A Time to Burn

Despite her religious vocation, or perhaps because of it, my mother is a skeptic when it comes to dreams. She cautions against taking them too seriously, prefers observing them in the soberness of daylight and “biblical truth.”

Nevertheless, after a vivid nightmare of her friend’s son on fire—his body caught in a cage of bright flames, his legs sliced asunder and burning like logs—she jolted upright in a sweat that left little room for intellectual distance. Gathering her hands in clenched prayer, she clamped her teeth down on his name until morning broke. 

As soon as the sun streamed through her window, she called her friend, asking: Is everything all right with your son these days? Over the phone, her friend let out a trembling sigh. Don’t even get me started, she said. Yesterday night, he kept falling asleep on his long drive home, and almost veered off the road several times. He could have died if it wasn’t for the driver behind him, honking at him all night long.

• •

Whether for good or for evil, fire has always been a portent, a sign of things to come. In early Korean history, sudden outbreaks of fire were often interpreted as heaven’s condemnation for the sin of an individual or the government itself.

And fire wasn’t only a sign from the heavenly realm to our own: it was also Korea’s quickest and most accurate method of primary communication. During the Joseon Dynasty, workers on mountain peaks would use torches and smoke signals as a simple, effective warning: two torches for an enemy, three for their approach, four when they had crossed the border, and five for close contact with allies.  Within twelve hours, a report from anywhere in the country could arrive at the capital city.

I can understand fire as a way of speech, a warning: there is something about fire that demands our immediate, undivided attention. Its sudden scream of light, at once a comfort and a threat, dances at the periphery of our vision. Carefully handled, it can turn four walls into a home, a bloody mass of meat into a fragrant meal. Unattended, it can flare into a nightmare. At any moment, it can turn and swallow us whole.

• •

For several years my two little sisters and I mostly lived in our family’s church. It was a cramped, dirty building, one of the ugliest edifices I have ever seen. Walls streaked with gray soot and cobwebs, the tiny parking lot overflowing with drowned cigarette butts in sewers overflowing with unidentifiable black gunk, an occasional rat or dead street cat rotting beneath the cars.

Without a heating system in the building, my sisters and I lugged a black electric heater with us whenever we stayed at church, huddling beside it for warmth. We would squeeze together in its harsh but effective glow, teeth chattering, as Mother fried vegetable fritters and stirred seaweed soup on our portable gas burner. It was easy to forget the heater’s power until an ashy smell caused us to go “Oh!” and look down—and find a ragged black hole gnawing its way through our coat, or the legs of our chairs melting lopsided, or the fragile church pews giving off a hot rubbery scent. A lesson we frequently learned: the things we forgot, we burned.

• •

Sometimes, of course, we burn to forget. Fire has been used for centuries that way. I distinctly remember one evening, the cool blue wind flowing through the windows, and my mother standing in front of the sink. Her soft, dark face, in all its unspeakable sadness, lit up with a sudden hot circle of flame, as she set a bundle of papers alight. She held them out, the letters curling black and taking flight in wisps of smoke. In her hands, fire throbbed into air, then unidentifiable ash. The remains swirled silently down the drain.

My mother has not had an easy life in any sense of the word, but she has survived—and what is more, so has her gentleness.

“The ‘I’ inside myself used to be so strong, so adamant,” she said to me once. “And now—after all these years—suffering and sickness has burned it all out of me. I have grown so weak, ‘I’ am barely left. But,” smiling slightly, “in its stead, there is Jesus. The smaller I get, the clearer His image becomes.”

• •

“So much of any year is flammable, / lists of vegetables, partial poems,” Naomi Shihab Nye writes. “Orange swirling flame of days, / so little is a stone.” Burning as both the cleanness of obliteration, and the energy of a fresh start. 

Traditionally, Korean families took care to keep household fires burning from generation to generation, and woe to the careless daughter-in-law who let the precious ember go out! Sometimes, however, the king would sometimes kindle fire anew—a ritual worthy of national celebration. During the Joseon Dynasty, the palace would light fires with elm and willow trees and distribute the flames to provincial dignitaries around April. Rather than feeding the same fire all year round, and thus risking it becoming “soiled” or “weak,” the people would welcome spring with a freshly burning flame. 

And today? When I visited my sister in Boston for winter, she told me that they would be having fireworks at the Boston Harbor, and despite the driving sleet—the unholy hour—the frightening streets in a foreign country—neither of us could resist. In a cold that made both of our phones shut down, we grasped each other’s hands and ran through the freezing dark. We reached our destination just as the first spark sizzled up in the air. Boom! Suddenly, the whole sky was a conflagration of color. The crowd let out a collective gasp. Sparkling, glittering, coruscating, the new year had begun.

• •

I am grateful that I have never seen fire untamed, and I am deeply frightened by stories of those who have. One of our church members described a fire breaking out in her family’s apartment on Sunday, while she and her parents were partaking in our church’s worship service over Zoom.

“It was horrifying,” she said flatly. “We were trapped. There was nothing we could do as we watched the flames spread across the ceiling. It could have been the last Sunday service of our lives.”

There was something hollow and diminished in her description, as if the traumatic experience had seized her very belief in what she worshiped and shaken it to its core. Ultimately, she and her family survived unhurt, but much of their house—and their treasured possessions—were irredeemably destroyed.

• •

Living in my home country of South Korea means that while I have never had direct experience with fire, it is a prospect that never seems too far away.

In 2017, in response to North Korea’s belligerent statement that it was considering a strategy to strike US territory with mid- to long-range missiles, Donald Trump warned reporters that North Korea “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen … they will be met with fire, fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

While a brimstone-laden speech from a US president caused many South Koreans to go slack-jawed with astonishment, such threats of annihilation from the north have become so commonplace that many people find them hardly newsworthy. Another day, another barrage of test-fired ballistic missiles. Just in the past few months, this has included the launch of North Korea’s advanced intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), a test of a rocket engine, and continued progress on its rapidly advancing nuclear tests.

In college, I met a kind American man who was helping me file my student taxes. When we were alone in the room, he leaned forward and whispered urgently: “Living in Korea, at a time like this. Aren’t you…you know…terrified?”

I smiled at his concern. After decades of being held hostage, most Koreans have learned to shrug off fresh threats with dismissiveness, even boredom. The volatile economy, the increasingly intense job market, the difficulty of finding affordable housing are all far more pressing concerns. Although the Korean War killed nearly five million people, of which over half were civilians, the generation that experienced its horrors is passing. In its place is ennui, suspicion, and a vague sense of embarrassment at the tasteless, tacky violence of a war dragging long past its expiration date.

“The Kim regime is crazy, but they’re not suicidal,” my friend said, yawning. “Maybe it’s time we just abolish mandatory military service. I feel like it’s just a government ruse to get free labor.”

My adopted brother takes the prospect of burning to a crisp more seriously, but his conclusion isn’t all that different.

“If we go, we go,” he says, shrugging. “Once they hit the nuke button, there’s nothing we ordinary citizens can do.”

• •

The threat of North Korea literally looms on the horizon in the 2018 Korean movie Burning. Poverty-ridden Jong-su lives in a rural village in Paju, directly beside the demilitarized zone separating North from South Korea; the film shifts between the rural landscape of Paju’s cow turds and broken-down farmhouses, and the coldly dissociative glitter of Seoul, the capital city. In the background thrums an ever-present soundtrack of deep anxiety, underscored by the North Korean propaganda blaring constantly on loudspeakers across the border. As someone who lived in Paju before moving to Seoul, I swept my eyes across the barbed wire fences of one and the crowded anonymity of the other with a sense of both sorrow and home.

In Paju, fire is stark, primitive: it has immediate consequences. It is linked to not only the fiery sunsets throwing light on a divided country, but also the chronic anger of Jongsu’s father, who once forced Jongsu to set his mother’s belongings on fire. It is a violent and visible expression of anger for those who have nowhere else to vent their despair.

In Seoul, by contrast, Jongsu enters a gallery to stare at a painting by artist Oksang Lim. The painting depicts the flame-engulfed Yongsan massacre, in which six people were killed and twenty-three injured. In the wealth-sanitized glamor of the city, even an event of mass violence can be turned into a metaphor, hung up on a wall for display.

One of the film’s crucial scenes takes place in Paju between Jongsu and Ben, a mysterious Seoulite with an Americanized name and unplaceable wealth. Ben casually reveals his strange hobby to Jongsu: burning greenhouses down to the ground. 

“Korean police don’t pay attention to those sorts of things,” he assures Jongsu, eyes glowing. “Those greenhouses are dirty eyesores just waiting for me to burn them up. And watching them burn is thrilling. Like a bass, booming down to the bones…”

• •

There is a pleasure in obliteration.

When I was very young, I loved the promise of new notebooks: a fresh, gleaming white page, a volume of creamy, fluttering wings to take flight on. The first few pages were meticulous: neatly printed letters that were more calligraphy than writing, painstaking illustrations, each word pressed down with religious care.

By the third or fourth page, however, entropy would begin: a wobble here, a misspelled word there, an ink blot or a tiny crease that could not be erased. Rather than accepting this as a part of growth and moving onto the next page, I would feel my nerves prickle hotly every time my eyes grazed the unforgivable error. Without hesitation, the offending pages would be ripped out, and I would start all over again—or more frequently, abandon the notebook, no longer pristine and perfect.

This impatience with imperfection still resides inside me, a bright coil of matchsticks that could burst into flame with irritation.

The older I grow, the more fearfully I promise myself that I will not use pain gratuitously, neither for a metaphor, nor for art. The more mistakes I make as I age, the more I try to school myself in the grace of forgiving rather than the way of fire.

To be imperfect does not mean that you deserve to burn.

To wobble, smudge, crease, careen. To write bad poems and bad essays. To show my ugliness to the people I love, and be amazed at their generosity in continuing to love me anyway.

To be willing to accept my mistakes, and reach out to turn a fresh page.

• •

I will always be a little afraid of fire. Even at its most benign, it always holds the potential for a sudden outbreak of bright violence. The potential for one of the most painful deaths known to man, the surest ways to take revenge.

Think of Samson, tying three hundred foxes tail to tail in pairs, with a torch fastened to each pair, in order to burn his enemies’ olive groves. Think of his enemies, seething with rage, torching his ex-girlfriend and her father in return. No need to search through ancient literature for examples: just this past summer, a man in his fifties set fire to a court building in Daegu, Korea, furious at the loss of his civil suit. To quote Lemony Snicket, “If everyone fought fire with fire, the whole world would go up in smoke.”

And yet, hasn’t fire also always been a symbol of life? In Greek tradition, a gift snatched from the realm of the gods, precious enough to risk eternal torment for. In Judeo-Christian tradition, there is the burning bush: brambles trembling, glorious, afire—burning yet not burning, flaming yet not consumed by the flames. God reaching out to His people and revealing His name. God reaching out to touch us, and forging a fragile union that would allow us to live beside holiness without dying.

• •

In an eerie parallel to the story of my mother’s nightmare, my mother was driving down a US freeway in our old secondhand car with the frayed leather straps and old seats that smelled like baked fur. As she drove, she noticed that the car behind her was honking intermittently, the blare of its car horn a high, insistent wail.

When she finally swerved to the side of the road and stopped, a panicked woman jumped out of her car and waved her hand frantically at Mother to step out. As soon as she did, Mother realized that the trunk of the car was on fire.

In one swift movement, Mother slammed open the back door of the car and snatched her baby out of the car seat. The baby—my youngest sister—was completely unhurt, but when my mother pressed her face into the child’s clothes, she could smell the bitter tang of smoke.

The American woman, the Korean woman, and the stunned, ash-scented baby stood on the side of the road, watching a car go up in flames.

• •

Holiness, I think, to be touched by the bright fire of God and yet emerge unscathed.

And this, too, a kind of holiness: the music of car horns honking at each other all along the winding, dangerous road of our lives. Keeping each other awake, attentive, alive.

• •

A few months ago, it was a church member’s birthday. We clapped our hands, sang happy birthday, presented him with a frosted strawberry cream cake topped with a crown of flickering candles. It was only when he leaned in to blow that we realized the difficulty: it was the time of the pandemic, and everyone was masked.

It was only a moment of hesitation. His face golden in the halo of light, he shrugged, smiled, and reached out his hand. Fluidly, his fingers swept through the air, and clamped around the flame. We all gasped as the fire flared out.

“Don’t worry,” he said, laughing at our shock.

His hand opened, soft as a cabbage leaf—whole, unscathed, unburnt.

Only the lingering smell of smoke, and his eyes, touched with light, told us where there had once been a fire. Where he had reached out to that first bright gift from God, and prayed for a wish to come true.

With grateful acknowledgment to The Florida Review, where this essay was published.