American Han

i

I can see for the first time a troubling of the word born of the thirty-five-year-long Japanese occupation of Korea, the division of the country by US and Soviet forces after WWII, the ongoing war at one of the most militarized borders in the world. I can see, too, an era further away. The word names the feeling that arises as you are buried alive with your dead husband. It’s harder to weigh a word with a history that permanently exiles its victims. So on one side I write the word han while on the other a historian on a panel erases it. He says, “Koreans outside of Korea can’t know han.” The historian confesses a discrimination between us. “My han is the original han.” I am not Korean as I thought but a perpetual outsider. It’s not a word but a war. The word I thought belongs to me only belongs to the Korean border. But if I am not uncanny, melancholy, or nostalgia, then as I see the word now and, because I can’t unsee myself in it and must continue to live within and outside of this world nevertheless, I am the word.

ii

When I give a talk about han in DC, a young man in the audience has a panic attack. Then it happens again at a virtual talk in SF to an older woman, though I don’t know until later. Both the man and woman say the room started to spin when I kept saying the word han. In psychiatry, the word causes dizziness and heart palpitations. The consequences are real.

How poet Kim Hyesoon defines autobiography as autotestimony: she is narrating her historical death. So on one side is how she has died while on the other is how she remains living. If I am the word, saying the word is to narrate my death. I meet the consequences here. This might be an answer to why han is trouble. The word brings up the question of how one has died and how one could remain alive.
 

iii

My mother would try to take her life (with a kitchen knife) in the name of han. Then what does that do for me, with the word so deeply tied to my own throat?

The closest word I have to describe this is an opera singer’s duende. Federico García Lorca says, “The duende does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible.” There’s something more. To have han is to be a child who hoped to be loved in a manner she understood but accepts any love, because pain cannot lessen a hope for love.

iv

In an online discussion group, han is called a meaningless word. “Only an embarrassing artifact. Like the possession of demons. Possessed people suffer, too. But the answer isn’t to take demons seriously. There’s no usefulness in the word. Why not call it what it is, trauma, without ethno-essentialism? What’s the difference between suffering of a Korean and a Rwandan genocide survivor or a Jewish Holocaust survivor?” The argument says the word has damaged Koreans, convinced them of their sorrow. It says Koreans but especially Koreans outside of Korea—Korean Americans, mixed-race Koreans, adoptee Koreans, queer Koreans—and their obsession with han is delusional. We’ve sabotaged ourselves where healing is possible. We’ve 
condemned ourselves to terrible pain.

v

To hear the word has nothing to do with me. I’m aware of how I now know two scholars writing about han who have given up because of the fear and repercussions if we do recognize the word as displaced persons of war and as perpetual outsiders of history, and I share their fear.

   

  vi

I’m grateful to the historian. After his panel, he changes his mind. I resent him also.

Then can han change—transform? Can I talk about han as a Korean American, about how han is doing something different with my throat?

vii

A visitor writes on my page:

       Han is ethnocentric and has been cancelled by actual Koreans.

I write:

       Consequences are the homogenization of Korean experiences and
       erasure of features of marginalized literature. (deleted)

viii

Han is not just trauma, vague in western circles for colonization and war, historical defeat and inhumanity. Han, not as an illness, but a way of thinking about our lives. Han specific to Korea but not limited to Korea. Han as exile by native Koreans. Han as crossing the Pacific. The word brings me closer to the truth of living as a perpetual outsider and against the definition of han as nationhood. The earth’s han, face pockmarked over a hundred years of bombing. It is not only a suffering but a suffering that is avoidable and is not avoided, a suffering that breaks us and need not break us.

ix

I go back to the discussion group. The war is ongoing. “The word wasn’t cancelled ... but [Korean natives] lost interest in the idea they felt no longer described their life experiences.”

“As for your conception of han as a universal idea that is a recognition of hardship and sorrow ... I just do not know if that can be called han in thetraditional sense ... I don’t know if it’s appropriate to use the same word ... with little connection to the original han.” “Again ... wrong ... define in contexts ... century ... vagueness of han ... malleable ... out of style ... Korean ... dropped ... language ... ”

x
 

xi

Truth is I want a world where the word does not exist. The trouble is the way it shrugs off anything. Steven Yeun’s character in Burning smiles and says: “There’s something in your heart. There’s a stone in your heart. The stone is making you suffer. That’s why you can’t fully enjoy things. That’s why you can’t eat tasty food and appreciate it. That’s why you can’t tell a man you like that you like them ... You have to remove it.”

I want to make clear ... I believe the word ... killed ... and the word still lives ... no denying people who suffered ... they make it truthful ... what is interrogated is the word ... and its history ... not the dead and the living ... not the word as we each feel it in our bones ... keep in ... I may not have to discard the word ... if I lead ... with its shadow ... limitations ... its horrors ... what remains is a sense of life ... recognizable ... as relief ... then as mine ...