SOME NOTES ON SUJI KWOCK KIM AND NOTES FROM THE DIVIDED COUNTRY WITH A CLOSE READING OF "LEAVING CHINATOWN" - Page 2

“hawkers haggling over cellphones or silk shirts,
shaking dirt from chamae & bok choi,
chanting price after price,

fisherman cleaning tubs of cuttlefish & squid,
stripping copper carp,
lifting eels or green turtles dripping from tanks,

vendors setting up pojangmachas
to cook charred silkworms, broiled sparrows,
frying sesame leaves & mung-bean pancakes

hanyak peddlers calling out names of cures
for sickness or love—
crushed bees, snake bile, ground deer antler, chrysanthemum root”

The charm of these images near the end of “MONTAGE WITH NEON, BOK CHOI, GASOLINE, LOVERS & STRANGERS,” is undeniable. They are not arranged so much according to argument as by their Neruda-esque sheen. Yet, this is not Kim at her best. This is Kim in homage to Neruda and in homage to Hongo and Komunyakaa and Hirsch. This is Kim indulging in her Korean-ness in order to fit the requirements of the tradition into which she falls. This is Kim fitting into, not transcending, her poetic oeuvre. It is still wonderful work, but it is not Kim at her best.

The poem I want to focus on is LEAVING CHINATOWN. The poem’s title matter’s only at the end of the poem so I will set it aside for now. In the first quatrain of the poem we begin with a kitchen detail of four hands sharing a piece of split fruit. A mother-in-law type and a speaker who is involved with the child of the mother-in-law. The delivery is subtle, and understated. This might be the only place in Kim where the small moment of two people interacting in a private domestic space is used. Yet it is where the writing seems most comfortable and most compelling.

“Peeling a mango to share between us, your mother
laughs at the grinning fool I’ve become, pours me
more and more wine. You’re working late uptown.
Green platanos searing in oil, saffron rice boiling,”

The poem introduces three people so swiftly and so simply the reader finds themselves enthralled in the familial drama almost without notice. The mother’s hands are “peeling a mango” that is foreign and yet familiar to the speaker. The peeled mango is “shared” and the speaker and the mother are “laughing” finding, however nervously a little drunken intimacy.

The mother and the speaker linger before us: their hands and smiles intermingling over the orange fruit of the mango, over the aroma of what one imagines as red wine. The absence of the loved one…the one loved by the lover and the speaker is noted. And then Kim introduces the process of cooking, a process that is other but is also familiar. The speaker calls out “platanos” because the word is flavorful, its color, strange and wonderful but not entirely other. It can’t be. The speaker knows the object by name, claims it in some respect. The cooking is the hinge in the poem that acts as the trope that will invoke the imagination. Separate this from the frame of the split fruit. The split fruit is the rhetorical frame within which the cooking and the mother and speaker intermingle. The second quatrain unfolds:

Article Author: David Koehn

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