Keep thinking about a bomb means

“Keikai keiho! Kaiho da!”

My Korean grandmother was born in Japan during the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea. She would occasionally talk in her sleep in Japanese. These words occasionally surfaced in my grandmother's sleep, articulated with the precision of someone wide awake. Only recently, after coming across my grandparents’ atomic bomb victim registration certificates, did I understand where those phrases originated. As a child, I read a book illustrating nuclear winter: ash-grey skies, blackened ground, and parents trembling as they held their child. Terrified by the illustrations, I used to skip those pages. The atomic bomb, once a distant and macroscopic fear easily bypassed with the turn of a page, revealed itself to be a memory of catastrophic ruin: a dark narrative cutting through an entire lifetime. A ten-year-old girl had been drilled to retreat into a shelter at the cry of “air raid alert” and emerge at the call of ‘liberation.’ That drill remains ongoing.

Eighty years ago, the majority of Koreans returning from the atomic bombings settled in Hapcheon. People referred to Sinsoyang, Yongju, Ssangbaek, and Chogye, the areas where they took root, as the "vanished land." I traced the sites where the daily lives of first-generation Korean atomic bomb survivors intersect with history. Centered on the Hapcheon Atomic Bomb Victims Welfare Center, I observed the survivors' oral accounts and physical gestures, closely examining the memory of massive violence that had previously been reduced to mere statistics and figures. They recounted times whose weight could hardly be measured: walking to and from school just before the detonation, the frantic escape following the blast, and the long years endured as displaced returnees. Each time I stepped out of the center, the peaceful hometown of my youth shifted into a landscape of sorrow obscured behind national liberation. The lake where I fished for smelt, the hill where I gathered chestnuts, the yard where I dodged manure, and even the funeral hall and motel where my grandfather was laid to rest began to feel unfamiliar.

Their lives have now far exceeded the average life expectancy. With diminished strength and stooped backs, walking through the village is the most they can manage. Yet I document them before their remaining time disappears entirely. This is also a record of the ground beneath their feet, observed through my position as a Korean inheriting this history, a third-generation descendant of atomic bomb victims, a grandson, and a neighbor. "Keep thinking about a Bomb means" is a history our generation must remember, and a narrative about a bomb whose implications we must ceaselessly re-examine.

Lee Jaekyun is part of »Guest Room: Sunyoung Kim & Shinwook Kim«.