Korean Hillside

 

I’ve arrived at a westerly mountainside, and it’s

lined with grassy mounds of dirt. At my

garden, Grandparents lay vibrant

plastic flowers on a mound. I sing to it

child-flower songs and lie on my back. My

feet face the mountaintop, and from that

backward slope, I fall into the sky.

 

Grandmother’s cursing strikes me down to

earth; she has thrown a shot of clear

liquor onto her father’s grave, roaring,

You have died too soon.

 

 

History of Korea through Language

 

My grandfather ticked his tongue at me,

sounding the clicks that women make in

markets when talking ill of some neighbour’s

daughter, when he learned that I can’t read hanja.

 

(Once upon a time, there was a great Korean king

who declared: Let’s stop using hanja; we need to

match our blocklike tongue to a new alphabet.

No more Chinese.)

 

But even with the birth of the native

phonetic script five centuries ago,

I find myself struggling, deciphering

pictographs that still exist in high newspapers and

theses, so here’s a manual to help you get started.

 

We use the Chinese symbols of natural elements for

the days of the week, like the “sun” for Sunday

and the “moon” for Monday, but our coincidence

with English ends there. Thursday’s for “wood”,

 

not Thor, and Friday intrigues me more than

the rest, for it has two different sounds,

swapping sides within its contexts. It is always geum for

“gold”, unless it is someone’s last name, like my mother’s,

 

which is Kim, like short for “Kimberly”, but it’s actually

Gim, which sounds just like the word for “seaweed”.

In English, you can call it just that, “seaweed”, or even

“laver” like the Welsh, but please never call it nori

like the Japanese, since you’ll need another manual that rewinds

thirty-five imperious years of oppression behind my request.