Dictee

There is a map of Korea divided into North and South Korea with text describing the narrator watching a film in a theater where another woman is seated. The narrator wishes to become deeply engrossed in the film, sitting as close to the front of the theater as possible “to eliminate presences of others […] [in] the absolute darkness the shadows fade” (79). The narrative shifts to a letter from the narrator to her mother, dated April 19 without the year, except to mention that 18 years have passed. The narrator describes the bombs that fell when the Korean War began on June 25, 1950, and says that it is not like that today: There are no bombs falling, no “woman with child lifting sand bag barriers, all during the night for the battles to come” (80). Her mother waited 36 years in exile before she was able to return to Korea after World War II when Japan was defeated. However, the narrator writes that when she herself returns to Korea years later, the war is not over, it simply has a different name: civil war.

The narrator describes a day in 1962 when she was 11 years old, 18 years before when her mother pleaded with her brother not to go to a student protest.