The Melody of Care

From the adjoining room, I heard H. sigh. It was a bleak sigh, heavy with the weight of another’s grief. “There, there. You mustn’t cry, dear,” she said hurriedly into the phone. “It hurts me to hear you in such pain—”

Her voice caught, and it was too late. An inner crutch slipped, and I heard her muted weeping through the walls. My heart clenched a little, because I loved H. 

When she returned to the office, our manager took one look at her before saying, in his brusquely affectionate way, “Sentimental old woman. That’s the face of someone who’s about to get ripped off by another sob story.”

“Oh, shut it,” she snapped, reddening slightly. It was common knowledge that H. was one of the most soft-hearted North Korean counselors at our organization, and often used her personal money (despite living on minimum wage) to support patients who came to her for help. She bought them emergency meals, lent them money for broker fees, and offered her house as a place to stay, even when her trust was frequently betrayed.

“It’s just that she’s from my hometown from North Korea, and when she started crying about her family up north, I got to thinking about my own daughter, and—well. It reminded me of a lot of things I shouldn’t think about.” She closed her eyes and shuddered.

At over sixty, H. had all the bubbling humor and energy of someone who had gone through far less time and pain. Her round, peach blossom-pale face was soft with lines that usually broke out in childlike laughter, and the few times I saw her in distress were usually on behalf of other North Koreans. I was shy in the face of her pain, humbled by what I could offer no adequate solace for. What can you say to someone who has lost her son to the ocean, her daughter to sex traffickers in China, and her own homeland to an unending war?

We both live in a broken country, yet this brokenness has cast us into two completely different worlds. During one of my early days at my job, when I was assisting at a conference, a North Korean refugee approached me and asked, “So which province in the upper neighborhood are you from?” I laughed, “Oh, I’m from the ‘lower’ neighborhood.” 

Surprised, he asked if I had any family connections to the north, and I demurred: my mother hailed from Jinju, my father from Daegu. Growing up in the neon blaze of Seoul, I had never experienced a blackout; had eaten three square meals a day, and trembled at the word “plump” as an insult; received a scholarship to study in the US and in England, and been ungrateful in more than one language. Despite devoting my life to the study of the soap-bubble brightness of words, I was silenced by the unsurmountable snowdrift between our lives, a snarl of barbed wire no words could clear away.

So instead, I went to the mug stand and boiled a cup of coffee—strong and bitter, the way H. liked it. She said she had almost never tasted coffee before coming to the south, but now, she drank a cup daily. She brightened when I placed it on her desk. “Thank you, Esther,” she said, folding her hands around the pooled warmth. She lifted it to her mouth and drank all the darkness down.

°❀.ೃ࿔

For two years after I graduated college, I came back to Korea and worked at Saejowi, a North Korean refugee resettlement organization in Seoul. H. was one of our North Korean counselors working at various hospital branches across South Korea. She was a peer listener rather than a licensed therapist, and usually referred serious cases of mental illness to professionals. However, she was an essential intermediary for North Korean refugees, many of whom have often never heard of terms such as depression or domestic abuse their entire lives. For refugees—ashamed of their accent, flummoxed by the complex medical jargon, and daunted by hospital fees—a reassuring voice in the North Korean dialect was “like an oasis in the middle of the desert,” as one elderly refugee put it. With the outbreak of COVID-19, H. had moved to our headquarters to field inquiries over the phone instead.

Public health experts have noted inequities in how the pandemic affects vulnerable populations in the US, and while there does not seem to have been a disproportionately higher percentage of COVID-19 cases in the North Korean refugee community, the pandemic greatly exacerbated their mental health crisis. According to government-led studies in 2015, the percentage of North Korean refugees with suicidal ideation is around three times higher than that of the average South Korean, despite the fact that South Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. 

In the process of fleeing North Korea, most refugees experience traumatic events such as sexual trafficking, torture, or witnessing severe violence, which cause PTSD or physical illness for years afterwards. Many also feel persistent, abiding guilt over leaving their friends and family behind to the mercy of a state that punishes traitors to the third generation. Add the anxiety of a pandemic and social distancing measures to this crisis, and people are pushed over the edge.

I was drafting an application for a grant to help North Korean refugees during the pandemic, and H. told me the story of J., a single mother who was raising three children and struggling with various illnesses, including hepatic cirrhosis, clinical depression, and insomnia. As she suffered from severe breakdowns, her 23-year-old daughter often stepped into her role to take care of her younger siblings.

College had provided a brief respite for the girl, who was training to be a nurse’s aid, until the pandemic forced her to return home. During quarantine with her mentally ill mother, who was known to abuse and beat her during her breakdowns, the girl became severely depressed herself. In the spring of 2020, she threw herself from the eleventh floor of her apartment. Her mother had been seized by fits of cardiogenic shock ever since.

“It is a terrible thing,” H. said, lowering her hands slowly onto her lap, as if balancing a heavily laden tray of horrors. But she spoke with the same quiet calm with which she had told me about the screams she heard in the Chinese jail, or her vanished daughter’s jewel-bright name, or the blinding, uninhabitable memory of her own mother being deported back to North Korea. There were terrible things happening all day, every day. It was important not to feel wounded by every single one.

Yet the reason I loved H. was because I knew that, deep down, she still took these stories of suffering personally. Once, she was counseling a North Korean girl at the hospital, and discovered she didn’t have any parents or relatives in South Korea. The tears rose to her eyes, and she touched the girl’s hands impulsively.

“I have lost everyone I know, too,” H. said. “Would you like me to be your mother?”

They have been living together ever since. “When I went home at night,” H. said, “I used to be terrified of those dark rooms, those cold floors. Now, my ‘daughter’ is there to greet me. In the evenings, we break an egg and eat together, and comfort each other’s grief. It is good to know there is someone waiting for me. It is good to know there is someone who cares.”

°❀.ೃ࿔

The word care originates from Old English carian, “to be anxious, to take concern,” from Proto-Germanic karo, “lament” or “grief.” Traced further, it stems from the root gar: to “cry out.” Care as an expression of fondness seems to have developed later. Solicitude originally emerged as a scream.

I have always been suspicious of the demands of care, the way self-sacrifice can turn into constant permutations of pain. My parents pastored a small church in Seoul, and for over a decade, I watched them dismantle themselves to serve others: waking up in the middle of the night to drive to church members’ homes, waiting hours in the morning to pick up people for worship service, shivering in borrowed and unheated rooms as they preached warmth and glory to people hungering deeply for both.

Founding a church composed of poor college students meant no money for winter clothes, college prep, new shoes, or family vacations.  In addition to her ministry, Mother worked herself to the bone teaching children English to support our family, and when she became too ill to walk up a single flight of stairs without trembling with pain, there was no money for her medical bills, either.

Even when Mother’s marriage had grown agonized and disillusioned, and her depression so sharp and deep that she gave me instructions for how to take care of my sisters in the event of her death, she was unable to show the church anything but a face of smiling calm, of gentle and agapic generosity. People came to her for advice in breakups, loss of faith, and illness, and she wept and prayed over each of them in genuine kindness, even as her own life grew drained of color.

Care as carving, caving. I couldn’t care less about most of their sorrows. I was too busy resenting them for knowing nothing about our own.

°❀.ೃ࿔

When I returned after college to work with North Korean refugees, many questioned the wisdom of my job, which was neither prestigious nor lucrative. My parents, however, accepted it as a form of Christian caring, as in: “Esther has always had a calling to help North Korean people.”

It is true that I have always been drawn to the people of North Korea, but I feel embarrassed by the word “calling,” its risk of self-righteous martyrdom. The truth is more homely and complex. In their suffering, I saw both a reflection of myself and the hope of escape from the same.

By which I mean: I knew that were I born thirty minutes up north from where I lived, I, too, would worship a dictator as a god, know hunger as a living and taloned thing in my stomach. As a pastor, my father would have been stoned to death. If I wrote poetry, it would all be in praise of the “Mother State” and the Kim regime: no lines fishing for stars, no phrases rejoicing in wordplay or question or confession. Although I have known South Koreans to curl their lips in distaste at their northern kin, as if regarding a source of acute shame, I always feel a shade of survivor’s guilt—a resurgence of the old fear that comfort, including my own, is always bought at the price of another’s pain.

But there is more than this: in the face of a North Korean woman, I recognize the face of my mother, who has endured a lifetime of trauma (from a nightmarish childhood to abusive relationships to a deeply unhappy marriage) and still survived and somehow remained beautiful. To go through such valleys of despair and still be alive—this, to me, seems miraculous, a living declaration of strength.

All the more so as I have struggled with melancholy most of my life. It is, as I sometimes say sharply to myself in my dark moments, an unjustifiable melancholy—for what do I have to be depressed for, if I do not need to worry about my next meal, and both of my parents are still alive? It seems self-indulgent and outrageous that I should be weary of life, when I have never had a blade pressed to my throat; never had my legs forced open for a stranger; never been sold, or smothered, or shorn. And yet, there remains something inside me that wrenches me into bad manners towards God, to feel life as a weight, not a wonder—a command to be barely endured.

To believe in hope for North Korean refugees is to believe in hope for myself. If someone can lose their country, their family, their childhood, their home—if they can lose all that, and still find reasons to be happy, how dare I complain? How dare I wish for my breath to be stilled?

°❀.ೃ࿔

Han, the wound-riddled Korean word with no exact equivalent in English, translates roughly to “the calcification of deep resentment, unjustified suffering, or extreme grief.” Calcification to—what? A stone weight in the heart: thick gloom, stifled breath, suppressed memory. Or to language—han as a cold jewel encompassing everything we are afraid to speak of. I began writing poetry, after all, in the hopes of escaping from grief.

My country’s self-identification with this word is unsurprising, given the modern history of Korea. Cross-genre writer Sam Cha puts it succinctly: “Here’s a country that for about 80 years just could not catch a fucking break.” After the Japanese colonization of Korea, or “36 years of the Japanese doing cute little things like outlawing the speaking of Korean and press-ganging young men for cannon fodder and young women for military fuck parlors,” there’s “all out fucking civil war, except really it’s the USSR and the USA getting down to it, going twelve rounds in the ring using the two Koreas as fucking boxing gloves.” At the end of the match, nobody is a victor. The country is torn in half.

If Hankuk, Korea, is permeated with han, we cannot afford to see North Korean suffering as unrelated or other: the han of the north is the han of us all. And if, as Korean-American writer EJ Koh suggests, we expand the definition of han as “specific to Korea but not limited to Korea”—if we resist the “definition of han as nationhood,” and see it instead as “the truth of living as a perpetual outsider”—is that not all the more reason to feel the suffering of North Korea as our own?

I do not mean, of course, to equate anything we go through in the south to the particular experiences of the north: one must be cautious in speaking, even in sympathy, of another’s pain, especially a pain as vast as that of most North Korean refugees. And of course there is a danger in the glorification of suffering. During my study abroad at Oxford, when I was reading Fyodor Dostoevsky, my professor slammed her cane down vehemently in discussing his novels.

“For all his great reputation, he advocated the belief in salvation through suffering—a most pernicious doctrine! One that set the Russians back by hundreds of years…”

Yes, salvation does not come from suffering. I cannot help but find hope, however, in the cool, smooth solidity of what remains from the shipwreck of han. And isn’t that, in itself, an affirmation of life—to see the survival of a country, of an individual, as strength?

°❀.ೃ࿔

In college, my philosophy professor was an erudite, irreverent man who sometimes called himself a “closet Christian” because of his intellectual interest in Jesus of Nazareth. He is perhaps the only person to whom I have ever spoken about my childhood in detail: even in writing, the fear of diminishing the light of my parents’ love, or the truth of what good work was wrought in the midst of their pain, always kept me half-silenced, skirting around incidents with euphemisms and metaphor. I loved him for allowing such openness in my life.

Once, as I sat in his office wiping tears from my eyes, he said gravely:

“Esther, no single person can ever force another to be saved. Christ Himself couldn’t do that. That is a choice each person has to make on his own.”

And he said this, a lesson I have tried to carry with me ever since:

“Fill yourself, Esther, in order to give. Care comes from overflow.”

°❀.ೃ࿔

Even as I illustrated posters of North Korean refugees glowing with hope and shared stridently cheerful stories of successful resettlement and recovery, I remember those two years at Saejowi as overcast by a heavy, persistent gloom, as if someone had thrown a thick dun rug over a brightly polished floor.

The conflicts at home remained visible, tensile, quivering, added to which I was struggling my way out of a deeply loving, irredeemably troubled relationship. I cared about both, I cared deeply—but this care, suppressed and embittered, ate at me inside like hunger. My stomach seized up, my hands trembled, I had difficulty breathing. I developed cystitis, which persisted, despite both traditional and modern medicine, for six months. My periods grew irregular, and when they came, blood spangled my days like slick autumn leaves for nearly a month.

I struck myself internally for this hemorrhage of emotion, this theatrical despair, the body conspiring with the heart to demand me me.

Selfish and ungrateful, I thought, as I went to the bathroom to cry, you who have so little to mourn.

°❀.ೃ࿔

Lunch at Saejowi always consisted of gimbap at a small snack stand, the cheapest meal possible in the neighborhood. Everyone ate it, from our executive director to our counselors; costlier meals were reserved for important external guests. Although it was generally poor fare, it allowed Saejowi to keep a promise that had been made from its very founding: that no North Korean refugee who visited Saejowi, whether for an event or a counseling session, would return home hungry.

H. announced over lunch that it would be her birthday soon, and Manager Yoo, with his caustic humor, shot back:

“Surely no better time to pop off to your grave. Make sure you bring an axe tomorrow, and I’d be happy to do the favor.”

“Oh, dear!” H., who was used to rough speech, did not bat an eye. “Will you be sure to give me a quick death?”

“I’ll try. Esther, you’re in charge of shoveling the dirt over her coffin.”

“Watch your back, young man. One of these days, I’ll tear off your skin and use it as a jump-rope if you keep speaking such nonsense,” she fired back smartly.

“Listen to this old woman and her insults! You can never beat a North Korean in an argument,” Yoo grumbled, rolling his eyes. “This is why our little hero Lee Seung-bok said, ‘I hate communists!’”

“Who’s that?” H. questioned.

“Ha! Look at this, you don’t even know your own history. This was during the Korean War, remember? Seung-bok was an elementary school kid, and when the North Korean commies invaded and started beating him, he told them, ‘I hate communists!’, so they ended up ripping his mouth open and slaughtering his family. It’s a famous story.”

“What?” H. stopped laughing abruptly and jolted upright in sudden, genuine distress. “What...what cruelty! How vicious, how horrible! To a little child! I never knew about this before. Are...are you still joking, or is this for real?”

“Of course it’s real. Look it up, woman.” Yoo had finished eating by now; he pushed back his empty plate and swung himself to his feet. “I’m going to grab a smoke and head back. Finish your meal and come up when you’re ready.”

I watched him stroll out the door, cigarette already in hand. Manager Yoo was decidedly a far cry from any preconceived image of a Korean reunification leader I might have had. He was a swarthy, stolid man who detested political correctness or glib speech, and complained that he would never have stayed at Saejowi for over a decade if he hadn’t had the bad luck to marry a North Korean woman. The few words he spoke all day were usually groans of “Open the window, Esther, I’m going to kill myself,” or jokes that could swerve from insensitivity to outright cruelty. Once, I was outraged when a North Korean woman said that she had crossed the Tumen River in the spring, and his careless response was: “Oh, that’s not even a proper escape, then. You ought to have gone in the winter when everything is frozen over, or the summer, when the waters are at their highest. You had it pretty easy.”

And yet, there was something in Yoo that drew North Korean refugees to him, and made them address him with an ease and naturalness I seldom saw in their interactions with other South Koreans. For some, the very brusqueness of his manner gave them reassurance, as he treated them as neither objects of pity or poster children, but as faulty people who annoyed him just as much as any South Koreans. And then, behind his bluntness lay an odd and ample kindness: I often saw him working late at night to help North Korean college students with their homework, or to file some bureaucratic paperwork that refugees could not understand. The very fact that he was staying at an underpaid job he professed to abhor and seemed patently overqualified for remained a testament that North Korea meant more to him than his jeering suggested.

During one of his tirades about how much he hated Saejowi, I asked him why he hadn’t quit yet, and a shade of earnestness flickered over his face—a rare moment of seriousness that he seldom betrayed.

“Jeong, I guess,” he mumbled, shrugging.

Jeong: another untranslatable Korean word, a word akin to familiarity or love.

°❀.ೃ࿔

After his departure, H. and I passed each other kimchi and black beans and ate our gimbap and ramen quietly, until I blurted out a question that had been on my mind:

“H., how do you hold onto happiness when you feel sad? I feel very sad these days, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

H. pondered my question for a moment. Despite being a shining example of North Korean resettlement and recovery, she also continued to struggle with bouts of depression or persistent insomnia. Finally, she replied with a smile, “It sounds rather simple, but I like to listen to music. Sometimes I listen to very upbeat music to forget about my worries. Other days, when I really need to have a good cry, I listen to very sad songs and let myself weep. That was something I learned in South Korea: to just let myself cry. And sometimes, I would go to a karaoke room by myself and sing and sing for hours, until I had sung all my sorrows away.”

H. had a rich, vibrant voice and sang beautifully, with great pleasure. She went on:

“Oh! Another thing I like to do when I am sad is to look at videos of babies. It always seemed so beautiful to me, the way parents adore their babies in the south. Of course, I always loved my daughter, too, and I never raised a hand against her. But in the north, we never say the words ‘I love you.’ We are only allowed to say those words to the Dear Leader, so for my entire life, I never told her that I loved her. This is my biggest regret…”

When I went home that night, I paused in my mother’s room, caressed her hands as gently as I could. The gloom receded briefly from my eyes, and I recognized what a blessing it was, to love someone who was still alive and on the same side of the border as I was.

“I love you, Mother,” I said. “I love you very much.”

°❀.ೃ࿔

I do not wish to be a writer of han, either North or South Korean. Enough devastation! I wish to grow into a writer of jeong: to celebrate the invisible, too often unspoken feeling that compels us to kindness, generosity, community. If han is an exercise in ostracism, an anguish at once collective and terribly lonely, jeong is a spontaneous touch that binds one person to another.

At Saejowi, I once translated a testimony from a North Korean refugee who spoke of how, during the famine, her best friend had shared the last drop of grass porridge with her. A love speaking louder than hunger: the persistence of jeong amid han.

All this, of course, may be simple naivete. I have not, as my mother once said, suffered enough to truly understand Korean suffering. Can love exist in a country that does not have the language for it, or kinship in a community where one neighbor eats another’s child during the famine?

Yet for all this—I still wish to scavenge for evidence of our capacity to love, as one sifts through dark sand for gold. Survival is necessary, but it is not enough to be alive, as the suicide rates in Korea can attest: we need something worth staying alive for. In a way, Christianity itself is predicated on jeong—the extravagant jeong of God, a jeong outrageous enough to kill death. A jeong that would appear over the centuries in ways both graceful and imperfect: in fervent prayer for one’s enemies; in lifetimes of constant serving; in worship and generosity and joy. A jeong manifesting in care.

I am still a novice in the lessons of love, and too often unable to offer it to myself. Yet at Saejowi, I learned to be patient, and start recognizing it in the smallest things. I want to write about North Korean curses and North Korean jokes, and how even death (“I’ll kill you”) and dictatorship (“oh, of course we should do this-and-that, for the glory of our Dear Leader—damn him!”) are transfigured to vessels for affection, resistance, and laughter. I want to write about the way a North Korean woman’s eyes softened as she spoke of her first love, or how another woman blushed deeply with pleasure and dimpled at the portrait I had drawn for her graduation ceremony. Moments that often go unnoticed in narratives of nuclear war, the Kim dynasty, or even individual North Korean refugees as reduced to only victims. These and other small illuminations are nothing against the backdrop of historic and ongoing pain. But they gave me hope that to live was a thing worth struggling for—a thing of great beauty and awe. In a way, during darkness, they kept me alive.

°❀.ೃ࿔

The very definition of jeong implies a community, but every community (religious or not) has its limits. I joined Saejowi because of its nonreligious, nonpolitical nature, as I was curious what serving without spirituality might look like. I quickly realized that this place, too, was a place where imperfect works were carried out by imperfect beings. I noticed how South Korean “benefactors” who donated to the organization would walk into the office and refuse to even look refugees in the eye, except to order them rudely around like servants. I turned pale with anger when a South Korean “volunteer” loudly chirped to her daughter, in front of other North Korean refugee children, “Make sure you grab some good photos—playing with these North Koreans will all be useful on your college resume later!” 

Our director was a woman of great, self-sacrificial love for North Korean refugees—and also, arbitrary and astonishing anger. A small mistake or a bad day could send her flying into a storm of slammed doors and high-pitched shouting: “You people are so uncivilized and ungrateful—I’m sick of North Koreans, sick of them!” When I watched a North Korean refugee’s hands begin to shake as she listened to our director shout, I thought in dismay, For all that we provide mental and medical health services to many refugees, aren’t we destroying the mental health of others in the process?

Yet this was the place that so many North Korean refugees called “their mother,” “their home,” “the only place where they felt understood!”

°❀.ೃ࿔

After lunch, Manager Yoo became bored and started up his usual banter with H. again. During their conversation, she mentioned that the last place she had lived in North Korea was a small village named C—, and Yoo suddenly snapped his fingers at an idea.

“I bet we can find it on Google Maps! Technology these days, you know!”

We searched it up on Google and scrolled past videos of residents biking through empty streets, photos of the Kim family’s statues grinning down on deserted plazas. When we found the satellite images, we zoomed in on roads and hills, following H.’s finger like a compass.

“This is where you lived?” Yoo clicked furiously. “See anything familiar?”

“Yes, this looks a bit familiar. Those brown fields, that river, and...oh! That’s my house!”

All at once, H.’s voice electrified with color. She thrust herself forward to see more closely. Her eyes sparkled as she began explaining rapidly:

“Yes, it’s my house, I am sure of it! We used to live a bit apart from everyone in the village, so we had to walk a ways. See how the road turns here? We lived right at the foot of the mountain, with the river right in front—yes, here it is—we used to take our clothes and wash them here…”

“Nice,” Yoo muttered. “Go back to where you came from, won’t you?”

“Yes, yes, this is where I used to live with my mother all those years ago,” H. went on, cheerfully ignoring his sardonic comment. “There was a cow-pen here, I remember…”

She fell silent, tracing one point on a drab brown landscape to another. A multitude of memories trembled and unfolded in the movement of her finger.

“Want me to print this out for you in high res?” Yoo asked casually. I glanced at him and realized that although he was fending sentimentality off with his usual brusqueness, his eyes were turned upon H. with concern.

“In high resolution? That would be nice, for sure.” H. sighed. “My father died soon after building this house, so we buried him in the backyard.”

“Oh, that little gray dot?”

“Yes, I see! That’s his grave, it is.” She paused, and stared hard at the satellite image. We all became silent again; I crept to her side, and touched her arm gently.

“Ah...my heart feels strange,” she said, quietly, and moved back to her desk.

On the computer screen, Yoo’s mouse hovered over a frozen smudge of earth, indistinguishable to all except those who had lived and breathed and mourned inside its space...

°❀.ೃ࿔

Communities grow, just as individuals do. Over time, I was surprised to find that those who had troubled our church with anger and desire had slowly fallen away, and those who were left responded to my parents’ love with more than understanding and gratitude—they began serving us in return. Every week, my mother’s arms were filled with fresh flowers gifted by members from the church. We set up a system of leaders who stayed up every night praying with us for the sick, the weary, the sorrowful in our church, and in the quake of crisis, they stood faithfully by our side. My father flushed with embarrassment when he stumbled home one day to find our church leaders waving balloons and party hats, yelling, “Surprise! Happy birthday! We’re so thankful that you were born!” From some indefinable point, when I asked my mother what the church meant to her, the first thing she did was smile. “They’re my family,” she replied, simply and sweetly, and my heart opened with relief.

Most importantly, their jeong was not founded on the extent of my parents’ self-sacrifice or my mother’s charisma; over the years, the jeong of the church had grown organically into one founded on faith, a genuine belief that Christ could fill every need. As the faith of the community strengthened, a new creed of care became ours: one that was founded on grace rather than pain, a discipleship of shared trust rather than carving oneself inside out.

Even as the church flourished and matured, however, my own soul remained stunted. To be the first daughter of the pastor too often meant smiling brightly and uttering platitudes according to the letter of the law rather than its spirit. Watching those around me in worship, I felt as if I were looking in on a feast through a half-open window: hearing the sound of laughter, smelling the lovely spices and drifting aromas, yet unable to partake in the bounty.

As COVID-19 shuddered through my small world, however, I realized that what had so often felt like a burden to me had been a lifesaving safety net for many. Each family scattered to its own home, like the splitting of tongues at the tower of Babel, and many fell through the cracks.

Young mothers struggled intensely with postpartum depression with nowhere to turn to, where before they would have come to their “second home” for worship, comfort food, and prayer on their behalf. A troubled young man without a family broke up with his girlfriend, and felt so keenly alone afterwards that he contemplated suicide. Live-streamed worship and Zoom prayer seemed awkward and inauthentic, and many grew reluctant to log into service at all, when they could just as easily watch world-famous sermons on YouTube or listen to high-tempo praises while driving away for a socially distanced holiday. Like hot taffy stretched until it oozes and snaps, my community was drifting apart, and I was surprised at the sense of loss.

It also brought, however, a blessing in disguise. Without the need for performativity, I was able to reconsider what the church meant to me, and to remember what had attracted me to Christianity, and kept me, despite all my inner conflicts, committed to this faith. I took long walks through the pages of the Bible, letting myself question and doubt, wrestle and rebel, in the privacy of God’s gaze.

In time, I reached out first to one of our oldest church members, a young woman who had been like an older sister to me in her unswerving affection and unconditional kindness, but whom I had never been able to show my unhappiness, for fear it might damage her relationship with my family or my ex-boyfriend, both of whom were important to her life.

Her response startled me. Even though I clutched at her sleeve (virtually, as we were meeting over Zoom) in a jumble of vague and unexplained grief, asking post-blank for her prayers, she did not offer simple remedies for a complex problem or trivialize my small, human anguish.

Instead, she responded in the same way that I had to the far greater sorrows of H. or other North Korean refugees. She listened with her whole body, with an attention that made itself felt even across the distance of a video call. As I spoke, my tears sprang from her eyes, and ran slowly down her face.

We prayed together afterwards: a heartfelt, soul-gathering thimble of time. But somehow, by the time we bowed our heads to pray, I felt as if my prayers had already begun to be answered.

°❀.ೃ࿔

“Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure,” writes Charlotte Brontë in Villette, which contains one of fiction’s most compelling descriptions of loneliness I have ever read. “Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven … a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.”

Yet I still believe there is much to be said for the messy, strenuous effort of clearing damp clumps of darkness to plant kernels of light. Before laying his hands on the sick, Jesus asked the seemingly obvious question: “Do you want to get well?” Happiness is unpredictable and uncontrollable, a shy visitor who seldom announces his approach, but one for whom we must turn over every corner of the earth in order to prepare a welcome.

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Before the onset of COVID-19, Saejowi held its yearly North Korean dialect singing competition, in which North and South Koreans could choose any popular song and sing it in the northern dialect. Though the purpose was to celebrate the North Korean dialect, which is so often frowned upon in South Korea, the event itself gave me cause for many a blush of angry discomfort.

Of the eleven judges, only one was North Korean, for starters. Then it irritated me to see the number of South Koreans who were obviously there to show off their singing skills and nab the prize money: it was clear they had no interest in the North Korean refugees the event was ostensibly for, from the way they snubbed them backstage. The former South Korean Minister of Reunification droned on and on in an extremely formal, long-winded speech that most of the elderly North Korean refugees in the audience could not understand. Then everyone was obliged to bellow an unnecessarily jingoistic “theme song” for the organization as if it were the national anthem. One South Korean donor was given a plaque for being “a person who made our organization shine,” and she was so pleased that she donned an extremely glittery shirt bedazzled with red sequins and paraded across the stage to drive home the point. As everyone applauded her virtues, I wondered grimly whether this event was actually for all the North Korean refugees sitting in the audience, or a self-congratulatory circle jerk for wealthy South Koreans.

Something strange happened, however, during a performance by one of the North Korean contestants. He was a dark-complexioned, dejected man with curly, unkempt hair, crushed beneath a thick set of headphones; he slumped into the auditorium without greeting anyone. Onstage, he introduced himself hesitatingly as having escaped from the notorious Aoji coal mines in the North Hampyeong Province—a remote place where prisoners were subjected to forced labor. North and South Koreans alike shuddered as the shadow of death flitted swiftly through the room.

He began singing a North Korean rendition of a popular South Korean melody, and once he wrapped his hands around the mic, the shyness and sorrow seemed to fall away—his eyes grew clear, his voice ringing and liquid with passion. I was listening with real interest when K., one of the North Korean counselors, suddenly ran out from the crowd and began pumping her arms energetically beneath the stage. She was dancing—dancing to his music! In the next moment, H. threw aside her coat and joined her, waving in resplendent glee and kicking her heels to the song. Then, one by one, all the North Korean workers at Saejowi ran out, dancing, jumping, cheering him on wildly.

Watching them, I felt an unexpected stab in my chest, and tears flooded my eyes.

They’ve taken back the stage, I realized, they’re cheering him on, even though he’s a stranger, simply because he’s one of ‘our people,’ and they want to celebrate him for making it here alive.

My heart slammed itself against my chest as I watched them dancing, dancing. Even our director ran out at the end to join them. It was a deeply genuine moment—almost the only moment in the event when I felt that this space had become truly and authentically for North Koreans.

When he finished singing, all the North Koreans leaped to their feet screaming, breaking out in thunderous applause. It was a moment of spontaneous community. It was a moment—I was wiping my tears, I was laughing—it was a moment of overflow.

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Today, when I look back on Saejowi, it is the tender, tactile fragments of jeong that remain, like walking through a field of dandelions and finding their delicate fur clinging to unexpected places for months afterwards: socks, shirt-sleeves, collars. The golden crispness of North Korean tofu, battered and dipped in a sweet, spicy sauce that we joked was the color of communism. The way G., another North Korean woman, used to loop her arm through mine and giggle uproariously. The first time H. hugged me warmly, saying that for all her initial fear of my fancy English degree, she had come to trust my heart for North Korean refugees. The day I spent translating letters sent to us by North Korean refugees who had received our care packages, in which they said, “When we ate the corn noodles you sent us, it was like receiving a gift from home.”

None of these will reunify the country or end our unending war. If my time at Saejowi has taught me anything, it has taught me to face the reality that Korea, which I have never known whole, will most likely remain broken as long as I live.

Still, these interruptions to grief are important. These “small reunifications,” or “preludes to reunification,” as we called them at Saejowi, are what make a community. They are what make our brief journey on this planet livable.

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As for myself, the worst of my sadness is now (for now) in the past. I work as a paralegal at a global law firm now, where the glass offices sparkle like sheets of ice and the toilets (immaculate and white as snow) are heated warmly—a far cry from the cramped, dusty rooms I used to sneeze in while working in the reunification movement, but a place in which I often look back on my days at Saejowi with a mix of nostalgia and gratitude. 

With the higher salary my new job afforded, I finally moved out from the house of the young man who had embodied, for me, so much of all the joys and anguish of care. I filled my small, solitary room with the soft, potted unfurling of devil’s ivy and spathe flowers, my favorite books and music. And as spuds of happiness began pushing through the soil of my days, I threw open my doors again. Every week, friends, family, and members of the church would enter my room to eat at my table, seek comfort from their everyday grief, and return refreshed in body and spirit.

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There was a day recently when the shadows of the old troubles crossed through my life again, and a film of despair fell over my eyes. It prowled through my room, a sulky beast the color of black sesame, and crushed its heavy paws across my chest. I looked up at its muzzle and blinked wearily. For all my struggle to be happy, my sadness had come to visit me again.

But it would not do to lie passive forever. This time, I swung my feet over the side of the bed and stood up. I opened the Bible, swallowed its verses like a tonic even when they felt flat and dull in my mouth. Sadness retreated slightly, shaking its head as if under a cold drizzle of rain, and I began to breathe and think of ways to feel wholly (to feel holy) again.

So I walked. Walked and walked among strangers, through the untimely chill of autumn streets, until I began to draw in the richness of the living world around me. The rancid, buttery stench of gingko seeds crushed underfoot. The sound of a street musician blowing into a traditional bamboo pipe—very badly, but with incredible feeling. Sunlight filtered through the threads of a willow tree and turned its leaves to tossed gold. People jostled and talked, laughed and spun. Beside me, a man bent over backwards to snap a picture of his lover from the right angle. Her olive-green skirt gleamed in the light. I smiled and walked on.

On my way, I saw a coin karaoke room, at which I halted, remembering H.’s personal remedy for grief: singing all her sorrows away. I was shown into a tiny stall with two mics ready for use. Plumping down on a garish red seat, I entered in my favorite songs, and began singing by myself.

My voice, thin and colorless at first, stretched and floated like a yellow balloon. Before I knew it, I was laughing. I was dancing. I threw up my hands to the disco-light ceiling and called out the lyrics to “Antifreeze”:

We’ll dance and fight against despair

Above this deep-frozen asphalt city

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At the end of the day, I finally made it to my destination: Dream Forest, a park at the edge of the city that I had often visited as a child.

I had always come here with my mother and sisters in the afternoon, when the sun was at its highest, but it was my first time seeing it alone in the coolness of evening.

A soft, drenched, shadow-blurred evening. The darkness draped over the trees, the brown reeds, the fields of grass, cloaking everything in watery gray-blue. Wherever I looked, there were memories of tenderness—my mother following me and my sisters as we chased each other, her eyes wide with vigilance, to make sure we were safe; a fountain where I truly believed magic dwelt, and pretended I could move water at my will; the cleft of rock where I had seen a heron in its snowy, unsullied coat, and cried out to my mother in delight…

Everything was the same, yet in the absence of light, and seen in solitude, everything was different in texture and hue. Trees murmured darkly and bowed. People had drained away from the blue fields of grass, where only a child and his father remained to blow (and break) a flurry of resplendent soap bubbles. It was so quiet, I felt that if I shouted, I could be heard from one end of the park to the other, perhaps as far as the border itself.

I sat down, unwrapped a sandwich, and ate. It was a pleasure to swallow what I had made with my own hands, a greater pleasure to do so in fresh air, amid the undemanding company of nature.

At my feet, the well-loved pond of my childhood was a pool of both darkness and moon. In its large, generous stillness, everything inside me went silent.

All that was left: the world God had made.

Living and growing and breathing.