You worry that this time you will not find her.
So you drink. One more bottle. Two more shots.
Three more markets to search.
Each moment burns like water.
—excerpt from “Mother Ran Off the American Base in South Korea”
In the South Korean midnight market, vendors don pastel hats and arrange bright, sometimes gory, displays of fresh fish for sale. The smell of spicy foods sinks into your clothing, and every clam soup that the aging peddlers sell from their carts puts fire on your tongue. The customers vary from businessmen finally walking home to college students to old women who push everyone else out of their way. These women do not deliberate over a serving of kimchi.
Marci Calabretta samples everything she can in the market, which she says is an honest, unedited portrait of the country and its people, particularly when the potato wine, called soju, flows freely. Calabretta is spending a year before entering college teaching English there. Most of her students are orphans or refugees from North Korea. For the ex-patriots, the visitors, those who are half -Korean like Calabretta herself, she says feelings of isolation are very real.
Four years later, the Carnegie Mellon English major accessed those feelings of loneliness and the midnight market imagery to create her senior thesis. Her poem, “Mother Ran Off the American Base in South Korea,” tells the story of a half-Korean teenager who goes to the midnight market to drown in wine the memories of tumult between his parents.
An encouraging nudge from Professor Jim Daniels and a poster in the creative writing center led her to submit the poem to The Albion Review, a national journal of undergraduate work. She made the midnight market come alive for readers, winning Albion’s 2011 Poetry Award.
—Michelle Bova (HS’07)
Realted Links:
Senior Marci Calabretta Wins Poetry Award
