4) The Camellia Girl

     Wolran Kim

 

She wears the Japanese language like an unseasonable lipstick. Shameful of her existence that everyone wants to hide, is forbidden forever, as was the colonial history. Her high-pitched singing from twisting her body must be the way she lives with her misery. My mother wilted whenever the old radio blossomed.

 

Her illegal singing became a song of the earth. Climbing up the cliffs until her nails fell off, babies were born just like powerful enemies, on the end of the umbilical cords, cut by herself. Under the unstable roof, she put tears in her eyes, watering a plant, every time she laid down sideways.

 

Camellias were in full bloom in the basket like the suffering period when the sky was red around the childish water outside. A thick smell of Camellia oil spread out from her permed and towel-covered hair. She stretched on the icy, wind-chilled floor, even before the spring. She was a spiteful petal.

 

In her Northern Boundary Line, with no butterflies, flowers still bloom in the winter. After letting her springtime leave her, after letting her husband leave her, even after letting the nether limbs leave her, this world was still a place where she had to go on foot. She crossed the Pacific Ocean on a wheelchair, so how did she cross the Jordan River?

 

A septuagenarian singer is singing on the turning stage. The mother flower, broken at seventy, is crying.

In many nights you cannot count

In passion of pain hollowing out my heart

How long did she cry her heart out, Camellia Girl*

 

* Camellia Girl: The title of the song in 1964 that was banned by the Korean government because of its Japanese influence. I was born in 1964.