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