— Fanny Howe, The Winter Sun

Koreans count the gestation period as the first year in a child’s life.

It is believed that the mother’s thoughts, behaviors, and feeling during the pregnancy will have a formative influence on the well-being of the fetus, so the prenatal period is called the education period for the unborn child.

A dream may predict the kind of person the unborn child will be.

Someone very close to the child to be born — the mother, grandfather or other close relative — is likely to have such a significant premonition-like dream.

If the dream is about a bear, the child is likely to be a boy; if about a snake, it will be a girl; if a sky or star appears in the dream the child will go very far in life.

Should the relative be visited by a dream in which the newborn child holds the moon, then that child will be an especially previous person.

— “Understanding My Child’s Korean Origins,” a booklet from Holt International

Pierce and piece the zone.

Memory and multiply —

1 x 1 = 1.

Chrysanthemum petals braided bread into a veil.

Silver mirror thread through a net.

10

9

8

While I am in the red room

I see you through leaves of skin and shed.

This room burns my bonds.

According to radiocarbon dating, the presence of humans on the Korean peninsula dates back to 40,000 to 30,000 BC. It seems that art, or decoration at least, did not exist until 4,000 BC when the inhabitants of the peninsula began making pottery with comb patterns scraped or scratched into the clay before hardening.

Clans were absorbed into other clans. Fishing, farming, and hunting.

The introduction of metal from the Han civilization brought with it improved farming and an ability to make visible social hierarchies through the production of symbols of power such as dolmens (burial chambers).

And also through the production of more effective weapons.

Earl of Wind, Master of Rain, and Master of Clouds.

These were worshipped by the natives before sun worship replaced such totems.

Koreans have their own curious creation myth.

Hwanung, the son of the Hwanin, the Lord of Heaven or the Heavenly King, descended into the human world and, bringing Bronze-age culture and government, created Sinsi, the City of God on Mount T’aebeck.

A tiger and a bear prayed to Hwanung to become human. Hwanung told them to stay intheir cave for 100 days and stay out of the sun and eat nothing but the twenty cloves of garlic and mugwort that he gave to them.

After about twenty days the tiger gave up, and left the cave, but the woman remained and at the end of the trial she became a woman, Ungyeo.

She had no husband, she prayed to sandalwood tree for a child —

Hwanung, taking pity on her, married her. Mated with her.

Soon she gave birth to a she-bear who gave birth to Tangun, the first ruler.

A female creating a female creating a male ruler.

A double crown or a double shadow.

The baby has stridor. Notes are made in thin black script on charts. Nurses bow, bend, take the bus home.

The baby exhibits abnormal breathing with a high-pitched sound, the neck and face swollen, blue lips, blue nail beds, or bluish color of the skin.

The medical records look like a musical score of the body, its excretions, its color, the temperature of the interior.

We have inside us a series of red rooms, lesser and slighter, minor and more secret.

The baby cried for her first home, her mother’s body. Paper soaked in milk.

The small body shook. Made itself sick.

The illness of the throat delays the baby’s journey to America.

Made itself forget.

The stethoscope, its metal methodical ear cupped to the hot and hollow places of the body — sounding the depths.

Long poem as prescription. The doctor is memory. Thick as a rib. Skin-paper. Blood is water and iron. A million motes of oxygen. Bind, bound. Slippery remembrance.

The heavens riddled with rain.

Black sheets and white veins.

Upon my arrival on U.S. territory, I am not on a boat but I wear them on my small feet. They have red, green, and yellow wave-like motifs on the gunwales. White cotton-cloth socks, flat, each two symmetrical pieces sewn together, then turned inside out.

Around my small body is wrapped a hanbok, stiff, translucent, red as a poppy.

Over the years I’ve had several hanboks — all red or pink, all with painted on gold at the hem of the overskirt. A bell-shaped garment, easy to conceal anything below the rib cage.

Throughout my childhood I keep my arrival garments in a white box in a drawer. They’re gone now. Those things touched by Korean hands — wherever they are, do they remember the Korean skin inside the space they made, do they remember the Korean hands that stitched them together, that wrapped that child and tied her up like a gift?

In my mind there is a typewriter with a few keys with which we write our past. On these few keys are a few words. Words that are not words, but mean time and space, mean loss and gain. They are more like numbers than signs for ideas and things and classes of things.