#ae hee lee

[lunchboxpoems]

A STUDY THROUGH HOMES

We live in imaginary countries —Etel Adnan

When people ask where I’m from, where I’m really from, I ready my permutations. My mélange of autumnal streets, my obscure cities, the countries I found built on a mound of papers and tears, the pebble-sized universe occupying my left shoe—I want to tell them everything. I want to see how far we can go.

____

A Venezuelan couple moves into our neighborhood. They share their story with me, why they migrated to Peru: the inflation, their hunger and fear, their love—they are relieved they can send money back to their families. They say they miss the soup their grandmother used to make, the sleepiness after eating it, the magic. When I ask what’s home for them, they say home is a fist that dreams.

____

Instead of calling home by the name of a country, I imagine calling it by people’s names or pronouns. Hello, I’m from Sang-Hee. I’m going back to Alejandra. Have you ever visited Daniel? I’m proud of you. I miss me.

____

I realize I’ve been acquainted with my husband for less time than I have my parents, who received and kept my first laughter like a pressed flower in the folds of their memory. Less time than my sister, who would only fall asleep when my hair was twined around her thumb, an amulet against nightmares. I didn’t expect I would end up staying in the United States after finishing my studies; I find it strange I fell in love with a stranger. Though maybe it was because he was a stranger, and it’s easier to love strangers. One day, the years I’ve known him will claim half my life, then maybe most of it, but never all. This, the life of an immigrant too.

____

I ask my parents whether they miss Korea. My father crosses his arms. Says home is now. My mother, next to him, adds home is also then.

____

A BBC documentary explains how, at some point, a hermit crab must look for a new home, a new shell to protect its curved abdomen, pliant as a grape, easy cooking target for the sun. It’ll meet others by the shore, where they’ll line up patiently from largest to smallest, to swap shells that match their present size. A systematic method of survival that benefits everyone—except for the one left out. It sears into my mind. Not the idea of one being left out but the image of the crab, its toy-orange legs flailing, hurrying after a shell with a hole on its roof that will just have to do for an uncertain while.

____​​​​​​​

I ask a friend whose life oscillated between Trujillo and Lima where’s home for her these days. She says home is any place that calls her name.

____​​​​​​​

At the airport, the day I would stop sharing a roof  with my family, my mother tucks the word saranghae deep into the pocket of my ear. She repeats, saranghae, saranghae, saranghae—until the word I’d heard every day sounds like a foreign language, until the word sheds the husk of its meaning and is replaced with music.

____​​​​​​​

At one point, I thought my home was a pair of hand-me-down pants I’d eventually grow into. But home was the blur of my body, in which the same bloodstream didn’t flow twice, in which a deep breath made my lungs embrace my heart tighter, before letting go.

____

​​​​​​​In my mailbox: a welcome letter and a 3x2 inch card. It declares I’ve been granted temporary permission, acceptance, to be where I already am. I could drill a hole in it with my stare: this small key on the palm of my hand, green like a pair of emerald earrings I never had, green like bad breath and anxiety, green like the application fees that continue to increase like an insidious dream of bloating grass. Green, the color of my conditional privilege. All condensed into a single object I’m asked to carry at all times but made so I could, easily, lose so much more.

____

​​​​​​​I’m tired, so I read about how policies attempting to restrict immigration constantly fail, unable to forbid the body, the cities and deserts it carries inside, the winds wrinkling its lakes, the finches darting not only above but under its airport ceilings. I’m tired, so I lie down. The earth spins for me and the dead continue their orbiting. It gives me strength to remember there is no such thing as an immovable object.

AE HEE LEE

#ae hee lee #poem #poetry #home #immigration #immigration poem #immigrant poem

[creatediana]

“Self Portrait as I” by Ae Hee Lee, published in The New England Review Volume 41, No. 4 (2020)

Ae Hee Lee was born in South Korea and raised in Peru. She received her MFA from the University of Notre Dame and is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in the Georgia Review, Southeast Review, Poetry, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, and the Adroit Journal, among others. She is the author of two chapbooks: Bedtime // Riverbed (Compound Press, 2017) and Dear Bear (Platypus Press, 2021).

#influences #ae hee lee #new england review #poetry journal #literary journal #literature #american literature #twenty-first century #decided to use her biography from that issue of ner since i was already typing this directly from the book #i don't do enough influences from modern literary journals. which is weird bc ive worked for two and i try to read them from time to time #i used to subscribe to a handful but. i didn't have time to read them between reading submissions. #ive recently left one of them for a better opportunity doing freelance work. hopefully ill have time to get to the damn issues ive missed #catch up on my reading y'know

[6peaches]

Ae Hee Lee - Green Card :: Evidence of Adequate Means of Financial Support

I needed money. There’s no poetic way to say this. Even so, when you touched my face, brought my cheeks to the nook of your neck, I burrowed into it— a firefly seeking shelter from winter, far underground. Then,

         you told me there’s no application form that can hold          the entirety of a life, because our days constantly spill like wine.          Imagine that, you said, apricot tones all over the page!

         you told me about your ferns, bejeweled with jade dew,          their coiled fiddleheads full of unfulfilled,          twirling futures, and I forgot about my fixation with earning          people’s respect, among other things for which          I’d been told it was proper to plead          until granted.

         you told me, if immigrants could enrich a country,          you didn’t want to know          our melting point and whether we would shine          brighter than gold.

         you told me how I could stop confusing belonging          with belongings,  good with  goods, by sharing          the way our hearts continue to beat          resilient, even without an assurance of worth.

         you told me there can be solace in a dead end, in knowing the sea          still collapses, still runs and soars carrying its broken          shells, somewhere out there. And then,

                     you buried a kiss in the dark                      earth of my hair. I believed it all.                      What else could I do?

- Green Card :: Evidence of Adequate Means of Financial Support by Ae Hee Lee

#poem #poet #Ae Hee Lee #Green Card :: Evidence of Adequate Means of Financial Support

[rosemooncinnamon]

 green card :: evidence of adequate means of financial support by ae hee lee

#poetry #poetry foundation #ae hee lee #poem #dark academia #classic academia #light academia #studyblr #words of affirmation #literature

[bone-free-as-the-wind]

I had a micro-interview on Instagram by Ae Hee Lee of Milwaukee’s Woodland Pattern Book Center. The rest of the interview is here.

#poetry #book #interview #Sharon Suzuki-Martinez #The Loneliest Whale Blues #ae hee lee #woodland pattern book center

[byronicist]

"Do you trust me? Trust me, / just in the beginning. Then translate / me for yourself, question me / unsparingly like a sparrow / to another sparrow about breadcrumbs."

Ae Hee Lee, Prelude (2022)

#quotes #lit #literature #poetry #spilled ink #modern poetry #poets of color #ae hee lee

[missedstations]

"(Dis)ambiguation" - Ae Hee Lee

Occasionally an automated e-mail or a person I just met halves my name, addresses me as Dear Ae, not knowing this to also mean Dear Love, * Are these the names they call themselves too, I wonder: Sparrowhawk— Bluethroat— Many times, I've not recognized myself— a fistful of dark feathers caught between a caller's teeth. * At a coffee shop, I introduce myself as Ruth. The cashier scribbles it down on the cup, says, What an American name! about the woman who had become a foreigner for a foreigner.

#Poems #(Dis)ambiguation #Ae Hee Lee

[noleavestoblow]

"you told me how I could stop confusing belonging with belongings,  good with  goods, by sharing the way our hearts continue to beat resilient, even without an assurance of worth."

-Ae Hee Lee

#Ae Hee Lee #reading #literature #quotes #life #life quotes #quote #world #random beautiful stuff that i read #random quotes #stumbling on random beautiful quotes

[cupsofsilver]

Via Poetry Foundation

#the poetry foundation #poetry #poem #poets #Korean American #Ae Hee Lee #immigration #immigrants #poetrycommunity

[generouswindow]

A Study through Homes

by AE HEE LEE

We live in imaginary countries

— Etel Adnan

When people ask where I’m from, where I’m really from, I ready my permutations. My mélange of autumnal streets, my obscure cities, the countries I found built on a mound of papers and tears, the pebble-sized universe occupying my left shoe—I want to tell them everything. I want to see how far we can go.

____

A Venezuelan couple moves into our neighborhood. They share their story with me, why they migrated to Peru: the inflation, their hunger and fear, their love—they are relieved they can send money back to their families. They say they miss the soup their grandmother used to make, the sleepiness after eating it, the magic. When I ask what’s home for them, they say home is a fist that dreams.

____

Instead of calling home by the name of a country, I imagine calling it by people’s names or pronouns. Hello, I’m from Sang-Hee. I’m going back to Alejandra. Have you ever visited Daniel? I’m proud of you. I miss me.

____

I realize I’ve been acquainted with my husband for less time than I have my parents, who received and kept my first laughter like a pressed flower in the folds of their memory. Less time than my sister, who would only fall asleep when my hair was twined around her thumb, an amulet against nightmares. I didn’t expect I would end up staying in the United States after finishing my studies; I find it strange I fell in love with a stranger. Though maybe it was because he was a stranger, and it’s easier to love strangers. One day, the years I’ve known him will claim half my life, then maybe most of it, but never all. This, the life of an immigrant too.

____

I ask my parents whether they miss Korea. My father crosses his arms. Says home is now. My mother, next to him, adds home is also then.

____

A BBC documentary explains how, at some point, a hermit crab must look for a new home, a new shell to protect its curved abdomen, pliant as a grape, easy cooking target for the sun. It’ll meet others by the shore, where they’ll line up patiently from largest to smallest, to swap shells that match their present size. A systematic method of survival that benefits everyone—except for the one left out. It sears into my mind. Not the idea of one being left out but the image of the crab, its toy-orange legs flailing, hurrying after a shell with a hole on its roof that will just have to do for an uncertain while.

____​​​​​​​

I ask a friend whose life oscillated between Trujillo and Lima where’s home for her these days. She says home is any place that calls her name.

____​​​​​​​

At the airport, the day I would stop sharing a roof  with my family, my mother tucks the word saranghae deep into the pocket of my ear. She repeats, saranghae, saranghae, saranghae—until the word I’d heard every day sounds like a foreign language, until the word sheds the husk of its meaning and is replaced with music.

____​​​​​​​

At one point, I thought my home was a pair of hand-me-down pants I’d eventually grow into. But home was the blur of my body, in which the same bloodstream didn’t flow twice, in which a deep breath made my lungs embrace my heart tighter, before letting go.

____

​​​​​​​In my mailbox: a welcome letter and a 3x2 inch card. It declares I’ve been granted temporary permission, acceptance, to be where I already am. I could drill a hole in it with my stare: this small key on the palm of my hand, green like a pair of emerald earrings I never had, green like bad breath and anxiety, green like the application fees that continue to increase like an insidious dream of bloating grass. Green, the color of my conditional privilege. All condensed into a single object I’m asked to carry at all times but made so I could, easily, lose so much more.

____

​​​​​​​I’m tired, so I read about how policies attempting to restrict immigration constantly fail, unable to forbid the body, the cities and deserts it carries inside, the winds wrinkling its lakes, the finches darting not only above but under its airport ceilings. I’m tired, so I lie down. The earth spins for me and the dead continue their orbiting. It gives me strength to remember there is no such thing as an immovable object.

#of living #ae hee lee #the context of my story changes when you enter

[junkobato]

Upcoming Kdrama April 2023 💚

10/4: Paper Moon with Kim Seo Hyung, Lee Chun Hee, Lee Shi Woo. 10 episodes; thriller, mystery, romance. Trailer

12/4: Bora! Deborah with Yoo In Na, Yoon Hyun Min, Joo Sang Wook, Hwang Chan Sung. 14 episodes; rom-com. Trailer

12/4: Stealer: the Treasure Keeper with Joo Won, Lee Joo Woo. 12 episodes; action, mystery, comedy. Trailer

14/4: Queenmaker with Kim Hee Ae, Moon So Ri, Ok Ja Yeon. 12 episodes; political, drama. Trailer

15/4: Doctor Cha with Uhm Jung Hwa, Kim Byung Chul, Min Woo Hyuk. 16 episodes; medical, comedy. Trailer

17/4: Family with Jang Na Ra, Jang Hyuk, Chae Jung An. 12 episodes; action, comedy, thriller. Trailer

26/4: the Good Bad Mother with Lee Do Hyun, Ra Mi Ran, Yoo In Soo, Ahn Eun Jin. 14 episodes; family, life. Trailer

28/4: Romantic Doctor, Teacher Kim 3 with Han Suk Kyu, Ahn Hyo Seop, Lee Sung Kyung. 16 episodes; medical, drama. Trailer

So excited for JangJang couple reunion!!!

Which one are you going to watch? 😆

*REBLOG FOR UPDATES*

#upcoming drama #april 2023 #paper moon #kim seo hyung #bora! deborah #yoo in na #yoon hyun min #joo sang wook #Stealer: the treasure keeper #joo won #lee joo woo #queenmaker #kim hee ae #ok ja yeon #doctor cha #uhm jung hwa #family #jang hyuk #jang na ra #the good bad mother #lee do hyun #ra mi ran #Romantic doctor teacher kim 3 #romantic doctor teacher kim #dr romantic #ahn hyo seop #lee sung kyung #tvn family

[binging-asian-dramas]

Call It Love. 9

Story: 9

Acting: 10

Chemistry: 10

Comparable to: Just Between Lovers (kdrama) ; When the Weather is Fine (kdrama)

Flat out has to be one of the most depressing but romantic melancholy healing kdramas. Male lead’s character is written in the most whump’ness way. Don’t get me wrong female lead’s character is just as whumpy, but oofing ML is dialed up to 💯 No matter the storyline flows excellently despite some questionable editing choices. Gosh knows how many slow motion scenes this drama, if you took a shot every time there was one you’d be drunk by the end of the episode. Despite that everyone did an outstanding job, both leads chemistry was oozing on screen, I mean honestly I’m a bit bias always with Kim Young Kwang dramas. For me there’s never a drama I disliked of his. He always manages to pull off excellent dramas (still standing on that D-Day is top fav) If you love melodramas, this should definitely be a must watch!

#call it love #kdrama #hulu #disney + #kim young kwang #lee sung kyung #kim ye won #yeon je hyung #jun suk ho #sung joon #ahn hee yeon #nam ki ae #jang sung bum #seo dong won #melodrama #romantic drama #whump #slow burn #love/hate #office romance #ceo #fav #rec #❤️

[6peaches]

Ae Hee Lee - Prelude

     Traduttore, traditore.      —Unknown

     Your infidelities will have changed you.      —Olena Kalytiak Davis

I don’t deny it. I’ve taken the dagger of my tongue and gently run it over your ear. I’ve often 

thought Umma, said Mother, thought it wasn’t my mother whom I’d spoken about— all this without you suspecting me, 

I’d like to think. I’ve whispered Te quiero to actually mean I want you. I had to use a  Japanese word, ginko, to explain in English my first time seeing the splitting yellow fans of eun-haeng leaves in Korea. 

There’s so much of the past in these choices. Let me tell you 

how I wished for a long, unfractured life:           I slurped noodles, threaded           needles. But again and again I dreamt           I was a series of footprints           pressed deep into the earth, covered in snow.

I told my parents about this, saying:           나는 hilo의 삶을 바랬어요           조심스럽고 잘리지 않게 자라고싶었어요. 하지만 soñé           que me había vuelto muchos 발자국들, 땅에 깊이 눌려진 발���국들,           cubiertos de nieve.

Do you trust me? Trust me, just in the beginning. Then translate me for yourself, question me

unsparingly like a sparrow to another sparrow about breadcrumbs.

- Prelude by Ae Hee Lee 

#poem #poet #Ae Hee Lee #Prelude

[rhys-bae]

11 eps of Queenmaker ™ are all it takes for me to spend days digging all the materials about Kim Hee ae all the way back to 1983-her debut year

Special mentions:

lee young ae (the resemblance!!)

cate blanchett (three sons vs two sons)

lee seung gi (got teased by hee ae not to worry about her driving skills because she got her driving license before he was born lol)

secret affair jtbc (best love story™, please watch)

#kim hee ae #kdrama #netflix kdrama #queenmaker #cate blanchett #the world of the married #lee young ae #secret affair #yoo ah in #jtbc #sisters over flowers #women chefkiss #women

[fuckyeahkimyoojung]

#kim yoo jung #lee hee ae #kim hyang gi #go ah sung #sns update #ppoyamom #240322

[yemme]

The Underrated Asian Show of 2023

QueenMaker (2023) ~ Actress Kim Hee-ae portrayal of being a Fixer (Hwang Do-hee) for one of Korea's prominent families is a thriller. It is 'Scandal' wrapped up in a stellar cast of proficient actors. When I say proficient I mean Proficient... Seasoned Actors... Marinated. This cast is your favorites Idol in the industry. This series is an acting class, pull up a seat. Who controls the narrative the world sees is Do-hee skill set. She's the only sleeping dog you should let lie before she takes your entire existence. The most underrated series of 2023. When you see actors in their 50's getting a check with a story line like this make some noise and praise them. Western World get to watching. I pray they will have a Season 2. The acting is everything. Netflix. (Korea) (x)

#Queenmaker #Netflix #Watch it #kdrama #korean drama #Korean series #Kim Hee-ae #Moon So-ri #Ryu Soo-young #Ok Ja-yeon #Seo Yi-sook #Jin Kyung #Han Chae Kyung #Kim Sae Byeok #Lee Kyung Young #Kim Ho Jung #Kim Sun Young #A project with grown women killing it #Acting #Actors #Drama #Youtube