Drowning Not Waving

paperclip pricks kill

tiny daily wounds fester

follow random

natural patterns

of swarms of ants and bees

lemmings and their

suicide trajectories:

dark puffy dots cover

the cold surface of the water

how lovely to meet a cool and quiet end.

but what if

that sought after

peace is only the portal

to a parallel world

with the same absurd day-to-day

the same stupid people with the same stupid

jokes and higher degrees and fancy

wooden salt and pepper shakers

receding hairlines extending bellies

popping out the same

smelly drooly mottled babies

shitting and sucking and crying

to be held

tight smiles masquerade as

happiness, fearful mediocrity
spews toxic purple fumes

as it burns, warms toes

feeds institutions and marriages

tuition, therapy, plastic surgery

away from that communal fire
a brief yearning,

not for dreams deferred,

but memories of what

dreams might have been
for what or why

© Jane Park 

Twelve Years Ago

What is it I want most in my life, she asks herself.

2001

The real new millennium

27 years and alone

Blunt cut growing out

Nails bit down to blood

Resolutions:

Drink more water.

Exercise.

Stop dating.

Stop fucking.

Make peace with silence.

Make peace with myself.

Where does she see herself in a year, 5 years, 10?

An airy condo, a spiral staircase
White window seats

Splashed with colorful pillows

Windows

Big, clean, clear

A breathtaking study

Wall-to-wall books

An uncluttered mind complemented by

A spare, efficient body with 
Elegant, logical lines

Lines that don't break.

Drink more water.

Exercise.

Make peace with silence.

Make peace with myself.

Make peace.

© Jane Park 

Emille

The Sacred Bell of King Songdok

This bronze bell, the largest of its kind in the Orient, was cast in 771 A.D. during the reign of King Hyegong, the 36th ruler of Shilla. An impressive example of Shilla metal craft, the bell is approximately 3.78 meters high and 2.24 meters in diameter, weighing 18.9 tons. The making of the bell was first undertaken by King Kyongbok to honor the spirit of his deceased father, King Songdok. King Kyongdok died before realizing his dream and the bell was not completed until the reign of his son, King Hyegong.The hollow tube, which is believed to control the tone, the kneeling apsaras (or heavenly maidens), the four panels (each containing 9 nipple-like protrusions), and the lotus and grass designs are all typical of bells of the Unified Shilla period (668-935). The bell is commonly known as the Emile Bell, a name derived from an ancient Shilla term, pronounced em-ee-leh that means "mommy." According to legend, the bell would not ring when it was first cast, so it was melted down to be recast. The head priest of a temple threw a small child into the molten metal, saying he was told to do so by a vision. When the bell was recast and struck, it sounded like the baby's cries of em-ee-leh when the child was sacrificed.  --Gyeongju National Museum Travel Guide

Above mountains swathed in thin blue mist

Teeter giant dragonflies

Buzzing drunken mid-summer songs

Under black earth and bright green grass

Slumber kings and soldiers

Servants and concubines

Ancient tongues, wrist bones, and hair

Ache and hope

The everyday grind

Between the two worlds

A large bronze bell

Is tolling is pleading

Inside 

The necessary sacrifice of a woman 
Who had nothing else to give

A nation under threat

A grateful, indifferent king

The child’s voice cries for his mother

em-ee-leh em-ee-leh em-ee-leh

Knowing no one will answer

No one will come

© Jane Park

From Whence Comes the Title of my Blog

Ernest Hemingway's Iceberg Theory of Prose:

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured, or well-bred, is merely a popinjay."

(Death in the Afternoon. Scribner, 1932)

A popinjay:

1. a person given to vain, pretentious displays and empty chatter; coxcomb; fop.

2. British Dialect . a woodpecker, especially the green woodpecker.

3. Archaic . the figure of a parrot usually fixed on a pole and used as a target in archery and gun shooting.

4. Archaic . a parrot.

The popinjays are winning over the icebergs in the world. Of course I have problems with Hemingway as I would with any man who compares a woman to a racing yacht. But if I let ideology govern my taste in art, I'd be bored out of my mind. (And as sexist as that metaphor is, you have to admit it's pretty compelling and it sticks.) What I admire about Hemingway is his approach to writing as life - thought and feeling embodied in action. I also have a thing for doomed, stoic heroes. I.e. being them not necessarily wanting to be with them. How to write a Hemingwayesque heroine - Octavia Butler comes close - but I want my female heroes to be slightly less geeky, and funny. A funny woman of color. Now that would be revolutionary.

There Are Beings That Give Off Their Own Light

There are beings that give off their own light

     said Carl Sagan as we watched strange,

amorphous aliens undulating in effortless space.

The water crept in through our ears.

We were holding hands that slowly, surely

were growing into wide primordial fins.

Fish.

I could feel your smile through warm ripples in the water.

We were FISH.

But it was as if nothing outoftheordinary had occurred.

As if

     we had always been fish swimming in human bodies.

Suddenly

     the two legs, two arms, and

fresh fruity skin that

moments ago had covered us

seemed useless,

     extraneous

Primitive appendices outgrown aeons ago.

We had come full circle and were returning

to the sea, which had borne us and hurled us away.

The ocean roared

     white horsehooves beating distant.

We have come home,

     said the dance you danced

with odd, watery grace.

I almost didn't recognize you ...

You gave off

     such light.

© Jane Park

Echo

I woke up mute this morning, searching for my voice

     which had flown its birdcage of tendon and bone.

I saw you, tried to speak with you

Tapped you gently, insistently, on your shoulder

It was cold.

You turned around, looked at me.

I tried to get through to you, tell you the importance of

You standing there, and me

     waiting for the words to come to tell you

But the only words that came were cereal jingles and

Theme songs from recycled sitcoms.

You turned away, disgusted.

With invisible fingers

I traced the tension of your anger

     taut as the vibrations on a just-slammed door.

You did not see my pleading eyes

My gesticulating arms

You did not hear my hollow love songs.

 

© Jane Park

Homeland

One day in the middle of November 1998 I found myself on a crowded subway train in Seoul, Korea. Earlier that morning, I had gazed out the kitchen window of my aunt's apartment building and gazed on more buildings that looked like steps. Boxes piled on top of more boxes, going where? Seoul seemed an endless stream of steps. Subway steps. The stone steps that led up mountains where ojusi and ojuma dressed in bright, garish hiking clothes huffed away for their all-important health. The steps I had to climb to get to the bakery, the bookstore, the cafe. To meet a friend, a contact, a potential employer who waited for my Korean-English conversation and quick, friendly American smile.

I found it difficult to keep my face expressionless like the natives no matter how hard I tried. Even though it pissed me off, I respected the indifferent Oriental mask with 'fuck off' eyes. Because I recognized it as a part of myself. I alone knew that beneath my well-trained polite Asian American facade lurked an authentic 100% Korean bitch. I just didn't know yet how to unleash her onto the world.


There is something tense and claustrophobic about Seoul. A tension that seeks release but can't find it so falls asleep on the subway train, the monotonous noise of wheels churning and the automatic voice announcing a destination over and over again, first in clipped Seoul dialect then nasal American English. Everyone's face sallow and tired. The young women with puffy collagen-injected fish lips lined in black, their almond eyes tattooed on, feet bound in 4 inch-heeled elevator shoes. Their butterfly bodies exquisitely starved (Anything for a man after all. Who wants to be single over 25?)


The older women in the same getup, a parody of the female form and testament to the horrors of conformist fashion, squawking loudly among themselves: "Let me tell you." How to prepare winter kimchee the correct way. How much I spent on this Chanel outfit. How I can't seem to lose 5 kilos of body fat. How my children won't listen to me. How my husband stumbles in drunk every night.

And the men, asleep or staring straight ahead, gaping fish-faces hung out to dry in the gray, underground sun. Skin taut and leathery, stained the color of muddy soot from years of drinking soju and filtering the thick urban air through stale cigarette butts.

On TV is an entirely different world. One that exists in bright cartoon color and smashing music. Groups of plastic teen singers gyrate in sync to bubblegum synthpop.  MCs with happy-hard faces introduce the latest curiosities from quaint, far-off lands like New Guinea, Malaysia or the nearest South Korean province. Usually the biggest curiosity is a live native specimen, who, lured by the promise of magical commodities in the Big City, unwittingly entertains the audience for half-an-hour with 'natural' poses and conversation.

Flip the channel for programs that locate relatives lost 40, 50 years ago, recognition between separated family members occurring instantly, sometimes with the help of a birthmark on the thigh. Korean melodrama in real time. Flip again: the duhrama, broadcast every evening, all with the same unchanging plot twists. The actors’ smiles are perfect and practiced and usually sculpted with the expertise of the surgeon's scalpel.  Producers and managers make their livings by predicting the next trend to arrive from the US via Japan. They construct sellable histories of their star proteges. The junior high school girl fans gobble the stories up, scream 'o-bba!' in high pitched squeals when the anime-boys saunter out to perform their latest version of NSync in Korean.

Meanwhile, I was working at activist organizations, inhaling gas fumes from kerosene heaters and the secondhand smoke of my colleagues. They fancied themselves romantic Marxists, carryovers from the student movements in the 80s. Still stuck in their heads was the image of housewives in Kwangju shot down by machine guns as they put their laundry out to dry. Chun Do Won, Roh Tae Woo, a distant relative of mine, surname forgotten, one of the officials executing their orders, slaughtering a city's people. For what?  Bad blood between two provinces? A slip of paper from Seoul? A piece of consumer capital pie? Irrational little boys shoving their sharp penises down the mother country's dry, constricted throat. And all you hear are the muffled gargles.


The litany in my head as I climb up the stairs and up the stairs: What have they done to this country? They call it the Land of the Morning Calm. But it’s the land of division and resignation, men and women with bombastic promises, loud voices and little substance. Those with substance stay quiet. Those with money send their kids abroad.


Someday my aunt used to say the north will come raining down again, and everything will end then. Malseh. There were days when my aunt couldn’t get out of bed because her back hurt too much. I cleaned the apt, fed the dog.


Korea was an experimentation ground. It tested my limits as a subject, a non-subject, as someone totally formed by language, in a language whose tongue-contours were familiar but whose messages escaped me. All I seemed to hear were murmurings. The possibilities of what I could have been had my family not flown out the cage and into the fat and dripping land mass called America.


In Korea I got used to feeling lost, to climbing all those stairs without worrying so much where they were taking me. I learned to remember what I wanted and in the specific ways I wanted to remember them. In other words, I learned to forget.


While I was transcribing the proceedings of a Feminist Counseling Conference attended by women activists in the Asia Pacific Region, the ROK army made a mistake and launched a Nike missile just a little too close to the peninsula, hitting Inchon instead of the Yellow Sea. There were shots of shrapnel and gesticulating citizens on the Evening News. My cousin turned to me and said matter-of-factly, imagine what would have happened if they'd aimed it a few kilometers north. We would have had a second Korean War, only this time with no survivors.


The morning after that, I broke down and cried all day. In the living room, on the street, on the subway. I couldn't stop. I let myself go, lost myself in the rhythm of my sobbing. All I wanted was for my history and the history of these two countries imprinted inside me to go away, the burden of my parents, the burden of my own guilt--imagined and real.

So much arises from misunderstandings, words wrenched out of context. As I was walking home along the infinitely long alley that runs behind the apartment complex, I wanted more than anything to stop talking altogether. So I wouldn't confuse myself or anyone else anymore.  But when I came home, my face broke and the words spilled out and over to my aunt who sat patiently in her high-backed wooden chair. I'm imagining her face now—how still it was – as she looked at me and kept looking at me, until I'd finished, and I was quiet. And the room was quiet.


© Jane Park

Working Out

I run the track

Around and around

In the same circle

I focus on my breath

In tempo with my strides

I forget where I am

The bodies hurtling around me

The panoramic window view

I am Here

In the step

In the breath

So thankful

And so blessed

© Jane Park

Plane Trips

anyoung haseyo

 juh nun bak ji hyun ibnida

gu wul eeship chun gubek chilsam nyun eh seoul eh suh tehwuhnasubnida

jeh ga neh sal ddeh

ooli bumonim wa nam dongseng rong

miguk uh ro imminwassubnida

Honolulu, Hawaii 1978

I am lost in a sea of urgent brown faces at the airport in Honolulu.

My introduction to my new, adopted nation

            a pit-stop in one of its ex-colonies.

I am staring into a security guard’s hard belt buckle.

My face is squeezed tight to hold in the fear

I feel choked by the velvet red ropes that encircle me.

When my mother comes to claim me, the airport personnel tell her

            I am a brave little girl

            I didn’t cry.

Taegu, Korea 1988

I look down, shocked at the intense green of the rice patties that dot the Korean peninsula. Kimpo Airport smells faintly of fish. We visit our grandparents in their Japanese style house with paper walls and cool wooden floors. The little boy next door watches me undress through the window in the backroom. I wear a pale green tee shirt and a white cotton training bra with pink ribbon threading. I have braces and I’m growing out a bad perm.

Seoul, Korea 1990

Everything buckled in the summer heat. Playing cards wilted in the heaviness of the air, of summer monsoons about to break. Raindrops pelted the blue roof of my grandmother’s house like giant pebbles.

When I wake up from my nap, she is making sam-gye-tang.

Already the cancer is spreading through her brain.

I ask her about the white sweater she knitted

            when she lived with us in Oklahoma.

Her face registers nothing.

She tells me I should marry a Korean man.

January 1994

I sit for 17 hours in business class, crossing the Pacific with my father.

I am en route to junior year abroad at Yonsei University

He is returning to Taegu after the annual family reunion in Texas

           

We are so diasporic.

My haircut is a sad cross between bowl and butch.

We’re drinking scotch.

He confides in me that I’m named after Tarzan Jane, as much as Eyre Jane 

            the sensible sparrow of a governess who lands

            financially stable Rochester

                        (albeit old and crippled)

who locked up his mad Creole wife in the attic

and watched her burn to ash

in the fire of her frustration.

July 1999

I am flying back to Dallas, my high school home, land of big hair and Neiman Marcus, after a year of playing liaison between warring parents, a tired orphan.

I remember Korea as a stranger who looks like my mother in a recurring dream.

She passes by me, not seeing,

            as my eyes plead.

I pull up the shade while everyone is asleep.

It is impossible to say whether the sun is setting or rising.

And strangely, I feel at home there,

            hovering between morning and night,

                        in the in-between space of wide awake.


© Jane Park


Published in Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia and The Austin Project, edited by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Lisa L. Moore, and Sharon Bridgforth (University of Texas Press, 2010).

Education

English

The letters in the picture books come alive and crawl across the page. My eyes try to catch them but they sprout wings and fly into my head and their buzzing drives me crazy. I study English diligently. Because no one talks to me or plays with me at school and a nasty little boy named Jeremy in thick glasses with a potbelly chants Chinese Noodle at me over and over near the tires on the playground. The others join in and I stand there naked with no language. Because I can’t go to the bathroom and my bladder is in constant pain because I don’t know how to ask permission in English and I am too ashamed to tell my parents. So my bladder is heavy for six weeks while I work very hard on Dr. Seuss and smile pretty for the teacher and try to stop the buzzing in my head.

Math

Everyone thinks I'm a nerd because I have black hair and almond-shaped eyes and I never talk. But I’m getting increasingly bad at Math. In eighth grade we move from Baton Rouge to Akron – world capital of polymer. At Litchfield Junior High I enter my first day of Algebra II/Trig. The teacher is a former Marine drill instructor, a bald old man named Mr. Barrett who looks like a cross between Yoda and a fat bullfrog. I scan the room and notice one other Asian kid. He’s shorter than I am, wearing a sky blue sweatshirt, pants cut off at the ankle, and bottle-cap glasses. His hair sticks out in tufts, like duck feathers. “Walter, would you like Jane to sit next to you?” asks Mr. Barrett. Winking at the uncomprehending FOB boy from Hong Kong, math genius extraordinaire, “Walter, do you know about the birds and bees?” The class explodes in laugher. I vow never to speak to Walter Lee. I get worse at math. I hate quadratic equations. My father tries to help me with my homework. In that infuriatingly patient voice he says, “A person of normal intelligence could solve this equation in 5 minutes. It took you 10 minutes. That means you have to work twice as hard.” I start reading Camus.

Art

In sixth grade I find refuge in Greek and Roman mythology. Latin becomes my favorite subject. I write short stories during lunch period about slave girls killing their masters in their sleep. For the National Junior Classical League Convention I make a huge mosaic of one of these slave girls out of aluminum foil, candy wrappers and bits of pink cloth. It’s hideous and wins 3^rd place. I start drawing faces. In tenth grade I take an art class with Ms. Paris-Krummel whose mission in life is to teach us how to draw with the right side of our brains. One day, during the self-portrait unit, she motions to me to come and stand in front of the class. I obey. She clears her throat and asks everyone to look up from their oil pastels. “I want all of you to look at Jane’s face. She has the typical Oriental face. Flat eyelids, small eyes, round cheeks, soft jaw …” The room spins, a kaleidoscope of staring eyes. My body goes numb and my eyes turn fish-gray. It doesn’t bother me, I chant inside. I will forget this. I will forget this. I will forget this. I will forget this.

But I don’t. 

Graduate School

I am 29 and in my second Ph.D. program. I have decided to wreak revenge on those who made me feel small, ugly and unwanted with my ever-increasing stash of cultural capital, official pieces of paper legitimating my cerebral superiority, and a practiced ability to turn a phrase quickly.

But it’s not enough. I need a new language – something that comes out of my own body, this strong, cracked vessel whose surface reads an Etch-a-Sketch map of pain. I’m tired of borrowing inadequate terms from French critical theorists and British cultural workers. Marx and Freud were crabby white grandfathers telling clever stories by the fire.

I want to tell my own stories. In a language that doesn’t contain. That doesn’t sort and compartmentalize and peer into my mouth with clinical fascination. I am tired of being dissected and dissecting myself, of turning myself inside out. I am tired of performing poodle tricks for invisible robots in white lab coats who take methodical notes behind the mirrored window.

A messy language.

To articulate

            through art

the art-ificial real

The art-ificial – imagination.

Becomes real.

If only momentarily,

            through art,

the hovering place,

the art-iculation of language

            – as song –

and myself,

its non-hyphenated, non-modified

Subject

            with a capital S.

What does it mean for a little Korean girl lost in the Bible Belt

            to claim the space of universal voice?

What is the punishment for screaming?

© Jane Park

Published in Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia and The Austin Project, edited by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Lisa L. Moore, and Sharon Bridgforth (University of Texas Press, 2010).

Bad Sperm

A circle

Of men

            With the heads of sheep

In a circle

Circle-jerking

            Mechanically

            Together

            In-unison

Is Brotherhood

Is Nation

Is Arms

            Racing toward each other

Is a withered penis

            Being fellated by a

Toothless mouth,

            Gagged and silenced

And forced to swallow

The bitter, slightly-tangy

Battery acid ejaculated by men like

The Texas fratboys laughing out of their SUVs

The blank-faced man peering in through the window

The uncle breathing deep and pushing his fingers in

The father pausing a fraction of a second

            Before walking past the open bedroom door

Is this particular kind of semen an acquired taste

Or some taste we have always known

            Like the taste of milk

            Or sweat

            Or tears

Or is it just something we swallow quickly,

Like bad medicine.

© Jane Park

Published in Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia and The Austin Project, edited by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Lisa L. Moore, and Sharon Bridgforth (University of Texas Press, 2010).

Anime Wong

My friend in Los Angeles says I look like a cartoon character

Like I could have leapt out of a terebi-manga

Like I could be Speed Racer’s girlfriend cheering on the sidelines

My hand demurely smoothing down my skirt, my mouth

            A perpetually sweet, pornographic O

It’s creepy, she says

That under the

Cute and Innocent and

Terribly Funny exterior

Slurps

A voracious, glutinous,

Pink jellyfish of a

Mind

Sucking in steel and spitting out

Shiny, sharp-pointed stars

Piercing porcelain blue neck skin

Digging

            And digging

                        And digging

                                                Dirty long fingernails

Until they strike the

            Clean white bone.


© Jane Park


Published in Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia and The Austin Project, edited by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Lisa L. Moore, and Sharon Bridgforth (University of Texas Press, 2010).

Amnesia

It is about speaking the language

Of the people

Who stripped, beat, and killed you

And learning to love it

Telling yourself

This is the only language I have known

This is the only way I have walked in this body

     In which I have lived always

And this town, these people …

It has never been otherwise.

But something in your bones remembers

Another tongue        throat         song

Curves of another landscape

     Tributaries of tears flowing over and through

     A rough terrain of dried over scars, wrinkles, corpuscles

    

Memory etched in body

     The grace of strong, gentle hands tugging at roots 

     Underfoot, white fur rustling in moonlight

From below somewhere

A slow low moaning, soft

At first then reaching the pitch

Of scream so high

No one hears it

Its echo catches in the trees, falls into

Velvet pools and drowns

As night gradually sets and

     You wake to morning

Wrapped tight in a

Blanket of bright white

Tongue swollen and thick

The sound of grinding then

The swirling rich bitter aroma

     Of quick caffeine forget

© Jane Park


Published in Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia and The Austin Project, edited by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Lisa L. Moore, and Sharon Bridgforth (University of Texas Press, 2010).

My Grandmother, A Year Before She Died of Brain Cancer

I am listening to your soft voice

            As it weaves through the tapping

            Of the monsoon raindrops     

            On a tin roof

In a green and blue house in Seoul.

Fences encircle us.

Paper cards buckle under the wet air.

You are boiling chicken.

           

            I look at you, not comprehending

(your mouth forms vowels, your hands pantomime)

            I nod yes

I mouth neh,

            Neh, halmunee

I am remembering your gnarled hands

            Braiding my hair

            In thick and heavy ropes

            Covering my chin in

            An orange butterfly blanket

            Tugging gently at tender roots

            Hiding underfoot

I touch your hair

            Still gleaming black

(the few white patches

shocking rabbit fur)

We listen to the rain as it skips heavy on the roof

            Like giant pebbles.


© Jane Park