5 Times I Saw Younghill Kang
Penelope Pyo
“To a friend whom I will see often on the other side of the water.”
– Younghill Kang, signed in a 1925 Boston University yearbook
He is thumbing through a flaking copy of Candide on the Orange Line. Double-breasted eggshell jacket and peacock-eyed tie. Eating a powdered doughnut. Spring onions poke out from the brown paper bag on his lap. My father whispers his favorite game of Korean Or Not. My brother and I shush him but he continues anyway. We still lean in to listen. Our Candide gets off on Back Bay before we can ask. Doughnut crumbs are pulverized underfoot the soles of students pouring onto the station platform.
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My thirteen-year-old cousin solemnly vows to become the most famous rockstar in the world when he grows up. AC/DC tattoos encircling his wrists seal his oath in temporary red ink. Somewhere across the sea on a sun-warmed patch of grass, three boys press needles to their wrists, ink pooling beneath their skin in the same promise.
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Getting tangled in dovetailed Latin sentences, grasping about for the main verb. When I knead my cramping wrist, I think of my aunt signing up for her high school’s German class when her suitcases still sat unpacked. The harder her father pushed her towards ESL and other practicalities, the deeper she flung herself into wrestling with German conjugations, swirling oil pastels, arranging vases of lupines. Now I comb through cedar-perfumed hexameter, clumsily daisy-chain nouns together.
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Weighing which parts of myself to fold up into tiny squares and tuck away, moving among desks, Thanksgiving table chairs, pews, sticky red plastic cups. I used to think I was good with words. But you must have, at moments, wrung the red from your speech like my grandmother, exchanged names cashier-quick like my mother, and swallowed white-hot fury with a smile like my sister. The more words I collect, the less sure I am of which ones to use and how.
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A yellow Buick streaking down the wet black highway. We arrived in New England for leaf peeping, but the dry summer had ignited and snuffed out the foliage sooner than expected. We hightail it after the receding peak foliage, following in the Buick’s tire tracks. As you crisscrossed these red- gold mountains in your Buick, the air soil-damp, I wonder if you allowed yourself to pretend you were a wandering poet-scholar and not a triple exile turned itinerant lecturer. I wonder if when leaning on roadside gas pumps, to forget the pump meter’s sluggish ticking, you performed Hwang Jini sijos or Hamlet soliloquies for the migrating warblers and upstream-arcing salmon, who do not think red is such an ugly color.
Penelope Pyo (she/her) is a sophomore comparative literature major from San Francisco. Her work has been published in the Journal of Literary Translation and 295 Magazine. She can be found drawing, perusing record stores, collecting scarves, and listening to 50s-60s rock music on long walks.
ABOUT THE ART | The Sun Builds A Little House In My House by Islay Ross, 2026. Islay Ross is a student at Yale University.
