Selective Transcription of Texts:
Addled by busyness, I crumpled my life and let it drop and then I outlived my life
How do I walk with my feet off the ground when I am afraid of the sky?
Shrink o self into the contraction of history
Beneath the trees mama sits and murmurs to me: where did I go wrong? maybe I got sick because of Corea; because of the camera, all those hours I spent around those chemicals, the camera you love now -- that I loved then --
Look up! Look up!
조심해.
조심해.
American planes dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Corea
32,557 tons of napalm
the disintegration of progressive time and the inability to locate (and thereby erase) the content of memory
What skies do you see? Where do I land when I am still mid-air?
THE SKY
THE SKY
black boulders rain down
你数过天上的星星吗
它们和小鸟一样
总在我胸口跳伞
deluge upon my eyes like a falling body
总在我胸口跳伞
Napalm was conceived in 1942 in a science laboratory at Harvard
Between 1950 and 1953, US bombers dumped 600,000 tons of napalm on Corea
If by chance an airplane overhead excavated an echo in the sky, then I knew that I was cradled in its sound
SAY THE WORD SEED THEY THOUGHT I MEANT BURY
Today I'll get me a gook
More than half of the population of the peninsula were killed, wounded, missing, or permanently separated from their families
Meanwhile bombs, drones, and other winged creatures vanished from our sight and into the living, where we won't find them
Next to you my small mind shivers like some forty wings
Millions of those who remained were left homeless.
By the end of the war in 1953, the peninsula was in total chaos, forcing a complete reconstruction of Corean society
This new society was literally built by Americans
i am but im not; i am but im not
Korean immigrants are not detached bystanders
but rather profoundly implicated in the
American racial order
조심해.
조심해.
조심해.
조심해.
조심해.
조심해.
The number of Corean dead, injured or missing by war’s end approached three million, ten percent of the overall population
The smallness of our work in contrast to disaster
WHAT DO THEY [artists] THINK THEY ARE DOING WHEN OUR KID IS DEAD
If by chance an airplane overhead excavated an echo in the sky, then I knew that I was cradled in its sound
My life is worth as much as the colonist's
Look up! Look up!
His voice can no longer petrify me
SAY THE WORD SEED THEY THOUGHT I MEANT BURY
조심해.
조심해.
How do I walk with my feet off the ground when I am afraid of the sky?
I crawl like an ant in mourning
THE SKY
THE SKY
我宁愿我妈是个普通人
how old grows the held hand always elder
how larger now my hand once smaller
엄마는 괜찮아?
"These flowers looks like barbed wire"
how i take, & take
what I cannot give back
Voices From:
Emily Jungmin Yoon, A Cruelty Special to Our Species
Aracelis Girmay, The Black Maria
Yan Jung, The Future for my Diasporic Mother
Grace M. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora
Forrest Gander, Be With
Jennifer S. Cheng, House A
Claire Jean Kim, Bitter Fruit
Tae's unpublished, on Gwangju
Kyung's unpublished/conversations
Won's unpublished, on family
Honor Ford-Smith, talk to SAIC graduate students
From BiGan's Long Day's Journey into Night
Plath, The Colossus
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth
Mia Mingus speech 2018
Armstrong, “The Destruction and Reconstruction of North Korea, 1950-60”