I first came across Sun Yung Shin’s work through the VIDA Review, where I served as a poetry reader. I was drawn into the concrete landscape of Shin’s work, the way it filled the page, the way it wrestled with whiteness. All three of the poems published by VIDA are in The Wet Hex (Coffee House Press, 2022), and here they are given a home, as Shin further explores whiteness and womanhood in terms of cultural history, symbolism, and race.
The book’s opening poem, “Translate This Body into Everything” begins,
Here I am at the inconvenience
store of unspoken words. Rows of soft
silence. The produce
of our Korean families. 5,000 years
+
of the People in White. We are the girls
who went away, who left memory behind,
who ate pebbles and stopped talking . . .
This poem, placed before the first section, serves as a declaration to ground the reader. The book is deeply infused with Korean history and mythology and the traditional and contemporary ways women are outcast, used, and portrayed as monsters. Shin asks readers to perceive “the girls who went away,” intent on giving voice to women silenced and erased by patriarchal and racist societies, both Korean and American. The poem carries on:
Here we are at the corner of the past and fate
no one discovered except American day
by American night. Work. Switching faces was easier
than trading one tongue for another.
+
How do we pronounce our skin in English,
turn our silences inside out like a fox-fur stole.
The Korean fox with nine tails is a demon,
always a woman, her heart thick with dreams
+
of human sacrifice, of the future of nature . . .
Shin ties the Korean legends with the experiences of being labeled as other in America, of attempting to integrate without sacrificing oneself and one’s culture. I am particularly interested in the reference to “The People in White” in this poem. There is—unknown to me prior to reading The Wet Hex—a history of the Korean people being referred to by outsiders as 백ㅢ (baegui), or the People in White. There are multiple meanings or reasons behind this title: white clothes represented mourning and also differentiated a commoner from someone with an office. Whiteness itself was tied to indigenous worship of the sun, purity, and morality. Part of Korea’s history of colonization includes colonizers banning white clothing because it was so synonymous with Korean culture, marking Koreans as other to non-Koreans. Koreans then reclaimed the description as a form of protest. In addition to pointing to historical context, the use of the term “the People in White” serves as a starting point for readers to think about the multiplicity of whiteness, which Shin takes apart elsewhere in the text.
“Whiteness: A Spell Thrown” is an example. In writing this erasure poem, built from a passage of Melville’s Moby Dick, Shin does not redact, instead whiting out the excess words so the poem in black ink stands out against the lighter ink of the rest of the paragraph. The context is there for anyone who wants to put in the extra work of reading, and this feels symbolic too. The poem opens with the lines “whiteness refiningly enhances / beauty,” and from there reiterates the Western racist notions that whiteness—and therefore white people—alone can represent purity, holiness, and honor. “In the House of Moths” has a similar focus in its opening: “Everything was white.” Shin brings together these different images of whiteness, with their different cultural contexts and ideas of what they symbolize.
Despite the many invocations of whiteness, I was also struck repeatedly by the apocalyptic natural world these poems inhabit, at once dark and alive, beautiful and precarious. It’s the kind of darkness that leaves the reader trapped in embryonic stasis, unsure where to go, or if it’s even possible to go anywhere or if what happens next will lead to violence, decay, or new life. The poem “I Wandered into a Mass Extinction Event” imagines a world where “the floods gathered up the last of the patients in small cork boats / that fell from the sky” and the speaker writes “obituary after homage after ode after elegy (for every species / larger than my thumb).” The natural world has come to ruin without the speaker even noticing. To save themself, the speaker gives up first their humanity, then their words and language. The poem closes as the speaker buries the world’s books. After destroying and remaking and striving, what, the poem asks, will we give up to save both a dying planet and ourselves?
Section three of the book sustains some of the same shadowy themes. Entitled “The Underworld Holds All Tethers,” this sequence of poems retells the story of Princess Baridegi, the seventh daughter of a king, cast away for not being a son. The king grows ill, eaten up by the terrible crime of abandoning his daughter. Salvation comes for the king when Baridegi intercedes for her father, going to the King of the Underworld and laboring for nine years—and bearing the King seven sons—to receive the Water of Life. An epigraph at the beginning of the section notes Baridegi’s uniqueness: unlike most Korean myths, where the women exist only for procreation and quickly fade out of the story, Baridegi becomes the foremother of shamans, helping guide the souls of the dead to the Underworld. Her strength and value are recognized independent of her sons’.
Shin pairs this haunting retelling of Baridegi’s story with drawings by artist Jinny Yu. The pieces are simple, black and white, and often geometric, with stark circles and rectangles overlapping. Yu’s drawings correspond with Shin’s poems, depicting the door into the Underworld, the shifting of the river, the absence and the darkness. It is in this sequence that The Wet Hex’s many threads draw tight together: the Korean mythos, the collision of whiteness and impending doom, the women whose independence and strength make everything possible.
Like in Baridegi’s story, mothers are knit into the larger fabric of The Wet Hex. On nearly every page, there is mothering or birthing or the image of a womb. To be a mother is to have strength, resilience, and ferocity in the face of oppression. It is also to contain the magic and power of creating a new life, of bringing up children, of making a home and a legacy. To combat the erasure and monstering of women and mothers, Shin centers motherhood and daughterhood throughout The Wet Hex, subverting the past and refocusing the present.
One last gem from the richness that is The Wet Hex is “Appendix – L’Etranger | An Unburial | A Funeral,” the last piece in the collection. There is much to pull from, even before the poem begins: the invocation of Camus’s The Stranger and the juxtaposition of unburial alongside funeral, the subtitle “Korean words for family,” and two epigraphs from Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. These references raise questions about living, about belonging in the world, and finding meaning in that belonging, and they are followed by a prosaic interlude that puzzles through the interlocking branches of Korean words for family members. The speaker muses,
A deconstructed and generic family tree like
the one in this entry is strangely satisfying as an archetype and map of
what could have been.
From there, the poem ends with a two-page-long detailed list of the Korean words for family members. Different titles are assigned in Korean for maternal and paternal relations, with further distinctions for marital status, elder and younger siblings, and whether the person has married into the family, creating a complex web of names to call one’s family members. In my halting ability to read Hangul, I can slowly parse how to say each of the words, which Shin does not provide anglicized pronunciations for. Reading through it, I am reminded of my childhood inability to properly say the Korean word for “grandma,” how it always came out sounding like “harmony” instead of 할 머 니 (halmeoni). Like the speaker, I am moved by this family tree closing the collection, providing a physical map of a family I can only partially grasp. I am reminded of all the myths and histories I am not privy to, having grown up in America in a mostly white town. It seems fitting to end here, with a reminder of all that is preserved and all that can be lost.
Sun Yung Shin’s The Wet Hex flirts with the darkness and the light, playing with form and with expectations. It rages, it remembers, and it questions. Folklore meets personal and collective history, woman meets animal, and end meets beginning in these pages. The result is a gorgeously resonant collection of poems both intimate and expansive as it catalogues loss and remembers the past. As Shin’s speaker says,
