Thinking of My Older Brother – 오빠 생각

Thinking of my older brother,
I remember him telling me,
“울지 마”.
He would then make me laugh,
By telling me a funny joke,
Always the same joke.

Thinking of older brother,
I remember him making me repeat
our address, until I knew it by heart,
in case I would get lost.

Singing the melody of the song 오빠 생각,*
I’m thinking of my 오빠.
Unlike the story in the song,
He never left our hometown.
I’m the one who left it.
I got lost.
I told our address to many adults.
But it was of no help.
I ended up on another continent.

Humming the sad melody of the song 오빠 생각,
I’m thinking of my 오빠.
I wonder if he has ever thought of me,
before leaving for another world.
And I’m heartbroken.

_______________

I’m missing you

While singing our childhood song 오빠 생각,
whose lyrics I lost with the loss of our mother language.
I’m missing you, 오빠.
I returned to our hometown, a decade too late.

While listening to our childhood songs.
I’m missing you, 오빠.
I’m missing our parents too.
I’m missing our hometown.
I’m missing our country.
I’m home sick.
Our childhood sad songs make me sad.
Our childhood happy songs make me sad too.

_______
* When I was just a little kid, I was fond of a beautiful and sad melody of a children’s song, whose lyrics I lost with the loss of my mother tongue, but I never forgot is melody.
Last week, I found the song with the lyrics on Youtube, when I was searching for 1970s Korean children’s songs. Its title is 오빠 생각 which means “thinking of my older brother”. So I used the Google translator to translate the lyrics, and I also searched to learn more about it.
To sum it up, the lyrics originated from a poem composed in 1925, by a 12 year-old girl Choi Soon-Ae’s own experience. It’s an elegy to show sorrow for the dead or for something lost. She asked her brother, who was going to Seoul, to buy her silk shoes, but as spring passed, summer passed, fall came, and the leaves fell, there was no news from her brother who went to Seoul, so she wrote her sad feelings.

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Adoption, a weapon that takes lives without killing.

When you expelled me from our country,

I lost my life without dying.

You took my life from me without killing me,

with the weapon called adoption.

Why didn’t you take my life with a gun or a knife instead?

“Adoption is Love”, you say.

The truth is that 

A child corpse had no monetary value and couldn’t be exchanged for cash.

Alive, I was a product worth $2,O00.

“To give you a new family”, you say.

Away from my family,

I prayed God and my late grandmother to bring me back to my father.

“To give you a new home”, you say.

Far away from Home,

In a foreign country,

I begged God to bring me back to Korea.

I begged my late grandmother to forgive me for being bad and to end my punishment.

I lost my life without dying.

I begged God to let me die, to deliver me from this hell you sent me to

Why didn’t you kill me instead of exporting me ? 

Adoption is love?

The truth is:

A child corpse had no monetary value.

Alive, I was a product to export worth $2,000.

You sent me to a foreign country with 

a Bible, 

a dictionary 

and a Korean children’s songs book.

The Bible? I lost Faith.

The dictionary? I lost our language. All my words flew away while I was forcefully penetrated by foreign words.

The book of Korean Children’s songs? 

고향의 봄 / Spring in my hometown” is the title of the first song. A popular song about

nostalgia, longing for one’s hometown.

How cruel of you to send a child when you knew she would be homesick forever.

In the first two years of my banishment from my country,

I sang it a hundred times trying to hold my tears.

I missed you (my native country, friends and family). I missed our foods and our way of living. I missed everything. I missed you so much I would rather have died in my homeland than being expelled from it.

I’m homesick wherever I am.

I’m longing for Home, but It is nowhere to be found.

I’m homesick and it hurts so much I feel I’d go crazy.

It hurts like if my heart is going to explode into thousand pieces.

I feel like awake while sleeping; starving while eating; thirsty while drinking; suffocating while breathing: sad while laughing; homesick while at home.

Why didn‘t you kill me instead of taking my life by adoption?

I have no fear of death.

But i’m scared to die in this foreign country.

Dying far away from my homeland would mean I’ve failed in keeping a promise made to myself as a child to go back home some day.

You (Family, Friends, Hometown, Country, Korean society which include the evil persons who sold me for adoption) are all part of the Home I’m missing.

I hate you one day

I love you and miss you the other day.

I hate you hundreds of times.

I love you thousands of times.

I hate you because I loved you.

I hate you because it hurts.

I miss you a thousand times because I love you.

By hating you one day and loving you the other day, I’m confusing hate and love.

Why didn’t you also take my memories with my life?

The memory of our childhood songs make me melancholic.

I want to forget them

But I can’t help humming their beautiful melodies.

The happy songs make me sad.

The sad songs make me sadder.

I lost their lyrics with the loss of our language.

Despite myself, my mind desperately tries to remember the words  I once said, sang or heard like a drowning person desperately tries to breathe.

When you sent me away to a foreign land,

You sent me to an island of loneliness.

A country where I belong nowhere.

I’m an outsider everywhere.

I’m excluded from the “we/us” everywhere.

And I’m nostalgic for the time I belonged somewhere.

My memories, 

I wish to forget.

Yet I cannot abandon them.

The memories of us together 

The memories of the time when I was part of the “우리 / we/us”.

They can’t be forgotten 

They just pop up

And they keep replaying. 

The memories of the time when I was me, before losing my life without dying.

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Why are our childhood songs so sad?

I remember our childhood song that begins with the words *singeul beongeul*.
I lost the lyrics but I remember it always filled me with joy.
Why am I now feeling so sad while humming the melody of our childhood song?

I remember our childhood song that begins with the phrase 하나, 둘, 셋, 넷, 앞으로 가 자.
I lost the rest of the lyrics but I remember being happy singing it.
Why am I now in tears while humming the melody of our childhood song?

I remember our childhood song that begins with the words *peureun* 하늘.
I feel suffocating desperately searching for the lost lyrics of our childhood songs
And I break down and cry uncontrollably.

I remember the words *peureun* 산, 개나리, 진달래, 무궁화, 노랑 나비 and 겨울 나무 from other songs.
Why am I crying while humming the melodies of our childhood songs?
Why every song from our childhood makes me cry?
Why did our childhood songs have to end like this?

I remember our childhood song that begins with the words 우리의 소원,
And I want to die right now
So that we can write a forever happy song together in our next life.

Note: I wrote this almost a year ago, on November 2021.
Words in italic between two asterisks are Korean words as I remember.
As for the words written in Korean, I’ve checked their spelling using Google translate.

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You never checked on me

I trusted you like a fool.
I waited for you to come and take me home like a fool.
I waited for you to come rescue me like a fool.
I missed you like a fool.
I clung to the hope of our reunion like a fool.
I loved you like a fool.
I kept you in my heart like a fool.
I erased you and then I drew you again like a fool.
I hated you and then I loved you again like a fool.
I wanted to forget you, but I always thought of you like a fool.
I’m loving you like a fool.
I’m missing you like a fool.
I hate you because I miss you.
I hate you because it hurts.

**********

You weren’t there when I was sad.
You weren’t there when I was homesick.
You weren’t there when I wanted to return home.
You weren’t there when I was having a hard time.
You weren’t there when I was losing my words.
You weren’t there when I was losing my manners.
You weren’t there when I was losing my way of thinking and creating.
You weren’t there when I realized I lost our language and felt rape in my soul.
You weren’t there when I needed your protection.
You weren’t there when my life became hell.
You weren’t there when I was alone in my despair.

You sent me away.
You never checked on me.
You forgot me.
You erased me.

**********

You weren’t there to protect me when they were removing my Korean manners from me while teaching me their manners as being the right manners.

You weren’t there to protect me when they were draining me of my ways of thinking and creating while injecting their ways into me.

You weren’t there to protect me when they were emptying me of all my words while penetrating me forcefully with their foreign words.

I lost our language because
You sent me to a foreign country where nobody called me by my name and nobody spoke our language.

I lost our language and culture because
You sent me away.
You never checked on me.
You forgot me.
You erased me.

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There was a Korean girl who didn’t matter to anyone

Her family was removed from her
Her country was removed from her
Because she didn’t matter.

She was exported to a foreign land
She was sold to a new family she didn’t look like at all
Because she didn’t matter.

Her birth date was removed from her
Her name was removed from her
Her manners were removed from her
Her words were removed from her
Her ways of thinking were removed from her
Because she didn’t matter.

She was given a new birth date that has nothing to do with her birth
She was given a new name that didn’t match her face
She was taught new manners as being the right manners
She was forcefully penetrated with new words to become her new mother tongue and new ways of thinking
Because she didn’t matter.

She was killed when I was created
She is not because I am
I am not me I’m her.
Don’t tell me I matter when she didn’t

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