An Empty House

An Empty House

The house has not been occupied since my father left for the city.  It is still standing,  but is now occupied by  a wild cat and his family. The gate and orange tree-lined wall remain the same.  In front of the guest house, gingko trees  greet me while the swallows fly under the roof.

My grandpa built this house in the 1920s on a solid foundation. He planted the gingko trees from the gingko my mother brought when she married my father.  These trees are  almost as old as me, 65. My father named one tree, “Poet,” when I left for the United States. I was 26. He was using this house as his summer house.

My uncles’ weddings were all conducted  in the courtyard. My father’s funeral was also held in the courtyard. Now, it is full of the same weeds as the wilderness. At the corner, a well is abandoned, but the blue sky and white clouds surround the house during the day, and stars at night.  The sight of the well brings back memories of cool showers during the hot, humid summers.

The kitchen was not just the kitchen. My aunts showered in the kitchen. My grandmother watched her daughters shower from outside the kitchen.

The back yard was filled with persimmon trees, there was a terrace where jars of kimchi were left for fermentation. On the narrow wooden veranda, I read Emily Dickinson, Herman Hesse, Leo Tolstoi, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck during my summer vacation while the song of the cuckoo drifted down from the mountain.

Now, I sit down on the wooden floor, watching the rapid train passing through my hometown, and feel guilt for neglecting the house. I am now very far from this house. I am in a foreign country. I visit once a year.

The wind opens the gate, inviting the birds to the orange and persimmon trees in the yard.  I see a snail. I envy the snail as it lives with its own home on its back as it goes about. People, in their shame, keep their houses on their hearts. It is better to get homesick.

At the Glacier Bay

Kongsvegen

20m high cliff-face at the terminus

Photo by Manuel Elviro Vidal  

At the Glacier Bay

The waters are cold and blue.
The mountains are high and steep.
The clouds hang on the waistline of the mountains.

The whales, sea lions and sea otters are the living things
on and under the waters.

The sound and sight of the glacier falling into the waters
awaken my sleepy conscience,
making the solitude so deep.

The glaciers are crying for their disappearances
from the Earth,
from the Glacier Bay in Alaska.

Poet’s Daughter

Poet’s Daughter


Poet’s daughter brought a gift of five pebbles

From her Ireland trip to her father.



It was the best gift to her inland dad

Who sees the beauty in the pebbles formed from the crashing waves on
the sea shore.



The pebbles are losing the seawater in his study,

But they will be good companions to the poet

Who comfort his sea fever.



Anyway, they are the expression of daughter’s love of her dad.

Ieodo

Ieodo

Ieodo is a underwater rock in the East China Sea which has been a disputed “territory” between China and South Korea. It is within the median line of Korea, so Korea constructed an ocean research tower in 2003 and has been operating. Half of Cheju fishermen who were fishing in the Ieodo sea did not return due to swiftly changing weather and storms. Cheju women, sea-diving women, sang a song, “Ieodo Sana, Ieodo Sana,” (Do you live in Ieodo? Do you live in Ieodo?) in the sea from their heart for centuries. Their sorrow was in their song.

By Yearn Hong Choi

The peaceful sea will never show Ieodo;

only the stormy sea will show Ieodo.

10-meter waves will expose top 5-meters of Ieodo,

a rock hidden under the waters.

Ieodo is located on the way to the distant sea

from Kapado and Marado.

Half of those who passed by Ieodo

did not return to the mother island;

only half returned to the port.

Those who could not return

drifted away to the South China Sea and Indian Ocean.

The seafarers could not communicate with tropical island people

and disappeared into the equator with the sunset.

With the sunrise

in the following morning,

they rose onto the water,

disappeared into the blue sky,

and then appeared as shining stars in the night sky.

The blue sea has the same amount of territory,

as much as the blue sky.

Ieodo was the gate to the distant sea.

Half knew it and

half did not know it.

That was the message

the classic sea was telling us.

The peaceful sea did not tell us anything,

but the stormy sea was reading to us the memorandum

of those who could not return.

No one wants to leave their hometown,

but the stormy sea forced Cheju seamen to lose their ship,

home town, and home port.

Ieodo is somewhere

in the lost sea.

Goodbye to My Uncle --at his cemetery in San Francisco

Goodbye to My Uncle

--at his cemetery in San Francisco

You have been a romanticist, never getting old even in the last moment of your life.

You have overcome a language barrier, racial and ethnic discrimination in Japan and the USA as a young boy and a mature adult.

You have been courageous in overcoming all the difficulties of life set in a poverty-stricken farm village in Korea and post-War Japan, and an affluent society in San Francisco.

In the midst of a difficult life, you always saw the beauty of life, using oil and Oriental watercolor to draw your childhood farm house, and later to draw the Bay area landscape or photographing beautiful moments.

You failed to treat your diabetes and instead drank hard liquor over the years. You travelled to Korea, Japan and the world with a never fading youth and romanticism. You had a young heart throughout your life. “How many speeding tickets did you receive, my uncle?” “Many,” you answered.

You were damn proud of the Choi family from North Choongchung Province in Korea.

In May 1968, you forced me to get off the cruise ship, American President, anchored in Yokohama, Japan which was heading to San Francisco via Honolulu and come to your house in Chiba, Japan by a taxicab. Then, you bought me a Northwest Airline ticket from Tokyo to Seattle. “You are the first Choi studying in the United States, I cannot let you sail to San Francisco. You must take a flight.”

That was the way I landed in Seattle, the USA. You then followed me. You finally established Edoya, the jewelry store that took up one entire block of downtown San Francisco. You built a fortune and took me to Reno, Nevada one weekend to find and enjoy another world of the USA. You were brave to lose big and win big in Reno. That was you.

Your wife, my aunt, answered my question, “Why did you marry my uncle?” Her answer was simple, “He is the manliest man I have ever met.”

My wife whispered to me when you entered my Virginia home for the first time,” Your uncle looks like a prominent university president.” You smiled at my wife.

You have been ambitious and hopeful. You have been a tearful man with compassion and loving care.

I will miss you forever.

San Francisco has been you, and will be so forever,

As Chiba, Japan has been you and will be so forever to me.

God bless you.

You have been my one and only uncle in the USA and will be so forever.

My uncle, Choi Hyoo Hyoung or Edward Kawana

Sea and the Nations

Sea and the Nations

The sea is one, but the nations divide and conquer it. The sea does not acknowledge national boundary lines, exclusive economic zone (EEZ), or extension of continental shelf. The sea ridicules and denies existences of such man-made divisional concepts.

Nations want to make and expand their own seas, because of the infinite resources the sea can offer. But what is the point to mandate the sea creatures to abide by these boundaries? They maintain their freedom to navigate as they please.

Nations do not yet know how to agree on how to draw the basic coastline, which is the starting point of territorial sea, contiguous sea, EEZ and Continental Shelf.

Nations have invested millions of dollars to study sea bed geology to justify their claims of continental shelf. Its geological formation was designed and shaped by Mother Nature, not by man.

My friends, we cannot draw dividing lines on the water. Water evaporates, producing clouds and rain for the living things on the land.

Sea ridicules the wisdom of humankind in the 21st century. Mother Nature, the Sea, the Earth are inseparable, but the nations do not know the triangle relationship, so precious to us.

Drawing a line on the surface of land is artificial.

Drawing a line under water is more ridiculous.

Sea, one body of the sea, is, and must be the common blue space for all of mankind, but it is polluted and destroyed by nationalism, greed, overfishing, tensions, wars and military confrontations, even after two World Wars and the Cold War over half a century, and wars since.

How ridiculous we are!

How pathetic the nations are!

Advanced technologies are destroying our sea. Nationalism is making the sea as a complex web of too many artificial lines—more ridiculous and more pathetic.

Alas! Our sea is a sorrowful, painful tragedy, the tragedy of the commons.

***This poem was delivered at the Third South China Sea Conference in Hanoi, November 2011.

Praying Hands —to Albrecht Durer





Praying Hands

—to Albrecht Durer

Yearning, suffering, hope and aspiration.

Silent language from the soul ascends to heaven:

The mother prays for her son living in a foreign land

every dawn with a bowl of fresh water from the spring.

A man's hard labor in the mines has financed his brother

who has become a success as a young artist.

The bones in every thin finger have been smashed and abused

with suffering arthritis. He cannot paint with his damaged hands.

A candle is burning next to his two hands fused in one.

A blessing descends to the darkened room lit by the candle.

A young woman dreams to swim across the ocean

inside her lover’s prayers to reach the other side of the ocean

 every morning.

Our world of blissfulness!