I Find It Harder to Love in Korean: On “Wavelength // Waveless”

“사랑” (love) is a word we rarely say out loud, a word only existing on birthday cards or sappy movie scripts. “사랑" is confessional, revealing, an open show of affection. In English, “love” overpopulates my lexicon. I love poetry and I love green tea. I love my family and I also love Mitski songs. Love is a variable. These varying degrees of love hide behind the English language.

Eomma barely speaks English, but I find her embodying “love” and not “사랑." Eomma hides pain in the name of love, but on the receiving end, that love never surfaces. Eomma delays her flight from Korea back to California and I’m frustrated. Living without her is a tormenting routine, consuming the same bland foods, writing poetry, meeting deadlines, going to bed. I barely text her. I don’t realize that disconnection is eomma’s way of love, of protecting me from truth.

“Eomma has breast cancer.”

I don’t let it sink in. Although love is less frequent in my mother tongue, it lasts longer. Eomma lives in all my poems. I see her face in every childhood photograph. I hear her conversations about her ideologies and insecurities. There is no end to the 사랑 I can give to her, and yet, I wonder if grief also lasts longer in Korean. I refuse to believe that there will be moments where my disconnection from her is permanent, that her motherhood comes with an expiration date.

I want grief to be logical. I learn that the doctors had already performed a biopsy on her, that she was preparing for her subsequent surgery in a months’ time. I research what “carcinoma” means, dig up articles on dietary recommendations for women with breast cancer, and send dozens of texts to eomma on Kakaotalk reassuring her that it’s not too late to change her exercise and eating habits. Behind statistics and data, I too can hide. I can hide as long as I don’t write a poem about this reality. Still, poetry surfaced naturally.

Like living organisms, waves have life cycles. Wind gives birth to a wrinkle on the ocean’s surface, which matures into a larger ruffle before easing into patches of foam that lapse onto a shore. A wave is continuous, yet its departure is so distant from its origin. Like the metamorphosis of a wave, the beginning and final stages of a poem feel disconnected. In many of my early poems, my emotions and thoughts manifest as surreal or imagined images, and by the time it reaches a reader, the poem feels like a foreign creature to me. I had been writing from passion but not truth. I had been hiding behind the morphology of a poem, many miles beyond the shore on which my poems surface.

Hiding behind logic or fantasy is stifling. I realize this as I discharge words onto a blank laptop screen. I start to feel tears trickle down my face. I want to grieve without a filter. I want to write a poem without restraint—something that is frightening and vulnerable. In “Wavelength // Waveless,” I acknowledge that:

                  For the first time,
I notice death in the negative space behind my body—
and not just in the imaginary universes in my poems.

“Wavelength // Waveless” is more memoir than poem. I see my seventeen-year-old self in my Californian house, at the wet market, by the sea. I see eomma in the hospital, hear her voice over the phone, feel her palms touching mine. It holds the grief of a scared teenager alone in her bedroom at midnight. It holds the weight of truth, as it didn’t undergo any edits beyond syntactical and structural ones. It holds a flailing memory that is desperate to be remembered. In all honesty, I’ve only read through the entirety of my poem once. Sometimes, it’s too long for me to read it in one go. Other times, the grief is too overbearing for me to continue. Yet, my poem begs to exist in my identity as a poet and as a daughter. It begs to be a part of my truth.

Grief ebbs and flows. There are some days when I forget that eomma has cancer. There are others where I tear up at the sight of homemade Korean food on the dining table. I envy my cousins for having moms who are healthy. I remember eomma silently crying in her sleep on the day my halmeoni died of breast cancer. I pretend not to notice eomma’s strained voice from crying about her late mother. I feel closer to eomma. Sometimes I feel further away from her. I get frustrated with her when eomma nags at me for being too lazy or fat. I cry while reading an essay about a Korean mother with cancer. I miss eomma’s dakgangjeong or bibimbap dishes, even as I eat them. I try not to shy away from these waves of grief.

Right now, eomma is on the phone with her aunt. She learns that her appa is on the verge of kidney failure. Like me, eomma searches for dietary recommendations for people with faulty kidneys. She doesn’t cry. Eomma tries to resolve pain through logic. I wonder if grief is nothing but recursion—if my poem is just an iteration of a story that will weave its way into another person’s life in the future. But for now, “Wavelength // Waveless” is entirely mine, a cycle of loss and hope, an epistle for the person I love most, a wave reaching for a truth I will continue to grapple with.