HAIBUN FOR 한
i always describe 한 as someone squeezing my chest. like my bones are going to pop out of their sockets & release a wave of emotions choking my throat drowning myself –– drowning, drowned : 한 is the 304 high school students who left for a school trip that morning without realizing they would not return that night. drowning, drowned in the ocean the ferry capsized turning over itself on its side careening into the waves. 한 is the pair of shoes a fifteen year old will never wear again. drowning, drowned in silence, the ones who survived the ones who disobeyed their elders. 한 is the government’s silence the families still with no answers for the cause of the disaster. tragedy threaded through the strings of yellow ribbons.
*
i wonder if it’s okay for me to describe emotions as 한 when i’m a diaspora kid who hasn’t lived in korea since two. there’s 한 in unknowing & erasing memory : the burning of temples and the national flower under the iron fist of japanese colonization. what’s left behind is ash and what’s recreated is a lens always blurred, never clear. 한 is the violence our halmeoni endured in world war two : the violence of breaking the body of denying the body the return to home of washing over the history as if it was voluntary. of your own country denying the cause of violence, allowing japan to wash its hands clean of apologies unsaid. when the last surviving halmeoni are gone, who will remember? 한 is the loss of our survivors & their songs.
*
i first learned of 한 when my friend sent me an npr article capturing the photos of diasporic koreans. diaspora like me, their faces stark against the dark background, the pain of separation from the homeland in the bags under their eyes. 한 is america splitting your country in two / is america installing a puppet president who everyone wants to forget / is america building bases for the military who rape your women / is america crafting an image so sweet you want to leave your country for the country who separated you from your kin / is america the same country where those who left for it died at the hands of a man with a gun believing in america’s greatness. 한 is never knowing if you will see your country whole again.
*
한 : collective grief
washing over me, wailing
for that we have lost.
I WAS BORN IN A CITY
named Seoul, my soul torn
along the fissure between
north & south. Before
1950, before Seoul, there
was Keijo, there
was Kyongsong, the names
colonial on my tongue invoking
fires set to palaces, to
hanok villages, to our
flower. Before 1910, before
Ke–, before Ky–, there
was Hansong, there
was Hanyang. There
it is, again – han. I walk
along the Hangang, Seoul,
city
of my birth, city
of temporary return.
Monica Kim is a queer writer and organizer. Born in Korea, she now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing has been published in the lickety~split, Pollux Journal, Pine Hills Review, and others. You can find her on Twitter at @kimmonjoo.