s.penkevich > Books: korea‎ (10)

‘‘During the day everyone is so judgemental…The night rebalances things and disturbs our senses. We see things differently. The night lets us behave in ways that can surprise us.’

‘It’s no longer night, but not yet day. It’s the darkest time and also the coldest. It’s also a time when unexplained phenomena occur. Because during that violent time of transition you have to be ready for change. For the day is coming’

’The flower shop in the early summer is verdant and radiant. The windows, even the outer shutters, are opened to the street. The sidewalk in front of the shop is wet, as if someone has just sprinkled a hose there. Pots of ficus trees, rubber figs, and lady palms populate the sidewalk. When annoyed pedestrians walk by, their frowns melt into contented sighs at the sight of lush green plants, purple balloon flowers, and buckets filled with China pinks and irises.’

’Her hair has been cut short. Despite rarely wearing makeup, she now sports violet eyeshadow and her cheeks have been rouged. She looks like a different person...she looks so fragile that a mere brush might send her toppling down.’

‘ It tied together groups from all points of the political spectrum under the one banner of independence: the Anarchists, the Communists, the Nationalists, the Christians, the Buddhists, and the Cheondoists. He was one of the senior leaders of the Communists, but among their ranks there were those who saw the struggle as primarily between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the rich and the poor, and not between Japan and Korea, as MyungBo had always believed. The Anarchist credo was that any social order was destructive and oppressive. The Nationalists were the conservatives and some of them put more faith in America than in Korea itself. They also opposed the Communists almost as often as they fought the Japanese. Then some of the Christians were Pacifists, although a few of them had gladly assassinated Japanese generals and governors before putting a gun to their own heads.
All the groups believed that Japan would send every Korean man to the mines and every Korean woman to the military brothels rather than admit defeat; their opinions diverged on what they could do to implode Japan from within before that point.’

‘According to the South Korean Red Cross, in the thirty years leading up to 2018, 132,123 people had registered to meet their North Korean families. Of those, 75,234 have died and only 56,890 are still living, with more than 85 percent of whom are over the age of 70.’

’suddenly felt that I was owed an apology. From whom? The idiots who blamed homosexuality for every stupid thing? Or the specific idiot next to me for smothering himself in that bullshit and being unable to accept himself for who he was? Or the other idiot who fell for the first idiot, even when he knew the first idiot was an idiot, who fell for him so hard he dug through his computer to know everything there was to possibly know about him? Maybe I was owed an apology from all of the above. Or maybe from none of them.’

‘In those days, we learned a little bit about what it was like to live as other people. Jaehee learned that living as a gay was sometimes truly shitty, and I learned that living as a woman wasn’t much better. And our conversations always ended with the same question.
-Why were we born this way?
-Who knows?’

‘Like laundry stiffened and sprawled on the floor
I am tossed and wrinkled whichever way to be worn at random.’