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Notes
1 And of my mother’s many dreams, one was that I would grow to be my father’s height, approximately 5′7″, but I am approximately 5 inches short and I didn’t get into Harvard.
2 If I were writing a fairy tale, I would write about how my mother can touch fire, hold it to her fingers. I would title it, 독한년.
3 정 is a fairy tale.
4 In the UK, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) determines how public funding for research is allocated.
5 IMPACT is measured by stars; our research is measured by stars.
6 I have learned to hold my Korean name close in fear of old hurts from when I was young. When I could better read Komunyakaa’s words, I was entering my twenties. It was the summer I fell in love with a grown woman from New York. Beneath the frenetic markings for my doctoral thesis, I can still make out the sections I marked to share with her from ‘Songs for My Father’ and ‘Faith Healer’.
7 Yusef Komunyakaa 11–12.
8 Kim Hyesoon 101–02.
9 교수님, 죄송합니다. 하지만, when your bright and shining daughter spoke so casually of handling toxic materials known to cause serious illness or death for her art, I would just like you to know that I felt very — I felt, very, as the daughter of a mother who instilled in me deep, had to, an animal fear of unjust sickness, unjust death. I felt, very. I hope you’ll understand.
10 And I have learned these conversations are often best served when I stand a half-step behind my husband and let him do all the talking for me and do not, under any circumstances interject unless my husband speaks directly to me first, leaving room for the possibility that my English is perhaps not good enough to participate fully in these conversations. It’s November, nearly two months into my still-new job and it’s Thanksgiving at my husband’s family home. I am seated in what I come to realise is the Asian corner, but to the other largely British guests must be the Chinese corner. There is me, another Korean woman, and a Vietnamese woman. Actually, between me and the Vietnamese woman is her partner, a white American man. We are all pond jumpers here. I don’t know who exactly decided to seat me between the coupling ‘just like’ mine, but I want to pluck three hairs from my head to stir into their soup: obviously one for me, one for the Vietnamese woman, and one for the other Korean woman. I am not contributing enough to the general conversation and, furthermore, I am certainly failing in my intended purpose to rally my corner to join in on the general conversation. At one point, the Vietnamese woman’s partner kindly asks me about my new job, but I think I say ‘Cassandra’ instead of ‘Vanessa’ when talking about the dumbwaiter, the dumbwaiter, the only thing I can recall and speak to about my job in this moment and I’m just so fucking tired so I keep stuffing my face and I hardly feel bad at all when the Vietnamese woman is doing most of the talking from our corner. ‘My parents are refugees’, I can hear her saying in just the right way. I hardly feel bad at all because honestly, I’m just really grateful it’s not me this time. Occasionally, I glance across no man’s land to my white, blonde, and blue-eyed British-American husband who smiles to reassure himself I am coping ok and I wonder if he ever thinks: I have grown tired of the black fibrous tendrils in her soups. 정 is Thanksgiving.
11 If I could, I would get them the good stars, four?, five?, I don’t know what the maximum number of stars REF gives is, but I would get all the stars, I would get all the stars I could for them.
12 I am trying to write what is missing from the ending when my husband calls out from the other room, ‘Boris has the virus.’ I’m scared that if he dies, he would become a martyr. It’s 30 October 2020 when I am editing this piece with another kind editor. The editor notes here, ‘He doesn’t die.’
13 Aman Ahluwalia np.
14 Komunyakaa 24–26.
15 KHS 27.
16 봉준호. <기생충>. CJ 엔터테인먼트, 2019. A Korean reviewer in Korea taught me that Korean titles are not italicised; they, we, use these arrows like open mouths that to me mean less-than and greater-than. I want to thank them for being the first ever Korean reader in Korea of my work that I know of. 감사합니다. 걱정해주셔서 감사합니다.
17 Here are the base components. You may want these at the end: ㅇ, ㅇ, ㅇ, ㅇ, ㅇ, ㅇ, ㅇ, ㅇ, ㅇ, ㅇ, ㅏ, ㅑ, ㅓ, ㅕ, ㅗ, ㅛ, ㅜ, ㅠ, ㅡ, ㅣ
18 Don Mee Choi 10.
19 Sara Ahmed np.
20 Komunyakaa 67–68.
21 Toi Derricotte 218.
22 When I sleep, these nights, I dream of guns: home invasions, school shootings, a muzzle tucked beneath the chin and a pale hand that is and is not mine at the trigger.
23 My love for London began in Bloomsbury, on a scholarship to study Creative Writing. I was sixteen? At some point, I cut this detail from my CV (but I still have a line, to this day, about another scholarship I won at seventeen? – eighteen? – when Toni Morrison herself selected my essay about my personal hero, my mom. I wish I still had the essay, but I was seventeen or eighteen and too depressed to think to save the words I wrote, even if Toni Morrison said they mattered), but I can trace so much to being sixteen in London and spending days writing in the Bell family home.
24 DMC in KHS 158–59.
25 KHS 29.
26 This is the fairy-tale ending: a life rich with books and a deep love for words, working with books and words and people who, even with flawed and broken means push and push for there to be more books and more words in this world. We are not the right kind of doctors, no, not at this pivotal moment in time. But I could always feel how proud my mother was of me when I was reading. I can feel how proud she is of me for writing. I can feel it in every good word I write.
27 You must know it is ours, our mouth.
28 You may cover your ears now.