From Where I write

(written in Seoul, January 2009)

 

In the evenings, I like it best here. The smog that constantly covers the city like a bell jar makes the sun go down in the most colorful fashion. In the distance underneath me, the busy streets of Sinchon glisten and glimmer with the light of thousands of cars, billboards, store signs, traffic lights. The noise of those streets is nothing but a faint humming, while I walk back home.

Last summer, when I moved into my flat up on a hill in central Seoul, Korea, I could still hear the faint chatter of our aging neighbors as well, who always seemed to hang out in front of our building or in the little park behind the house. They are all gone now, or rather, as I want to see it, have not quite made it back into the open yet.

“Go search up on the hills”, a Korean friend had told my flat mate and I before we set out on our journey to find ourselves a place – “it’s cheap to live up on the hills.” The poorest and cheapest of all neighborhoods, it is true, have traditionally been located up on the hills and near the streams and rivers of the city. Ever since the heavy modernization projects of the 1970s and 80s, the flat areas, including those located near the river banks, have all been redeveloped and vastly gentrified, with skyscraper office buildings and high-rise apartment houses covering much of Seoul’s space by now.

Just a few years ago, one of the last old working class neighborhoods near a stream – the famous Cheonggyecheon area, where the Korean labor movement started in the 1970s with the self-immolation of then 20-year-old Tae-il Jeon – was dismantled and razed, with some of the local inhabitants and business owners literally being driven out with sticks by the construction workers bringing in progress. And a few weeks ago, five protesters and one police man died in flames, too, burning to death during a violent confrontation in a “condemned” building that was being stormed by a SWAT-team of policemen in a district nearby.

The city from where I write is not the most peaceful of all places, and the proverbial morning calm of Korea has long been drowned by the constant noise of development. A little bit of peace in the city, however, can still be found on the many hills in Seoul – it is here that one can still find cheap, alas run-down housing amongst buildings that are usually not more than three storey high. It is mainly old people and big families living here, that is, people in need of cheap housing; they live in small, dark apartments, several people in one room usually, so when the weather allows it, everyone ends up using the streets as their living space instead, particularly in the summer, when it gets too hot in their little places, and when the faintly rumbling electrical fans do nothing more than mix the humid air with a little bit of dust…

Yes, I remember summer very well. The memories of it keep me warm while I blow my breath onto my fingers.

From where I write the cold air is filled with the scent of garlic. From where I write I can hear the bells of the little white dog tinkle who follows young women around that happen to walk past him, in the streets of our neighborhood. From where I write I can listen to the monotonous chants of salesmen, driving their trucks endlessly around the blocks, up and down and round-about, the loudspeaker on top of their vehicle cranked up to the maximum. From where I write it is starting to get sunny these days, but the light feels too weak to warm your skin just yet. From where I write there is hope of spring in the air.

Speechless

(written in Seoul, January 2009)

Put me in your suitcase

Let me help you pack

Cause you’re never coming back

No, you’re never coming back

(“At the Hop”, Devendra Banhart)

A commercial I saw on Austrian television during the time I spent at parents’ house this Christmas. A bank robber who ends up not being able to say the word “robbery” at the most crucial moment. “Hands up, this is a… a… a… well, you know what it is. Cause this here, you see, in my hands, it’s a… well, it makes ‘boom’ if you don’t watch out, so give me all your… aehm…” Then a cut: “The new deal we have for you will leave you completely speechless…”

“There are so many languages that I can almost speak”. That’s how she put it, my friend O., a native of Ukraine, currently living in Hungary and studying Anthropology at the same American university as me. I nodded in agreement. I said ‘yes’ on top of it. I tried to store that uncomfortable feeling away that always creeps up on me when talk comes to languages. There’s so little that I can say. And so much in that vast universe of language, of speech, of listening, and uttering and reading and scribbling that is beyond my capacities. And the more I try the more it all seems to slip away. Not only do I seem to be hardly able to acquire new language tools. What I have thought to be in firm possession of actually keeps slipping away in the process of attempting to fill my head with new words.

Like at my parents’ house. The local accent of German that my family speaks comes easily, the intonation, the speed, but the very words seem to slip away constantly. I point at the cake -I say, cookie. No, that ain’t it, how about… torte. Nope. Korean words tumble through my head, English ones, but the godforsaken German word won’t come. Kuchen. There we go, finally. Can one actually somehow trigger Aphasia by simply trying to study other languages? Or is it just this particular one, Korean, that started this corrosion of my brain?

I have lived on three continents, in numerous cities; I have found refuge in an endless row of student dorms, hotels, shabby apartments, on friends’ couches, on the very floor. I move from country to country within a matter of one year these days. I recently found myself seriously considering the option of getting a frequent flyer card. “You are at home in so many places in the world”, my brother says admiringly over Christmas dinner. I just laugh. In fact it seems that with all the traveling I have only managed to be in permanent confusion. To never be entirely sure of what is going on around me. To be at everlasting loss of words, contexts, ideas and memories.

What is one to do if the world seems too vast and confusing to ever be understood? Well, for once, I suppose, one should attempt to see the facts for what they are: a 27-year old crying over how she is losing grip on her cognitive capacities is nothing but pitiful. As a friend of mine summed up that pathos-ridden creature that is me these days: “Elisabeth, your brain is just fine – if only you weren’t so fucking jetlagged all the time.”

Yes, she is right, I suppose: the days that I have left for lamentation will be countless in the future, but the very days during which my energy is still pumping through my body with all its force are numbered. I will never again be as young as I am at this very moment. So for now, what is left to do, I suppose, is the opposite of celebrating loss – and that is, to put those damn words together, one by one. To make them stick. To put my mark on the landscapes I travel, to keep a clear head while doing so, and to continuously work on those inner places of my own – my ideas, my passions, my politics, my writing. And this, naturally, is the work in progress here, so go ahead and follow the traces of what has been and what is to come.

The Burning Gate of Seoul

On the 10^th of February of 2008, a 610-year old gate – the Namdaemun (literally: “Great Southern Gate”) – was destroyed in the city center of Seoul. A 69-year old man named Chae Jong-gi would later confess to having set the oldest remaining wooden structure in South Korea’s capital on fire. He was angry over the little amount of compensation money he had gotten for selling his land to urban redevelopers, the man said, and claimed that this is the reason why he sought to make a statement against the government that would be visible to everyone.

Crowds gathering at the site of the burned-down gate

As I walked past the remnants of the Namdaemun two weeks after the arson, a full yellow moon was hanging over the city’s skyscrapers. I had just left the house of a few friends living in an old squatter community in the nearby Namsan-dong area. This particular neighborhood, called the “Liberation village”, was established by refugees coming from North Korea after the Korean War. The inhabitants of the area up to this day enjoy some of the cheapest housing available in Seoul; but there is talk of urban redevelopment coming to this neighborhood just as well, and fears are growing that people will find themselves without their homes in the not-too distant future. As I was now standing next to the Namdaemun in the midst of high buildings, heavy traffic and the hordes of bank clerks and businessmen drifting past me, the little makeshift houses that I had just seen in the Liberation village felt a thousand miles away. The atmosphere near the gate, however, was a lot more somber than usual: An invisible drummer went about his business and the beats could be heard all over the nightly square. The little that was left of the massive gate was no longer visible to those who passed by it – a large structure had hastily been erected to spare the city’s inhabitants of the constant sight of what had gone up in flames here. The white plastic walls around it, however, only seemed to make the loss even more apparent, and I stopped to watch the constant flow of people who passed by the location. They all halted in front of the huge black-and-white poster that showed the gate in its old state; here they would quietly take a bow in front of the little shrine that had been built here. Many had brought their children – they took them all the way up to the plastic wall and made them scribble a few words onto the paper sheets someone had tagged onto it. The loss of the gate, it seems, is mourned here with the same solemnity that people would otherwise display at the funeral of an old, beloved friend.

"History is not a joke, and culture is not a toy. Know your shame."

The annihilation of the Namdaemun weighs even heavier in a city in which historical urban structures are conspicuously absent. In the urban Moloch that is today’s Seoul, historical landmarks are few and far between, limited to a handful of temples and palaces that somehow survived the large-scale destruction taking place during Japanese colonialism, during the Korean war and the subsequent military dictatorship. Also, the stunningly rapid modernization of South Korea took a toll on the traditional urban landscape: one old neighborhood after another gave way to anonymous skyrise buildings, car and amusement parks. The methods deployed in the name of progress were often not exactly of the softest kind: In the wake of the 1988 Olympics, for example, up to 800,000 people were evicted from their homes in Seoul to make space for urban restructuration. Often, only small compensation money was paid to those who had no other choice but to abandon their homes, leaving poor communities even more impoverished than before.

View onto parts of Seoul from the 63-tower

In such a small country as South Korea, new land for urban enclosure is desperately sought after. Over 50 million people inhabit a territory only slightly larger than that of Hungary, and most of South Korea’s inhabitants indeed live and work in cities. Seoul, the mega city, and its surrounding satellite towns, with its 22 million inhabitants together shape the 3^rd most densely populated cosmopolitan area in the world. And indeed, within the next few years, a huge plot of land – 2.5 km2 within the very heart of Seoul – will become freed up for new development projects: the Yongsan U.S. military base (which borders the above mentioned Liberation Village) will be dissolved. Many of the U.S. soldiers stationed in this base will then be relocated to Pyeongtaek, a smaller town an hour away, where an already existing military base is currently being expanded. The dissolution of the Yongsan base is a great victory in the eyes of many Koreans who have started to view the presence of American soldiers on their soil with ever less enthusiasm. But the prize for the dissolution of one military base is paid by even more evictions of civilians in another location – over the last few years, many farmers near Pyeongtaek have been forced out of their homes to make room for the expansion of the base. The village of Daechu-ri, for instance, was leveled to the ground in May 2006, and hundreds of people were injured while being expelled from their homes by thousands of Korean soldiers. This was the first time since the end of the military regime that Korean soldiers were deployed against Korean civilians, and the incidents near Pyeongtaek would draw international attention to the fact that (urban) development in South Korea often comes at great human cost.

Similar stories of forced expulsion can be heard about a project that targeted an area in closest vicinity to the Namdaemun, namely the restoration of the Cheonggyecheon stream which runs through much of downtown Seoul. In 2003, current Korean president Lee Myung-bak who was then still mayor of the city, initiated this large urban development project for which Lee ended up earning the somewhat ambiguous nickname “bulldozer”: the restoration of the stream also went hand in hand with the large-scale destruction of old neighborhoods nearby, and the forced eviction of both local residents and the many street vendors that would traditionally sell their goods in this particular area. With his most recent election as president, Lee now made promises to do to the country what he has done to the city of Seoul – and what sounds promising to many, brings along rather fearful memories for others.

Cheonggyecheon stream in downtown Seoul

In the meantime, the suspected arsonist Chae Jong-gi faces prison time for burning down the Namdaemun gate. Several years ago, he claimed, he sold a piece of land to developers, and he was promised a large amount of money, but ended up seeing very little of it in the end. After years and years of unsuccessfully petitioning governmental bodies to hear his case, he took to the most drastic measure of burning down the Southern gate. The man – believed to suffer from a mental illness – apologized for his act, but added that ”nobody got hurt. You can always restore a cultural heritage.” Chae’s daughter’s explanation was less ambiguous: she officially announced that she wishes he would have set his own house on fire instead, and apologized to the Korean nation for the great damage that her father has caused.



Families

We thrive and perish because of those very people we call family. I have often wondered about one of the  greatest, most magical, most absurd dilemmas in life: that we are unconsciously, against our will and most probably at random indeed born into families – good ones, bad ones, caring ones, negligent ones, stable ones, dysfunctional ones – so that years after we have managed to somehow loosen the grip of father, mother, sister, brother on our selves, we then often willingly join yet another equally as complex blood alliance through marriage. Most of human suffering and joy grows in the very heart of that tight and messy enterprise called family that embraces people from cradle to grave. And outside of its realm is the unthinkable, the adventurous space only the very young think they can permanently inhabit, until they wise up and then, too, seek out the familiar company of those they are related to.

I am an Austrian student currently living in the city of Berlin, but I am at the same time – and this confuses me more than I can possibly express – a recent member of the Lee family in the far-away country of South Korea. My grandfather-in-law is a self-studied Confucian scholar. Eighty years of age by now, this patriarch has spent most of his life learning about Feng-Shui, the ancient Eastern science of discovering the hidden energies and meanings of the very spaces around us. Over the years, his studies have slowly evolved from general interest into an obsessive quest for finding the best location in all of Korea for himself and his family. He is not concerned with building a new house, however, but rather with a grave instead, and is determined to find a place so perfectly situated within the Korean terrain that putting all our bones into this ground will bring peace for many generations of Lees to come.

On our very first encounter in the farm house that he and his wife live in, after the formal introductions and the bowing and the strict questioning of the newly arrived bride-to-be, he showed me his small notebook that he keeps with himself at all times and that contains the gist of half a century of probing into the matter of life and death – a worn-out, leather-bound book filled with endless rows of his beautifully arranged hand-writing, indecipherable not only to me but also to my husband with his limited knowledge of the Chinese characters that his grandfather writes in. I gazed at all the drawings, and charts, the symbols that he uses as tools in his search, and I looked back at him, not knowing why exactly I was to see all of this. “It’s about that writing of yours”, he finally said, “I read it a couple of days ago and somehow thought my own writings would interest you too.” Finally I understood – my fiancee’s mother had showed him an essay I had written and that a friend of mine had translated into Korean so that it could then be published in a literary magazine in Seoul. And so it had found my grandfather-in-law who managed to make some connections between his interests and mine, despite everything that separates us from each other.

House Made of Stone, House Made of Dust
(published in Korean in Essay, 2008, 5/25)

When I think of those that I am related to by birth, I always have to think of the very spaces they inhabit. Coming from a long line of Austrian peasants, this obsession with the physical, the material, with the bricks and stones and walls, seems to be something that is sited in my very blood. Land and houses, after all, have been the very things to toil, to strive, to labor for, because land – and buildings on that very land – were hard to come by if one was poor and a farmer in this country.

There are two kinds of dwellings that belong to my family; one is built out of bricks, the other is made of dust and earth and bones. In my dreams, both of these places – the family house and the family grave – often become indistinguishable, as the dead walk amongst the living, and the living amongst the dead. Maybe I find it so hard to tell them apart because these houses share one fundamental attribute: that they are overly crowded, that there is no way to escape from all the others, amongst whom one has come to live.

There is the family house that my great-grandfather erected with his own hands, in the flat land of Southern Austria, in a village where the Slovene border is so close that the wind carries the smoke of Slovene chimneys all the way from over there to our house. It’s a small, dark and inconvenient residence, this house of ours; during winters, it would never be warm enough, and in the summers it was always way too hot. And never, ever was there enough space in between those walls for all of us, for those living and those already dead, as we were going about our daily lives, all forever entangled in each other’s space.

The other kind of house, the one that exists underneath the surface of the earth, is located in walking distance from the family house. So I would accompany my grandparents to the graveyard every other day, where we would lay flowers down on the family grave, light candles and say a prayer for the souls of those that have already left. And my grandmother would repeat, again and again, after saying yet another Rosemary for those who have departed, that in this very soil, all of us would come to rest some day.

And there I stood, a tiny girl, thinking of the relatives that had passed away before I myself was born: my great-grandmother, that gifted and harsh old woman who came alive in all the stories that my grandfather would tell me, and then her husband, Franz, who had been a soldier during World War I, stationed in the town of Mostar, Bosnia. Their black and white portrait hangs in our hall, showing a stern-looking man and his pale wife with those huge dark eyes. I would come and stare at great-grandma’s face, because my grandfather kept insisting that she and I looked so much alike. “You have so much of her, so much.” She would live much longer than the grim soldier man who toiled and toiled his life away; she grew to be an old and stone-faced lady, forever nagging at her daughter-in-law, my grandmother, for not working hard enough, for never being clean enough, for never being good enough.

Then there was a third one, that small girl whose name no one recalls, who would have been my grandfather’s little sister, had she not died one cold winter at the age of three. One of her braids can still be found in our living room – my great-grandmother took that braid off the dead girl and attached it to her wedding picture, and there it hangs, a reminder of the briefest of all lives that ended in this house. The fourth to go, to make her last breath in between the walls of our first house, to then be taken to our second one, was my grandmother herself. Last summer, she passed away in her kitchen, as quietly as she had lived, in the very space where she had spent the better part of her long life. My grandfather, awaiting his own death ever since his wife has passed away, with the same bitter silence that seems to run in my family like heart disease does in others, has turned this very kitchen into a shrine for her – pictures of her cover all the walls, and a candle burns night and day, so that she may not be lost in the dark, in case her soul finds her way back into that kitchen of hers. She seems to be resting peacefully though, together with those other three, their bones forever embracing each other, in that tiny space underneath the tomb that has our family name engraved in it, in that second, subterranean house of ours.

Hiroshima, Wide Island

(16.08.2008)

- “You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.”

- “I saw everything.”

(Hiroshima, Mon Amour)

A hand, Mr. Masataka Segi says, a hand is the reason why I talk today. That thin hand, as it grabbed and grabbed and grabbed into nothing but air, desperately trying to find something to hold on to, that hand of the supposedly dead man amongst the endless pile of corpses. He had walked for hours through flat emptiness, a boy of 10 years, had treated on that blackened land that used to be his home town; he had walked over corpses and stepped on the dying to get to the hospital, to search for his father. He wolfed down the rice that kind women handed him on the way, he ate it all to the very last rice corn; that’s when I started to understand that my soul had died that day, Mr. Masataka Segi says, “how could I have eaten after everything I had seen?” He adds softly, but with determination: “I think the war destroyed my heart and spirit entirely”. Then he continues to talk about how he came to the hospital, how he stared into the endless row of faces of the injured, dying or dead, in hope of recognizing the features of his father. In the hospital, that’s where he saw it, while searching for the body of his father which would remain forever lost, he saw the hand and then he ran away without telling, ran away and cried and cried, leaving the man to his death amongst the already deceased. He would be the only witness to know that the man was still alive that day, he would be the only one, yet he didn’t, couldn’t speak. He had seen too much that day, too much for such a small boy to take in, so he silently ran. But the hand, it kept haunting him in his dreams for many, many years – and only on that one day in 1988 when he finally told his story in front of an audience of strangers those nightmares would stop. “I survived, so I believe it’s my responsibility to tell the story of the hand. To fulfill my duty towards that arm.” I have to talk about the hand, Mr. Matsataka Segi says, it’s what I’ve come here for today.

At six in the morning, the sun is not painful just yet, as it rises above the city of Hiroshima. It is the 6^th of August 2008. We had arrived at Hiroshima two days earlier, had listened to lectures and testimonies, had wandered around aimlessly in the peace park, gazed at the A-bomb dome, had looked at memorials and talked and talked, but the one Hiroshima of the 6^th of August 1945 had somehow remained out of reach. Perhaps because history is everywhere in Hiroshima, because they rebuilt the place for the sole reason to make it a landmark for the cruelties of war, perhaps because it is all over the place – the bomb and how it destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives – perhaps that’s why it can never fully be grasped. The A-bomb is still in the very air that one breathes in Hiroshima, in that same air that 63 years earlier a dying man’s hand would try to find something to hold on to, longing for a moment of stability amidst chaos and death and destruction. But how, how, how does one hold on to thin air, after all?

The sky was clear on August 6^th back then, the sky is without a cloud on this day, too. By 8 o clock the heat stings, all the fans and cold cloths and water and parasols fail to protect people from rising temperatures. The crowd grows and grows, over 40,000 people it will finally be, gathered around the shrine in the very center of the peace park in Hiroshima. At 8.15 every sound stops in the vicinity, as 40,000 bow their heads in silence to mark the moment the bomb fell. In the distance, though, I can hear something that sounds like wailing, a gruesome noise that becomes ever more clear in the silence that has set upon the crowd. It is only half an hour later that I understand that what I took for weeping sounds was nothing but the battle cry of counter protesters trying to express their discontent with the government-led commemoration ceremonies.

We leave the ceremony behind once the speeches start – the prime minister of Japan is to speak amongst many other visitors, Hiroshima’s status as a victim is fully embraced this morning by the most prominent officials of the country; but Cheong-hee and I are too far away from the main stage anyways, and our Japanese is inexistent, so we prefer to wander around for a while instead. It does not take long and we run into a group of aging anarchists, one of a handful of leftist groups that are holding protests that morning; we start to talk with them about their reasons for coming here today. “Don’t get us wrong,” a man explains to us, “we are against the war just as well. But we are also against what this government has turned this ceremony into. We are against their continuous support and tolerance of the U.S. military in our country. We are against their most recent attempts at reinstating their own military in our country, against their attempts to buy new weapons to take part in all this militarization nonsense that happens in East Asia. We are against their primary focus on victimhood – so many suffered through the hands of Japan. We should look at all kinds of sufferings – we have been perpetrators as much as we have been victims. That’s why we have come here today.”

An hour later, I listen to the lecture of an important academic from the local university who also leads a high-profile NGO that is sponsored by a lot of government money. Hiroshima, he says, is a red flag for the left of Japan, but we here are all working at turning Hiroshima into something that the world can look out for, a model for peace building all over the world. There have been two processes of peace in Japan, he says – one that started in the late 19^th century with the inner consolidation of Japan, which was then interrupted by World War II, after which the second peace process started. The longer the professor speaks, the more my agitation grows over his use of the word peace – yes, he admits, this first era of peace sadly coincided with Japan, too, having to take part in the big game for acquiring colonies and new territory. But that’s the road modernity took back then – and in the end, partial peace was reached after all on the islands of Japan. Hiroshima, he says, can stand as a grand example for rebuilding war-torn regions all over the world – this, in fact, is what their NGO is trying to achieve. Whenever he goes to one of those regions, the Sudans and Sierra Leones of this world, he says, one question that ordinary people always seem to have is how they themselves can benefit from peace building. They believe, he says, that in the end it is usually just about a bunch of NGO workers making big salaries, about local politicians learning a new more beneficial kind of peace lingo, and PhD students being able to gather some more material to build their careers on… It is hard to convince them, he acknowledges, hard to make people believe in peace. I look over to Cheong-hee, she listens silently, her face stone-cold; for 40 years, Korea was a colony of Japan, and up to this day, thousands of forced laborers, amongst them hundreds of former forced sex laborers commonly known as the Comfort Women – the few that are still alive of the hundreds of thousands that suffered and perished – have waited in vain for an apology from official Japan for what has been done to them so many years ago. Thousands of Korean forced laborers were in the city of Hiroshima when the bomb fell, too, we learn later on a guided tour through the peace park – the Japanese lady leading us through the park makes sure to add that the number that the Korean side gives – over 20,000 Korean deaths on that day – is probably much too high and cannot be trusted. “Why would she say that?” Cheong-hee says to me, as we stand in front of the Korean memorial for the dead – a memorial that has only been included in the peace park a few years ago after much pressure from the Korean side – “why on earth would she say that?”

Setsuko Marita speaks very softly, her eyes filled with tears for most of the time that she takes to speak in front of us, but despite that her voice never breaks, the flow of words never stops. She had been 1,4 kms away from the epicentre, she tells us, she was a school girl back then, they had been mobilized to work in a field nearby that morning, that’s why she wasn’t at the very city center on August 6^th, a small coincidence, she says, that’s why she’s still alive. Some girls working in the field that morning had been more unfortunate, they had heard the airplane that would drop the bomb and looked up from their work to gaze at the sky. She herself, she heard nothing, she said, which probably saved her live – those that looked would have their faces burnt beyond recognition, but she was crouching, bent over her work, when the bomb fell that morning. That way my face stayed intact, she said, just the skin coming off my arms – she touches the old scars now while she speaks. 6,000 students were mobilized for work this morning, she says, only 1,000 of us survived that very day. “Many of my friends died that morning and were cremated at our school just as well.” What I saw, what I did, how can I speak about it, she says; we kicked the dying students to prevent them from clinging to us, she says; we dragged ourselves for hours through the destroyed city to get back to our school so that we could tell our teachers of what had happened, they surely would know what to do…

A few months later she was back at school, but her world had changed entirely. She and the other survivors were ridiculed for their looks by the healthy students; the teachers stumbled around the building all confused, not knowing what to teach now that their great Japan had been defeated. 2/3^rd of the curriculum was no longer to be used then, what was there to teach really now that they had lost the war? Every once in a while a jeep by the American soldiers would stop in front of the school and come to pick young Setsuko Marita up – she was taken up the hill to the ABCC, the research center that the U.S. military had established soon afterwards where data of the aftermath was meticulously collected. Ms. Setsuko Marita now passes a copy of her own file around – look carefully at how much information they put together about me back then, she says, and no treatment was ever given up there, she adds bitterly. “They took pictures of me, too,” she says, “I wanted to get a hold of those as well, but they are in the U.S. now in some military archive, and the military informed me that I have no right to see them.” It was only in her early 20s that she learned what she suspects that the American officials had figured out rather early – that the A-bomb had left her barren. I lost every hope that I would ever get married, she says, and so did many of my friends who had gone through this just as well. What was there to do for us, she said, many of my friends joined Buddhist or Christian monasteries now, as marriage had become an impossibility for many of them – others, she adds now, they had to go another path. I wouldn’t want to talk about it, she says, but the truth is that many started to prostitute themselves, selling themselves to the U.S. soldiers stationed nearby. Even those who managed to get themselves married, she says, would suffer from mental problems for much of their lives, or would die from leukaemia years after the bomb. There was no counseling, there was no treatment – we were tired and listless all the time and just didn’t really understand why; the A-bomb, she says, it divided us and left a huge gap between people; the survivors just couldn’t compete with those who had not been near the bomb, their health was too poor, their mental state too fragile.

She met a survivor eventually and fell in love with him – everyone told us we’re crazy to get married, two survivors together, what’s the use of that, people asked us, but we did it anyways, she says proudly and passes pictures around of herself and her husband, he was the tallest and most handsome man on the volleyball team, she adds with a smile. They moved to Tokyo then, got themselves a store together and never mention a word about Hiroshima to anyone anymore. Only in the 1990s they would move back to Hiroshima, as the city gives survivors many benefits for living in the city after all. It’s here that I learned to speak about it again, she said. She worked as a calligrapher during the day before she retired, and at night she would speak endlessly of what had happened to them on that hot summer morning. “It was good that we came back to Hiroshima”, she says, folding her scarred hands in her lap, closing her story in this way.

“Four times at the museum in Hiroshima. I saw people walking around. People walk around, lost in thought, amongst the photographs. The photographs, the photographs, the reconstructions, for lack of anything else. The explanations, for lack of anything else. Four times at the museum in Hiroshima. (…) The illusion, quite simply, is so perfect that tourists weep. One can always scoff, but what else can a tourist do, but weep. I’ve always wept over Hiroshima’s fate. Always.”

(Hiroshima, Mon Amour)

“Let all the souls rest in peace, for we shall never repeat the mistake”, the inscription of the main shrine at the Peace Park says. A few steps away, the bodies of about 70,000 still unidentified corpses rest in a mass grave; the grave diggers were busy day and night back then, there was no time to waste on figuring out who it was they buried into the ground back then. Hamai Shinzo, the 1^st elected mayor of Hiroshima was the one who then ordered the construction of the peace park only a few years after the bomb fell, on the very ground that used to be downtown Hiroshima. In 1947, the very first commemoration ceremony was held; only about a thousand citizens showed up. The U.S. military sent their official representatives to speak at the ceremony, and I imagine that the air must have been stiff with suppressed anger that morning, what kind of peace are these people talking about, many people wondered, with much of the city still in rubbles, with people jobless and starving, with those that pushed the button entirely in charge, but the commemoration ceremonies continued on, from year to year drawing an ever growing audience to shape the perception of the event; the peace park was established, the museum set in place, tourists poured into the city to treat on the ground that was charred by the very blast of the bomb, they fold paper cranes like us, look at the items on display, walk out from the museum a little numb, into the heat of a summer day, with the air filled with all the noise the crickets make, sitting in the trees of the peace park nearby.

The museum that I visited that day left me in sheer despair – half-way through it I realized that I could not look at a single item more, I hurried through the rest of the exhibition to find later that the only picture I had taken in the entire exhibition is that of a map I found hidden somewhere inside the many rooms – the Information and Intelligence Network of the U.S. military that is still stationed on Japanese soil up to this day – an elaborate graph showing a dense web of military alertness, a loud and bold “We are ready” screaming at those who look at that very graph. I think of Korea for a moment, of what peace means there, of what Cheong-hee had said to me a little while ago – how she already longs for Korea again, for the heavy debating and the daily contention that is Korea – every single person in this country, it sometimes seems, has a different idea of where to go with all the huge problems that the future will hold for the peninsula, you can’t think of peace without politics, she says, how would you wanna do that?

On the 6^th of August we join the crowds at night – once the sun sets, thousands of lanterns with thousands of inscriptions of hope for peace are set into the river where thousands of corpses once swam. We are exhausted and cheerful, as we watch the lanterns drift past us, and right there, by the water – watching young children and grandparents, students and workers and teachers and tourists all alike as they gaze at the nightly river and the A-bomb dome that stands brightly alit this night – I have a single moment when I feel like I can touch what Hiroshima is about. Mariko, a peace activist born and raised in Hiroshima that I talked to earlier that day, had said that after all these years she is still frustrated and at the same time obsessed with that one thought: that we shall never truly be able to understand what happened that day to those in the center of Hiroshima. Hiroshima, perhaps, is all about making the futile attempt at trying nevertheless. Perhaps, if thousands of lanterns drift down a river that was once filled red with blood, perhaps if tens of thousands of people stand silently in awe, perhaps somehow, somewhere, a little bit of the horror in fact can be alleviated. It’s the only hope we truly have.

24 hours after we left Hiroshima, we hear the news of Georgia, and I sit in my room in Seoul in silence, and now I finally weep.

Was mache ich hier / What am I doing here

“What am I doing here.” I remember staring at the title of this book every time I took a peak at my father’s collection. A couple of times the adolescent me took it out of the shelf and looked at the cover, finding that a pensive and decidedly sexy looking Bruce Chatwin would stare right back at me. “Don’t read it just yet,” my father told me, “you would get bored of it, I’m afraid. And the story that you are looking for, the one that answers the title question – it’s not in here anyways.” I would reply to my father, with the usual air of frustration that accompanied me at all times back then, that I didn’t even need to read this book, as it already captured my entire life in its very title: “What am I doing here … in this godforsaken village.”

My father had told me enough about Chatwin’s biography, of course, that I had already gathered that most likely Chatwin’s sense of bewilderment at the very location he finds himself in does not really stem from the fact that he is bored out of his mind by rural life. That in fact was the second layer that the title and the attractive author on the cover conveyed to me: the hidden promise that I, too, would be able to get out of “here” one fine day, and get to a new, much more exciting “there”.

A good 15 years later, a couple of days ago, browsing through the many stands of an antique market in Eastern Berlin, I discovered the very same copy of “What am I doing here” with the very same good old Chatwin still gazing back at me with that indecipherable look. I bought it for 2 Euro without a moment of pause. “What am I doing here” – after an afternoon or two of intense reading, it turns out, indeed lacks a story of the same title. I guess the story that describes how the author almost ended up lynched as a supposed mercenary in the midst of a coup d’etat in Benin could have gone with that heading just fine. But the same holds true for his description of how he spent a few days in the company of a decidedly difficult Indira Gandhi following her on her last big campaigning tour all across India, just months before her assassination. Or when he was hanging out at a Werner Herzog movie set in Ghana, where Klaus Kinski ended up siding with a group of 700 heavily armed young actresses who demanded pay raises for their roles as amazons in the film that was based on one of his own novels.

As for me and the way I understand the world these days – I guess the very meaning of “What am I doing here” has changed over the course of the years rather drastically, the further away my own journeys have brought me from that house in a small Austrian village, where the bookshelves of my father still stand. I could add my own fair share of stories, of strange times that I spent in the (certainly less illustrious) company of friends and strangers, in countries, far far away, and of moments of utter loss and amazement. And indeed, I suppose this is what this entire blog might actually turn out to be – an attempt to add my own, fair share.