Letter to My Grandfather

“The United States dropped more bombs — 635,000 tons — on North Korea than in the whole Pacific Theater during World War II, including large quantities of its new incendiary weapon, napalm.”

— Owen Miller, “Uncovering the Hidden History of the Korean War,” Jacobin

“Wars are destructive of the natural world, pretty much by definition… The impact of artillery fire in WWI on the French landscape was so great that it ‘corresponded to 40,000 years of natural erosion.’”

— Elizabeth Kolbert, “Chemical Warfare’s Home Front,” New York Review of Books

It’s a winter’s night. Outside the snow falls like powdered sugar. I’m teaching myself hanja these days in pandemic quarantine isolation. I sit on my bedroom floor at my low lacquered table and write out the characters with my plastic brush pens and permanent markers. A far cry from a Confucian scholar guiding inky brush strokes across rice paper.

Teaching my muscles to memorize the characters, the dense root of many Korean words, I feel like an archaeologist of sorts. Here, for example, is Dongdaemun, a raucous, shopping district in Seoul where my mom and her artist sister would drag me, bleary-eyed, to shop for fabrics at midnight. But, also, , the Great Eastern Gate.

Like a sun that throws all the mossy textures into relief after a rainy day, hanja illuminates my dim understanding of this hand-me-down language.

I wish that you were here today to teach me all you know about each character. Dad taught me something he learned from you, a memory aid, as a child for or man. To me, looks like a window above two praying mantis arms. The top gridded bit is a field, and below is the character for work or power. Together they form “man” because, he explained, man works the field. Though, he paused, that’s not quite true since woman do too.

In my fieldwork, I remember searching rather aimlessly through the newspapers and periodicals of the British Library a few years ago. I set up my filter for papers published from 1800 to present day and entered the terms “Korea” or “Corea,” and I found a small paper with Christian missionary’s account of a Korean woman. “She works harder than the beasts,” he wrote, “In Korea, women have no names and are merely referred to as ‘Look here, you!’” My heart went out to this turn-of-the-century woman. I imagine her hands were rough, her back stooped, white cotton shielding her hair from the sun, mosquitos and dragonflies flying about in the summer air around her.

I put away my index cards. The black tea in my mug has gone cold. I found your yellowed notebook, Grandpa, the one where you recorded your childhood memories of winter in Pihyeonmyeon, North Korea near the end of your life. It sits on my table, stapled, and each night I study a sheaf and translate by longhand. Unable to travel during this year of pandemic, I’m visiting your memories of home:

When we lived in Gwangpyeongmyeon Sanggwangdong, the mountains were high and rugged so we could not see any planes, trains, or buses pass by, but once we moved to Pihyeonmyeon, where the mountains were low and the White River flowed strong, there were many sandy fields and rice paddies, so farming went well, producing corn, beans, rice, and grains, and our entire family could eat our fill.

Night and day the airplanes flew above in the sky and the train whistle shrieked as we watched them pass. By the rice paddies in front of the house, the neighborhood children would gather and ride their sleds, strike their wooden tops and ice skate during the cold winter, and we’d play even more gaily as the evening sun set and it grew darker. I begged and coaxed my older brother into make me a sled, I whittled the top with my own hands from a pine tree he spent the whole day sawing, and for the skates, I begged my father until he went to the blacksmith, who made it out of iron, nailed it into a wooden board, and then made a hole in the board for a string and I wore my shoes with the string tightly tied around and stood up to skate. At first, I couldn’t even stand up straight…

What strikes me is how modernity, with its planes and train whistles, shrieks so nearby. The 1930s in the Hermit Kingdom. Who knew? Well, you did. It was once a home. Like you, your older brother, the neighborhood children, and your father no longer walk this earth. What also strikes me is how much effort it takes to create toys and how close you are to the land. It’s interesting the things we lose. I admire that knowledge, skill, craftsmanship, community, and handiwork involved to make the thing, rather than purchase it at a store. These days, that ice skate might be marketed as forest to foot.

This winter, I live through a screen darkly. In the morning, we posed a check-in question at my work meeting to remind each other of our bodies and places. We started with, “What do you see out your window?” I saw the bare Japanese maple, the neighbors’ car in their driveway, and snow piles on the front lawn.

I’ll never know half of what you experienced when you trekked from your home to Seoul by foot, alone.

It’s late, but my mind races through all the lists of the day. I put away the translation and grab the Penguin paperback, Younghill Kang’s East Goes West (1937), by my bedside table. Your journey mimicked his months-long voyage by ship. Both leaving Korea and finding a home in New York. Both exiled, though he was three decades older than you:

How far my little grass-roofed, hill-wrapped village from this gigantic rebellion which was New York… this lavishness which without prayer, pillaged coal mines and waterfalls for light, festooning the great nature severed city with diamonds of frozen electrical phenomena—it fascinated me, the Asian man…

The “great nature severed city” is quieter these days. It stopped me in my tracks to realize that our light now, as it did then, comes from pillaging the earth. How many more years have we left…? Nonetheless, it’s been nearly a year since I’ve been inside Manhattan, and I deeply miss “the city’s man-made whiteness, a false and livid dawn light, stolen from nature.”

When Tropical Storm Isais cut off our power without warning for a few days last summer, I was reminded of how we could and did live. How some do live and how we, in the so-called developed world, might live once again. In those heavy, summer nights, we found candles in the house and lit them for dinner. The background hum of electrical appliances — the refrigerator, the air conditioner — was silent. We listened to the cicadas outside instead. Forced to conserve the battery on our phones and computers, we went to bed when the sun set and woke when it rose. The birds seemed to sing riotously the next morning. The days without power felt incredibly long. Time flows slower when you’re not streaming content.

Without air conditioning, the house grew oppressively hot and muggy. I walked down the quiet suburban street under a relentless sun and found that the homes that normally shut their doors and windows to contain the AC-chill had thrown them all open.

I thought of Yi Sang’s “Ennui” (May 4-11, 1937), an essay about a Seoul-city boy on Songchon village. He snidely looks down upon the farmers, their repetitive life, their backwardness:

Living in these fields without a single utility pole, what could possibly be exciting? Steel poles line the ridge of Mount Palbong. But their copper wires won’t drop off a single postcard here. The electric current flows, but there’s hardly any difference between the utility poles and the poplar trees at the village entrance for these folks because they illuminate their rooms dimly with pine resin.

What do they hope? For grain to ripen in the fall. But that’s not hope. It is instinct. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I must do what I’m doing today. (my translation)

Today is not so different from yesterday. During the pandemic, I lose track of the passage of time. I subscribe to a newsletter named “What day is it?” But how can I complain? I have shelter during a time of upheaval and grief. I can step outside and enter the woods. I live today with drinkable running water, clean breathable air, and seemingly limitless electricity outside the city’s dense apartments.

I go to the bathroom to brush my teeth before bed. Every time that I turn on the tap now to wash my face, Kang’s first encounter with American bathrooms runs through my head:

Beautiful, shining, glazed, so ordinary here, and yet a marvel of plumbing and utility. Even a prince in the old days could have had such a tub. In Korea, the tubs were not of marble, not machine-turned porcelain, but of humble intimate wood… Then all the water must come from the well. In summer man bathed in streams, in winter from a great hollow gourd, a shell of the summer.

‘But here,’ I thought,’ a man has only to press a button. All the streams leap when he calls.’

I turn a tap. All the streams leap when I call. How I take this water for granted. I rub a sweet-scented face cream onto my cheeks before I slip back into my bed.

Grandpa, I wonder how you would regard these times. I sense we in the U.S. are living in the last, great shudders of a dying empire. We believe too much in the infinite.

I focus on the finite. My feet are at the foot of the bed and ensconced in fluffy black socks. Perhaps we must stop stealing from nature. Guess I’ll turn the lights off.

Outside, I see the neighbor’s lights are still on on the second floor. The snow on the ground looks eerily full of shadows. I draw the curtains and lie back in bed. I remember one evening after an event on Taiwanese poetry, I wound up on the same northbound double-decker bus as another attendee. I struck up a conversation with him, an elderly English geologist, who had frequently been to the Koreas for his research. He studied some ancient minerals that were found on rocks from the Precambrian era located along the North China-Craton continental shield. It honestly went over my head.

I said I had no idea that this particular continental shelf was so important. His reserve broke and he spoke with such unbridled enthusiasm, I’d absolutely love to go there to take a look. Rich in some rare specimens. Then he quickly retracted, mumbling.

It made me laugh – even the geologists long to enter your home country – and I realized the different time scales he and I worked in. Our borders today – heavily fortified as they are, delineated and carved down to air rights and maritime boundaries – are man-made, but the Earth has a different memory of fault lines and fractures. Soon the geologist and I ran out of things to talk about, and when he alighted, I watched as his black cap floated across the sidewalk.

A large landscape ink painting of the Diamond Mountains, hangs in our living room. Soft copper trees invite the eye into the mountain pass. White clouds drift across too. I long for the day I can step foot into Pihyeonmyeon and walk along the colder mountains. I envy the birds who are able to fly freely over the DMZ.

I know it’s a tall order; the policy wonks and war hawks scoff at reunification. But I think this dream of mine is not unreasonable, or perhaps it’s as unreasonable as hoping for the end to endless wars and for our planetary future. Boxed inside these four walls, I work the field of dreams.

______