Obangsaek 

Andy Seungu Choi 

BLUE 

​

An acupuncture needle punctures the peninsula 

and pricks my thumb: my halmoni had never seen Korea before liberation.

Her father lay hunched in the coal mines of an archipelago 

separated by deep blue water and forcefully conjoined by the hungry embrace of empire.

subaltern bodies displaced in the process of hemispheric annihilation 

stars and stripes replace the rising sun, countless villages are lost in the hellfire soft corals suffocated under concrete / disembodied voices rising from scattered bones The 38th parallel

is stitched into the backs of the peninsula’s phantoms, begging to be soothed. 

 

I trace my roots to Paju, a city on Korea’s waist 

where the blue waters of the Imjin River flow in tight curves and barbed wire lines the motorway. Tourists flock to the Joint Security Area, snapping pics of a 70-year war to bring home with them but the DMZ is more than just Panmunjom to me 

more than just 160 miles of electric fences and land mines, or a skinny strip of unspoilt land

the dividing line transcends the peninsula’s crinkled terrain 

runs through the streets of every Koreatown, summons ghosts from all corners of the diaspora. Island ancestors, mountain ancestors calcified in submerged valleys 

calling across the Pacific, pulling on rotting commodity chains, hiding in the shadows of warships, stowing away in plane cargo to surmount the vast ocean 

to remind us of the motherland, whose waist is so unjustly cut in two 

and how the architects of division lie so near to us 

busy at work imposing sanctions and building bases 

while killing and exploiting just the same in these very streets. 

Occupied land on both sides of the Pacific swell with loud cries rising to the shared sky. The blaze of Minneapolis could be seen from the streets of Gwangju 

and the chants of the crowds could be heard from the seashells of Jeju. 

 

The Forgotten War is not forgotten. 

The separated families do not forget. 

The child killed by sanctions does not forget. 

The adoptee does not forget. 

The displaced peasant does not forget. 

The unconverted prisoner does not forget. 

The camptown sex worker does not forget. 

The stateless Zainichi Koreans do not forget. 

The massacre victims buried on mountain sides and under airports do not forget.

The refugees strafed while fleeing the conflict do not forget. 

The city residents huddled in the subway station during an air-raid drill do not forget.

The schoolgirls run over by US military tanks do not forget. 

The factory worker unable to support her family due to neoliberal reforms does not forget.

The red soil destroyed by napalm does not forget. 

The Algerians and the Vietnamese civilians who bared witness to the same colonial brutality which was perfected on the peninsula do not forget. 

Generations disemboweled by empire, forgotten only by the empire’s own annals. 

 

The steady beat of the hourglass drum reverberates through every mountain valley.

The piercing cry of the gong is carried by the ocean breeze 

as if imitating the whine of the 635,000 tons dropped on the north 

or the whistling of gunfire from the USS General Sherman sailing up the Taedong River. An uninvited intruder posing as a benevolent guest, feasting until there is no more blood left to flow from the peninsula’s valleys. 

 

How many more monsoons must flow in from the Pacific we can cross that dividing line?

How many more typhoons must roll up the coast from Okinawa before the land is free? 

 

RED 

 

Dollars and dollars and dollars pour into the country like mackerel from a winter

catch. Structural adjustments are made with surgeon-like precision. 

A scab hits a worker’s head, disfiguring him permanently. 

Smog drifts across the DMZ from the beehive apartments of Seoul. 

Politicians advertise free economic zones and fancy megaprojects. 

Shell casings emerge from the mudflats of Maehyang-ri. 

The last ritual is performed on Gureombi Rock before it is dynamited to build a naval base.

Riot police are deployed in rice fields as students gather around the entrance of Camp Humphreys. 

 

My great aunt 

born in Jeju on the eve of the massacre 

300 miles from the hallowed halls of the capital 

exiled to the long shadow of the volcano. 

An island with its own cosmos, legends of the sea and the sky 

witness to countless uprisings sweeping the circumference of the rocky coast

and penetrating deep into the gotjawal forest. 

Memories of death are hidden under golf courses and luxury resorts. 

The waves that crash upon the cliffs murmur to the basalt walls and the infertile soil

of the guerilla shrouded by evergreen leaves 

and the shaman whose song rises above Hallasan. 

A song carried beyond the reef to Osaka as the villages are torched 

unable to return with the reversal of the current 

kept alive by a language unintelligible with the tongue spoken on the mainland.

바당 badang (sea, ocean) 

밧담 basdam (stone fence around a field) 

보리클 bolikeul (barley field after harvest) 

도시리다 dosirida (let somebody know) 

거둡다 geodubda (harvest, gather) 

건들마 geondeulma (wind during the summer rainy season) 

흥글다 heunggeulda (shake, swing, wave, sway) 

궵씨 gwebssi (rice cake used for ancestral rites) 

친부찌다 chinbujjida (help people become friends) 

시꾸다 sikkuda (appear in a dream) 

과랑과랑 gwalanggwalang (sunny part of the day) 

 

Learning how to measure the tides 

trace the moon and plow the earth. 

I cast the broken fragments of my Konglish into the sea. 

Living artifacts of the neocolonial still weighing down on my tongue. 

Picking up what I have lost / what has been taken from me 

and remember the masses of people huddled in the caves 

listening to the water drip like the whispers of the forest spirits 

and the distant sound of gunfire coming ever closer. 

 

YELLOW 

 

“Are you from North or South Korea?” 

​

I come from a peninsula with a longitudinal span of 3,000 ri, jutting out into the northwestern Pacific as a land bridge between the continent and the scattered archipelagoes. I come from a place untraversable by land, a place perpetually at war, a historical crossroads, a site of imperial collusion. I come from a place way across the ocean but intimately tied to the banks and the bases and the bureaucracies over here, a place haunted by what you call the “Forgotten War.” When you talk about Korea it is not a nation, a peninsula, or a place but a projection, narratives that inevitably cast the “East'' as automatized and inhuman whether it serves the purpose of villainizing the north or praising the south. But the empire has stretched so far that for you, Korea lies to the west, not to the east, across a militarized ocean that the empire calls its own. And as the empire has encircled the globe, so has Korea- Korea as in the diaspora pulled to every corner of the world by the global flows of capital, Korea as in the international struggle against imperialism, Korea as in solidarity amongst division. 

The DMZ is everywhere. 

 

“The DMZ is everywhere?” 

​

The DMZ runs through Palestine just as it does through Korea when Palestinian refugees are unable to return to their home villages. The DMZ runs through Okinawa when Okinawans are

prohibited from visiting their ancestors’ grave sites because they lie on a US military base. The DMZ runs through Vietnam when the victims of Agent Orange cannot get full compensation for their suffering. The DMZ runs through the Philippines when Filipino community leaders are massacred in counterinsurgency operations directed by the United States. The DMZ runs through Guam when sacred Chamorro sites are destroyed to build a firing range. The DMZ runs through Hawai’i when native Hawaiians are forcefully evicted from their homes to make way for resort development and military installations. The DMZ runs through Puerto Rico when residents of Vieques are poisoned by the US Navy’s activities. The DMZ runs through Laos when Laotians are killed by unexploded ordnances. The DMZ runs through Cuba along the barbed wire fence of Guantánamo Bay. The DMZ runs through Afghanistan, through Libya, through Grenada, throughout the entire world. 

 

“What is Korea then?” 

 

Korea is a peninsula surrounded by ever-warming seas and becoming more and more subtropical every year. Korea is a strip of land raised and developed in the Cenozoic and Mesozoic orogenies. Korea is a nation-state consolidated under the Silla Kingdom in the 7th Century. Korea was first described as the “hermit kingdom” by William Elliot Griffis, an American orientalist in 1882. Korea is invisible above the 38th Parallel, packaged and shipped all over the world below it. Korea is famous for its never-ending blocks of apateu, its army base stew, and its haendeupon manufacturing. Korea is the 7.4 million people in the diaspora. Korea is the flesh of the earth twisted by ancient tectonics, laid bare for the weathering of history, and left open to witness unimaginable destruction and limitless possibilities. 

 

Our peninsula’s story meanders like the countless rivers that flow west from the Baekdudaegan. Our dreams are launched to the infinite horizon beyond the breaking waves, looking southwards, eastwards, in whatever direction, searching for whatever it is that may set all of us free. 

 

WHITE 

 

The first time I remember apologizing to anyone was when my elementary school librarian told me her grandfather had died in the Korean War. 

“I’m sorry,” I said head bowed, and at that moment, I was, under the lingering gaze of my peers A soldier of the Korean People’s Army, John Doe strung up through my bayonet, his sacred flesh pierced by my savage hands, the red afterglow of a foreign Sun seeping into my coin slot eyes stretched thin like blood sausage and the 38th Parallel. 

A zipperhead piled onto rows of bodies arranged like cypress trees on the side of a dirt road, carrying a persistent bullet in my body that penetrates through my ancestors and haunts this peninsula like a distorted shadow. I am faceless, a buried ghost tethered to the thick concrete

of U.S. army garrisons and crucified to the barbed wire of the Demilitarized Zone.

 

In Korean there is a word called han, a visceral state of intense rage and resentment stemming from the trauma of colonization, war, division, and occupation that has haunted generations as a vicious specter and a catalyst for resistance. 

 

a map of the alien motherland drawn on every flag 

strips of calcified land between rivers of blood 50 stars, 500 years of conquest i saw in

my sleep that it was 1950, the 

bombing of pyongyang had not yet started 

and all i could see was 

the grins of 100 senators one solitary bald eagle, suffocated under the packed under one

dome weight of olive branches and aircraft bombers location: washington, district of

columbia 

district: the territory in jurisdiction columbus: the shivering masses graced by this of a feudal

lord, from the latin god-given land, sentinels of blood, distringere (draw apart) the cries of

millions stomped under their feet in 1945, u.s. forces invaded korea and 

established a military government, effectively 

dividing the peninsula. by 1953, 5 million people 

had died in the korean war. 

 

BLACK 

 

August has stretched on drowsily for too long 

the bittersweet taste of that hot summer day haunts every fireworks display.

Suspended over loudspeakers and ICBMS 

the air stands still as if about to be broken by the cries 

of a million flag bearers pouring into the streets just like in 1945 

upraised arms beaten down by barbed wire and B-29s. 

on a peninsula of ghosts perpetually threatening resurrection in the form

of tongue twisters whispered under the cover of nightly curfew 

of another student engulfed in flames, of another ceremony on campus to honor them of grey

work clothes neatly folded in the corner of an apartment to be torn down, gathering dust of an unconverted prisoner crying out to the moon from his cell 

of a scorched-earth operation pulling a village out of the frail tissue of collective memory of

a peasant wiping her brow and feeling a harsh tugging in her stomach of a crowd of

bullhorns encircling a korean school, a rising sun on both sides of the horizon of

unexploded bombs hiding under the bustling streets of pyongyang 

of toxic waste dumped into the han river by the US military 

of war drills reminding the weary land that the armistice is just that, a frozen war of

camptowns, of air bases, of firing ranges, of training areas, of naval facilities, of military

installations, of power projection platforms, of missile defense systems 

of a peninsula trampled, walked over, choked, stabbed, flattened, shackled, and

of a nation divided at its waist, bearing a scar almost a century in the making.

If anything, the silt along the Imjin River will wash me clean. 

If anything, the collective rhythms of a global pungmul will set us free. If anything, the monsoon will no longer have to release its heavy belly over barbed wire If anything.