whole

In the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, a combined North and South Korean women’s ice hockey team finished with three crushing defeats.

—

It’s incredible, my mother says, that our country could host the Olympics twice.

Note, how she says our country.

Note, she has given up her korean passport for American citizenship.

Note, how she says our country.

Note, when she draws a map of home, she lines the border before the war.

—

When I watch the spectators

I laugh at this pathetic game of house.

The dysfunctional family

follows two separate scripts—

one waves south korean flags to the kpop song playing overhead.

The other a troop of tight buns and gloved hands,

their claps like soldiers’ marching,

machine gun percussion

chanting

We

are one.

—

A poll cites that 43 percent of South Koreans were opposed to the team.

The majority were the younger generation born after the war.

who can blame them

when they have left their tiny peninsula and seen cadillacs and the chrysler building?

When they have the fastest internet in the world just under a country without any at all?

When they do

not remember the years when both north and south shipped our cattle and grain to the Japanese?

When they do not remember a whole nation.

when they have filled the hole in their nation with the white man’s cross and samsung galaxies?

Who can blame them

when they are too young to remember

families torn in half

shooting a brother

a sister, slipping past your fingers into a sea of orphans?

My grandmother never found her again.

She could be dead,

alive. She could be in the north.

If she found her, would she see stranger? enemy?

sister?

Could an American soldier at the DMZ shoot the right one?

So we make up for our identical eyes, our twin tongues with practiced difference

cover up the targets on our backs with cultivated contradiction.

I know they can tell that we are the good ones when the white pastor sends my grandfather a card every Christmas that he asks me to translate.

They can tell that we are the good ones when we do not raise our hands every time our teacher calls our war the forgotten war.

They can tell that we are the good ones when we crawl under its nuclear umbrella each time they promise a storm.

—

When asked about her feelings on the joint team, South Korean athlete 최지연 referred to North Korean teammates 황청검 and 김향미 as eonnis.

“The eonnis approached and talked to me first, and they cared for me.”

Eonni.

Sister.

by JINHEE HEO