Text
/
Essay
Gwangju Diary
Year
2023
By
Tram Lines (online essay magazine)
Format
Online, published monthly
Language
English, German
Description
When Lena Müller wrote to us from Gwangju, we had asked for a short travel piece, two pages at most. She sent six, an apology, and a promise that there would be more.
What arrived over the following months was not travel writing. It was a diary kept by a visitor who knows she is a visitor: someone with family in every neighbourhood and a home in none of them. The entries are short, often funny, and careful in a way that only comes from listening longer than you speak.
We are publishing the diary in six parts, one each month, in the order it was written.
— Inês Moura, editor, Tram Lines, from the editors' note
Excerpt
My grandmother's city is a city I visit, not one I come from. I keep a diary here because the streets ask to be written down.
Monday. Rain in the market. The fish seller laughs at my accent before I have said a single word, as if he can hear it in the way I stand.
Tuesday. My aunt teaches me which bus not to take, and then, without explaining, which street not to walk down after dark. I do not ask why. I write it down instead.
Wednesday. I walk to the river and cannot decide whether the quiet there is peace or something being kept.
— Part 1: Rain in the Market
