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It has never been easier to buy kimchi in central London than it is today In the past few months alone, shiny storefronts of Oseyo stores – Korean supermarkets – have appeared on the streets of Charing Cross, Waterloo and Angel, inviting more people to consume the culture, neatly packaged and curated, than ever before Such ubiquity of Korean produce feels very new, and indeed the cultural capital of South Korea is currently at a premium (in the late 1990s, the term ‘hallyu wave’ was coined to express the culture’s surging popularity across the globe) Here in London, the parts of it that we elect to take in are those of Samsung phones, BTS concerts and the gleaming skyscrapers that lacquer the skyline of the eleventh-largest economy in the world As a country, Korea thus perceived is simply the ‘Miracle on the Han River’; it is held as aspirational, the ultimate capitalist success story   Such success, however, acts as a veneer on a recent political past pockmarked by tragedy, cultural repression and violence – a much less palatable truth In 1910, the peninsula was annexed as a colony of Japan, falling under a regime of extreme censorship and cultural suffocation Up to hundreds of thousands of Korean women were forced into sexual slavery, known as ‘comfort women’ Liberation came when Japan surrendered to the allied forces in 1945, only for Korea to be torn in two by war in 1950 The Korean War is widely regarded as the first major proxy war of the Cold War – so-called because of major interference and vested interest from the US and Soviet Union The country became a stage on which overseas conflicts could play out Although a ceasefire was reached in 1953, tension between the two halves of the divided country have continued to simmer, and the USA still maintains a military headquarters in the South, incongruously named Camp Humphreys Throughout the past fifty years, the South Korean government has been in turbulence – defined in turn by US-backed militant anti-communism, brutal military rule and corruption   Kim Hyesoon, who began her poetic career in