Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border

By which a strip of land became a hole in time – Durs Grünbein

Grandfather I cannot find,
flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone,
what country do you belong to:

where is your body buried,
where did your soul go
when the road led nowhere?

Grandfather I’ll never know,
the moment father last saw you
opens a wormhole

that has no end: the hours
became years, the years
forever: and on the other side

lies a memory of a memory
or a dream of a dream of a dream
of another life, where what happened

never happened, what cannot come true
comes true: and neither erases
the other, or the other others,

world after world, to infinity –
If only I could cross the border
and find you there,

find you anywhere,
as if you could tell me who he is, or was,
or might have become:

no bloodshot eyes, or broken
bottles, or praying with cracked lips
because the past is past and was is not is –

Grandfather, stranger,
give me back my father –
or not back, not back, give me the father

I might have had:
there, in the country that no longer exists,
on the other side of the war –

This week marks a return-visit to the work of the award-winning Korean-American-British poet and playwright Suji Kwock Kim. It’s from her pamphlet Notes from the North, published by Smith/Doorstop in 2022, and was a 2019 winner of its annual International Book and Pamphlet competition. Focused on the violent disruptions experienced by the poet’s family members during the Korean war and subsequent North Korean dictatorship, the collection was described by Amy Wack, one of the competition judges, as “a scorched family album, rescued from the ruin”.

Search Engine is an invocation to the poet’s grandfather, circling round a series of three apostrophes that suggest the intensifying fact of his absence: “Grandfather I cannot find”, “Grandfather I’ll never know” and “Grandfather, stranger”. That the voice in its fruitless search reverberates over much of human history, 20th century history in particular, is signalled by the epigraph. In the East German poet Durs Grünbein’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Border Dog, the dog remembers the now-invisible border and the “strip of land” he once guarded: “Watchtowers are forgetful, / Like eyes which have been torn from their sockets. / Gone already: the separating place’s / Two or three names. // The trick’s now unbetrayed / which made a strip of land a hole in time. / I’m glad my brow does not reveal a thing.”

Kim’s triplet stanza gives a sense of the circularity of the search-within-a-search enforced by the “hole in time”. For her, the hole is a wormhole. In her quest for the specificity she needs to flesh out the truth of her past, the searcher asks her grandfather: “what country do you belong to: // where is your body buried, / where did your soul go / when the road led nowhere?” Why these questions are urgent is explained in the preceding poem, Searchlight. The grandfather leaves his 10-year-old son (the poet’s future father) in a forest in North Korea’s far north, “whispering Wait in the woods until I come back.” But the boy’s father doesn’t return, ever. The poem evolves into a series of agonised questions as to why the abandoned son hasn’t tried to find him. The searchlight’s brightest illumination is saved for the questioner’s final sharp pang of insight: “Is it better not to know what happened, as if the not-knowing could keep him alive?”

While the “searchlight” has become a “search engine” in the current poem, the wormhole of infinite connections flows on: it “has no end”, as time, for the child, waiting in the woods for his father to return, would have seemed to have no end. There is still a border between now and the past, and “on the other side // lies a memory of a memory / or a dream of a dream of a dream / of another life …” The puzzle of alternative possibilities is interrupted in the ninth stanza by the device of making the challenged reality so harshly present it shoulders all alternative dreaming aside: “no bloodshot eyes, or broken / bottles, or praying with cracked lips / because the past is past and was is not is – ” But again, there’s a feeling of circularity in the shifts of consciousness suggested, between drunkenness and thirst, or sleeplessness and prayer.

Scrupulously precise, despite her passion, the speaker utters her last plea (“Grandfather, stranger, / give me back my father –”) and instantly checks herself, “or not back, not back, give me the father // I might have had …” In the search engine of the poem, complexity of thought always coexists with openly expressed emotion. The title metaphor implies that the desire for answers could, should, be matched by the availability and interconnectivity of facts; if it’s not, the drive to go on seeking answers in the absence of connection can be relentless. Physics can’t help the recovery of the lost “flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone …” Time can’t be reversed, and the search is abandoned unfinished, “there, in the country that no longer exists, / on the other side of the war –”

Kim writes, “There are an estimated 10 million separated families (이산가족) divided between North and South Korea, including my own.” For additional context, her short essay, no end / to the end, is essential reading.