5.

My grandmother speaks Korean but, a child of colonial Korea, reads and writes in Japanese. Now, of course, she conducts her life in English. She worries what I’ll do with an English degree, not because of the “adjunct situation” or the overall decline of the humanities, but because she knows countries are not the concrete, black-outlined shapes that seem so permanent when we open our textbooks. She knows how history can wipe away a person’s language. She’s been the real civilian I can only try to imagine when I read articles in the newspaper over hot coffee.

It’s my grandmother who ran, four months pregnant, five-year-old daughter clasped to her back. It’s she who pleaded and begged, who prayed that a soldier would listen when she screamed her name. It’s her home that was severed by an arbitrary line, her family, like a brittle branch, snapped down the middle.