‘엄마 없는 집에’ is the only Korean poem I have ever written. The Korean used is likely broken and outdated, as I left my first homeland in 1994 at the age of seven — but it is my own. The poem was written in 2013 during my doctoral studies in the UK, while visiting my childhood home in America. At the time, I was greatly struggling to write my thesis because I felt so unsure about my claim to literature of the American South. The poem came to me as fully formed as it could be (considering my mutated Korean), in the span of time it took for me to walk from my childhood bedroom to the kitchen of my family home. In the poem, I am home alone with my father, observing him doing dishes at the sink, while my mother is away in Korea visiting her dying sister. The poem makes no direct mention of my mother coping with her sister dying, noting only my mother’s absence. There is some sense that my mother might be dead. My mother and her sister were the closest in age of their siblings and my mother tells me they looked very much alike in their youth with their snow-white, full moon faces. They are present, my mother and her sister (my aunt I hardly remember as she is dying) in the poem’s closing focus on a rice bowl my father holds, gleaming like a pearl. I translated the poem into a monologue from my grieving mother, imagining her voice in English. Through this imagined, other voice of my mother, I found room to speak to things unsaid between me, my mother, and my father. In the monologue, instead of speaking directly of her sister’s death, the character of my mother poses questions around both the possibility and certainty of her own death and how my father and I would survive. The two pieces are extensions of one another, sisters in shared in-between spaces.
– S J Kim