Korean Quarterly

Giving Voice to the Korean American Community

Yearn Hong Choi

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)

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.  

A poet who revered tradition

by

Shedding of the Petals ~ By Ji-hoon Cho

(Cross-Cultural Communications, Columbia (MD), 2019, ISBN #978-0-8930-4293-6)

Review by Yearn Hong Choi (Spring 2021 issue)

News in Brief from New York was the name of a small book party in which the outgoing United Nations Ambassador Tae-yul Cho read his father’s poem from Shedding of the Petals, the first collection of poetry by Ji-hoon Cho in both Korean and English. Ambassador Cho’s famous literary father Jihoon Cho, wrote from the 1940s to 60s, and died in the 1960s. This collection of nearly 80 poems in translation was published by the family more than 50 years after the poet’s death.

I knew both father and son well. I read the senior Cho’s poems during my high school and college days. Then I met the junior Cho in Washington DC in the 1980s when I was working for the government, and he was starting his diplomatic career in the nation’s capital.

I invited the junior Cho to the Korean Poets and Writers Group to speak about his father’s life and poetry.  He related that he lost his father when he was in middle school, so he did not have much to talk about regarding his father’s life and death, but it seemed to me that he has learned a lot between then and now.

Once, while in South Korea, I visited the Cho Jihoon Literary Museum in his hometown, Joosil Village, Youngyang County, which is about 70 km. from the city of Andong in North Kyungsang province. Beginning in the 16th century, the first community of neo-Confucian scholars was located near Andong.  That was where Ji-hoon Cho learned Chinese classics from his grandfather. Traditional Korean studies was a form of resistance to Japanese rule over Korea.

After the liberation of Korea in 1945, the elder Cho was offered a teaching job at Korea University. He turned it down because he did not have a formal doctoral education. However, he was already a famous young poet, one of three Chongrok-pa poets. Chongrok-pa means literally the “Blue Deer Horn Group,” a nature-oriented poets’ group.  Korea University knew that he was qualified to be a Korean studies college professor, and urged him to accept the post.

Eventually, Ji-hoon Cho accepted the college teaching job and became a famous scholar in Korean cultural studies.  His 20 years at Korea University was marked by his advocacy for traditional Korean culture and literature, and he was known for his courageous opinion writings on democracy and freedom during the 1960s.

Many years ago, on April 19, 1960, I participated in a street protest demonstration by Yonsei University students against the rigged and corrupt presidential elections that eventually toppled the Syngman Rhee government. Some demonstrators were gunned down in front of the Central Government Building while I was in a crowd of students nearby.  Hearing gunshots, we threw ourselves on the pavement.  After a while, I opened my eyes and looked up. There I saw Ji-hoon Cho and Doo-jin Park, two of the Chongrok-pa poets. Park was my college professor. I will never forget the moment when our eyes met. They were standing on the roadside, watching us. After a few days, President Syngman Rhee resigned and was exiled to Hawaii.

During his teaching days at Korea University, Prof. Cho would wear traditional Korean clothes while he lectured on Korean culture and arts. Korean clothing was his trademark, and he clearly believed in the beauty of traditional Korean poetry and culture.  The titles of his three most famous poems, Buddhist Dance, Flower Petals on Sleeves, and Old-Fashioned Dress eloquently speak for his mind and heart.  His poems were products of his scholarship in Korean history and literature combined with his appreciation of nature — delights of the changing seasons, flora and fauna, white clouds in the blue sky, mist, moonlight, mountains and rivers. 

Reading his new poems from New York reconfirmed for me that Ji-hoon Cho’s ideas and thoughts dwelt on traditional Korean objects and arts (e.g., an ancient temple, a stone gate, a bamboo flute player, or the music of a kayageum).  The poet’s language was rather antique, and  today’s young people cannot easily comprehend it.

Cho reflected in his poem a certain acceptance and appreciation for what he had, and the contribution he had made to the intellectual heritage of the nation. He even accepted his forthcoming death as an order of nature. In the final poem he wrote, his spirit is vivid, and I can perceive a farewell to life.  The last three lines of the poem, To My Illness, are the following;

To life, it still is boundlessly beautiful,
And even if torture is in store in the netherworld,
I am not really afraid of dying.
You were a friend dear to me,
And one to whom I harbor reverence.

If I could choose only one favorite poem from this volume it would be Flower Petals on Sleeves. This poem was written in 1942 after he first traveled to Kyungju where Mokwol Park, one of three Chongrok-pa poets, lived.  This poem was sent to Mokwol after their first encounter. After that, Mokwol produced his most famous poem, Wayfarer, in response to this poem. I still admire their friendship with poetry.

Almost all Ji-hoon Cho’s poems are in this volume, but one of the most famous, Buddhist Dance, was missing. A translation of that poem would be nearly impossible for anyone. However, the omission of this poem is a critical weakness of this collection. Moonlit Night the title of a poem in this book, that I once translated as Old-Fashioned Dress. “Spring Night” might be a more accurate translation than “Moonlit Night.” 

Professor Sung-il Lee of Yonsei University, the translator of this volume, emphasized that Cho was a dreamer. Of course, poets are dreamers. But in Cho’s poems, I also see his reflections as a  social thinker, especially in the later part of his life, and his poet’s willpower to preserve and pass down the beauty of traditional Korean life.

Dr. Choi, a poet and writer based in Northern Virginia, died January 6 of complications related to his battle with cancer.  He was a longtime friend and contributor to KQ.

Poetry that puzzles

by

Someone Always in the Corner of My Eye ~ By BoSeon Shim

(White Pine Press, New York, 2016, ISBN #978-1-9352-1090-4)

Review by Yearn Hong Choi (Winter 2021 issue)

BoSeon Shim, a social scientist educated at Seoul National University and Columbia University, is not well known yet in Korea, but his new volume of poetry is in English and published in the U.S.

I opened his poetry book with some curiosity, because I have never read his poems and was unfamiliar with his name.  As a fellow social scientist/poet, I have also had a dual vocation, writing poetry while teaching public policy and administration.  I felt that we are in the same boat.

Shim’s poems are not easy to read or to comprehend.  The spirit of his poetry may be puzzling to some readers, and I am not always sure what he is aiming at. However, the fact that Shim is so different from traditional poets makes him interesting.

There is no rhythm in reading his relatively long poems; his sense of form challenges the traditional.  His choice of content also is in contrast to traditional topics, such as the poetic glorification of nature.  In Shim’s work, there is none of that. Instead, he seems to be saying that the age we live in calls poets to break out of their old forms and try something new.

Reading on, I try to find meaning, enjoying some striking words and stanza in his poems.  He accuses his own poetry of being for the depressed and deprived.  Can this poet provide comfort too?  I hope so.  He seems to believe that poetry can be meaningful to people in modern society today.

Shim twists what he observes and looks at the world with a sense of humor, attacking intellectuals who are snobbish and refuse to take responsibility for their actions. However, Shim’s poems are not snobbish at all.  I hope his poems can reach out to depressed and deprived people on one side and intellectuals on the other.  But in order to be comforted, the reader must first understand the message, and this poet’s messages are difficult to fathom.

The majority of Shim’s poems are a couple of pages, but I like the style of the few short poems in this volume: 

Words
There is countless evidence that we have souls.
Today I will reveal one truth.
And tomorrow, another.
Like that, one each day.

Social scientists may see many facets of one truth, in the way that several blind men describe one elephant. This short poem, the prelude of his poetry book, eloquently declares that.

Another short poem is titled None of the World’s Business:

Breaking up with you is none of the world’s business.
I’m waiting for the apocalypse…
We’ll break up after that.
When is the apocalypse?

This short poem sums up the Korean phenomenon of talking about the private affairs of others.

As an old poet, I enjoyed his poem, Good Old Days.  He did not experience the good old days as I did.  I am nostalgic about those good old days when we were all poor and caring for each other, building a new economic powerhouse from the poverty-stricken country that was left after the Korean War.

I am fascinated by his Fascination, a romantic love poem.  The poet writes: “Following fascination,/ time flies like an arrow./ Following fascination,/expressions are shaped by someone in the corner of the eye.” There are other romantic love poems in this book, in which he mixes sexy and jazzy moods with his social scientific description of making love.  In these, the title of this poetry book, Someone Always in the Corner of My Eye takes on new meaning.

Then, I tend to agree with the following quotation from NEWSis:

In this book, Shim gives his attention to love.  He devotes himself to the activity of love creating useless things, instead of labor producing useful things.  Through this, he stresses the importance of changing ourselves by holding each other’s hands and taking a stroll together, instead of the remoteness and loneliness of art.

I cannot fully comprehend the above quotation from the back cover of the poetry book, but I tend to agree: Love is the most beautiful thing in life.  I remember the Beatles’ famous slogan “Make love, not war.”  Poet Shim may be in the same mindset as the Beatles in the 1960s.  Is it love he is talking about?  Is it sex?  Or perhaps it is both.

Poet and poet’s advocate

by

Yearn Hong Choi dies at 79 | By Martha Vickery (Winter 2021 issue)

Yearn Hong Choi making a pilgrimage to remember poet Dong-su Yun

Poet, translator and scholar Yearn Hong Choi, who has contributed poetry and poetry reviews to Korean Quarterly, and was KQ‘s own poet laureate for over 20 years, died January 6 from complications related to his battle with cancer.  He was 79.

In mid- to late 2020, Choi worked very hard in a short amount of time to self-publish two final works before his illness took over. One was a book of his own poems, entitled Snows of Kilimanjaro, a timely last collection featuring recollections of his travels, personal musings, and questions and perspectives on mortality. A favorite author, Ernest Hemingway, inspired the title, as well as the successful 2018 trek by his daughter Joyce Choi to the Kilimanjaro peak, on behalf of her dad’s dream.  

The second work was a collection of stories entitled Five Boyhood Recollections of the Korean War 1950-1953, featuring the experiences of five Korean American men who were boys during the war. In an interview in KQ (Summer 2020 issue, p. 64), he said the collection is significant for his generation, because “when we are gone, there will be no one who was a witness to the Korean War experience.”  

Choi, who was from Yeongdong, North Chungcheong Province, made his literary debut in 1963 while studying at Yonsei University in Seoul. He then moved to the U.S. where he earned master’s and doctorate degrees in political science and public administration at Indiana University.

Choi worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense as Assistant for Environmental Quality from 1981 to 1983. He was a prolific scholar on environmental policy, and also taught at several U.S. universities, including the University of Wisconsin, Old Dominion University and the University of the District of Columbia; he also taught at the University of Seoul before retiring in 2006.

Throughout his life, Choi maintained a second career as a poet, and took an interest in helping and promoting fellow Korean American poets, particularly those interested in publishing English translations of poetry collections. He founded both the Korean Poets and Writers Group and the Korean-American Poets’ Group in Washington, D.C.  In 1994, he became the first poet from Korea to be invited to read at the Library of Congress.

During his lifetime, Choi promoted and translated the works of Dong-Ju Yun, who wrote during the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-1945), and evoked in his work nostalgia for times of peace and independence in Korea. Choi translated and published Yun’s major poems.

A prolific writer himself, Choi won the Yun Dong-ju Literature Award in 2009 and was the recipient of Yun Dong-ju Poetry Award in 2016 for his poetry book, Incan Woman.

The Korea Times reported in a story about his life that Choi was one of the longest-serving columnists at that newspaper, sharing his insights on topics of cultural and social issues.

Choi’s passing is also very significant to KQ, since his depth of expertise in Korean poetry in translation made his contributions, in nearly every issue over the years, unique and irreplaceable.  We will also miss his humor, love of nature, and enthusiasm for literature and for life in general. Rest in power, Dr. Choi.

Loving life, a poet reflects on his passions

by

Snows of Kilimanjaro by Yearn Hong Choi

(independently published, 2020, ISBN #979-8-6784-5960-7)

Review by Woo Ae Yi (Fall 2020 issue)

Yearn Hong Choi introduces Snows of Kilimanjaro as possibly his last poetry book, and I understand that because he has currently been undergoing pancreatic cancer treatment, as he mentions in his poem A Poet, Golf and Pancreas Cancer.  He even mentions death in his poem South Col, implying that he would rather be cryogenically frozen than to undergo tortuous cancer treatment.  If he doesn’t die from cancer, he warns his reader that one could die from an accident, in the poem An Accident Report, and ironically prized his crutches in Memorabilia.

In the middle of summer, I write a book review of Snows of Kilimanjaro, a nice reprieve from the blistering heat, in the hope of getting this review out by the fall or wintertime.  The theme of the first part of this book is obvious; snowy mountains or snow and mountains, so it’s appropriate that I write this review from Denver, Colorado, known for both.  Even Calgary Stampede speaks of love for the Wild West and the poem Aurora Borealis, though about the Northern Lights in Norway, has a name like Aurora, Colorado.

The first poem of the book is Snows of Kilimanjaro, inspired by Ernest Hemingway.  Hemingway also shows up later in Baseball.  A poem about Mount Kilimanjaro is an appropriate way to start the book, as people know that climbing Mount Kilimanjaro is quite the feat and, as a possible last book, it’s appropriate to highlight lifetime accomplishments and show that he has reached the “pinnacle” of his success. 

I appreciate the end of this poem. Instead of saying veni, vidi, vici, Latin for “I came, I saw, I conquered,” he exchanges vici for amavi, a combination of amor (love) and vita (life).  It reminds me of a quote by Brandon Burchard, a motivational speaker and self-help guru, who has made popular the phrase “Did I live?  Did I love?  Did I matter?”  Along the same lines, Choi’s poem Typo reminds me of the quote, “Those who live passionately/Teach us how to love/Those who love passionately/Teach us how to live” by Parahansa Yogananda.

Some have said that Eskimos have at least 50 words for snow and similarly Dr. Choi’s treatment of snow is varied.  Snow represents everything from frozen fish in South Col to life, in Ode to Aomori Under the First Snow to a snow angel metaphor in Kiss the Snow to the Ice Age in Post Card from Winter Rocky Mountains to a snowstorm in Ode to Snowstorm and snow blowing in Neighbors.

Mountains are as prevalent as snow.  Part of this could be because his friend told him “Dr. Choi, you made a mountain, and I just planted a tree on it.”  His friend died before the book was published. 

Not all of the first part of the book is “cold.”  In his search for heights and amazing experiences, he also came across the Arenal Volcano of Costa Rica, one of the most active volcanoes of the world, in Costa Rica and Ode to Morning Coffee and makes volcano metaphors  in Tango.  Heights can also translate to space, as he visits the Johnson Space Center in Houston. 

He has shared many more of his seasonal travel experiences within this book, including parts of the world connected to Buddhism and China as we see in The Silk Road, Splendor in the Mongolian Wilderness and Genghis Khan (refered to as Temujin), and Bangudae Petroglyph.  He experiences heartwarming human moments with others and is awestruck by the beauty of life, using words and poetry to best describe his experiences, fluctuating from one-word per line poems as in Dance to full-on prose in Elegy 2.

The themes for the second part of the book are local sports plus current daily politics in both the U.S. and Korea. As the average person experiences politics mostly by reading the news, there’s less emphasis on active adventuring as in the first part of the book and more emphasis on being an awestruck onlooker in the audience.  This passivity mixed with wonder is particularly evident in poems about watching sports or the Olympics in Baseball, At last, the Nationals are Champs, Synchronized Swimmers, and Ode to the Capitals!

Discussing social politics is almost “par for the course” for any poet living in the U.S. in 2020.  He refers to the U.S. as a “war torn country” in Labyrinth and can’t help but criticize Trump and Trumpers, as hardly anyone can avoid talking about him or them nowadays. 

Even though his poems are left-leaning by American political standards, they are right-leaning by Korean standards, as he questions the good it would do to reunify with North Korea, a country that is so far removed from South Korea as we see in Panmunjom Poem and #MeToo.  In #MeToo he criticizes a famous monk who had sexually harassed a famous poet and briefly mentions Stockholm, both an actual city and an indirect reference to “Stockholm Syndrome.”  His political activism makes sense because he started his American life in anti-war activism and submitted poems to The Indiana Daily, which also supported civil rights activists in the 1960s.  In the 1970s, he was so against the authoritarian South Korean government that he could not return to South Korea.

The theme for the third part of the book is an ode to his Korean family, and composed of multiple poems.  He misses Korea and ponders if Canadian geese miss their hometown too in Canadian Geese. His poem Genealogy discusses the  Korean emphasis on the importance of the first-born son, saying that he is the first-born son of a first-born son and that his first-born son has had his first-born son. 

His experience must be rare in Korea for his father wanted him to be a poet, but in Name, it is evident that Korean society thinks very differently.  He shares the love he has with his wife in Honeymoon Haiku (both in Jeju and Hawaii), the love for his ancestors in Eggs in the Internet Nest, and the love for his progeny in To You, My Love in which he shares that love has been an enduring theme throughout all generations in his family.

He has a smaller section entitled Four Poems from Pusan, Korea which features poems about the  Korean War.  Some of the poems in this section are not about his immediate family, but perhaps about the larger family of Korean poets or Korean artists in general, like in The Yoon Dong-ju de Compostella, At the Rikkyo Campus, Miss Ji Hae Park, The Violinist, or Mr. Chung Ho-seung, Korean Poet, a poem he uses to tie back to the first part of the book about snowy mountains.

Death is prevalent near the latter part of his book, a testament to his own mortality.  Not only does he speak well of his family and friends, but he also talks about how much his mother sacrificed for him so he could go to the U.S. and how much he sacrificed for her (such as giving up his naturalized U.S. citizenship in order to return to Korea to take care of her), lamenting that all he did was not enough.  He has a series of elegy poems and another poem about attending multiple funeral services in One Spring Day in 2017.  His regrets in The Evanescence hit a personal chord in me as he talks about reaching out to people he cared for, only to find out that they had already died.

This entire book could be used as his own elegy or eulogy to himself as he says, “Well, we came like a Spring flower and go away / in thousand winds that blow. / In between, I enjoy poetry and music and appreciate arts. / I am grateful to my life given”

This is much more than just a book about nature or the environment or politics and family; it is a book about accomplishments, achievements, and adventure.  Choi’s love and celebration of life is clearly obvious in his preparation to say goodbye in the future, but one hopes, as is inferred in A Poet, Golf and Pancreatic Cancer that his hopefulness will give him more time to live with love and to continue to reflect on his love of life. 

The stories of children in war

by

Five senior Korean Americans pen their recollections of a boyhood they barely survived  | By Martha Vickery (Summer 2020 issue)

(left) The cover of Five Boyhood Recollections of the Korean War and
(right) Anthology editor, and poet, Yearn Hong Choi.

A Korean American poet and writer has edited an anthology of five remembrances of the Korean War from the perspective of childhood, entitled Five Boyhood Recollections of the Korean War: 1950-1953.

Editor Yearn Hong Choi said he is the youngest of the contributors to this volume; he was nine in 1950, and is now 79. The oldest contributor was age 18 when the war started.  Korean Americans old enough to remember the Korean War were all children when they went through the experience.  “When we are gone, there will be no one will be a witness to the Korean War experience,” the editor said.  “That’s why this book may be a significant contribution to Korean War historiographies.”

Common among the stories, Choi said, is that “the Korean closely- tied family network saved their lives during the war.”  For example, contributor Hong Kyoon An’s mother worked for the local neighborhood office, where the organizers knew when young men would be rounded up for forced draft into the military, he said.  That knowledge was key to saving her son from the wholesale conscription going on during that era.  “She was a kind of double spy!” he said.  All of the contributors are the editor’s local friends and acquaintances; every Korean American of this age group has a family survival story that is seldom told. 

The editor contributed a short memoir and several poems to this slim anthology.  In a short memoir, he remembers his father going into hiding and his mother bringing him to an uncle’s house north of Seoul, from which they waited out the occupation of Seoul in relative obscurity.  He recalls the vista from the top of a wrecked tank on a hilltop.  He would climb up there every evening to watch for his mother appear on her way home from a marketplace where she sold vegetables.  He was later relocated to his grandfather’s rural home further south, and eventually, his father reappeared, evacuating the family south to Busan, where they survived the rest of the war.  The editor also added some short essays and poems to the anthology, selected from his Korea Times columns related to the Korean War.

Hong Kyoon An, in his essay Ninety Days Under the Reds: June 25-September 29, 1950, describes a more detailed and nuanced view of experiencing a military occupation from the perspective of a high school senior.  His essay describes how he perceives his parents alarm as they try to find food and call in debts in the days after the June 25, 1950 incursion of North Korean troops over the border of the DMZ.  His parents decided to wait, not knowing whether to flee Seoul or stay.  In the end, they split the family and hid in a couple locations, but never evacuated to Busan as other South Koreans did at that time. 

There are interesting details, such as how a military parade in advance of the mobilization showed off a few unarmed aircraft (the extent of the air power of the country at the time), and a military marching band, which notably, played unfamiliar songs on unfamiliar instruments, like the sousaphone.  The South Korean military used the U.S. military band because it had no band, and no marching songs.  He later decides that the North Korean army has far better revolutionary songs and catchier lyrics, in fact, better propaganda of all kinds, than the South Koreans.

Waking up one day, he sees tanks sitting silently in the middle of the street, flying an unknown flag, the new North Korean flag, and concludes that his city has been occupied.  He was confined to the house, but sneaked out one day, and remembers chilling details of Seoul city streets under occupation, with empty streets, empty store shelves, and propaganda posters everywhere.

An’s mother answers the door one day to find her son’s former classmate, who urges her to send Hong Kyoon to a “rally” at school the next day, although the schools were still closed.  An successfully avoided the search parties that rounded up young South Korean men and forcibly conscripted them into the so-called volunteer army.  This was mainly due to the determination of his mother, who guarded him, and hid him in a woodpile, a small crawl space, and other places.  She also got a job working for a neighborhood office for the specific purpose of finding out when search parties would be sent out.  After the North Koreans are chased north again and the city was free from occupation, An reflected, “And in our own way, my family —- my mother in particular —- won the battle.”

After the Chinese army invaded in November 1950, An walked from Seoul to Busan to join the South Korean Army.  He served for 10 years, leaving as a captain, and immigrated to the U.S. as an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  He later earned a graduate degree in international politics from George Washington University.

Chang Wuk Kang, a Baltimore, Maryland psychiatrist, was a junior high school student in Busan, the southernmost port of Korean Peninsula, the only area that was save from Communist invasion in the South during the War.  From a boy’s perspective, his essay documents the transformation of his city, and the mix of people who were forced into the city at that time.

Kang describes a young boy’s observations of a suddenly overpopulated city, teeming with an influx of American soldiers and other United Nations forces, together with their arms and supplies.  He remembers how his own knowledge expanded as he walked the streets of that diverse city.  “I especially liked the comics that were thrown out by the GIs.  My friends and I would pore over these comics, and I was able to use a dictionary to translate the unfamiliar words I read in the comics, my first attempts at learning to read English.”

Jai Won Choi, writing from the vantage point of a 12-year-old in 1950, shares personal boyhood memories in his essay A Memory of the Korean War of wartime wonder and loss, from confronting the death of a friend who was one of the most promising young men of his home town, to the survival from his own near-death experience.  He writes warmly of an idyllic village life upended by the tragedy of war, and of the close-knit family ties that helped his family survive the war.

Choi, a graduate of Yonsei University, also earned degrees from California Baptist University and the University of Minnesota. He is now retired, but formerly worked at the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control, and was Professor of Bio-statistics at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.

Soon Paik, then an 11-year old elementary school boy, contributed a short essay The Korean War: Destruction and Hunger on his recollections of the War.  A North Korean agent arrested his father and sent him to North Korea, and the family never heard from him again.  His family of 12 lived in a small town south of the Han River, with virtually no food.  His memories of severe deprivation shaped his adulthood.  His family traveled to Busan to escape the invasion from the north by spending two weeks inside a grain car of a southbound train.  He is a graduate of Seoul National University and West Virginia University, and a retired economist who worked for the Department of Labor.  

Editor Yearn Hong Choi is a member of a Washington DC-area Korean American poets and writers’ group.  A graduate of Yonsei University and Indiana University, he taught public policy and administration in the U.S. and Korea from 1972 to 2006.  He is a longtime contributor of book and poetry reviews to Korean Quarterly. The collection Five Boyhood Recollections of the Korean War: 1950-1953 is now available from Amazon and Kindle.  A Korean translation of the book is scheduled for June 2021.

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

Copyright ©2024 Korean Quarterly. All rights reserved.

Show Buttons
Share on X
Hide Buttons