Songbirds

nonfiction, by Monica S. Park

Songbirds

The regent honeyeater is an Australian songbird that is forgetting its own song. Lacking kin to guide and teach it its own language, it has begun to imitate the songs of other birds. Doing this has led it down a path of mimicry and forgetting: survival at first, then self-erasure and extinction. By assimilating, it kills its own species.

Or so the story goes.

But how it must feel to sing borrowed songs. To speak so eloquently in foreign tongue. How, every time it opens its mouth, its mimicry begets something new.

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The language I shared with you, halmuni, was a kind of mimicry, too: limited and instrumental.

잘 주무셨어요?

How did you sleep?

배고파요.

I’m hungry.

잘 먹겠습니다.

Thank you for this meal.

건강하세요?

Are you well?

I knew how to express all my most basic human needs and desires, in all tenses, and the formulas of care we’d use to greet each other at the beginning of each day or after a long period of absence. This was our language’s full extent, but it was enough: what we communicated in was flesh and spirit.

Thump thump thump.

You were on the kitchen floor, squat-sitting on a low stool, knees raised in front of you, a wooden mallet in your hand, pounding the glutinous rice and shaping it into long white cylinders of toothsomeness. Garaetteok, the unassuming queen of all rice cakes: utilitarian and almost flavourless, except for the way it distilled everything good in a grain of white rice. You offered me a cut: Don’t you forget. I took a bite: I won’t.

You were like a Laughing Buddha handing out treats. The garaetteok would be divided into dozens, maybe hundreds of oval-shaped pieces, then put into the New Year’s soup that the extended family would stuff themselves with for luck and blessing.

I stuffed myself with it like everyone else – so much that I could feel it stuck in my gullet, wanting to rise back up and out: then out with my luck, out with my fortune. I was desperate to keep it in.