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).