<park's "queen min bi"> 2004-05-30.1:15 a.m. Queen Min Bi Ishle Yi Park Queen Min was the bomb. Smooth forehead, perfectly parted thick hair, and plum lips at fourteen enough to make any pedophile happy. So the king handpicked her, orphan Korean girl born in Yuhju, stringless, to be a royal marionette--who would have guessed she owned a wooden heart to match any politician's? Maybe she abused her handservants. Maybe she pumped into her husband doggy style with an early bamboo Korean strap-on and that's why she never had children. Maybe that made Hwang so happy even after she died, throat sliced open by invading Japanese, he carved her name into a slab of man-sized marble by hand, honoring a woman who snatched his kingdom without a glance back at history, what those scrolls dictated for female behavior. I want to be like her, befriending pale- skinned foreigners and infuriating her father-in-law enough for him to conspire toward her death while commoners rested head to stone pillow and dreamt of her brow-raising power; 16 when she married, 32 when she died-- before Japanese flags cloaked our country, before Korean housewives lay beaten without domestic violence laws to halfway shield their swollen faces. Half a world away nisei Korean children flinch at the smack of skin on skin, memorize the hiss of curses like bullets, and I wish she were more than dust and legend, more than a sold-out opera at Lincoln Center or part of a wistful poem; I want to inherit that tiger part of her, the part that got her killed, the part that inflamed my eyes and had me tracing the clay walls of her birthplace with fingers in the rain, wanting to collect and construct a woman out of myth. So by Chinese calendar she's a rabbit, her favorite drink was macculi, the moonshine of Korea, her left breast slightly heavier than her right and maybe she kissed her husband Hwang on the forehead before overtaking his kingdom, as Queen Min Bi, so loved by all they called her Mama. back /& forth /& frosting names are often sad