SEVERANCE 37°57´ 21˝ N 126°40´ 36˝ E
Katherine Yungmee Kim
i will bury him myself. and even if i die in the act, that death will be a glory. i will lie with the one i love and loved by him— an outrage sacred to the gods! i have longer to please the dead than please the living here: in the kingdom down below i’ll lie forever. do as you like, dishonor the laws the gods hold in honor. —Sophocles, Antigone
“Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives. A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family— and, often, is all that remains of it.” —Susan Sontag, On Photography
I Amugodoupsoyo means there’s nothing left—nothing there, nothing to see. It’s the kind of phrase you say when you open your palms to emptiness, perhaps with a shrug. I’ve run all out of something. Or This place has been deserted. It was the phrase my uncle used to describe the land in Yeoncheon. Don’t go there, they concurred. Gogi gajima. It wasn’t because of the North Koreans or the missiles or the mines. I was told that the houses were thatch-roofed and the roads would be flooded beyond traversable areas, but mostly that the journey would be arduous. It was changma, monsoon season, and a bad one at that. “There’s a bridge,” my mother’s cousin Kitae explained. “I don’t know if the bridge is still there, but if it is, you go over it and head towards a grove of trees.”
II I first met my maternal grandmother when I was four. (She and me, we bookend this photo.) I have no memory of the encounter, just this faded Polaroid of my two families merged in a Kimpo Airport hallway. We were roughly assembled. Later, I knew there to be conflict between the two families, centering on my father’s family’s disdain for my mother’s less-to-do lineage. Judging from their parapet of wealth. The Sohns recoiled, and for reasons I’ll never understand, my mother dutifully seceded. Most of the people in this photo are now dead. Nobody knows for certain—I’ve asked repeatedly for confirmation—but it is presumed that a stranger took this photo.
III It was a mirage, this land, of a long-lost orchard. My mother spun tales about her childhood. Summer peach juice, dribbled. A riverbank gallivanting. A vague funeral of her grandfather, memoried. She watched, hiding behind a rice paper screen, and licked her finger to bore a hole for watching. I know this room, she said. Let’s take a look. The body wrapped in hemp, supine and stiffened. These are the preparations. Let’s take a look, she said again and the boy said, nonono, but then, let me look. And he look.
IV Homing in, trying to find the land. Was it by the river? Yes, I seem to recall. It was by where the tributary turns, where the water flow meanders, sinuous and shaped like a snake, like a hairpin, like the letter U. There the roads segment, hollowed lines like bracchia. The towns dot, with their short vowel marks; mountains stand large, while faded counties recede‌ The name of the village was etched on a plaque. The plaque was placed vertically on the pontoon of the bridge. They told me the water would be so high I couldn’t cross. They told me that the land would be impossible to find. I said, Mother, please. You know well that everywhere can be found.
Verdant satellite treetops and the wide muddy river, murky with sediment and depth, swathing its own particular cut. I see tracts of land, farm plots, and harvest lines. Dirt paths the color of dun. The forest is green, the canopy darker still. The sifting silt, rifts severing from edge to edge, west to east. Across all those towns, I think. Splitting all those places with their provenances and their titles, places that have names, that were long named and placed, settled. (Sometimes I think of this stagnation, of this nation halted and split. Where we must hover bated, and then stagger within the void.)
V
VI
VII Hiroshima was bombed on August 6, 1945; Nagasaki on August 9. On August 10, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, thus the start of the Soviet-Japanese War. That evening, U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes, a former Supreme Court Justice, requested the construction of a plan by the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee for a joint Soviet-American occupation of Korea. Late that evening, poring over a 1942 National Geographic map, two young State Department employees arbitrarily made a decision that would determine the future of Korea. During a meeting on August 14, 1945, Colonel Charles Bonesteel and I retired to an adjacent room late at night and studied intently a map of the Korean peninsula. Working in haste and under great pressure, we had a formidable task: to pick a zone for the American occupation‌. Using a National Geographic map, we looked just north of Seoul for a convenient dividing line but could not find a natural geographic line. We saw instead the 38th parallel and decided to recommend that‌ [The State and War Departments] accepted it without too much haggling, and surprisingly, so did the Soviets.
VIII Panmunjom is a metonym, a name somewhat erroneously attributed to a broader geographic area. In this case, “Panmunjom,” the name of an old farming village, refers to the entire 79-acre Joint Security Area (JSA), a small roughly trapezoidal area containing several buildings and most significantly, bifurcated by the Military Demarcation Line, or MDL, which separates North Korea and South Korea, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) from the Republic of Korea (ROK). It is where the Armistice Agreement that ended the Korean War (in a stalemate) was signed on July 27, 1953. It is also the meeting point, established by the Military Armistice Commission (MAC) for the North and South, and sometimes referred to as “Truce Village.” All of this is within the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), which is 160 miles long and approximately 2.5 to 5 miles wide. The DMZ is comprised of the MDL, the Northern Limit Line (NLL) and the Civilian Control Line (CCL). The JSA is controlled by the United Nations Command Security Battalion (UNCSB), which is the ROK-US Combined Forces Command. Neighboring nearby to the south, the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission (NNSC), comprised of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland and Sweden was housed for many years.
IX Tulle puff and an open mouth, she is her thrilled eyes. Count the fingers as they stretch into a heroic wave. Feel the fishtails in her innards. She is teetering on her way down, spaceship spinning, and the gentle sway lullabies her vertigo away. But wait. Nothing moves in this photograph. The wind fails to blow. There is no scream heard. The pores of the rough paper betray her fair complexion, and cheap colors dye her natural contrasts all awry. She fell to the earth today. Hundreds of her scattered in the southerly winds and some stuck to roofs and some cushioned in backyards. Many soles stepped on her face. A sour man took a lighter to the corner and watched the flame change hues as it licked up and retreated into ash. Amusement Park Opens in DPRK! She was shot with a fast shutter by a man who was focusing below. He developed the film and clothespinned her dry and handed her to the printer who multiplied her. Over and over and over and over. Factory girls in black-stained cotton gloves stacked and cut her, twelve to a sheet, thousands in total. All elastic-banded in Room #40, Leaflet Manufacturing, and hand walked to the Balloon Propaganda Company, Division of the Enemy Force Breakup Operation Department. Down the hall from those who controlled the loudspeakers. Across the way from the billboard operation. She was tied to the bottom of a balloon, like the basket under a hot air, and she was cast away, with well wishes on an appropriately breezy day.
X Eundae-ri is Natural Monument No. 412, the only place where the water spider lives, setules sticking to the sides of plants and pebbles. After human battles, nature has healed here and found peace. The red-crowned crane migrates, round-tailed paradise fish and Manchurian trout swim back and forth from north to south and south to north—animals are doing this on their own. I have learned from them the lesson of coexistence on sky, on earth, on water…. Man has failed to take the proper steps to reunify. This place shouldn’t be used as a political device. It was given to us through the war, and we should approach it globally. But every time there is a new government, they come up with some plan for the DMZ area. Lee Myung-Bak came up with tourism; Park Geun Hye wants a peace park. The military puts up Christmas lights every year. I can’t tell you how many—it’s a military secret. But there are towers that are decorated with lights and when they are lit, the North Koreans can see them. This is our way of sending God’s will to North Korea. When I was a reporter in 1991, I was sent to the cover the story of the lights. When I got there, I just stood at the barbed wire. The fact that I couldn’t just cross over hit me so hard, it almost knocked the wind from me. And then I saw a bird—a goose, actually—just fly over the fence and I felt it would be so nice if I could do the same. When South Korea held the 1988 Olympics, the army bases ceased wildlife hunting in the DMZ. So now, the animals are not afraid of the soldiers anymore. In the winter the soldiers feed the animals; in a way, it’s a domestication. As a civilian, the animals are afraid of me—it’s the strangest thing. So now when I go in, I wear a uniform.
XI The old demographer told me how he was assigned in the early 1960s to the 502 Second Corps, the long-distance communication corps, which was like “the AT&T for the ROK Army.” There were lines criss-crossing the country and he was in charge of the construction and maintenance. His role was to look for espionage activity or armed patrols; if there was any sign of either, the lines had to be cut. In the fall, he explained, it was already cold in the mountainous areas, and they picked berries to eat. By winter, he was reassigned to the front in Yangpyong to ferry documents to a post three miles to the east. His platoon was mostly infantry—foot soldiers carrying artillery and machine guns. “The North Koreans would infiltrate, kill a guard and cut off his ear,” he said, dispassionately. Near the start of the war, he continued, the South Korean engineers destroyed the Hangang Bridge three days after the North invaded; it was detonated without warning at 2:30 in the morning. The noise woke his family, so they packed up their valuables— clothes, jewelry and grain—and left, walking about three miles from Seoul to Suwon. They walked day and night. The front line was coming down and the U.S. started to bomb the North Korean troops and some planes attacked the refugee trains in Suwon Station and many civilians were killed. His parents decided to walk three more days to Yongin, but when they got there, the North Korean soldiers were already there. So they hid in a cave, where they were detected by the North Korean soldiers, who ordered them—along with six other families—to come out with their hands up. They were marched into town and interrogated. They ate with
the soldiers, but his parents wanted them to leave in the morning, because South Korean observation planes were circling above and they didn’t want to get hit. So for the entirety of the next day, they walked to Ansong, passing convoy upon convoy of South Korean soldiers in retreat. They stayed in Ansong for three months. The town was North Korean-occupied and flew North Korean flags. His mother bartered her clothes and jewels for food, but ran out after a few weeks. His father, a pastor, made multiple trips back to Seoul—at least four or five times. “There were dead bodies and dead horses and the smell of death everywhere,” he recalled. Once, he accompanied his father and they slept at a churchmember’s house, hiding in the floorboards his mother’s clothes—her dowry: her hanbok, silks and velvets. Little by little, they brought it back to Ansong, where she took it to the village and sold it for grain. She peddled melons to the North Korean soldiers. His uncle—his mother’s brother who worked in the government— went to his office in Seoul and never returned. He landed in Sodaemun Prison, where they took the capitalists and intellectuals. Over the years, his family looked through all the corpses—prodded faces to the side with sticks—but never found him. The grain they bought was raw meal. Dried in the yard, it was mixed and cooked it with rice, but there was one batch that they served to his younger brother, who at the time was very little and very weak. They fed him the grain, which he couldn’t digest and along with his bellyache came a high fever that wouldn’t break. His father went out in search of help and came back with a medical student. The little boy died that night. His father took the body away and buried him by dawn. The next day the American tanks
came. It was Chusok. He was six years old. Every Chusok thereafter, the family would gather, but they could not eat. “They missed him by a day,” he sighed. Thirteen years later, the demographer went back to Ansong to find his brother’s gravesite. Everything had changed—the trees had sprouted and the sky and air was sharp and clear. “I went to pay tribute,” he said of this small parcel of land, “and to say goodbye.” He made it out to be both a regular thing and a monumental thing. “Every Korean has a story like mine,” he said.