SOME NOTES ON SUJI KWOCK KIM AND NOTES FROM THE DIVIDED COUNTRY WITH A CLOSE READING OF "LEAVING CHINATOWN" - Page 4

Then the voice cuts though the speaker. We are in the magical real again, but this magical real is not misty and coastal. It is hard and fast and specific. The poem re-doubles for as the speaker is split open by the mother, the speaker gains clarity almost simultaneously. For the speaker almost immediately sees “her as she must have been once.” The awareness that gains clarity leaps into a flashback that cannot be, but is, it comes from another place and time. The time shift brings a woman from the abyss of “long before” to the surface. A woman holding the speaker’s face in her hands, “afraid of nothing.” Words are spoken from mother to the speaker. Words of wisdom? Tenderness? Harshness? That we don’t know. What we do know is that they are the truth, a truth that cuts to the heart of the matter. The words allow the speaker to move into a past history in the last tercet when:

“she fell in love with your father, a man who shattered
what he touched, who left her eyes galled by all the other
faces, even yours, she might have looked into with love.”

The poem re-doubles again. The mother’s face precedes the ravages of her love and marriage to the speaker’s father. The speaker knows through the mother or the lover that the father was “a man who shattered / what he touched.” The lover and the mother were subject to the father and thus resemble each other.

At this moment, the mother looks like the woman she was before her eyes were “galled.” What a strange and peculiar and ideal word. Here eyes were left galled by the father. Is the speaker to have her eyes galled by their child? The mother appears as woman before marriage and before motherhood who could look on one with love. But here, as she holds the speaker’s face in her hands, she is not that woman. She is a woman who could not look on her child with love. Her tenderness calloused by the abrasive father.

So now the speaker sees the lover in a new way through the mother. This familiar scene, this tender scene, is undercut by the revelation that the loved one is not so much loved as subjected to the nature of family. The speaker sees in the mother’s face, the face of her lover to some degree. Will the speaker be ravaged in the same way? “How real is it?” As readers the speaker sees the face of a woman who has been beaten. The speaker also sees a self or what the self could become.

The tragedy and beauty of family is revealed here. The poem challenges assumptions about race and family. About violence and identity. The poem allows for something less than love, less then triumph, to evoke its final response. The poem cuts through us.

Article Author: David Koehn

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