Some Are Always Hungry. Jihyun Yun. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2020.
Military officers may not be inclined to reach for a book of poetry to bolster their understanding of warfare, but important lessons can be drawn from seemingly unusual sources. And while the Chief of Staff of the Air Force Professional Reading Program has been expanded to include cinema, photography, and even TED Talks, poetry in book or singular form appears to have never made the decades-old list. Similarly, poetry does not seem to be included on sister service recommended reading lists. Despite this, there is a place for poetry somewhere in the military leader’s piles of literature, history, and leadership books, one that puts a little heart into the science of war.
…practitioners of war must be acutely aware of the social impacts war has on individuals and cultures, stretching past the generation immediately affected.
War leaves scars on landscapes and people, lasting memories passed on from generation to generation, for the children of the affected to sort out long after the dispute is settled. When a nation decides to go to war, long term consequences must be considered outside of the military or political realm, especially in a world so interconnected as today. These considerations are twofold; the social, political, and military impacts of past wars can help to inform the current environment, but possible future impacts should also be weighed before engaging in new conflicts and as they progress. In many cases, military forces are not simply used to meet an objective and then depart. Instead, in conflicts spanning from Germany in World War II to present-day Afghanistan and Iraq, the military stays for rebuilding and stability operations. This means practitioners of war must be acutely aware of the social impacts war has on individuals and cultures, stretching past the generation immediately affected.
Yun’s collection often describes food itself, illustrating how hunger changes people and how food acts as an expression of culture.
Korean-American author Jihyun Yun’s poetry captures life during and after war, as well as its impacts on those who did not experience it. In Some Are Always Hungry, Yun “chronicles a family’s wartime survival, immigration, and heirloom trauma through the lens of food, or the lack thereof.”[1] While no poem explicitly says so, the work appears to center around the Korean War. The effects of back-to-back conflicts leading up to the war, specifically the Japanese occupation of Korea, followed by World War II are also present. Yun illustrates in less than eighty pages a country that has survived multiple wars and oppression inflicted by other nations, using her poetry to describe the hardships of a conquered culture, immigration, racism, and—not quite so simply—living as a woman. Yun’s collection often describes food itself, illustrating how hunger changes people and how food acts as an expression of culture. The poems are written from the female perspective, from what appears to be three viewpoints: the daughter, the mother, and the grandmother. Narration varies from grandmother to granddaughter at different stages and places in life, sometimes as a child, sometimes as an adult, and other times as an adult reflecting on her childhood. While themes weave throughout the book, the main arc begins with starvation during the war, then immigration to the United States, and ends with a hopeful look towards the future.
The recipe provides a cooking lesson, an experience of a war-torn nation, the pain of starvation, and tools for survival.
Yun’s poems vary from structurally familiar formats to pseudo recipes like “War Soup,” which lists ingredients, but the steps include both cooking instructions and the family’s struggles. Yun manages to make the reader feel as though they are watching an intimate moment between grandmother and granddaughter, the elder women passing on family recipes to the younger, while also sharing family history:
“5. Then Spam, more tofu than animal, cut to cubes. Say, we made do with what we did. At the bases, the Americans gave cans of beans or meat… We called it Johnson-Tang, rejoiced like we’d never again need to eat, as if the miles were no real thing. Now Chili, now green onion sprigs.”[2]
The last step ends by tying the cooking instructions to a critical lesson for life during war with, “I will teach my daughters / to bare their palms. / I will teach them how to beg.”[3] The recipe provides a cooking lesson, an experience of a war-torn nation, the pain of starvation, and tools for survival.
As readers, we are often left wondering about the depths to which we would sink to survive.
Perhaps some of the more difficult poems are those displaying the losses of humanity from starvation. In “Passage, 1951,” Yun’s unidentified speaker describes witnessing a woman killed by shrapnel, the baby she was carrying strapped to her back, somehow still alive, tumbles “...out like a squash / during good harvest.”[4] Rather than helping the child, the witness fights off others to strip the dead mother, searching for anything that will help them survive.[5] Later the witness observes:
“…My sister began to smile
while looting bodies,
and the sight of her
put freeze in me.
It was only after seeing her
I knew what my own
mouth was doing.”[6]
Starvation drives the narrator and her family to dig through trash for scraps from American bases, trade sex for meat, and, yes, search dead bodies for anything that would help survival. While she expresses fear that “…we would never / un-wild ourselves,” in a separate poem she asks, “why blame a human for his nature which at its core is merely hunger?”[7] As readers, we are often left wondering about the depths to which we would sink to survive. As leaders, we are left with many more questions. Are our actions in war forcing populations into starvation and into heinous acts in the name of survival? Does having an understanding and even empathy for individuals committing crimes such as prostitution, theft, and murder under desperate circumstances change how we deal with them? Do our desired outcomes take into account possible negative long-term effects on the populations of our nation and the others engaged? Should we care?
Escaping war through immigration comes with great difficulty, and Yun relates unique war-created immigration struggles in her poems. In “Diptych of Girl in 1953,” the narrator describes earning money for her baby brother, “Your tuition in hand, I am naked at dusk…Somehow I was a virgin before this.” [8] She is derogatorily called “western wife” and asks:
“…Is the moniker still wretched
if it becomes literally true? Soon
I will follow a white man to America,
his war-relic bride…”[9]
The narrator will escape starvation and atrocities in war torn Korea as the trophy of a soldier. Her immigration comes with varying costs, both physical and emotional.
Despite fighting to keep their native tongue alive, the war inflicted language losses.
Even after the war, shadows of trauma linger. In one poem, the granddaughter recalls her halmeoni’s (grandmother’s) use of a Japanese rather than the Korean word for carrot, a mistake committed so frequently that the young girl needs no translation.[10] Long after the Japanese occupation of Korea, the granddaughter inherits the language of a country she does not know: “…I think of colonization via inheritance, via memory. These words I’ve no reason to know but do.”[11] This transferred language is not due to immersion but instead through oppression as, “During the occupation, this tongue was dangerous, but we still wanted to keep it. We met under bridges to flex our Korean…Once, I watched an imperial soldier cave a man’s face in for refusing to give up our mother tongue.”[12] Despite fighting to keep their native tongue alive, the war inflicted language losses. Immigration to America forced more language and cultural losses as, in what appears to be the daughter speaking of her mother, the narrator of another poem states:
“At sixteen, she’s still new to this nation that unnames her daily.
An Oriental name will drag her, they say, so she gives up Sunju for Kathy,
though the tongue-tip press of -th- refuses her.”[13]
While war has stripped away parts of the grandmother’s culture, it has also weighed in on the life of her daughter. Halmeoni trades her Korean words for those of her oppressor, traditional dishes evolve to include items originally added only due to wartime limitations, and she sacrifices heritage by changing her daughter’s name for one that is less foreign.
The issues Yun raises are important in themselves—especially to those whose experience is captured—but also as an illumination for those studying past conflict and contemplating future conflict.
Poetry can be a deeply personal affair and what appeals to one may not appeal to others, much like music, which I would argue is often poetry itself. In all honesty, this book was not one that I connected deeply with, mainly due to stylistic differences and preferences, and though it may not be joining the well thumbed through works on my favorite bookshelves, it prompted new lines of thought for me on war and its broad ranging effects on individuals and societies.
The work provides a pathway to further exploration of often ignored topics. The issues Yun raises are important in themselves—especially to those whose experience is captured—but also as an illumination for those studying past conflict and contemplating future conflict. After reading Some Are Always Hungry, the reader should gain an awareness of the lasting effects war has on individuals seemingly outside of the military and politics. Military and political leaders at all levels should take heed, factoring in the short- and long-term effects of their decisions on both military and civilian populations of all nations involved.
Michelle Sabala is an officer in the Air National Guard. The views expressed in this article are the author's alone and do not reflect the policy or position of the Air National Guard, the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
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Header Image: Untitled, Andong, South Korea, April 14, 2019 (Mathew Schwartz).
Notes:
[1] Jihyun Yun, Some Are Always Hungry (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), back cover.
[2] Jihyun Yun, “War Soup,” in Some Are Always Hungry (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 21.
[3] Ibid.
[4]Jihyun Yun, “Passage, 1951,” in Some Are Always Hungry (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 4.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 5.
[7] Jihyun Yun, “Passage, 1951,” in Some Are Always Hungry (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 4; “The Leaving Season,” 61.
[8] Jihyun Yun, “Diptych of a Girl in 1953,” in Some Are Always Hungry (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 9.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Korean word for Grandmother, Recipe, 27. Jihyun Yun, “Recipe,” in Some Are Always Hungry (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 27.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid., 28.
[13]Jihyun Yun, “Immigration,” in Some Are Always Hungry (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 47.