Sample Book Series IV: Butterfly salt (2025). Natural dye, pigment, inkjet, pencil, thread on handmade paper and bark. 10.75 x 14.5 x 0.5” closed. 26.75” wide open. One of a kind. Cynthia Sears Artists’ Books Collection.
Named after a favorite aunt’s phrase about how to season Korean radishes when sautéed as a side dish, this book presents various samples of weaving paper and bark, sometimes singly and sometimes combined. Under each sample runs a sestina about family, language, travel, and pain. Aimee Lee made this book for Bionic Hearing Press in Cleveland, wrote the text, and applied it to handmade paper via pencil and inkjet (Minion Pro). The front cover design comes from hammered bark that has been pressure printed onto hanji at Zygote Press in Cleveland. Endsheets by Michelle Li at Oberlin College Libraries’ papermaking studio. Colors are derived from mixed lots of botanical papers, aqueous dispersed pigments in the papermaking vat, and natural dyes applied after papermaking, along with beeswax, crayon, Korean oils and lacquer.
Butterfly salt
I was finally flying to the place that pulls
on my heart, on my mind, in my dreams, this thread
that always tangles up in my chest and gut and mouth.
On the plane, I saw exactly which juice I wanted:
Grapefruit. But the flight attendant misunderstood
my words and reinterpreted, Apple? On that flight,
the first word flew
onto a new list: jamong. I pulled
out a book to start the note to help me understand
all of the new/old words that would begin upon landing, threads
in the tapestry of this language, the key to this place I love, where I want
to have a home I can safely return to, where I can feed my mouth
the foods that it has known since birth. I seek more mouths
that speak to me knowingly, attached to sensibilities that can fly
alongside my intermittent visits. What I most want
is what I’ve had all along, the cousin who hears my stuttering, can pull
the correct meaning from my missteps, and repeat it back to me whole. She threads
that needle deftly: listening, retranslating, and perfectly understanding
what sounds to me like messy garble. She deciphers sounds usually misunderstood.
Crossing south of the river, her father pointed out the Ministry of Defense, and I mouthed
the words intently, adding gukbangbu to my list, extending the thread
of a vocabulary chain that breaks often yet feels like exercise towards flight,
feeding muscles to power the wings of fluency. My aching hip feels the pull
of a seat on the bus. First I see icons, then read noyakjaseok but do not want
to bring attention to my able-looking body. I keep standing. Who wants
to appear like a jerk taking a seat intended for the infirm? I cannot afford to be misunderstood.
After the final bus transfer, I hike uphill to return to my aunt’s kitchen, where I pull
lettuce—sangchu—and other greens from the fridge, which I chose at the store, my mouth
and stomach so hungry for fresh leaves. She tells me about the heavy cutting board and stories fly.
The birch trees whose strong and dense wood are gone, bakdal, but one remaining thread
sits heavy on the counter, covered with a dishcloth. No frayed threads,
neat enough for a grandmother grappling with depression and dementia, previously wanted
for family service. Her filial son majored in information and communications. This hyoja flew
his only child to Atlanta for college, not to study jeongbotongshin, and we all misunderstood
how traumatic this rift would be for her grandmother, my aunt. Out of her mouth
came the words and reassurance I always wanted, along with brightly colored fabric she pulled
from storage spots so we could sew. I flew here to be with her, and now we are wielding threads
together despite the aches that pull on us constantly. We live forever with tongjeung, not wanting
a way out because this pain binds us in understanding, traveling from our fascia to our mouths.
