Cherry Blossoms

…and the rain came and then it was gone…

I Want to Stay in Corea for Another Year

I came to Corea hoping for growth. I had thought that growth meant healing—that I would hold myself up to the litmus of my homeland and find the ways to make the contradictions and pain I experienced as a Corean Adoptee in America somehow whole and righteous.

This past weekend it was my birthday, my first birthday experienced in the place I was born. Until coming to Korea, I had never thought about what my birth meant to me. I was greater than that event. I had agency, I was more than someone else’s decision, more than a mother in a society with no room for single mothers, more than a birthplace still divided by war. I wanted to believe that the culmination of everything I had done, the high school grades, the social circles I was accepted into and rejected from, the way I could analyze my identity through a term paper just as well as through a poem, would somehow move me to a place where this one past event could no longer touch me.

Over my last few months here, I have come to understand the legacy that is present in everything. It is in the language I still struggle to speak, the way I cannot help but search for the face of my brother in the men at the bars, the way I cried when a friend told me of his comrades who had fallen at Gwangju.

I came here wanting to move beyond the pain and separation I experienced as a Corean Adoptee. But moments of clarity are never planned; they wake you like a 4am phone call. Unexpectedly, growth has been a return to the pain that has shaped me, a return to legacy. It has been a discovery of the struggle that has occupied much of my life, consciously and subconsciously. I have realized that separation from my birthplace and my(?) people is not something I can or should move past. On bad days, it is paralyzing and enraging. On good days, it is reconciliation with the pain that made me. I have let pain in, greeted it, and asked it how I can continue to understand and shape my conscious self. I believed growth would be the process through which I would conquer and surpass my pain, but it has been the unequivocal acceptance of my legacy of pain that has ultimately allowed me to grow.

There is a way in which everything that is internalized, no matter how deeply it is buried, still impacts everything around you. I have always carried this pain, and I am just now beginning to see it.

Corea has been so wonderfully uncomfortable: host family miscommunications, difficult dialogues with my students about oppression, every question I yearn to shout into the crowded streets yet do not know the words to say. Sometimes it seems I know pain from my removal of this country better than I know the country itself.

I have been thinking about what my friend told me after a day of rich soup and 3 bottles of soju on the farm, emptiness is truth. For a while I thought he meant that to be without desires, attachments, or direction, is to exist honestly, purely. But I think I am beginning to understand emptiness as not a state of being, but rather the process of giving to the world all that you have been given and hold inside. I think the pursuit of truth is when you cast all of your trauma out into the spaces between us all in hopes that it will grow yourself and others—to throw your hands into the seed and soil and ask them to grow you a village. My discomfort is the greatest opportunity for transformation I have been given in this life.

I love my friends like family, and I love my family like a declaration.

Thank you for always supporting this journey, even when you have not understood.

Spring time in Corea: A Photo Update

I’ve been really busy with classes this semester as I’m teaching two extra classes, a hip hop club class, and will start teaching a writing workshop for Corean Adoptees this week in Seoul (https://www.facebook.com/events/394441327247800/).

Here is a photo update. Also I promise a writing update in 2 days…with some big/exciting news…*dun* *dun* *dun*

Pictures from Cambodia

Here are some pictures from I took on my trip to Cambodia. Sorry for not updating lately, please hit me up on email or chat if you want to know what’s been going on in my life.

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Some photos of the past year in Corea

Forgive the graininess on some—I often to not have my camera on me and have to use my phone.

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Picture Descriptions:
Fall leaves at Naejangsan
Morning bus stop
School festival stage
Mixing up the spicy paste for kimchi
Around 200lbs of cabbage awaiting their spicy destinations (and then later my stomach)
Students at Hanil during a free study period
A meal with my friend and gracious host Eun Kang
For the love of the word and my father
Goodbye old homestay
New homestay: hello trouble
New Years Eve (solar new year)

and it snowed…http://perpetualmotionofsearch.wordpress.com/2011/12/25/66/

In response to some who question the grief of the people of the DPRK by labeling it “propaganda”, or “staged” or otherwise invalid

I do not wish to lend my voice to a discussion of propaganda machines. I do not want to ponder if what I have witnessed through a computer screen or television is real. I believe these conversations are oversimplifications that seldom occur in the interests of the corean people and serve to distract from/replace dialogue on legacies of imperialism and colonialism, and otherwise facilitate US intervention (read: democratization, read: modernization, read: occupation). We ask for an easy verdict, “What is really happening over there?”, rather than pursue the more difficult exploration of “what has happened over there and what will continue to happen in our names as privileged citizens of the United States of America?”

I want to talk about understanding emotion.

As something much larger than a tear, or a shaking body, or even a public square filled with the mourning.

For me, emotion is lineage. It cannot be appreciated in its full beauty as a single moment in time. Rather it is a fleeting moment in which those in its presence are privileged witnesses to a culmination of past existences and histories that transcend one body, or “this place”, or “right now”. To see only the tree blossoming is to ignore the branches, the trunk, the roots—the profound mechanisms and relationships that nurture and sustain this single moment.

We, as oppressed people, know emotion as this deep connection to past. We know the weight of ancestors just as well as the weight of decisions made by white men, with power, whom we have never and will never meet. And we also know the violence of being asked to separate our history from our present. We are asked everyday to leave behind homelands, to unlearn languages, to forget the taste of a food. We are asked when they pass anti-affirmative action legislation on behalf of our best interests.

How then to make sure that we, as allies, do not become mechanisms to propel the same cycle that seeks our own fragmentation and elimination? It is a question that I struggle with daily, and for me it always comes back to understanding. I think an understanding (departing from a sense of love) of the context and history behind a moment can lead to healing and deep truth. And it is a good place to start when faced with the question: what do I do in the face of suffering?

Here are some resources that I have found helpful in my own process of understanding, and that move beyond the us vs them/evil-propaganda-spreading-dictator/victimized-and-powerless-people-of-the-third-world narratives and begin to examine the complex political, social, and economic forces behind the corea that we see today. Ultimately I believe it is our responsibility, as privileged citizens of theUnited States, to educate ourselves on these issues while examining over-simplified narratives and ask, “for whose benefit, and for what purpose are these narratives ultimately being created?” Please take these with an open heart for the gifts that they are.

http://kpolicy.org/

The Korea Policy Institute (KPI) is an independent research and educational institute that provides timely analysis ofU.S. policies towardKorea and developments on the Korean peninsula. In the interest of promoting friendship between the peoples of theUnited States andKorea, KPI is guided by the premise that a reasonableU.S. policy towardsKorea must be supportive of the legitimate desires of the Korean people for peace, sovereignty, reconciliation, and the reunification ofKorea.

http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/?&cline=10

The Hankyoreh is a progressive newspaper, decisively committed to journalistic freedom, democracy, peaceful coexistence and national reconciliation between South andNorth Korea, which were divided by external forces after World War II.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/robin-park/freewrite/10150630696223135

Robin Park, wrote this poem on what it means to grieve from her perspective as a member of the corean diaspora. You can find more of her work at: www.robinisalive.com

https://www.facebook.com/notes/terry-park/on-the-great-leader-and-dear-leader/10150426222131691

Terry Park, wrote this reflection on Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, after visiting the DPRK through the DPRK Education and Exposure Program (DEEP) in 2007.