Going Back: A Story in Letters
“Going Back: A Story in Letters” is a lyric essay that documents the speaker’s ever-changing relationship with her birth country (Korea) and home country (U.S.), as she contemplates and then executes a return to her so-called “motherland.” It is constructed as a series of letters back and forth between the speaker and the personified countries.
First published in Water~Stone Review Vol. 12/2009, it was later nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Many thanks to Barrie Jean Borich and the editorial staff for selecting it.
EXCERPT:
To My Two ‘Homelands’:
Today I climbed what I thought was Bongwashan. Do you remember the Telephone Game, where the players sit in a circle and whisper a secret from ear to ear? Sometimes when adoptees go to Korea, information gets passed to them from adoptee to adoptee. An entire guidebook via the Telephone Game. This is how I ended up on top of Bongwashan with three adoptee friends, all thinking we were in the right place.
We wanted to make offerings to the ancestors, and one of us had been told how to get there, so we bought soju and fruit, and my friend learned the proper way to worship. But, the trail leading up the mountain was dotted with small exercise stations, and from the beginning I had a feeling we were in the wrong place. At the top we found many things—badminton courts, outdoor weights, and even a house. But no shrines. Koreans in smartly matched workout gear gave us funny looks; and all around us were groves of trees, the ends of which were wrapped in white paper. Not one of us knew what kind of trees they were, and something inside me felt guilty for not knowing, like the knowing was somehow Korean, unlike me.
So, the four of us found a secluded bench off the path. Someone had left a scarf, an ivory square with pale pink roses, sitting on the bench. We chose to take it as a sign, a gift, and we made the scarf and the bench our altar and made the offerings, anyway, while anajashe watched us from the path. The four of us sat there afterward in silence, as the mosquitoes nibbled at our legs, mosquitoes that I swear are bigger, faster, and smarter than their Minnesota cousins. We sat there until our legs were covered in bites, as the mosquitoes happily took our blood. We gave it to them freely.
[END EXCERPT]