Don Mee Choi’s newest book of poetry Mirror Nation opens on a bridge in Potsdam, just outside Berlin. The last spy swap between East and West Berlin is taking place on the Bridge of Spies, and Choi is watching her father, a photojournalist, move around the bridge photographing the event. He’s easy to spot because he’s wearing a white winter hat with its ear flaps down.
Mirror Nation is replete with bridges. There’s the Eisener Steg, a footbridge that crosses the Main River in Frankfurt, where Choi lived in the 1980s. There’s the Langenscheidtbrücke in Berlin, which features prominently in Wim Wender’s film Wings of Desire. There’s the Glienicke Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which I just mentioned. In Korea, there are the Taedong Bridge in Pyongyang and the Hangang Bridge in Seoul. Choi lived near the latter and used to walk on it as a child. What she tells us at the outset of this book is that certain symbols, like these bridges or the Mercedes Benz advertising logo that she sees from her apartment window in Berlin, along with certain hours on the clock, can send her memory tumbling back in time. “Sometimes, the flow of time is reversed for no apparent reason,” and memories of grief return.
Written while living in Berlin (once a divided city, just as her native Korea remains a divided country), the main event of this book is the May 1980 Gwangju Massacre (as she calls it) or Uprising, when hundreds, if not thousands of students and civilians were killed by Korean soldiers after the newly-installed South Korean military dictator Chun Doo-hwan implemented martial law (with the full backing of the U.S. government). Thousands more were arrested and tortured. This event is threaded amongst moments plucked from Choi’s autobiography along with some free-form writing on a handful of topics like memory, angels, and time. Mirror Nation is the concluding volume of her trilogy of books that use both poetry and prose written in English and Korean, along with a somewhat adventurous use of type fonts, photographs, and other types of imagery. Collectively, the trilogy addresses Korean history during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s, racism, and the legacy of the Korean War and subsequent American involvement in Korea. These books are part autobiography, part activism, and part “disobeying history,” as she says in Hardly War. In Seattle’s Wave Books, she’s found a publisher that gives her the design freedom to present her hybrid form of text/image to its best advantage.
Choi’s father, a photojournalist, photographed and filmed events throughout the days of the Gwangju Uprising and Choi herself turned eighteen only months afterward. Eventually, the family emigrated, splitting up between Australia, Hong Kong, Germany, and the United States. Years later, her father related to her at length the frightening days he spent dodging soldiers as he photographed the clashes between protesters and government troops, documenting the dead and wounded. Several of his photographs are reproduced in the book, including a powerful sequence of full-page images. Also included in the book are several once-secret U.S. government documents demonstrating how American diplomats blamed Korean students for the protests and urged the Korean government to use violent force to put down the uprising.
Choi began this trilogy in 2016 with Hardly War, a bravura example of poetry and visual performance that more or less focused on the Korean War, although Choi’s books are never about just one thing. In 2018, DMZ Colony won the National Book Award. Its central theme was the succession of corrupt South Korean governments and the violence they have perpetrated on their own people, both before and after the Korean War. “How does this happen?” she asks. After Korea had been colonized by Japan and “neo-colonized by the US military machine,” it was easy. All the Korean regime needed was language to turn protesters into enemies of the state. “Not difficult to see each other as ‘scums of society,’ ‘commies.'”
Throughout the new book, Choi pays homage to other writers and artists who have influenced her work and Mirror Nation in particular. She quotes W.G. Sebald on “the silent lament of the angels, who have kept their station above our endless calamities for nigh on seven centuries” (Vertigo). There are references to Fritz Fanon, for his writings on post-colonialism, and to W.E.B. Du Bois, a co-founder of the N.A.A.C.P., who studied in Berlin in the 1890s. Walter Benjamin is invoked, of course, since Choi clearly abides by his belief of involuntary memories. But the presiding figures that hover over this book are the angels from Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Wings of Desire, his love letter to Berlin and to the angels that watch over that city.
Bruno Ganz in Wings of Desire
After three books of war, incredible violence, and a family scattered across the globe, Choi, at the end of Mirror Nation, understands that she, too, is a divided country, a political person and a family person, one person who is consumed with history and grief and another person who stops to marvel at sparrows and swans. “While filming wars,” “[my father] said my sister and I often flashed before his eyes/we were a panorama of sparrows under Mother’s umbrella.”
Choi’s politically engaged, plurilingual, autobiographical, illustrated, and typographically bold trilogy is the worthy successor to her fellow countrywomen Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s now classic book Dictee (1982), which is frequently called a “masterpiece” by reviewers. In terms of their construction, Choi’s books are more complex than Dictee. Reading Choi’s trilogy is like watching a juggler tossing up a plate and an apple and several other odd objects, one of which is a very sharp knife, as our emotions shift from horror to tension to laughter. She can take the reader from anger to childlike silliness over the course of a page or two. Like Dictee, each of Choi’s three books are meant to be considered as a whole, not as a collection of individual poems. This lets her set up a body of references that continually bounce off of each other throughout each volume and throughout the trilogy, giving the reader the kind of complexity and depth that is often only found in novels.
Choi seems to need to use a wide range of modes—to write in poetry and in paragraphs, to write in English and in Korean, to use images. Hardly War even includes a short play, complete with chorus. I think this is how she lets her divided self, her multi-sided-self, speak—her partisan self, her angry and persistent historian self, her family self, and the part of her that is still childlike. In this powerful and moving trilogy, she has turned a poetic mirror not only on Korea, but also on herself.