cripchick's blog

i’ll scream it again & again—

no matter how eager, how radical, how cute you are

i do not exist for your fancy of freakery.

i could care less about feeding your taste for exotic flavors. i was not born to stroke your fascination of marginalized people.

no matter how much you are learning, no matter how much power/money/influence you carry, no matter how much you always know the right things to say,

my body is not for you to examine, conquer, or casually observe
as if the strands of my hair were nothing more than pages of a magazine

the creator did not craft these hands, lungs, feet of mine so you can feel good about yourself. my issues are not for you to solve.

who said you could analyze me? i am not a hobby, a project, a case study

nor will i ever be a pet to collect
in that menagerie of yours

instead i am harriet tubman using her disability to trick slavemasters, survey lands, and carve out paths to freedom
i am the spear waiting in datu lapu lapu’s right hand, standing with thousands ready to slice the colonizer’s head off of magellan’s body
i am the body casts frida kahlo painted on
i am the freedom song my joseon ancestors sung, the taegukis wrapped around their foreheads as they demanded an end to tyranny

no matter how quick i was to hand you this hard-earned self-determination in the past, know that from now on, you are being watched. vigilantly.

flip it, spit it out in a poem, brand it on the tip
of your tongue
do whatever you have to do
to remember

when i tell people my harabeoji was an underground freedom fighter, i didn’t know it was him and uhh, 2,000,000 others (talk about people power!). today i came across a series of articles on the joongahn daily website that commemorates the march first movement, a korean uprising against colonial rule in 1919 that began with a declaration of independence and lasted a year. even though japanese occupation did not end until much later, the mansei demonstrations and its heroes (like Yu Gwansun, 16 year old freedom fighter considered to be a “korean joan of arc”) are a source of pride for all koreans. the pictures below link to two great articles.

illustration of koreans coming together to protest japanese occupation. picture links to an article about how the march first movement can be understood in a larger context of anti-colonist resistance.

another illustration of protestors. the picture links to an article about how the samil movement was one of the first people's movement to be truly inclusive (scholars, students, gisaeng, farmers, everyone!)

I’m tired of being angry, honestly.. but it never ends. I can’t just brush things off or pretend I didn’t hear something just so I can live in a happy little bubble. I wish I could– maybe then I wouldn’t alienate [push away] other people so much and be frusterated all the time.

But I swear, it’s IMPOSSIBLE when everything is so personal! Today in my International Political Economy class [a class about international trade], we were doing a country study on Japan… Even when discussing why Japan was so “economically successful”, the fact that the Japanese have colonized [take over] other countries was never brought up (that is, until I had a little outburst). Don’t they know that people, like my grandmother, were forced to take a Japanese name and to remove the Korean language from conversation? Don’t they know that her friends were taken as comfort women? Don’t they know that the winters were cold because the Japanese took everything they possibly could, even things like trees? That’s just the beginning. I can’t even begin to describe the horror, and it wasn’t just a 40-year thing, Japan and China have been trying to occupy Korea for thousands of years. More… »