A Postcard at the End of the World
by Sarah Carey Photo by Megan Chung This piece is a part of our Winter Issue of Selected Works. A little over 20 years ago, I was 9 years old and waiting for the new millennium. Between the television preaching of assorted doomsday ministers, canning vegetables, rumors from the kids at school, and my never-ending concern for our dot-matrix printer with accompanying computer, I was (mostly) convinced that the world as I knew it would cease to exist. Our computer would no longer work, the merchandise scanners at Walmart would cave in, the world wouldn’t function without a calculator. We would scrounge for food, barter with cans of baked beans, and our main form of entertainment would revert to sticks, stones, and crayons. All of this would happen, that is, if we didn’t die first in the riots that I imagined would sweep the country. As I watched the clock tick up the minutes to midnight, 11:51, 11:53, 11:55, 11:57, 11:59, I waited for it all. I waited for the end of a world where most luxuries I took for granted would vanish at the stroke of midnight. In a matter of minutes, those conveniences would be gone as the year 2000 ravaged the country from coast-to-coast. As Times Square ticked down the seconds from 10, I savored the last moments of the life I knew. At the click of midnight, fireworks popped on the screen, the New York skyline lit up, crowds cheered. But, in Washington County, Kentucky, the new millennium arrived without fanfare—just the ticking of a clock. Nothing happened. Our giant computer reverted back to 1984, and that was it. If this was the end of the world I was waiting for, it wasn’t much to write home about. A few days later I went back to school, and time marched on. Twelve years later, on the same night I once pondered the end of the world, I found myself nesting in an empty, shared hostel room in Incheon, South Korea. Around me, seven other bunk beds lay empty, as surely most tourists in need of a bed were out for a big night in Seoul, waiting for the New Year to dawn in a matter of hours. I unpacked what little belongings I had and arranged them for easy access: my hairbrush, toothbrush, and a change of clothes. The next day, New Year’s, I would catch an early Korean Air flight to Tokyo, to meet a friend and usher in 2013 in a way of which I could only dream. Yet, as I prepared in the silence of the end of 2012, I thought again about the last moments of 1999 and my life leading up to that New Year’s Eve. Even before the age of 9, my family traveled extensively, with car trips to the East Coast, up to Chicago, and down to Florida to see the beach (the near future would bring car-based trips to California and Washington State, Maine and beyond). Yet, in spite of my travels, I never imagined living, realistically, very far from Central Kentucky—much less South Korea—a country I only knew of from history books and documentaries. Certainly, the impending doom of the year 2000 would eliminate any hopes of a life abroad—or even beyond Kentucky’s state line. However, against the odds of worldwide destruction, I was now 8,000 miles away from home, living with a wonderful host family and teaching in a lovely school. Almost every day when I returned home from school, my host mother would have a traditional Korean meal simmering on the stove. My host father would take me to different fire stations where he worked on Jeju Island. During major holidays like Seollal and Chuseok, I was treated as part of the family—not just a temporary visitor from afar. I learned to shrug off the shame of nudity in a local jjimjilbang, and when I contracted pink eye, my host family dropped all their weekend plans and took me to a local doctor. Together, we fished for snails in the ocean and ate lots of cake. It was almost as if I never left Central Kentucky. Life in Korea was different compared to those final days of 1999, where I wondered if I would ever log onto a computer again. Life was simple and I had little to worry about. On December 31st, 2012, a few hours before midnight, I slid between the rough sheets of the hostel bed and turned out the lights. My mind hummed with anticipation of my trip to Tokyo: the lights, the sounds, the food. Knowing I would soon add another country to my list of places visited added to my zeal. I thought of my host family still on Jeju Island, such kind and generous people. I thought of the kind hostel owners who radiated hospitality. I thought again of myself on that same night in 1999, wondering what life would be like in the future. After all thoughts concluded, I drifted off to sleep, and the New Year came and went without any fanfare. Through this rebellion of peaceful rest, it was as if I sent a postcard to the 1999 version of myself waiting for the end of the world. I was letting her know that everything would be okay. Sarah Carey was a 2012-2013 ETA at Seogwipo Girls Middle School in Seogwipo, Jeju Island. After returning from Korea, Sarah taught a variety of subjects in Kentucky, New York, and briefly in China. In 2015 she received her master’s degree in Education with an emphasis on English as a Second Language from Georgetown College (Kentucky). She is now a graduate student in Applied Linguistics at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Haves, Have-nots, and Han in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite
by Padraig Shea Photo by LaToya Crittenden This essay contains spoilers for the film Parasite (2019), by Bong Joon-Ho. Han is often described as an untranslatable yet quintessentially Korean emotion, which is about half true. When King Sejong invented the Korean alphabet in the 16th century, the inscrutable syllable had a cognate: “Koreanness.” A century of colonization and partition has twisted han to mean a blood-deep Korean emotion of beautiful sorrow, which is still only partly true. Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” expresses the exquisite sorrow of han with such clarity it becomes understandable; with such particularity it becomes universal as the struggle against injustice. He teaches us to better understand han as a political idea; to understand han is to better understand “Parasite.” The century-old han story is romantic: King Sejong used the word as the Korean language’s etymological building block. It is the apparent foundation upon which the words for “one” (hana), “a Korean person (hankookin) and, literally, “the Korean language” (hangeul) are built. The Seine of Seoul is the Han River, as well as the setting of Bong’s third film, “The Host”, about a mutant fish eating hankookin along the Han. Han is a building block of Korean culture. “Pansori,” a 15th century dramatic form featuring female storyteller and drummers, manifests han, as does the unofficial national anthem “arirang.” To die by han overdose is known as hwabyong, according to Elaine H. Kim, professor in Asian American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2012 I first tried to define it: “Han is a repressed despair buttressed by helplessness; one suffers han when one lacks agency to keep the cruel world at bay. It’s knowing that, in the end, the world will break your heart.” My first viewing of “Parasite” inspired me to dig deeper. Han, I discovered, is not merely an emotion; it is an idea of political resistance. Korea has since 1910 been either occupied by Japan, partitioned, or at war. Perversely, the word was coined in 1920 during the occupation by a Japanese writer named Yanagi Sōetsu. He imagined han was a distinctly Korean ethos, a blood-deep quality that imbues all Korean art with “the beauty of sorrow,” similar to the four humors thought to control human emotion in Shakespeare’s day. (Bardologists might equate han to cold, dry, earthy melancholy.) Rather than a mysterious mythology, we are left with a mistranslation. To King Sejong, han meant “Korean,” hence hankookin is a Korean person and hangeul the Korean language (Hana doesn’t include the han syllable, it’s ha-na.) We are tempted to dismiss han as a colonizer’s rationalization, a destructive stereotype. Yet generations of Korean artists and critics have reclaimed han, which “became popular in the 1970s, as Koreans advocated for a kind of cultural authenticity,” wrote Thessaly La Force in a New York Times review of “Parasite.” On the bright side, knowing han’s colonial history frees us to reckon with its universality. As we have dismissed the four-blood-humors theory of human behavior, so should we reject han as a uniquely Korean idea. This is the transgressive power of “Parasite”: Viewers the world over have connected with the sadness of alienation in the face of undeserving oppressors. Han appears as beautiful sorrow to one’s oppressor; for its object, han is a statement of Korean dignity; subtler than a raised fist, it holds a big hope, even if they’re always going to win. “Rather than dismissing han as nothing more than a social construct,” wrote Sandra So Hee Chi Kim in 2017, “I instead define han as an affect that encapsulates the grief of historical memory—the memory of past collective trauma—and that renders itself racialized/ethnicized and attached to the nation.” ____________________________________________________ Han’s expression in “Parasite” begins in the opening line: “We’re screwed.” The Kim family lives in a stink-bug-infested Seoul “semi-basement.” They dispense with pizza-box-folding poverty after an unexpected visit from Min, friend of son Kim Ki-woo. Min interrupts the Kims’ dinner–beers and a bag of chips–to offer the family a lucky landscape rock, or suseok. “Some food would have been better,” mutters mother Kim Chung-sook. Min also gifts Ki-woo a job tutoring a rich girl, Park Da-hye, because Ki-woo is a loser who won’t seduce her. Ki-woo protests he lacks the required college diploma; Min suggests his sister Ki-jung forge one. As Ki-woo leaves to snooker the Parks into giving him a job, father Kim Ki-taek reveals an ongoing obsession: “Oh, so you have a plan, my son?” The plan gives Ki-taek hope. After Ki-woo lands the tutor gig, the Kims exploit his foothold and the naivete of the Parks, especially Americophile mother Yeon-kyo. They insinuate themselves into the Parks stable of workers by deceit and framing innocent peons. Bong signals Korean caste stations through food. With three Kims leeching off the Parks, the Kims eat pizza at the shop that paid them pittances to fold delivery boxes. They conspire to get the Kims’ house-keeper Moon-gwang fired and replaced by Chung-sook; once all the Kims have Park jobs, they eat the rich folks’ food. The Kims take son Da-Song camping for his birthday, so the Parks move in for the weekend just as a storm rolls in. “Look at us,” gloats Ki-taek, “The rain falling on our lawn as we sip whiskey.” “What if Mrs. Park returns right now?” replies Chung-sook. “You’d all scatter like cockroaches.” Their reverie is shattered instead by maid Moon-gwang, mid-deluge, looking haggard after her dismissal. She married an unlucky man, Geun-se, who lost it all on a failed cake shop, and her lot was to toil for the Park family and keep him secretly alive in their bomb shelter. Geun-se embodies han. For 4 years, 3 months, and 17 days, he starved in a bomb shelter built, like those in many expensive South Korean homes, to protect the owners from “North Korea or the creditors.” Reunited, Moon-gwang grabs his bald, infantile head and shoves a bottle in his mouth. He is lack-of-agency embodied, but he specifies the sociopolitical origins of han. “I am
Or Banished
Photo by Megan Chung by Sarah Berg or, banished family history is hot these days / so quit asking why / i’m interested / all i wanted / was a story a grandparent / or two / a dotted line / an arrow indicating direction an ancestor imagined / in nineties dress or bad behavior / in shakespearean manner / this story’s rebels do die they who traveled / interior distances / doubled back / into the south looking to me / like foreign newsprint / dead then / i unfeel like dipping / paper in water til / it’s gone forgetting tastes / like strange medicine / remembering like wet ink / from stone i demand to / listen as if / i can understand that / mourning is hereditary / justice feels like weeping til i get / a new tongue or til the border weeps / itself into waiting arms that wait for / mouths / that ex / claim salt