Folklorn

by Angela Mi Young Hur

Achievement redeems me; excellence makes me whole.

More than her ridiculous stories or my father’s outbursts, her sadness frightened me because it was powerful enough to erase her mind, rewrite her past, and connect her pain to that of all the women before her.

This is being Korean in a nutshell

He sighs. “Sometimes I’m the Swede, other times, the white guy.” I shrug, flop back onto bed. “I see the world the same way it sees me.”

His mustache hinted at whimsy, but the blond tidiness was so very fascist.

Passing them on campus, I’d try to give them the “ethnic nod,” though friends tell me it’s not a thing, especially when coming from an Asian woman.

But it’s not code-switching—I don’t adapt in order to fit in or translate myself back and forth. I can’t peel off my Asian face anyway.

“The terrors of childhood are mysterious, rooted in the inexplicability of the world and its people. Easier for a child to process her fear if it’s about being eaten; best if the child overcomes it by sticking the witch in the oven.

There’s no English equivalent, but it seems to afflict all Koreans—a mournful sorrow and railing against fate’s unfairness, an aching of the soul.

I used to be embarrassed of my fascination with Korean folklore, thinking it childish, mawkish. But why should we venerate the myths and legends of only a few cultures, recognizing how they are foundational to classical literature, whereas those little stories from other cultures are considered—lesser, quaint, and colorful?

“Human nature intrudes otherwise. If we form our inferences while looking at all the data, we cherry-pick or misinterpret based on our ego, desperation, and biases, both conscious or unconscious. So in the initial stage, we only look at a fragment. We work to deepen our understanding first. This stage can take years before an analysis is approved by higher-ups, and the physicist is allowed to ‘unblind’ the data or ‘open the box,’ as they say in my field.”

“Why did I obsess so much over the words of dead women? I’m going to write my own story. That’s what makes me human.” “No, it’s what makes you American.”