Night Fight 50"x60" acrylic on canvas   Picnic  40"x50" acrylic on canvas     My home in Seoul is right by the US army base. My dad used to joke about how if North Korea nukes us, we won’t even have time to panic because the bomb will land right on our front yard and we will simply evaporate - no pain. My mornings started with sounds of soldiers’ murmurs coming through my window, and by sundown the sky would be filled with roars of helicopters that flew above my neighborhood. In a way, I have always been living in America. I learned how to speak english before I could write in Korean. My papers say that I’m Korean but my country is merely yet another battleground for America and it becomes uninhabitable day by day. The air coming down from up north is really a wall of dust and we hear women cry in pain so my parents sent me off to America, a “better” place, but it's a familiar scene, except that there are guns, racism, and more colorful ways to hurt. Whenever I’d be called a dog eater or something, I retreated into the woods that surrounded my perfect little mostly white boarding school, because the trees didn’t know how to say ching-chong. Every spring, there were swarms of tiny frogs migrating from one side of the forest to another and I always accidentally stepped on a bunch of them. It was unavoidable and I didn’t feel bad. I would also fuck around and get too close to Bai Yuka, the stinkiest yet the prettiest little lake, and get attacked by an angry mother goose. My history teacher’s golden retriever, Lizzie, would sometimes run up to me out of nowhere, push me to the ground, and run off. Nothing ever smells like that place. Sweet and everlasting sour.

 

As a Korean, and as a Korean body. We suffer, but we also entertain ourselves in this strange land, and in this bizarre state. We are satisfied, but at the same time the immeasurable pain and horror is looming right in front of us. Jokes and games coexisting with chaos and madness. I live in this never ending American nightmare.

      Kay Lee is a second-year MFA student at the University of Pennsylvania. Born and raised in Seoul, Korea, Kay explores her identity, discomforts, and traumas as a young, non-binary Asian in this bizarre land called the United States of America, and its even stranger colony, the Republic of Korea. Kay makes paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, and VR art. She loves baking but only when she is not depressed and is fond of anything that contains an ungodly amount of garlic.