A Short Record in a Sleepless Night

This night, after failing to finish some academic pieces and deleting those mental efforts by pushing a keyboard button, I am sitting in front of a small bright screen, spending unproductive time, contemplating my indecisive future unplaced in between or both two countries, the United States and South Korea.

At some moments like this night, I usually open a poem book, written in Korean, not for reading but for perusing to enter the poet’s world for a while. The book I am picking up is Sky, Wind, and Stars by Dong-Ju Yun, composed when Imperial Japan invaded the Korean peninsula and colonized the Chosen Dynasty forcefully and brutally (Chosen is the name of the last dynasty before the founding of the Republic of Korea government).

During the Japanese Colonial period, his family chose to migrate Man-Ju where is near both Korea and China and had conflict territorial disputes between the two countries (but uniquely, this place functioned as a neutral zone for the two countries' peaceful residents as well), and he had been well educated through attending colonized Korea's various schools.

Sadly, Dong-Ju was killed by the Japanese military’s bio-experiment in 1945 after being arrested by Japanese police because he was doubted as a resistance for Korea’s independence by publishing Korean literature when he was a foreign student in the English department at Rikkyo University in Tokyo.

More sadly, before his death, he was in the continuous involuntary exiled status (in "unhappy, poor, bitter nostalgic about the society left behind, self-righteous") due to the homeland’s fall, even wanting the voluntary status (in "happy, comfortable"). As his works show, he looked like to seek an opportunity to actualize his vision to become a professional poet, but it never happened – his book had pressed after WW II and The Korean Independence Day on August 15, 1945.

Anyways, after opening the book, then, I am perusing “A Poem That Came Easily,” which is one of his sentimental poems, considered as endlessly pursuing moral justice, individual (also national) freedom, and self-reflection through expressing the feeling of shamefulness and helpless from the sadness of losing his native country by the external power.

It is as follows:

A Poem That Came Easily

(Translated by Kyung-nyun Kim Richards; Steffen F. Richards; Hyeo-Kil Kwon; and edited by DH).

A night rain whispers, outside the window

Of this six tatami-mats room in others’ country.

Despite knowing a poet is a sad karma,

I am writing another line of poems.

Having received tuitions from home in an envelope,

Holding the cozy scent of sweat and love.

Tucking my college note under my arm,

I go off to the lecture of an old professor.

Looking back, losing my childhood friends

One and two at a time and all of them,

For what,

Am I solely sinking down to the sedimentation?

Someone says life is meant to be burdensome,

But it is shameful to me this poem is being written easily.

Of this six tatami-mats room in others’ country,

A night rain whispers, outside the window,

After driving out the darkness a little by lightning a lamp,

The last me is waiting for the morning that comes like an era, in closing.

Then, there is the first handshake with me.

By offering my small hand with tears and solace to me.

Now, I am talking to myself like, usually, reading his poem is always dangerous (in particular, like in this dark dawn) due to my tendency to overly identify me with him emotionally, as a foreign student. And already, my emotional reaction toward identifying me with him is drawing me to one poem that I clumsily imitated his style:

Dae-Shin Farmers Market (translated by DH)

Wearing on Gap shirt,

Pony shoes,

And H&Ms, from Grapevine,

I go through Dae-Shin Farmers Market in Singil 7-dong street, 

Having full of familiar-scent and mood.

My favorite side dish shop 

that sold spicy fish cakes, tasty egg rolls, diced radish Kimchi, and various herb salads,

My favorite rice cake store 

that had the chewiest steamed Injeolmi,

My favorite old white-haired shoemaker 

who remembered my unusual feet sizes and adjusted shoes,

My favorite clothing store’s old lady 

who was greatly proud of his son and his fashion design major,

They are all there and all the same.

But because of my sudden nausea from the landscape’s unfamiliarity,

And because of an abrupt familiarity with the foreign things that I am heavily wearing,

at the moment on the way back home,

there was the only blinking yellow traffic light

on the returning crosswalk.

Despite some images and sentiments’ similarity between his and my work, unlike him, who resisted the colonial age’s unfairness and can be defined as both involuntary and voluntary exiles, struggled during the period of the politically ruined and colonized dynasty, where oppressed each Korean individual, I am just a naïve, common person who always fears to face the political turbulence and urgency of my age.

However, I was wondering what makes us share similar images, and I guess it is because we are sharing the suffering from placing us invisible borderlines that make shaded identities. The invisible borderlines, I think, will echo Azaldua's explanation of borders and borderlands as, they “are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.”

Finally, this night's thoughts guide me in a conclusion. I am expecting that having vague borderlines will continuously lead me into an identity crisis as a naïve Korean international student but a husband and future father in the United States simultaneously. But in opposition to that, staying and living in this foreign but my new family’s land in-between invisible borderlines also make me feel glad since there will be more possibilities that I can compose more beautiful poems like Yun, Dong-Ju, as a great immigrant poet, being with involuntary eternal sufferings from endless nostalgia.

Yes, this is my short record of a stream of unconsciousness (or consciousness?) from unstoppable thoughts on this silent sleepless night.