Untitled Sequence 1. From silence and darkness, sounds of ocean waves slowly rise; a wide shot video image of the East China Sea taken from a high angle fades up from black. The small turquoise, blue, and green waves crest in delicate white lines and roll over each other in a steady rhythmic repetition. The waters are off the coasts of Jeju Island.
She is reviewing and assembling video footage she shot when she was last in Korea for a year of research. In her video editing software, she shuttles between image and sound, searching for the materials that convey this feeling of being both outside and within oneself, both subject and object, what it’s like to live within the margins made of a whole.
Audio track 1: Dad. “It has something to do with wartime,” a man’s voice says. It is the voice of her father, who she interviewed for a project on migration and the cosmopolitics of hospitality for the foreigner. For most of her life, she did not hear her parents speak about their lives before immigration and creating their life in the U.S. So much of who they were, who their families were, what their realities were, remained unknown. She decided it was time to begin talking to each other.
“The Korean War was 1950,” he continues. “Korea was torn up, everything had been broken. There were no buildings because North Korea…and before that, for thirty-six years, Korea was under Japanese colonization. And constantly, Korea was trying to stand up, and then fell again with the Korean War. And everybody was just, they simply wanted to survive. Everybody was poor. There simply was no money.”
From the ocean waves, a cacophony of voices begins to swell. Three ascending melodic tones ring out and a voice over loudspeaker announces a train number in Korean, then the city of origin and the city of destination. Voices rise and fall with the sounds and images of ocean waves. Four melodic tones descending. Slow fade to black.
“We have seen a lot of unfairness,” her father continues. “And sometimes you feel anger, you know, people get poorer and poorer and some people get richer and richer.”
CUT TO: a memory. She is sitting with her father for the interview, which they held over a video call. When he spoke, he looked out into the distance at nothing in particular. There is that familiar tone of solemnness whenever he talks about anything related to Korea. He is pensive, sifting through the memory banks of his mind where waves of joy and grief ebbed and flowed as one. She knows he is remembering his sister, his brother, his parents —all of whom have passed. She knows that his sadness is born of deep regret for feeling he left them behind; regret that he did not make more time for them when they were alive. The unrequitedness of it all has folded into his psyche now, here to stay until he too transitions from this world.
Untitled Sequence 2. She switches video tracks to watch a close-up shot of a man’s hands holding a calligraphy brush. She zooms in on the brush. The soft, pointed bristles of the brush tip glide across the paper in a continuous flow, Korean characters painted with ease and precision. She zooms in more until she feels an intimacy in the pixels, then slows the image down to thirty-percent speed. There is something satisfying in the dissonance created through this very conspicuously digitized image of a very tactile, human process. There is something satisfying in exploiting the limits of a medium’s form until it becomes something outside of itself —artifact, extra, other.
“So, young people, they wanted to get out of the country. They lost faith in their own country, their own people. America portrayed to us, when you read Time Magazine about John F. Kennedy and you read about the American Presidents, you feel like, America is the place we need to be. And so everybody, they were just competing to come here.” Dad paused then said, “It’s just like everybody dreamed: America is paradise.”
She is searching for a new image now, looking through folders of video taken near a contemporary art museum outside of Seoul. She selects footage of a moving chairlift surrounded by verdant mountains, evergreen trees, and bright green grass. The seats, empty of passengers, swing gently as they are slowly pulled along the steel ropes. This image is disorienting: it is bucolic and eery, lonely and playful. Discordant, like America and paradise.
“I had a pretty healthy family life,” Dad continues. “Always parents taking good care of us, so I always enjoyed school. I was kind of mischievous.”
The image of the chairlift scene dissolves into darkness as another one appears. Slow fade up on a basketball court with a group of young men. They could be in high school; they are all wearing white button down shirts and dark pants. Their bodies pivot around and away from each other in a silent, improvised choreography. Their faces, full of youth, still childlike, with wide smiles, all looking up, then around, turning in unison, following the ball which is never seen, it is always just outside of the frame. She imagines they have not yet done mandatory military service. She remembers that the North and South are still technically at war, and how easy it is to forget that fact.
“We moved from the country to Daegu and transferring schools was kind of difficult. We came to Daegu after World War Two was over. Father working hard. And I was helping Father to try to save money so that we could go to school. We were not very rich, we had to work. I studied, I worked, I tried to learn more about the USA, and I taught Judo to some GI’s so that I could learn some English. Our parents wanted us to be in a better place. I was so excited to come to the USA, because I had so many dreams to become… better.” Dad’s voice and the video of the dancing boys fade into silence and darkness.
Untitled Sequence 3. The sound of something landing, or something arriving. The rushing of white noise gradually shifting from high and shallow to low and deep. Ocean waves off of Jeju Island rolling in and out. The sea makes the mind-body system feel like translucent white light.
Next, she is in a concrete, outdoor waiting area by the KTX train. More announcements over the loudspeaker in Korean. She still doesn’t fully understand what is being said. She feels funny because she still doesn’t have fluency in the language, but at least she passes as a real Korean now and is not so obviously of the outside.
“At that time, the sixties, everybody thought the USA was paradise on earth. Everybody wanted to come. I worked very hard to come, so when I came, I was very excited. Korea was a poor country. Unemployment, economically ruined, politically chaos. I was hoping to study, get a Masters degree in Political Science and return home to become a politician. But that dream never came about, because Korea changes so much. It was never quiet politically —always politically, chaos and turmoil.”
As Dad speaks, she moves through street scenes in Seoul. She observes these scenes through disembodied, floating eyes. She has no home base, nothing to tether her to something familiar, no sense of who she is to others here. Seoul is overwhelming, more so than New York City. Only because the city is so foreign to her, or her to the city.
Now she is on a train going over the Han River. More announcements over the loudspeaker. She watches as the landscape passes, shifting perspectives of nearness and distance, anchored by the steady horizon.
She hears the sounds of drumming fade in gradually, the beats overlay then overcome the rhythmic sounds of the train’s movement. A man is singing, his voice modulating and guttural —it is pungmul, a traditional form of music and dance. Like the concrescence of many heartbeats, percussion instruments of varying size and design are played together in unison, becoming syncopated and cyclical. The rhythms and chanting are the sound of Life Force itself, calling in the good spirits and subduing the bad, honoring ancestors on the auspicious full moon.
It is Seollal, the Lunar New Year. She is surrounded by a pungmul ensemble. They are mostly young, college-aged players dedicated to learning and preserving this form of collective drumming, singing, and dance that originated in the fields, through farm labor and spiritual connection to the earth. It has been integral to Korean culture for generations, an expressive vehicle for farmers, shamans, and in modern history, pungmul has been a deeply embodied form of protest in South Korea’s pro-democracy movement, led by students and laborers. Pungmul is the sound of the country’s collective resilience: celebratory, defiant, spirited, indigenous. At one point, it did not matter if you were in the North or the South, pungmul was spirit-song to all Joseon people.
Audio track 2: Mom. “I missed my family, my friends, and freedom.” Now she hears the voice of her mother.
The pungmul music has reached a trance-like rhythm. The drumming, clanging, and chanting are so loud and boisterous, it absorbs all in its path, leaving no choice but to surrender to it. The ensemble of more than twenty players, dressed in bright and festive multicolored hanbok, is now an unapologetically clamorous organism that overtakes the streets of Seoul.
CUT TO: a close-up of a chima, the capacious skirt of a woman’s hanbok gliding over the city sidewalk. The chima’s color is a shock of solid, vibrant hot pink, all the more electrified in contrast to the drab grey concrete street beneath it. As the woman walks, the airiness of the chima’s silky form glides, ripples, and flows like a stingray sweeping across an ocean floor.
“You know, you go out, and there’s your friends. You come home, there’s your mom, your dad,” Mom continues. “My dad was very strict. He made us come home with curfews. Sometimes I thought he was kind of unfair. Like in the summertime, he wanted us to come home by 6pm, and 6pm is like daylight, you know? So, I always felt I was being oppressed. I wanted to rebel. So when I went to nursing school, I was very relieved. I was not under, you know, someone watching me all the time. But I knew my dad loved me.”
The drumming swells once more, then softens and slows. The shot lingers on the close-up of the bright, hot pink chima as it shifts into slow motion, the long silk folds swaying side to side in hypnotic rhythm across the dark grey concrete, dotted with yellow traffic lines. Mom’s voiceover continues, “After I got married, all of a sudden, I got really homesick. I’m from the big city. I hear the automobile sounds, a lot of noise in the city, and here I am, we have this little tiny apartment. And when I would stay there by myself, I would hear all these bird sounds, but I had nobody to talk to. And I was very lonesome.”
FADE OUT.
Sequence: First Person Plural. From silence and darkness, we return to the waters off of Jeju Island. The sounds of the waves rise in volume over the same high angle wide shot of the sea. In this vast expanse of this blue, another image slowly appears, superimposed on the waves. It is a black and white image of a family.
“Then I started to work at the hospital. But still, you know, the English language, everything was just so difficult for me. It was a very difficult time. I just felt like…” Mom’s voice trails off for a moment. “I don’t know why, I just got really homesick.”
In the image of the family, there are three young Korean sisters. The woman on the right is in a nun’s habit, a younger sister next to her and the one on the left are both wearing hanbok. There is an older man, their father, in between them. He is wearing a tie, a cardigan, wearing dark glasses, and smiling gently. This is Mom’s family.
The image slowly dissolves into the ocean as another appears.
This image is of an elderly Korean couple posing on large rocks by the sea. The man is tall and slender and dressed in a three-piece suit. He stands with his hands clasped behind his back, dignified and humble. The woman wears a hanbok, a white quilted jacket, and a scarf tied around her head. She is squatting next to him, as if she had just been studying the subtle contours of the eroded rock or simply feeling the gentle winds gliding off the ocean waves upon her face. These are Dad’s parents. Their image fades into the ocean waves, the ocean waves fade into darkness, into silence.
We return to the waiting area at a KTX train station. Three ascending tones, then announcements in Korean amplify over loudspeaker of arrivals and departures.
FADE OUT.
Now we are back in the park. The young men playing basketball are gone. Instead, there are old men, sitting on concrete slabs. They are simply being, watching all of life move around them.
FADE OUT.
Dad says, “When I go to Korea, I thought that was my country, but I don’t feel that I belong there. And then when I come here, I don’t feel like I belong here. That’s why I said to myself: I’m a man with no country.”
FADE IN:
We are on a ferry now, leaving the peninsula. Watch as the seagulls soar over the wake of the boat, as we move farther and farther away — either the land moving away from us, or us away from the land.