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15 Roots and Wings Joann Yi Jung Huh No, my soul is not asleep. It is awake, wide awake. It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches, its eyes wide open, far off things, and listens at the shores of the great silence. —Antonio Machado, “Last Night” Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado For a long time, a period of eighteen years, my soul slept. It remained dormant , giving no thought to one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves: Who am I? From birth to emigration from my homeland, from my entry into America to entry into college, I never seriously asked myself who I was. It never occurred to me to inquire about it. Until age seven, my world was Korea. My parents were Korean. It was simple: I was Korean. And then we moved to the United States, greeted by a note in our mailbox telling us to “go back where [we] came from.” The note did not bother me—I was seven and carefree. I would have gladly gone back to Korea. My parents still desire to return. Such longing is natural: They spent their formative years in Korea. They have deep roots and attachments to our homeland. My father was born three years before the civil war, and tells me bits and pieces of his childhood during that indigent era. He recollects funny, sad, and tragic stories of those years. It was his world, and still is. Whenever he summons up the past, my father tenderly speaks of his mother. And he blinks back the heavy tears that threaten to fall or breaks out in joyous laughter . Both reveal a deep sense of loss and longing. I think my grandmother represents Korea to him: someone he loves so profoundly but can never see again. My grandmother has passed away, and so has the Korea that he experienced . Now all he has are memories. I do not possess many memories of my ‹rst seven years in Korea. But those years and my parents’ in›uence have been: I have an indescribable love for Korea. It blossomed further when I learned its history, and all the tragedies that my homeland weathered and overcame. I was deeply touched by the hardships that Korea endured, almost as if they had happened to me personally. In a sense, they had. I realized that I was never meant to survive —not as an ethnic Korean. Japanese colonialism, during its third and ‹nal mobilization phase, attempted to eradicate everything and anything Korean. Every word I read of the colonial period struck my heart, and I bled. I bled over the “comfort women.” I bled over the countless executions of independence ‹ghters. I bled over the murder of Yu Guan Soon. And the stream of blood became a torrential river as I learned of the division into north and south, the civil war, and the authoritarian regimes of several past leaders: I wept over the horrors that Koreans had committed against one another. I still weep. Korean history came to me in college. My parents encouraged me to read about it, but they gave me books in the Korean language. Because I came to the United States at such a young age, I could not and still cannot understand sophisticated Korean books: I can read the words, but understanding the vocabulary is a different matter. And Korean history was not offered in high school. Nor was history of any other part of the world except Europe. I cannot , of course, expect high schools to create such classes when they have to offer classes on subjects like ancient Roman civilization or home economics. The only thing I learned about Korea from the second to the twelfth grade was the Korean War. Which was actually a civil war. Civil. Fratricidal. I do not know if a nation warring against itself is “worse” than two different nations ‹ghting, but a fratricidal war just seems to carry so much more gravity . My class spent fewer than twenty minutes on that war, and I initially learned about it as it was taught: Americans saving foreign lives in some war in some other part of the world. It never hit me that some of my loved ones had survived that horri‹c war. That it represents the greatest thorn in the Korean psyche: The country was divided on the whim of another nation, and Roots and Wings 113 [3.144.212.145] Project MUSE (2024-04-19...

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