Finding Samcheong Dong Part Deux

The next day I returned to the Changdeokgung palace 6 blocks away, a Unesco World Heritage site and undoubtedly more popular than the Gyeongbukgung. It's interesting how rather arbitrary opinions define the way we think...someone at Unesco liked one palace better than another, therefore it becomes more worthwhile. After all, what really separates the noteworthy and the forgettable, success and failure? Opinion.

The Changdeokgung was similar to its older and larger counterpart, except for an exquisite garden situated on a lake in the inner courtyards, aptly named the Secret Garden. Well, it wasn't so secret anymore. Practically everybody who was anybody who visited South Korea had to get a photo with the Secret Garden. It was a greater celebrity than Lee Byung Hun. Aggressive photographers bellowed at tourists blocking shots of willow branches, pavilions, and mirrorlike ponds.

Truth was, the Secret Garden wasn't photogenic. Digitally, the waters came out muddy, and the trees appeared awkward and crooked, gangly sprouting teenagers with leaves. I wondered how many enjoyed the living beauty of such terraced landscapes, since most did not lift their eyes from the camera's viewfinder. Reminded me of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, prosaic men who preferred to see the dark silhouettes of things rather than the things themselves. When faced with the possibility of something real, do we make the leap?

As I left, I saw two fellow backpackers like myself. (Okay, so I really wasn't a backpacker yet, but I pretended to be one in my mother's absence. It made me feel more adventurous.) One was a mild-mannered Korean girl and the other, a beautiful Caucasian girl with an almost tangible exuberance for life. They looked like college students. I introduced myself and invited them to coffee to escape the sweltering heat.

Where, you ask? Samcheong Dong, of course!

Over tea and Kahlua, they told me they were sisters, visiting from Belgium. My bewilderment must have surfaced in my face, because Sun Mee, the Korean girl, leaned forward. "I was adopted. I'm Belgian. People come up and speak to me in Korean, but I have no idea what they are saying."

"It terrifies her," the emerald-eyed Cheryl laughed. "She shakes her head and turns away. Really quickly."

"She's not afraid of anything," Sun Mee countered. "She does whatever gets into her head. Moving out, quitting jobs, moving in with her boyfriend, takes off whenever to see the world."

"She thinks too much and she's too responsible," Cheryl gently berated. "It took forever to get her to Korea."

"Why Korea?" I asked.

"I just wanted to see the country I left when I was 6 months old. And I want to meet my mother."

I found out later that she did meet her birth mother. That it was like two strangers meeting, and that it felt like coming home. How they visited temples, Yangsan, museums, ate black pork dinners together, and still felt out of place, the residual memory of how things could have been permeating their conversation. Yet they still talk, though both are shy.

I realized that no matter where you go, you still have roots. Whether it is near or far, whether it hurts or not, your flesh calls to you like a conscience. Blood is a magnet; it eventually brings you home. I remembered I had left my mother back at the hotel.

I lost touch with Sun Mee soon after. But I wrote this for her, a Rendez-vous*.


Perhaps she will embrace the birth mother.
Marvel at the eyelid's flat plain, its singular whiteness
undisturbed by a crease, so like her own.

The woman's hair would be cropped close to the scalp
or pulled into a bun, speckled grey from weathering Korean snow.
And the girl would spot stray hairs, black as a calligrapher's ink.

protruding from the woman's neat ensemble, the disarray
she must have felt, finding herself with child. Aneong hay say oh?
the girl might ask, hesitation inflecting the vowels incorrectly.

This is not the question she wants to ask. Speech suspended in the
throat like a muffled bird. The woman responds in English, language
native to neither, but a common tongue and good enough.

Meanwhile her sister, a Belgian, is waiting.
She's the landscape of an entire country onto herself, steely confidence,
wheat shade of hair, and green eyes open to all they can hold.

The girl is thinking of tomorrow when she departs, what to say, and
how to pour feeling into it. Outside the sky is thundering.
She's hoping the silence between strangers is
like a break in sound, resting
between great chords of music.


*First published in the River Poets Journal, 2009