Winter in Sokcho: Winner of the National Book Award for Translated Literature

by Elisa Shua Dusapin

He told me he missed me but didn’t ask how I was.

‘What I mean is you may have had your wars, I’m sure there are scars on your beaches, but that’s all in the past. Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that’s been going on for so long people have stopped believing it’s real. They build hotels, put up neon signs, but it’s all fake, we’re on a knife-edge, it could all give way any moment. We’re living in limbo. In a winter that never ends.’

I recognised the hotels in Sokcho. The frontier was a scribble of barbed wire. The cave with the Buddhas. He’d lifted them from my world and planted them in his imaginary one, in shades of grey.

He had no right to leave. To leave with his story of Sokcho. To put it on display halfway across the world. He had no right to abandon me, to leave me here, with my own story withering on the rocks.

When he first arrived, he didn’t see me at all. He sensed my presence, like a snake that coils its way into a dream and lies there in wait. But then I’d felt his hard, physical gaze cut into me, showing me my unfamiliar self, that other part of me, over there, on the other side of the world. I wanted more of it. I wanted to live through his ink, to bathe in it. I wanted to be the only one he saw. And all he could say was he liked the way I saw things. That I had a good eye. Those were his words. A cold reality, devoid of emotion. He needed me to help him see. I didn’t want to be his eyes on my world. I wanted to be seen. I wanted him to see me with his own eyes. I wanted him to draw me.