• Seo-Young Chu deposited “Hwabyung Fragments” on Humanities Commons 3 years, 8 months ago

    In “Hwabyung Fragments” the Korean American poet Seo-Young Chu uses pieces of Korean mythology, family lore, DMZ iconography, speculative lyricism, allusions to Plato’s Symposium (the figure of one’s missing other half), and allusions to chimerism, mosaicism, and twinning to explore generational trauma, Korean division, postmemory han, the hwabyung that ended her grandfather’s life. She also uses the trope of apostrophe as a way of “communicating” with lost family members in North Korea whom she has never met.