Jeju woman, 85, learns to read and writes a poem to the father she lost in 1948

Ko Bok-ja is 85 and lives on Jeju, the island off the southern tip of Korea. Her father was killed when she was small, in the violence that began on Jeju on 3 April 1948 and went on for years. Koreans call it 4.3. Tens of thousands of islanders died. She never went to school; at eight she was minding other people’s babies.

“Our eldest girl should learn her letters too,” her father used to say.

She sold things to raise her children, cooked in restaurants and helped at a temple. She avoided places where someone might hand her a form, Jeju Sori reported, because she could not write her own name on it.

In 2022 she joined Yeongrak Hakdang, a reading and writing class for older people at the Yeongrak welfare centre in Jeju City. Kang Mae-il, 82, whose father also died in 4.3, started the same year. Kang says she can now find the right clinic in a hospital on her own.

Ko’s memory is going, she told the paper, but she still wants to learn one more letter a day. When the women call themselves foolish for forgetting a lesson, Park Eun-ju, who leads the team at the centre, tells them they forget so that they come back tomorrow.

The first thing Ko wrote to her father is a poem in the Jeju dialect, “Father, Spring Has Come”. Last year it won a prize at Korea’s national exhibition of poems by adult learners. This is our translation.

To my father, whom I miss! It is your eldest girl, the one who minded babies at eight. Every April all these years I have thought of you, who died in 4.3, but I did not know my letters, so I could never send you news. “Our eldest girl should learn her letters too,” you said, Father, worrying about her while you lived. Now your eldest, at 86, has become the student Ko Bok-ja and is learning her letters, and writing to you for the first time, the knot of 4.3 in her heart is slowly coming loose. Now I pray that you, where you are, can let go of the sorrow of 4.3 too, and rest in peace. From your eldest daughter, Bok-ja.Ko Bok-ja, “Father, Spring Has Come”

Another of her poems, “Studying Grandma”, ends: “I will study again tomorrow, my name, earned after eighty, so I don’t forget it.”

Jeju Sori met the two women on 6 October, for a series marking the hundredth Hangul Day on 9 October. Hangul Day celebrates the Korean alphabet.