By Spencer Lee Lenfield, ETA ’17-’18 / Photograph by Bridget Harding . Argument: Memory is not merely personal, but comes into us from what (and who) is around us: in a word, heritage. So we each excavate what memories we can from the materials, accounts, minds, and bodies around us, even if those materials often thwart our best efforts to understand them. . 老女 [노녀: Lady (Aged)] Innumerable years approach hawking sundries, back fixed parallel over wares— bloody century’s unseen retainer. I saw an elderly woman with a severely bent back, selling chestnuts for a pittance to a crowd that barely saw her. She looked as if she bore the weight of entire past century of this peninsula. 格子 [격자: Lattice (Temple)] Decline representation, simply afford ornament where needless—delight where unseen mosses witness tonsured susurrations. The geometric openwork on the doors and windows of temples and palaces has obsessed me. (I have an album full of pictures.) 量子 [양자: Quantum (Both)] Indeterminacy holds greater information: three states (yes/no/both), limitless computing power, unseemly logical consequence. I, too— Yangja is a homophone for “adopted child” and “quantum,” two things which hold more information than should be possible due to the innate unknowability of certain properties. 復元 [복원: Rebuilding (Palace)] History denies authenticity fetishes’ needless luxury: selfsame ink recopying burnt tomes, ceaseless necessity. Remade ourselves, wove memories purposively, expensively. Remembrance, however plasticine, bests even palimpsestic disappearance. So many of Korea’s most noteworthy historical sites are actually reconstructions, and people seem obsessed with the question of their authenticity, but that authenticity is beside the point. What they speak to now is the choice to remember when forgetting was possible. . 血管 [혈관: Vessel (Blood)] Starburst dappled across crabbed cheeks. Treated, salved, concealed; one shot unmasks. Decipher capillary scribbles, descry flesh’s lurking archive— centuries knotted here, three thousand li. Blood vessels can be unsightly enough that we try to make them invisible, but they return, like scribbles on the body. They too bear messages of a kind, and carry elements with a past far beyond a single life.   Spencer Lee Lenfeld is a 2017-2018 ETA at Hwacheon Middle School in Hwacheon, Gangwon-do.