I hide in the alleys of my own city like a comma in a sentence that refuses to end. The Japanese think I am a ghost. The communists think I am a traitor playing dress-up. My own mother, if she were alive, would not recognize my shadow. Good. Let her not. Because the boy who loved her is buried under a railway bridge, his mouth stuffed with surrender.
My real name is Lee Kang-to. But Lee Kang-to is dead. He died in 1932, in a basement in Incheon, while a Korean girl sang Arirang so softly the rats stopped chewing. What rose from that basement was a grammar of violence. A syntax of rope and kerosene. Bridal Mask Speak Khmer
It did not come to me as salvation. It came as a cough. A blood-fleck on a white glove. My brother’s dying hand pressed a ghost into my palm. And suddenly, the Nihongo I spoke so perfectly turned to ash in my throat. I tried to say “Tasukete” (help). What came out was something older. Something from the rice paddies my father burned. I hide in the alleys of my own
I am a wound that learned to walk. I am the missing page from the history book. I am the scream that your governor’s son hears just before the lights go out. And when I speak now, I do not speak Japanese. I do not speak the tongue of the occupier. I speak the language of the knife. My own mother, if she were alive, would
Now go. Before the curfew siren. And if a shadow falls across your doorstep tonight… do not scream. Just whisper the one word that will make me spare you:
I am not a hero.