The North Korea
Diairies
(no man’s land)
“The sound of silence:
a South Korean soldier takes down
loudspeakers on the border with North
Korea
yesterday. Both Koreas have ended decades
of propaganda broadcasts, which preached
the virtues of their rival
ideologies and encouraged each other’s
soldiers to defect,
in an effort to improve relations.”
– June 17, 2004, The Financial Times.
Pacific Ocean (air)
Koryo Air
A plane ride pinned
between strangers. We are related
the way moths pinned
to the same dry board are – paperthin wings
traced to identical
genus, species, form.
But mystery hides in
the map of our bodies in flight; who will spiral, zigzag,
or plummet into the
thin, singing air?
Tokyo (air)
Will I see North
Korea as a police state, a crumbling state, a resilient, bullied state?
*
North Korea in my
dreamscape:
land of white
projects, husk, lean reed.
Cragged peaks,
guerilla thicket,
soldiers with
soldered-on faces.
How much will we let
down our guards
(and Gods)? I’m
looking for
beauty, starkness,
dry-leaf or steel
bodies,
white scars of
suffering,
hunting for
palm-prints of joy.
Pyongyang, North Korea (land)
Day 1 – Landing
A camera crew films
us at the airport. Security clusters closer, a cloud
of flies.
I surrender my cell
phone to a soldier who talks through his cupped hand, covering
a toothless mouth.
Our translator Jang
wears a beige skirt-suit. Matching heels, silver straps. A pure
gold bracelet. Her
voice is soft, slightly British (which makes her
leaner, more pink).
Our old driver
swerves the indigo van. Blasts air-conditioning on high.
Luggage is bellboyed
away at Koryo Hotel, Pyongyang’s finest. Bedsheets
embroidered with
blue silk. A sitting room overlooks the empty
street. Free combs,
a mirrored closet.
A white-suited woman
directs non-existent traffic. She turns
and turns in four directions,
a broken compass.
Man Du Seh, Pyongyang (land)
Day 1
The Art of Bowing
Kim Il Sung’s statue
is hammered
out of bronze. All
50 feet,
complete with
wind-blown jacket, double chin.
Prodded, we dip our
heads. Two brides in pink
hanboks pass with
starched grooms, faces pinched,
All four bow from
the waist –
hems sway like
rustling bells.
How much does he
weigh? I asked.
Once, a knee-high
student answered:
as heavy as the
hearts of all the Korean people.
Our tour guide’s
eyes redden.
I drop a bouquet of
fake tiger
lilies by his
burnished feet.
van ride (land)
Day 2
1.
We press our faces
against the van windows.
Watch: little boys
pee in arcs
grandmothers hunch over grass,
skirts like white curtains
between their ropy legs,
brittle soldiers
with knife-carved cheekbones,
a girl
tracing a wall
with a stick.
In the white morning
haze,
I squint at vague
figures –
Sticks, pines,
water:
the mere
outline of things.
mid-meeting (water)
Day 4
Our translator weeps
and asks us,
How can you survive,
drowning in capitalist land?
She dabs a napkin to
her eyes.
She crowns us
heroes; we bow
our shameful heads.
group presentation (land)
Day 6
For two hours I sit
buried by words like nuclear disarmament, plutonium.
They choose me to
discuss war. Studies confirm 3 simple truths:
- One country
snarls, one cowers and snarls.
Proclamations bristle stiff as pine
needles.
- (The poor
evaporate like mist.
Grow rib-thin on grass pancakes,
or die in green uniforms far
from where they first sucked milk.)
- A country, like a
body,
gnaws away at itself
when it starves. It sucks its own bones
dry.
(water/no water)
Day 9
Outside of
Pyongyang,
city of stone and
blown light,
city of empty
hotels,
a green, humming,
country,
strung with ochre
beads of oxen,
a lean country.
flight to Paek Du San (air)
Day 10
A poet-youth hoards
the van mic,
croons a dirty love
song he learned in Cuba
where, he
confesses, he starved on platanos,
waving a paper
flag.
He returned to
North Korea a lean man,
yellow eyes,
mottled skin,
70s shades looped
into an unbuttoned
cardigan.
If I was born here,
my skin
might also be
marred with tiny blue spots
like his, my poems
quick as minnows –
flashes of silver,
half-light,
half-lecture.
Here, the state
imprisons poet-traitors
and rewards
poet-nationalists
trips to Cuba,
perhaps a 13-inch television…
(Never a hero),
how brave a Poet
could I be in this
country?
Pueblo Spy Ship Museum (water)
Day 11
History is a series
of myths. One chooses
which myths to
believe.
Hospital # 3, Pyongyang (land)
Day 12
We keep getting
shipped away
to elite areas.
A frail woman in a
black shirt, dazed,
led away by a thin
man.
She sits down on the
stone steps
and puts her
forehead in her hands.
We pull away and our
van
Drives us in crazy
circles.
Baek Du San to Pyongyang (air)
Day 16
Comrade Huh’s Words
America is a great
hawk
pecking you, a tiny
brown seed.
In your city,
tattered men
line streets like
peppers
on black mats laid
out to dry.
Here, no one sleeps
on concrete.
Three year olds
toddle on sidewalk
Alone, light or no
light.
When you return,
tell them about
Pyongyang, city of
blue lights,
Of me, my Cuban
songs,
Famine or no famine,
tell them
Our army hauls
stones
To rebuild a city
their planes bombed
to chimneys
50 years ago,
Tell them we still
guard
the door of our hut
With a sword,
protecting mothers,
sons.
Remember: Han
pitchul,
We spring from
one river of blood.
Myuhwang San (mountain)
Day 17
Faith is a long,
dangling bridge
over the steep
canyon.
The slightest shake
makes us grip
the ropes. When the
wood creaks,
we stare down at a
gaping
green abyss.
DMZ (land/no man’s land)
Day 19
(On both sides, people pee, people drink rice wine, people unbutton
skirts fervently, people walk by the river and drenched in rain, people
beat chests and tear undershirts...)
Children’s Palace (land)
Day 20
Inside the
Children’s Palace,
A nine-year old girl
works a green stitch
of grass into her
tapestry, flinches
when I zoom in the
camera.
Yet another room:
twenty girls play zithers,
fingers plucking
strings in unison,
heads nodding like
breeze-blown azaleas.
Last room: a tourist
trap with celadon ashtrays,
paintings of
drumming-women
shaped like the
peninsula.
I spot an American,
arms crossed
over a red Ecko
t-shirt.
We talk Hawai’i, hip
hop.
His name is Mike –
he’s Mexican, an
Army boy, broad-chested,
and suddenly I am
homesick for English.
He disappears into
the fold of tourists,
young soldier on a
mission
to gather the lost
bones of his country.
In a way, our
missions are similar; we pick up
shrapnel of a war we
inherited:
songs, flags,
bodies.
We are the young
enemies
with lonely
genitals,
in the world’s last
divided country,
intimidated by child
prodigies
with deft hands and
rubber limbs
who are quicker,
smarter than us.
We skim the edges of
this stone city,
find comfort in the
simplest of emotions –
lust, over a green,
trinket-filled table.
In the Great Hall, a
young girl backflips
like a windmill In a
seqined red dress,
her plastic smile
that turns and
turns until she
sticks her landing,
throws up her thin
arms
for applause.
© 2004 Ishle Park
Ishle Park is a Korean
American woman who writes and sings slam poetry. Her work has been
published in 20 anthologies, including the Beacon Best 2001 and The Best
American Poetry 2003. She performs across the United States and
Korea. Her CD, Work in love, is available at
www.ishle.com. She recently published her first book, The
temperature of this water.
