My father tilted the can to baby Sarah's mouth
and laughed at her sputtering, a laughter so serious
I think I forgive him, his hungry rough cheeks stilling
to the woman's hungry, rough songs. And Jung Yun's uma
sang like a torn-up hymnal. She sang until we dropped
the twigs and pigeon feathers from our hands
to sit cross-legged in the nest of our mothers,
she sang like a yanked-out phonecord; shrill,
cut, ringing, 70s pop ballad fervid
with religion so unlike our Sunday falsettos,
she sang and we believed in a smaller,
gruffer, chip-toothed god: she sang the dusk down.
And we, staring up at her knees,
rested in the blue fall of each others' shadows
while the bab and ban chan, paper plates and water coolers
were left, for once, gratefully unattended.
--Ishle Yi Park, "Ode to the Picnic Singers (Flushing Meadow Park, 1984)"
But when you feel longing, sing of women in love; for their famous passion is still not immortal.
Sing of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them, almost)
who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified.
--Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, Stephen Mitchell trans.
Guan Soon is the only daughter born of four children... From an early age her actions are marked exceptional. History records the biography of her short and intensely-lived existence...
In Guan Soon's 16th year, 1919, the conspiracy by the Japanese to overthrow the Korean Govenment is achieved with the assassination of the ruling Queen Min and her royal family. In the aftermath of the incident, Guan Soon forms a resistant group with fellow students and actively begins her revolutionary work. There is already a nationally organized movement, who do not accept her seriousness, her place as a young woman, and they attempt to dissuade her. She is not discouraged and demonstrates to them her conviction and dedication in the cause. She is appointed messenger and she travels on foot to 40 towns, organizing the nation's mass demonstration to be held on March 1, 1919. This date marks the turning point, it is the largest collective outcry against the Japanese occupation of the Korean people who willingly gave their lives for independence.
....
To the other nations who are not witnesses, who are not subject to the same oppressions, they cannot know. Unfathomable the words, the terminology: enemy, atrocities, conquest, betrayal, invasion, destruction. They exist only in the larger perception of History's recording, that affirmed, admittedly and unmistakably, one enemy nation has disregarded the humanity of another. Not physical enough. Not to the very flesh and bone, to the core, to the mark, to the point where it is necessary to intervene, even if to invent anew, expressions, for this experience, for this outcome, that does not cease to continue.
To the others, these accounts are about (one more) distant land, like (any other) distant land, without any discernable features in the narrative, (all the same) distant like any other.
--Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Dictee. 1982.
