Living in Korea as a girl meant living under a lot of discrimination and limitation. It was the same in my university and in the Korean literary world I am involved in now.

When anger and sorrow overflow, sometimes it becomes poetry.

Once, I compared poetry to mothers in my book called To Write as a Woman, because my mother is someone who captures me in her body and gave birth to me out of her desire but washed her hands of me after giving birth to me as a poet.

Our mothers who have gone are buried in our bodies. It can be said that we were born with dead mothers in our body.

I have to reach "the poetry condition" to write. Then it is as if the border around me is thinned or blurred or erased or disappeared or dead.

South Korea is one of the worst countries when it comes to opportunity for women in social activities and employment. To my disgust, in certain communities in Korea, you cannot even imagine how severe sex discrimination is.

If you happen to live in Korea, you might always suffer from anger towards people in power, because of political and social problems. I felt gloomy under this social dictatorship. Looking back, I feel like I never saw a sunrise in Seoul.