my father can’t fix a thing in the house.

It’s watching my brother’s plane take off for Vienna,

a gift-trip given by U.S. Jews to grandchildren

of Holocaust survivors as an act of remembering,

wishing that I could go with him.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

My grandfather said,

“I know what it is to be other. 

I know what it is to be discriminated against. 

The sadness I feel when I think of Austria. 

It’s the same that you feel for Korea. 

It is the land of my home

and the land my estrangement

in the same breath.”

We sat, as my Opa held my hand. 

I listened

as he compared the branches of the trees

to the limbs of ballet dancers,

as any great Viennese painter would do.

I listened

as he spoke to me tenderly~

“My dear Sun Mee,”

he said.

“In 1945, Austria was dubbed Europe’s Korea. 

Vienna is my Seoul.”

On this night,

my grandmother shares her escape from the concentration camp,

an expensively smuggled fake i.d.,

the blessing-curse of being a Jew born

with blonde-blue features,

and years living in hiding in Holland,

the only one of her family to escape dying. 

On this night, I am drenched

in my grandfather’s stories of

the bombing of his beloved Austria. 

A short while later, bombs were dropped

on Korea as well~

a wealth of cold war that

paved

our parallel roads

to the United States.

On this night,

I remember my 4 year old brother

insisting that he play a violin

solo

at my grandfather’s funeral

because he knew how much

Opa

loved music.

Inside my walls,

the heavy heart of Judaism

entwines

with the han of Korea~

echoing complexities of culture and war and survival.

Tonight, I see

the impact of history

in the eyes of my relatives

and no walls exist between us. 

Our history is the same.

“Walking through

the concentration camps,

I thought of

your father’s family,”

my lover said.

I would think

silently

as I walked away

from him,

“Walking through the concentration camps,

I would know that my father’s family

was my own.”

By Sun Mee Chomet

Korean Quarterly is dedicated to producing quality non-profit independent journalism rooted in the Korean American community. Please support us by subscribing, donating, or making a purchase through our store.  

Send your poetry, essays, photos, artwork, or other creative material to publisher@koreanquarterly.org

Layers of white

by

The White Book By Han Kang

(Hogarth Press London, 2018 ISBN #978-1-8462-7695-8)

Review by Yearn Hong Choi (Spring 2020 issue)

The White Book by Han Kang

Han Kang became widely known when her beautiful and startling novel, entitled The Vegetarian, was published in 1994.  She received the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for that work, along with her translator Deborah Smith.

This collection of Han Kang’s poetic short essays, in fragmented notes on her life, with the unifying theme of the color white.  A significant figure in this series of poems and poetic essays is the narrator’s baby sister, who died two hours after her premature birth.  She was covered up by a white baby cloth that her mother had hurriedly made. The image of this baby and her brief life, covered by white cloth, is an enduring imagery throughout the narrative.  The young mother cries out to God, “For God’s sake don’t die.”  The narrator reflects on the mother’s youth, only 22, and herself as a mother, and the births of her own children.

Typing a word, a sentence, and then a paragraph on blank white paper is the beginning of verse or prose.  The writer fills the empty paper with words in black ink. Korean people were known for wearing plain white clothes for 5,000 years.  The White Book contains many metaphors and symbology related to the Korean people.

Translator Deborah Smith has demonstrated her craft in converting Korean into English.  The author and the translator are a great team judging from the fruit of their works.

The author’s statement specifically declares the work as one of fiction, not memoir.  It is certainly a collection of her poetic notes on the topic of white things —- swaddling bands, a newborn’s gown, salt, snow, ice, the moon, rice, waves, yulan (magnolias), white bird, the idea of “laughing whitely,” blank paper, a white dog, white hair, and a white shroud.

In this book, the reader can observe her way of approaching fiction with verse.  The Vegetarian was successful due to the author’s poetic approach, using the vocabulary and style of fiction.  It is a collection of three short stories.  Han Kang attempted The White Book as fiction, but many may not agree with her.  The fluidity in which this author works between fiction and memoir, poetry and fiction writing, is part of its mystery and appeal.

In the end of her essay, Boundary, Kang writes:

Now and then her mother would be struck by a sense of foreboding and give a corner of the quilt a tug, but the baby’s eyes opened only briefly, grew dim and then slid shut.  At some point, even that scant response was no longer forthcoming.  And yet, before dawn, when the first milk finally came from her mother’s breasts and she pressed her nipple between the tiny lips, she found that, despite everything, the baby was still breathing.  Though she had, by now, slipped from consciousness, the nipple in her mouth encouraged a soft swallowing, gradually growing stronger.  Still with her eyes closed the whole time. Not knowing what boundary, she was now passing over.

The author relates the baby’s death to the destruction of the city of Warsaw in Poland in a 1944 air raid.  She does not mention the name of the city, however, it is likely Warsaw, since the author lived in Warsaw as a writer in residence for awhile.  Of course, the city she describes could be Berlin or many other cities that were bombed in World War II. 

White Pebble is a short poetic essay which is representative of this book:

A long time ago, she found a white pebble on a beach.  She brushed off the sand and placed it in her pocket, then put it away in a drawer at home.  A pebble worn and round by the waves’ long caress.  To her, its whiteness seemed almost transparent, but when she tried to peer inside it she found she’d been mistaken.  In fact, it was a perfectly ordinary white pebble.  Now and then, she got it out and set it on her palm.  If silence could be condensed into the smallest, most solid object, this is how it would feel, she thought.

The premature baby was the narrator’s onni, or elder sister in Korean, the daughter who came before her.  The author uses another Korean word, nuna, the form of address of a younger brother to a sister.  It is interesting that the author uses two beautiful Korean words in place of English in this translation.  It is also logical, since there is no substitute in the English language. Alternatively, translator Deborah Smith may have chosen to retain the original Korean to maintain the correct meaning and context. 

Han Kang picks up another idiom in the Korean language — laughing whitely.  She says such an expression exists only in Korean language; an interesting discovery.  To “laugh whitely” means to laugh but not mean it.  The “white laugh” in Korean offers layers of meaning beyond insincerity, depending on the context.

As in The Vegetarian, Han Kang’s The White Book again offers a work of fluidity, with layers of meaning and depth, showing her flexibility and imagination as a poetic writer. 

Korean Quarterly is dedicated to producing quality non-profit independent journalism rooted in the Korean American community. Please support us by subscribing, donating, or making a purchase through our store.  

ode to morning coffee

by

Poetry by Yearn Hong Choi (Fall 2019 issue)

Before the sun rises, I go down to kitchen to make coffee.

Grinding the coffee beans for opening my new day is a must.

Then, the fragrance of coffee

Brewing in coffee-maker awakens my brain.

Then, I return to Costa Rica

Where I met a smiling Indio woman pouring fresh morning coffee

Into my cup from her big kettle in a beautiful jungle.

Her morning coffee message is Pura Vida!

Life is pure, beautiful and lovely.

Korean Quarterly is dedicated to producing quality non-profit independent journalism rooted in the Korean American community. Please support us by subscribing, donating, or making a purchase through our store.  

Send your poetry, essays, photos, artwork, or other creative material to publisher@koreanquarterly.org

North Korean poetic memoir

by

FLower Swallows Sing: A North Korean Memoir in Verse ~ By Imu Baek

(Hollym, Carlsbad (CA), 2020, ISBN #978-1-5659-1381-1)

Review by John Feffer (Spring 2021 issue)

In the late 1950s, when he was in prison and expecting to be executed, the South Korean poet Ko Un vowed that if he lived, he would write a poem about every person that he’d ever met. This monumental project, Ten Thousand Lives, grew to 30 volumes. In memorializing people who might otherwise be forgotten by those outside their immediate families, Ko Un also details the sacrifices that so many Koreans made to create the modern democracy of today.

Imu Baek has done something similar for North Korea. Although she titles her collection of verses a “memoir,” it is really a memorial to all those who did not survive the famine that swept through her country during the 1990s. Like Ko Un, she came close to death herself after her parents died and she lived as a homeless orphan. She was lucky enough to escape across the border to China and now lives in South Korea.

But Baek hasn’t forgotten what she left behind. She writes:

I will keep the promise we made that day
I will recall the days of suffering we endured
I will call to mind each of your faces
As I document your names in this book
A record of our lives together

The lives she is recording are those of the “flower swallows.” According to a helpful note from translators Hyongrae Kim and Siobhan Mei, the expression derives from the Russian word for nomadic, kochevoy. In Korean, that became kot (flower) and jebi (swallow). Just as there is no such thing in nature as a “flower swallow,” there was nothing natural about a horde of ragged children trying to survive on discarded and purloined food in a country where even Party members in good standing were starving to death.

The short poems in Flower Swallows Sing are full of horrors. The hungry range across the land like locusts eating everything in their path including grass and tree bark. Those who protest are “beaten, burned, stabbed, and shot.” The corpses that pile up everywhere provide a brief feast for vultures and crows. The truly desperate resort to cannibalism.

In keeping with the central conceit of nomadic children as birds, Paek tries to convey the surrealism of this “arduous march” period by deploying the folk tradition of enlisting animals as narrators. A cat flees before it can be eaten, sheep patiently await their fate, oxen dumbly labor under the plow, and weasels sneak out of their tunnels to steal food. The famine stripped people of their humanity, and even the innocent were reduced to the level of wild animals. The flower swallows, too, don’t have a choice but to forage for food that people ordinarily don’t touch.

they munch on dragonflies
and snack on tired butterflies
leaping grasshoppers and jumping frogs
dead snakes, sickly rats, chirping chicks
all can be eaten

Baek reserves her harshest criticism for the government that presides over this horror show. The leaders are not just cruel monsters. They are worse than the Japanese colonizers, which is possibly the worst comparison anyone can make in North Korea.

it was better under the Japanese,
at least we had food on the table.
now we starve to death
the elderly mutter
these risky words
when they think no one is listening

To drive home the point of government complicity, a number of poems contrast North Korean propaganda of the government with the reality on the ground. The leaders boast that North Korea is the “greatest country in the world” yet the flower swallows go hungry. Prison camp children are, according to the government, “lazy bums” who “have committed so many crimes are such a young age.”

we don’t have cloth
to make you uniforms
it would be a waste anyway –
work as you are
then die

Flower Swallows Sing is a devastating indictment of a state that has failed so many of its citizenry.

For all the power of individual poems, the collection is uneven. There is much repetition of imagery, for instance three poems comparing flower swallows to weasels, several similar-sounding prayers in verse, a number of poems devoted to rejoining parents in heaven, and so on. Perhaps the poet wants to convey the numbing sameness of life on the margins in North Korea, but the result feels rote at times.

Indeed, there can be such a frustrating lack of detail about the people who have died that when the narrator describes her father late in the book – “my own dear father was an angry drunk/when it was all too much/he’d resort to rubbing alcohol/and his rage would hail down upon us” – the words practically jump off the page in their horrifying specificity.

As a memoir, Flower Swallows Sing doesn’t tell us much about the specific plight of Imu Baek, a poet who received awards as a young woman from the North Korean state only to face near death as a flower swallow during the famine years. Unlike Ten Thousand Lives, it doesn’t capture the idiosyncratic personalities of the people she met during those terrible days. But as a memorial to an underclass of miserable children whose very existence belied the government’s cheery propaganda, Imu Baek’s poems are a wrenching collective portrait of those who are no longer here to tell their own stories.

Copyright ©2024 Korean Quarterly. All rights reserved.

Show Buttons
Share on X
Hide Buttons