Gwangju, South Korea — My dad used to be a knife. This is not a fact he gave up freely. The fun ones rarely are. I came across the old knifehood while looking through my dad’s photos. In one, he wears a jacket emblazoned with the name “Karl.” Who’s Karl? “Me,” he said. It was the name his uncle gave him when he first immigrated to the United States. He changed it long before I came into the picture, because it was hard to pronounce. He would say it “kal,” Korean for “knife.” He’d sign his letters with a drawing of a dagger. I’m on Day 3 of living in a new city, and I could be a knife. Or a sword. Or a spoon. I’ve decided to move from New Haven to Korea, a place I’ve never lived. I was born in West Virginia (mountain mama, take me home, country roads…). Where was I? Oh. Gwangju. That’s the city I am writing this from. Fourteen hours ahead and full of motorbikes. Here, I’m enjoying the experience of doing everything wrong. Strike one: I’m not fluent in Korean. Strike two: I’m super slow, I’m realizing. At the market, I took out my cash, counted it, told the clerk I didn’t have a points number, and was halfway through bagging my items when I realized the biker behind me had lapped me and was on his way out. I walk through the streets bewildered and excited. Every time a stranger helps me, I feel like they are saving my life. I sent a letter at the post office just now and felt so accomplished I could cry. I haven’t cried here yet, but I got close on the last leg of my journey, city bus 29. I rushed toward the open door to get on, then heard screams behind me. A girl had fallen hard on the sidewalk. What? I didn’t board the bus. She was back on her feet and gone before I knew it, and a woman on the bus stop bench was staring in my direction. I thought she felt bad I missed the bus, or that I was maybe stupid for doing so when it didn’t help the girl anyway. I blinked back tears of confusion. The next 29 came, and I glanced at the staring woman while hauling my suitcase up the steps. Her head was still turned toward where I was standing. So she hadn’t been looking at me at all. The bus driver yelled a stressed complaint and pointed to my suitcase. It was too heavy. It, along with the backpack on my shoulders, contained everything I own. I got off the bus and rounded the corner, where a taxi picked me up. “Why don’t you just make money in America?” the taxi driver said in Korean. “I wanted to be in Korea,” I replied, laughing. “You wanted to know where your parents are from,” he said. Exactly. He told me Trump needs to be killed — he did that throat-cutting gesture to make sure his message passed the language barrier — and triple-checked that I agreed the president is “bad.” Cherry blossom petals floated toward the car as he closed the windows, protecting his seats from the flower snow. I’m being a bit abstract with “where my parents are from.” My mom has never been to Gwangju, but in a way she led me here. That’s another case of a photo revealing secrets my parents didn’t volunteer. In that photo, my mom sings in an open field. She is leading the students at her university in a protest song against the Korean government. It was a period of mass uprising I would like to understand in my lifetime, if I can. It hit a critical point in Gwangju in 1980. My mom immigrated to the United States six years later. When she worked at a call center, she was jealous of the new teen on the job who picked up English faster than she did. She enrolled in community college for language practice and made up numbers for the homework in her sociology class. (“They wanted me to sit at a cafe and count the number of cars that passed,” she said. She wasn’t doing that. She had babies at home.) These worries and frustrations were always just stories to me. Walking through unfamiliar streets, raw as an undone scab, I’m beginning to understand what words could never say. I get up before the sunrise, still jet-lagged, and watch the light fall over the mountains. I wonder if I will tell the young people in my life about the adventures I’ve been up to, or if they are doomed to piece it together through old photos and transnational migration as I am. I will say it’s looking good for these yet-to-be-born kids. I’m scheduled to write multiple articles a week for the Independent’s multi-city Midbrow arts project, reporting from the new Gwangju bureau. I’m sure there’s plenty of mystery I’ll get away with still, but I’m destined for a lengthy paper trail. View from the KTX cross-country train from Seoul to Gwangju. The post Daughter Of Knife appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less