Claire Lee

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Gook


Genocide: committed with the intent to destroy.

Unfortunately, the UN doesn’t have as good of a guideline around what is historicized with the intent to forget. For all that we argue what is and is not, dare I bring up what is remembered and what isn’t? Intent to hold sacred or not, at least amongst those who did the destroying and not the being destroyed.

1936 saw the birth of my grandparents in a now lost-to-history village in what was then just the north of. 1952 saw them fleeing over the front lines, dogs at their heels, guns not far behind. Parents with them, siblings caught and turned back. 1953 saw a fifth of the population dead, 85% of all infrastructure destroyed, 32,000 tons of napalm buried in a landmass about the size of Utah. 2025 sees roughly 24,000 US soldiers still there, fighting the longest war either country has ever fought, a colonial occupation branded a successful partnership. Intent to maintain, to survive, to control, all muddied under the larger villain of outcome. This morning sees me waking up cousinless, grandparentless, countryless, divided into smaller and smaller fractions until the world accepts that they are close enough to zero.

In my dreams, I return to the place where my grandparents were born, a collection of buildings completely razed to the ground by the bumbling American soldiers who cast racial slurs upon the enemy that they didn’t realize was just the local word for “American.” In my waking hours, I know my navy blue passport would stop me at the border. 2023 saw the white boy I briefly dated saying “I wish I had a cool family history” when I texted him a picture from the border. The occupation is ongoing but so is the resistance – my father asks me to stop saying these things in public. People with our heritage aren’t allowed to be revolutionaries, at least according to my grandfather, voting for Yoon while I march for reunification. 2013 saw my mom’s white uncle lecturing me about his time in the war, said he’s the only reason my dad’s not some dead communist. The only thing worse than a dead communist is his living daughter. 1945 saw two American colonels drawing an arbitrary line on a National Geographic map with no input from any actual citizens, a line that would soon go on to murder and divide my family in a way that we keep intending (failing) to forget, a line that would leave me, the off-shooting American grandchild, with no sensible reason for the distant rage still beating in her heart every time she is asked why she does not have a relationship with her extended family, left with an immobilizing horror that one time she walked into a frat house and saw a wall of that specific genre of memes, a small man’s seemingly unreasonably fury adapted into a joke for a part of the world that sees no intent in remembering.

Intent to destroy grows greater meaning when coupled with intent to ignore, to forget, to reassign blame, to hold a starved and decimated nation to a pedestal of we have no idea why they hate us this much but isn’t it kind of funny. The internet sees endless content of photos, documentaries, voyeuristic white tourist vlogs, See If I Survive The Most Isolated (poorest) Country in the World! How lovely it is to watch such an incredibly well-written dystopia play out in front of our eyes, the knowledge of truth casting a sharper edge to our review of the hair and makeup department, the matching cuts on matching distortions of humanity. Intent to forget grows deadly when met with intent to consume – who cares if we understand the products we are given. My average day sees millions commenting on the validity of someone’s life via Instagram Reels. I watch and wonder if maybe I might see my cousin.

1982 saw my grandmother receive a clandestine letter from her sister, a connection forever severed that one night thirty years prior. All it said was that she was alive.

My lifetime will see liberation, a united Korea come again.

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Banner Art:
from Écriture No.160523, Park Seo-Bo, 2016