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Plunder
- Plunder
Factually speaking, the Korean War isongoing and according toDr. Millard,the celebrated Americanplastic surgeon who brought hisdouble eyelid surgery to Korea,
"The Asian monolid gives the effect of an expressionless eye sneaking a peep through a slit."1
Millard mused, in his words, how to "deorientalize" the patient.
Unable to find research in English,he devised his own method of raisingthe bridge of the nose to widenthe spacebetween our eyes.
"Alas, folds that were exotic in Pusan or Kyoto will become strangely foreign to Main Street of a midwest town or under the columns of a southern mansion."
Sangapul magicto plunder our body facts asend-of-war goodwill.
Skin extracted asporcelain, jinju,the pearl of the "Orient."
Peregrinating in his "Asian wood,"He moved skin and hair to new parts of our bodies.We were, "alas, folds that were exotic"like this wrinkle that is the [End Page 83] slit through whichsight is blunted—the man in the drive-thru window at the localDairy Queen,staring through my sisters and me. [End Page 84]
Joey S. Kim is a scholar, creative writer, and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Toledo. She researches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature with a focus on Romantic literature, global Anglophone literature, postcolonial theory, and poetics. "Plunder" is part of her longer chapbook, Body Facts. She has published work in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Burningword Literary Journal, The Keats-Shelley Review, The Keats-Shelley Journal, The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter: @Joeykim
Footnotes
1. All quotes taken from David Ralph Millard's essay, "Oriental Peregrinations." Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 16, no. 5 (1955): 319-36.
