Sometimes the moon wishes out to the sea, talk with me, be with me. And
sometimes the kirogi nibbles on the kosaree, child’s fingers, travel with
me.

My mother didn’t look like me. I didn’t look like her. Her height, her
body, the color of her skin. We were different. Her name is __________. My
mother looked like me. Her hair is black, her skin is pale, her eyes
brown. Her name is _______. Even maps do not lead me to her. Maps no
longer exist as a guide, the borders contract in the strain of memory. The
summer of 2002, a woman called me at home, I don’t remember the time. It
was sunny outside.

“Is this ______?”

“Yes,” I answered, startled to answer to a name I hadn’t been called since
age six.

“______, I am calling from Korea. Your mother wanted me to ask how you are
doing. She is worried about you.”

A long letter curled out of my fingers, onto a blank screen, then e-mailed
to the woman who called on behalf of my mother in Korea. I haven’t heard
from her since then.

There is no stability in hearing a language at once unfamiliar
and judgmental. The Korean language rattles me back to a place where I
cannot shake off the self-doubt that something is at once terribly wrong
and missing. Countries charge their citizens to lose citizenship, and the
borders that contract from the heat of distance create regulations, lorded
by people, that legislate synthetic belonging. Losing my citizenship cost
60 U.S. cents. Was there a time when a child, regarded as outsider, ever
returned to a country of exile and did not remember the tidal disregard
for her well-being? Did safety matter in a world of contracting borders?
What pushes out?

Countries, patriarchal, feint honesty, open borders. Water floods entire
wards, prison cells inundated, inebriated with their own power, bodies
held inside, floating. Water does not take kindly to lock-down. Piles of
earth turned over by water, softened into mud. How do you escape its
entrance into your mouth, your eyes, your ears? While I taught my fluent
language in Korea, people drowned in the United States.

There are the fun photo booths, and then there are the photo booths for
documentation. Four black and white photos printed out of a slot as I
waited in the Korean Subway. I am always leaving Korea, and Korea is
always leaving me. Where I taught, I carried pens at my side, the ink
sticks poised and pointed outward, while married Korean men stood close
and tried to brush my side. Taxi drivers smoked as they drove, and I
queasily held my head close to the open window. I haven’t always felt
small in the world, but I did as a little girl, and I did when I returned
to Korea. Liminal in a country that revered whiteness, bleached pale skin,
English spoken without an accent. I hid in my body, and if I did not
speak, I could pass as a stranger, but not foreigner. Kyopo. The white
rice sat uneasily in my stomach. My body swelled from salted food. I no
longer recognized myself in the mirror.

I lived with a woman who gave advice on my fevers and needed flowers every
day. I tasted sadness when I awoke, and when I slept. It is a sadness that builds up
in my joints, and colludes with my forgetfulness. My body becomes limp and
unstable, I cannot seem to joint sentences together. There is no magnetic
pole, north or south, from which I can reposition myself. The rocks on
beaches do not tear at my feet. I am weeping on them, adding to the salt
water that washes up at high tide.

In the airport, waiting for my flight back to the United States, I
remembered the previous night’s phone calls. I spoke through a speaker on
the front of a laptop computer, calling my mother who looks like me. A man
answered, twice, one for each phone call I made. The first time, he hung
up on me after he heard me speak beyond, “Annyung,” hello. The second
time, he did not wait for my response.

When people talk about exile, it is not hypothetical. The body knows well
its corridors, its trap doors and hiding places.