In the Korean historical drama, “Mr. Sunshine”, one of the opening scenes introduces its protagonist- a young slave boy of nine, carrying on his back a large bundle of sticks that towers above his small frame as he makes his way through a forest, back to his master’s house. He stops and looks steadily up at the sky as a black crow caws and flies overhead. A servant standing nearby with his master, an elderly nobleman who sits in a chair, watches the boy and asks what he is doing. The boy responds that he was thinking how just one black bird can ruin the view of the sky. The nobleman looks startled at the wisdom of this slave boy before he replies that he should keep his eyes glued to the ground and that the sky is too high for him. Little does the nobleman know that this boy will later grow up to shake the sky.
Back when I was in my mid-20s, I took a road trip to New Mexico with a couple friends, and the first thing I noticed was the sky. It stretched around the land and was the biggest sky I had ever seen. I turned my head in all directions, and everywhere I looked there was sky that seemed to go on forever. There were no buildings or structures to weigh down the land but just acres and acres of flat, open desert land.
In the city, the sky is a strip of blue that perches high above our heads. But in New Mexico, the sky is a wash of blues that marries the landscape and leaves no part untouched. We drove, it seemed, on a road that went from one end of the earth to the other, and for maybe an hour I could not stop marveling at the sky and how vast it was.
In the city of Albuquerque, where we went to go visit a friend, I tried green chili breakfast burritos for the first time and partook in a Native American ceremony, but what I remember most, is driving with my friend in her dad’s pickup truck over unpaved road, metal clanking against rocks and fallen branches, to a hot spring pool that only locals knew about. It was in the evening, pitch black except for the car’s headlights lighting up the trees and rocks she expertly dodged and swerved around. We found an open space to park in and hiked up to the pool that was hidden and disappointingly small, but when we stepped into the springs and looked up, all the stars were out and I could see that it was clearly the best view of New Mexico night sky. Everything felt sacred. My friend’s dad had just gone into remission, I was there with her in the city she grew up in, we were no longer fresh out of college, and we were learning that we would not always see one another.
I miss that friend. I haven’t seen her in maybe seven years. There are many friends I’ve, in a sense, lost touch with. We message once in a while, but there’s such a divide, a massive skyscraper that’s stuck its nose into the heart of the sky. And with each passing day, more time is added onto the estrangement.
There is something simple yet startling about sky that is unblocked by buildings and structures we build out of concrete and cement. You start to wonder the age of the sky and what it’s seen during all those years, you start to notice the sound of your breath and how your belly rises and falls, you start to feel the ache of eternity uncoiling in your heart, and you suddenly remember how to be. So simple yet startling, the way a young boy questions the existence of a black bird and changes the course of history.
mijin kang 