Elane Kim
The Good Daughter
based on the Korean myth of Princess Bari / after Nancy Huang
- This is how my grandmother tells it:
This is a story about
birth, the act of slipping into rivers
and bad luck streaming into daughterhood. A way of drowning
when there is no water, only miles of open field, a wired forest, puffs of
death
hidden behind camphor trees. The carp floating in the sky
so loose-tongued and clever, streaming in the wrong direction. The stork heavy
with clouds. The road to harvest cannot be followed, only discarded. There is an
open door
and sometimes an open mouth and always
too many caskets to keep holding onto. Bari, the youngest daughter, seventh
-born. Girl plunged into death for a bloodline that
does not love her
back. O love. O loving. Bari, meaning good girl,
bright girl, filial girl, meaning
there is someplace that will love her best when she is gone.
*
- This is how my mother tells it:
this is a story about
misfortune. Daughter born fish
-tailed, scaled, oceanless. No ending: only miles
of forest, a place so green it could burn you. Look around:
that square of earth
is somebody else’s. That star is not yours,
never yours. Daughter discarded, born
to die, ready to speak to the dead. So many rivers of yellow blood, steaming bile,
enough to drink
a body from. And when even
this body is not enough to silence the dead, there will be
nothing left to grieve. O God, O grief. Seventh daughter Bari.
Bari,
meaning to throw away, meaning
wordless thing, meaning
no good, meaning
girl.
*
- This is how I tell it:
this is a story about
absence. Girl born not
son, fish -mouthed, slick with the blood of another
saint. Too clever for her own good, too loud to speak to
the dead.
Too many rounded corners, mouth open to catch
sharp rain like bullets. A tailed daughter means no good,
means severed bloodlines and childless coffins.
This is a story about
cruelty. Fingers ready to slice
the sky open, face still mouthless, gaping, breathless.
O Bari, you shivering thing, you dead thing. Look around:
all this,
even that bright sun, belongs to you. So let us be loose-tongued
and clever. Let us love what makes us no good
girls, griefless girls. Let us have
ourselves
this open field and this terrible body
and a burning match and licks of bitter
kerosene and a mouthful of stars and so much potential
and still no water.
Elane Kim is a Korean American writer whose work has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation, the Hippocrates Initiative for Poetry and Medicine, and The New York Times, among others. She is a 2022 Davidson Fellow in Literature, the winner of the 2021 Columbia Journal Winter Poetry Contest, and the editor-in-chief of Gaia Lit. Her poetry and prose can be found in Narrative Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, One Teen Story, The Adroit Journal, and Electric Literature. Her story collection, Postcards, was published by Bull City Press in 2022.
