Long Division

A remnant of the Berlin Wall, now merely ceremonial and sculptural, stands in Potsdamer Platz, in central Berlin. The poet and translator Don Mee Choi asked to meet there in early December for lunch, followed with a long, looping stroll.

For years, I had admired Choi’s poetry, politics, and translations from afar; for weeks, we planned to close the distance between page and person. This was my first time in Berlin and her second—she was there on a yearlong fellowship from the DAAD/German Academic Exchange Service to finish her trilogy of verse on the Korean War, which she began in 2016. She walked me through a cold, bright center city marked by the concrete slabs of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Brandenburg Gate, the Bundestag, and Kathe Kollwitz’s Neue Wache pietà.

To Koreans both native and diasporic, including Choi and me, Germany bears the resonance of having been razed by war, then occupied and split, and now made whole again. It is also where Choi’s parents and siblings spent seven years after their emigration from Korea by way of Hong Kong. "What I think about when I walk around Berlin is, this is the future, not the past, the future of the Koreas," she told me. "I felt strongly when I first came to see the remnants of the wall. What will we do with all that barbed wire fence and the land?"

This way of seeing, at once prophetic and hardboiled, weaves through all her poetry, including her latest book, DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020), the second in her trilogy. To date, Choi has published three collections, several chapbooks, an anthology of Korean women’s verse, and a co-translation of poems by Kim Yideum. She has also translated six volumes by the renowned Korean feminist poet Kim Hyesoon. It was through translating Kim, Choi told me, that she was able to "find a language" for her ideas, one that hovers between geographies and tongues. "I’m not good at Korean," she said. "I don’t know why I hang onto it as if it’s my native … OK, it is."

Choi’s poetry is not bilingual but multilingual and increasingly multimedia, built of photography, film, drawings, handwritten letters, collage, and typographic play. The work is openly political, though Choi is modest about how honestly she came to her politics: her father was a persecuted journalist, and Choi has long been a peace activist and an advocate for Asian women in US military camp towns. She is also an activist educator. In Seattle, where she now lives, she teaches low-income, often homeless adults pursuing high school diplomas.

Knowing this, and getting to know Choi, I read these lines on Korea from her new book more inclusively:

10 prisoners were stuffed into a cell, …
…
We were side by side squeezed into one another
…
That is how we slept
like spoons
like bean sprouts
Then terror came
…
We knew our position
economically, politically, theoretically
Therefore terror came

***

Choi and her family left South Korea for Hong Kong in 1972, when she was 10 years old. The violence of Japanese colonization, World War II, and the Korean War were past, but Korea remained a scarred and treacherous place. As a news photographer, Choi’s father had captured images of the US-backed military dictatorship, which put a target on his back. To keep the family safe, he brokered passage to Hong Kong; years later, when some of the family decided to move again, first to West Germany, then to Australia, Choi went her own way to attend art school in Los Angeles.

At California Institute of the Arts, Choi tried to acclimate to solitude and to the whoosh of freeway traffic while making sculptures and what she describes as "boring" films. "Sixteen millimeter, for me, that was like writing. Moving blocks of language," she told me. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art, then taught humanities courses and advised Native American educators in Arizona. After several years, she quit her job and followed an old roommate to Seattle, where "rent was still fairly cheap" and "all the flowers that bloomed in spring—they were the same flowers that I grew up seeing in Korea. Forsythias, camellias, azaleas, rhododendrons," she recalled. It was there, in the late 1990s, that she learned of Kim Hyesoon and began to read and translate her poems. Choi enrolled in a doctoral program in modern Korean literature and translation and found encouragement from Bruce and Ju-chan Fulton, pioneering translators of Korean literature, and Deborah Woodard, a Seattleite who, like Choi, was both a translator and a poet. Choi met her husband in Seattle too: Jay Weaver, a drummer and teacher who gave her "this sense of, I don’t know, home, belonging," she said.

In the mid-2000s, one of Choi’s first published translations of Kim Hyesoon appeared in Circumference: Poetry in Translation. It caught the eye of Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson of Action Books, a publishing house in Indiana for "poetry that went too far," as McSweeney quips.

"We couldn't believe it. I'd never read anything like it at the time, simultaneously cute and sinister and threatening and memorable and powerful and domestic and femme," McSweeney said. "I felt like I had to read more poems by Kim Hyesoon, and I had to know who Don Mee Choi was." As poets, Choi and Kim share little in terms of style, but their themes and images overlap. Women’s bodies and bodily fluids reappear, as does the question of asymmetrical violence: the strong punish the weak.

McSweeney and Göransson took a lasting interest in Choi. Action Books published her first full-length translation of Kim’s work, Mommy Must Be a Mountain of Feathers, in 2008, then Choi’s own debut collection, The Morning News Is Exciting (2010), and several more volumes in translation. In the titular prose poem of The Morning News, Choi explores the concept of Korea as an American neocolony: "A nation may be wanted or unwanted depending on what the other nation is thinking about. … This is what happens when the other nation thinks a lot about a nation and stays an unwelcome stay." Elsewhere in the book, Choi considers the time it takes "to cut the waist of a Third World nation" and compares distance to "tarred breasts," a "mother as a river beyond reach."

In the English-speaking world, Kim and Choi have risen together, with each book more celebrated than the last. And their success has coincided both with a growing interest in Korean literature (e.g., Han Kang’s Booker Prize–winning novel The Vegetarian) and with the increased visibility of literary translators (e.g., Ann Goldstein, Emily Wilson). Last year, Kim and Choi won Canada’s Griffin Prize for Choi’s translation of Kim’s Autobiography of Death (2018), a seething response to the 2014 ferry accident that killed hundreds of South Korean students and eventually led to mass protests and a presidential impeachment. Choi "expands the horizon of English" through her translations, Kim told me. "She gives my work more freedom."

Choi has received Whiting and Lannan awards and the fellowship in Berlin for her own poetry, which, beginning with Hardly War (2016), found an expanded vocabulary—of equations, sheet music, Hangul wordplay, and her father’s pictures. Though Choi didn’t know it at the time, the book would be the first of three on the concept of the neocolony. In the poem “Ugly=Nation,” she relates the tale of “the most violently mountainous place on Earth … reduced to hills as everything depends on bombers and perspective if you happen to be nothing at all.” In “6.25,” named after the day the Korean War began, Choi includes a famous US military photo of a refugee girl piggybacking a baby in front of an M-26 tank and writes, “무궁화꽃이피었습니다 / … I refuse to translate.” The poem is legible to English readers, even if all the words are not: here, a reference to the five-petaled Rose of Sharon, South Korea’s national flower.

If Hardly War is at root a familial meditation—Stephen Sohn, an English professor at the University of California, Riverside, describes the work as a "salvage project" of the Korean War generation—then DMZ Colony extends the inquiry to more bodies, places, and times. The DMZ, Choi explains, is the demilitarized zone along the 38th parallel, the same latitude as St. Louis. This boundary, imposed by the US and the Soviets after World War II, forms the "waist" of the Korean peninsula, with its Communist torso and hypercapitalist, haltingly democratic legs. The new book includes photos taken by Choi’s father, as well as photos of her father, camera in hand, documenting North Korean soldiers and the ousting of South Korean President Syngman Rhee. Choi adds her own visual material: a pencil drawing of a cabin, notes scrawled in doodles and bilingual shorthand, cut-out letters ("이" / "e") collaged onto a photographed crowd, and map tracings of the Korean borderlands.

Nearly a quarter of DMZ Colony is based on Choi’s 2016 interview with Ahn Hak-sŏp, a former North Korean military officer and political prisoner who was captured by the US during the Korean War and now lives, as a North Korean sympathizer, on the southern edge of the DMZ. Choi was introduced to him by an activist she has known for years. "It happened spontaneously," she told me of her interview with Ahn. "It was so intense, I thought I was going to die. Four hours nonstop. He’s telling me everything." The resulting transcript poems, in font, leading, and ellipses, resemble a military report: "I was swept here and there during the war … I went all the way up north along the Chinese border as the Korean troops retreated … I received orders to go back to Seoul." Yet the account becomes progressively fragmentary: "… he was all skin … he still refused to ??? … then / 물고문 / water torture / ???" Scanned snippets from Choi’s notebook—words in Korean and English, diagrams of the prison cells Ahn describes—physically intrude on the page.

Later in the book are "The Orphans," letters penned by fictional children during and after the Korean War. They are printed bilingually, on facing pages; the verso is written in pencil in unpracticed Hangul script on cheap lined paper; the recto is Choi’s translation into English. "It was so cold that my fingers were ready to snap off, but I still went over to my friend’s house to play. Then I heard a machine gun," writes orphan Cheo Geum-jeom, age 13. "When I opened my eyes it was dark inside the hole. I touched armless, legless, headless bodies, looking for Mommy," writes orphan Yi Jeong-seon, age 7. Read these pages too quickly, and it may not be clear that the letters are fabricated, but just as with the poems inspired by Ahn, the orphans’ thoughts begin to spin out—"commie grandma / commie grandpa / commie rice paddy / commie mother / commie skirt."

Things get weirder still as the book moves on to "Mirror Words," poems in which the English language looks scrambled: words are written backward, though the letters themselves retain their usual shape. "Ruoy Ycnellecxe, / Si ti Laitram Wal? / Laturb Eripme!" Held up to a mirror or read slowly, they reveal their secrets. ("Your Excellency, / Is it Martial Law? / Brutal Empire!") "I’ve always liked the idea of order-words that Deleuze talked about," Choi explained, citing Giles Deleuze’s theory of language as a tool for compelling obedience. "So what would be the opposite of order-words? What other kinds of words can we have?"

When I asked Choi's peers to place her work in literary context, none had a ready answer. The poet Brandon Shimoda said, "It's really unlike anything else." He was referring in part to Choi’s multimedia experiments and to the visual aspects of her recent work. In Wave Books, Choi found a publisher that could "handle all my images," she told me. "The book is such an incredible, flexible medium." When we met in Berlin, she described with great excitement Wave’s plans to print some of DMZ Colony in color. These three wordless pages appear toward the end of the book: 13 rows of women, Matisse-like, round and heavy-hipped, rendered in pencil and shaded watercolor blue. Some of the figures bear graphite tendrils or halos or wings; others shed body fluids or beam rays from their eyes. The poem preceding them reads, "ㅏ  vowel  sky...sky...sky."

The final book of her trilogy will tackle the 1980s dictatorship through the lens of the Gwangju commune, a pro-democracy uprising brutally suppressed by US-backed Korean forces in May 1980, resulting in the deaths of 154 people and more than 4,100 wounded. "It was part of our family's history. Also, it was the reason we left South Korea," Choi explained. In the German state-broadcasting archives, Choi located a documentary by Jürgen Hinzpeter, a journalist who helped get footage of the events in Gwangju past the South Korean censors. She also found video of her father on a reporting trip to Berlin, in 1986, to witness a spy exchange: he’s camped out in a white hat and brown coat, one photographer among many on Glienicke Brücke, the "bridge of spies." All this will inform the book, as will filmmaker Wim Wenders’s ode to Berlin, Wings of Desire (1987), but it’s ultimately "about US imperialism—that the US was very directly involved in this massacre," she told me. "I think US nationalism is very strong and powerful, and people are really blind to it."

***

"Most of the time, I don’t even think of myself as a poet. I feel like a fake," Choi told me. What she meant was that "real" poets write full-time from the perch of ivory-tower tenure. Her own life is quieter and more pragmatic, wrapped up in the concerns of others. For the past 16 years, excepting her sabbatical in Berlin, Choi has taught adults who, for various reasons, were unable to finish high school but wish to obtain their diplomas. She tutors them, one-on-one, Monday through Friday, at an off-site branch of Renton Technical College in a YWCA in downtown Seattle. The dean of the school told me that Choi has spearheaded many community-based learning centers to reach the most vulnerable students. The Y comprises a homeless shelter, permanent affordable housing, and a one-stop social services hub and was, until the Amazon boom, a haven for poor and low-income people from around the region. Now, it operates in the literal shadow of a new, basalt-colored apartment tower catering to tech workers.

Choi shares a small office with Richard Nicholls, who teaches ESL in the same location. As a teacher, he told me, "the main thing that comes out is her incredible patience, her ability to gain the confidence of the students, because sometimes, her job is not just as an instructor but as a counselor." Her students share their many ordeals: no stable home, no car, no job or too many jobs, child care, mental illness, and substance abuse. Only a few of them know about Choi’s other life. "My writing has very little to do with my job," she told me. "I kind of like my secret life to be secret. It’s not that important in their context."

I did spot a link to her poetic world—the Korean neocolony—in the window of her office: a red "박근혜 / 즉각 퇴진" ("Park Geun-hye / Resign Now!") protest sign from the winter of 2016, in Seoul, when she attended mass demonstrations with Kim Hyesoon and Kim’s daughter. In the aughts, Choi volunteered as a Korean interpreter for the International Women’s Network against Militarism, which organizes for peace and on behalf of camp town workers in regions affected by US empire. Margo Okazawa-Rey, a feminist scholar who invited Choi to attend meetings in Okinawa and the Philippines, recalled Choi's "incredible capacity to be empathetic" and listen intently to what survivors of military violence were saying.

Okazawa-Rey explained that Choi’s work on militarism is "embedded in her personal history and familial experience"—a key data source in feminist epistemology. I noticed, too, that Choi has a habit of moving what’s usually in a book’s acknowledgments section (human sources and sources of funding) to the space of the poems themselves. In so doing, she highlights relationships and the economic reality of her artmaking. Poetry and translation are labors of love but also just labor, performed at night and on weekends, around the edges of a consuming day job.

Choi identifies as a loner, but her circle of poetry colleagues continues to grow. Recently, she has worked with a number of young translator-poets, many of whom are first- or second-generation Korean Americans, including Jack Jung, Emily Jungmin Yoon, and E.J. Koh. Several years ago, she learned through the Fultons that Jung was translating the modernist Korean poet and artist Yi Sang, whom she and Kim Hyesoon adore. She began to advise Jung on his interpretations of Yi, line by line, with an eye toward assembling a comprehensive anthology. "A lot of translators don't get to have this kind of mentor or editor who is also a poet and can talk to you about the source material," Jung told me. She challenged him "to come up with not just concise or efficient ways of saying things but to be more original in my translation as well." Wave Books will publish the resulting project, Yi Sang: Selected Works, this fall, with Choi as co-editor and contributing translator.

In early March, Choi set aside her writing to mount an art exhibition in the gallery of the German Academic Exchange Service, her fellowship sponsor. The show (which closed early due to the COVID-19 pandemic) was an adaptation of DMZ Colony, whose images and "anti-neocolonial" ideas were now flung into three-dimensional space. Enlarged book excerpts and two long, scroll-like paintings—the original blue women—hung on the walls. Photographs and cut-up words sat in a glass display case. At one end of the oblong gallery, a cluster of white hanbok dresses of various sizes, sewn from traditional mulberry paper, or hanji, stood on a pedestal, stiff like ironed ghosts. They were lit up by a rectangular projection of one of the bilingual orphan letters. I’d been struck by these garments months earlier, when I saw them casually propped on a mattress in Choi’s apartment. In the space of the art gallery, they took on heft.  

On our last evening together in Berlin in December, Choi and I met for Turkish food near Adenauerplatz, in the west of the city. Choi had learned of the restaurant after seeing a play nearby, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The play was entirely in German, which Choi was just starting to learn, and the theater had forgotten to project the English subtitles. Choi didn’t mind, she told me, her face brightening with the memory. The play was experimental and offered so much to look at—bodies swirling onstage, live-filmed and shown on screens, in real time, to convey voyeuristic compression—that the text was sort of beside the point. Translation is not always necessary.