“I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world.”
– Howard Zinn
A drum beats. 두룽두룽두룽.
I glide up a mountain of gnarled pine berets. Past caves where monks once isolated alongside ancient dolmens. When I reach a cliff, you arrive—your cavernous wings blowing gusts of air. 두룽두룽두룽. Your crest glistens cranberry, your chopstick legs quiet as the ants underfoot.
You have been here longer than the written korean word. Longer than the pictograms that form the bedrock of 한자.
You know that the word 민 is based upon the chinese character 民. 민, as in the people of a nation. Not a singular person, but a collective group.
The character depicts a prisoner of war, gouged in the eye by spear. They have been rendered useless to the nation they fought for. A prize for the nation who captured them.
Are we all captured people? I ask you.
You cock your head, obsidian catching the light.
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On April 7, 1950, a document known by its moniker NSC 68 was presented to the president of the united states. A solution in the uncertainty of post-World War II. Although a victory was seized, the soviet union and its communist agenda bled into china, and the decimated economies of the defeated—japan and germany—needed help. A pattern repeated: destroy, rebuild, destroy, rebuild.
NSC 68’s purpose was laid out with the utmost clarity:
to assure the integrity and vitality of our ████ society, which is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual.
The term ████ is used 163 times in the document.
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Redaction. From the Latin root redigere. To force back. To bring down. To call in.
& yet, in 1810, a written redaction was beyond petty compilation & editing.
A revision so special that it lay beyond.
In the beyond, this redaction multiples into: an empty space, a place, a claim, a code, a home, a hole, an escape, a rebirth, a universe, a discourse, an applause, a promise, a landscape, a misunderstanding, a characterization, a commitment, a tactic, a line, a pride, an ideal, a parallel, a spring, a swerve, an aversion, an erasure, an identity, an odyssey, a myth, a symbol, an olive branch, a truth, a lie.
◆
I read that you migrate to northern china & russia to breed, I say.
What is china? What is russia? you respond.
I forget that borders are an invisible line, a construct made of air. As a girl, my family and I often crossed the tennessee-georgia border. I felt the same on either side, no more tennessean than georgian. I was Asian on both.
I always desired a northern identity though. A girl drowning in the depths of all that southern twang. I loved the boiled peanuts but hated the cloying & sticky aftertaste of all the hypocrisies. So many I lost count.
You don’t know the meaning of these boundaries, only the fence that now surrounds you & your kin. Home in the DMZ, 150 miles long. When you fly across the line, you are northern for a moment.
Korea has been split by the united states’ arbitrary designation for longer than I have been alive—longer than my parents too. The north is neither myth nor fairy tale. In the south, the north is state-mandated curfews, imprisoned communist sympathizers, & impossible homecomings.
To be in the south is to be ████. Or so they say.
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The 한자 for north is 北. The character depicts two people standing, backs against each other. Originally, it was meant to convey the back part of the body. And then—the act of turning against.
What comes first—the prophecy or the history? The language or the violence?
◆
NSC 68 altered history forever. A gateway to global warfare. A justification to produce weapons & maintain a large standing army. The beginning of a military industrial complex & the gestation of future genocides to come.
Under prior presidents & conflicts, the army would shrink down in times of peace. NSC 68 argued for an offensive approach: by means of a rapid and sustained build-up of the political, economic, and military strength of the ████ world.
In the 1940s, defense budget spending was 175-billion dollars. After NSC 68, the budget ballooned to 650-billion.1
That was 475-billion dollars of more missiles, bombs, grenades, projectiles, cannons, sidearms, rifles, carbines, shotguns, submachine guns, tanks, aircrafts, satellites, infrared surveillance tools, biometric collection programs, artificial intelligence algorithms, lasers, submarines, ships, uniforms, vests, goggles, helmets, boots, bases, & people.
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The word for human in korean is 인간. In 한자, the meaning translates to person in-between.
In the in-between, I am you. Wings outstretched, my redness glinting for all the world to see. Legs caked in mud.
In the in-between, I am you. Soaring high above, miles at a time. Untethered by nation. Borderless.
In the in-between, I am you. ████, but without home. The earth is unrecognizable. The waters murky & crusted.
In the in-between, you are me. Wild & cagey. In a body made to fly but flightless.
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…the ████ society values the individual as an end to himself, requiring of him only that measure of self-discipline and self-restraint…
…marvelous diversity, deep tolerance, the lawfulness of the ████ society…
…pursuing through ████ inquiry the search for truth…
…building of a just society…
…the principal center of power…
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I met a man in dallas, where I wasn’t supposed to be. Waiting for the hotel shuttle, I asked what he did for the federal government.
Weapons & munitions testing, he said.
Oh, the poor earth, I said.
You flew overhead. Oh, the poor earth, you echoed.
We test in the ugly wasteland on the border of california & mexico, he said.
Oh, the poor earth.
But don’t worry, we watch out for the birds. We clean the debris.
Oh, the poor earth.
I joined you above, circling this white man. He confided in me that he didn’t care what our government did. I say yes so I can retire in a year, he said. He was thirty-eight years old.
I looked down & wished we could melt him into a wetland where you could rest, preen, breed, & gorge. But he was too solid with propaganda. A Yes Man. A weapons expert. A prisoner of the system. What does it take for him to be ████?
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Before NSC 68, there was containment.
The policy originated in 1946 via cable regarding the spread of communism. In the following two years, it was permanently documented & disseminated, first as essay & then as doctrine. Create a border around the very problem, it said, squeeze it until it collapses.
In many ways, containment became the backbone of NSC 68’s feverish desire for global defense.
If we build, if we maintain, if we protect, if we supply, if we deploy—only then will containment become more than calculated and gradual coercion. Containment will be enforceable & devastatingly so.
Yet another line drawn on a map.
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Despite the bloodshed that has seeped into the DMZ’s soil, it is now an ecological haven. Near-extinct species—102 out of the 267 on the endangered species list—thrive in this human-less paradise flanked by metal & barbed wire.2
One of those species is you, the 단정학.
Since 2013, the south has attempted to create an Eco-Peace Park out of this borderland. Its success is dependent on two opposing nations, still at war seventy years later.
To save the cranes, the south says.
Fuck the cranes, the north says. But this is the story the united states spins, because an occupation means power over & this power over is nothing more than an illusion of democracy & this illusion is the birthplace of a villain who won’t allow the 민 to forget how they barely escaped the Cold War’s threat of totalitarianism. & what they meant when they said totalitarianism was: the threat to the principal center of power.
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In medieval times, a god-fearing empire in the west built walls so high that the sky was nothing more than a tiny painting. Bordered by scarcity & loathing & survival. Is that what borders do? Force us into tiny corners of the world, where we add my before everything we touch? Delineate you & me from the good ground of the earth? Brainwash us into believing that crossing an invisible line means something?
Today, redaction’s former usage has been replaced by its practical & less imaginative sibling. The government now uses it to oblige the people’s demands of transparency while ensuring its secrets remain eclipsed.
The redaction under the nation: yet another man-made border.
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If the borders at the thirty-eighth parallel were to dissolve, what becomes of you?
In korea, you symbolize long-term partnership. And yet, a reunification of this split nation poses a threat to your existence.
If these borders had never been made, which is to say if these nations had never been built, which is also to say if empire was never born, would you be living abundantly in your homelands today?
Because I am a sucker for proxies, I find the Sandhill Cranes on Wapato Island. Bodies as big as yours, they are cackling jesters chattering in the marshes & sky. I watch them & watch myself watching them. I watch you watch me watch them & then I am soaring & swooping, elongating & thumping.
두룽두룽두룽.
We are beyond the pines, beyond the tarmacs of dallas, beyond the constructs of walls & nations & 민. We fly so high that the earth is nothing more than a seedling & we are stars & galaxies, dust & waves. From here, we know there is no distinction between us, only the never-ending river that connects, an apparatus that lives beyond language, power, & time, an apparatus as invisible as the borders we create, only called an apparatus because what else do you call a thing that cannot be contained?
What else, but free?
1. Bruce Cummings, The Korean War (Modern Library, 2011) 212-217.↩
2. National Institute of Ecology, Google (2023), DMZ Eco Story. Database on-line. Google Arts & Culture. http://www.artsandculture.gooogle.com. Accessed 23 March 2026.↩
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