The Fog Shrouded Hill That Overlooks the Ocean

-Penny Pyo

Multi-level houses sit stacked like teetering slices of cake.

Frosted, sugar-pale Victorian facades primly wedged between sleek, streamlined glass skyscrapers and cheerful brick apartments. Lanterns and laundry flutter in the ocean-spray breeze, saluting me as I trek up the hills. Eucalyptus crunches underfoot and gulls cry out, heckling a vexed fisherman who curses back.

My parents had traded towering mountains for rolling hills--

pines for redwoods, and the Yellow Sea for the Golden Gate Strait. Their daughters don’t understand the depth the Han runs in their blood.

The bleeding, gutted earth was freshly gashed into jagged halves of North and South when the boy, mother, and sister fled Nampo-- abandoned beloved fishing boats and bid relatives farewell.

The softer accent of the South is a level, grassy plain.

while the boy’s Northern intonation soars up and swoops down.

His voice of peaks and valleys sticks out like a crane among magpies.

At fourteen years old, the boy practices ironing out his words, flattening his inflections until his pronunciation

is smoother than those who had scowled at his Northern voice before.

The Morning Calm was still piecing its splintered, shattered self back together when the boy-- now a man-- decided to pack his bags and board a plane with his wife and children, headed to Miguk.

The songs of cicadas are replaced by rumbling ocean waves. Learning bizarre new words that click-clack together like janggi tiles, the man’s fourteen-year-old son grows up in the Beautiful Country.

He now writes letters horizontally instead of stacking each

on top of the other; pledges allegiance to the same country

that had bombed Nampo years ago, killing his grandfather.

The son learns to sharpen his rounded syllables, to harden his skin to mockery and slurs. To raise his head high and brave the rain.

When the slope starts crumbling, he shakes off the pebbles and climbs on.

The hike to the summit is arduous, yet here I somehow stand. Overlooking the city I call home, and yet will never

reciprocate the sentiment as long as I have this face.

Beyond thousands of li of seawater lies another

peninsula, another completely unfamiliar world.

Behind a border dwell the faceless and nameless who I can’t meet.

Beneath the surface of my shallow research lies generations

and generations of culture, history, and context that is

a simpler path for some, but a labyrinth for me to navigate.

Perhaps if I gaze far enough through the rising veils of mist and fog, strain my ears to the crash and roar of the waves below,

the answers I long for will emerge, whispering in the wind.

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Returning to Koreatown