lost seouls

if you don’t realize by now that i’m as sensitive as a person can get lemme make you well aware of that fact by telling you this fact.

whenever i see a particularly simply image of korea – women closing their stand at a market, kids in their hanboks, halmony’s laughing, i cry. plain and simple i cry.

 i feel like i was denied that part of me for many, many years. my mother is korean and she married my african-american father and i was born and raised in miami, with no korean family in sight. it wasn’t until a few years ago that i actually found them through the internet and you can imagine the tears my emo (aunt) and eomma had after found  and then seeing each other for the first time in nearly thirty years last april. and when they sat me down in my emo’s living room and told me story after story about their childhood, for the first time, i cried like a baby. it’s not that i don’t love my black family, and you will hardly find a sister more militant than i, but i yearned for my korean roots.

and it hurts that stories are all i have. i wish i was an army brat sometimes, i would have had, at the very least, a portion of my life when i had the chance to breathe the air, walk the streets, see the people, my people.

even though i know being half black has the same side effect as it does being half korean – they’ll look at me as though i don’t belong, as though i am not really korean. i don’t give a rats ass right now.

 my halmony (grandmother) took my mother and aunt shopping and to see films. she played cards with her friends and laughed and fought and died there, my uncles played sports on those fields, went to poetry spots and got scolded by my grandfather for being out too late on those streets, my mom and dad sat by that river for dates, my cousin was spoiled rotten by the ajuma’s and those markets. that is MY land. and i want to go.

i’ve never wanted anything so bad before.