uma haiku

I decided to look at uma haiku and try to analyze it to the best of my ability. It’s short, being a haiku and all, and it seems like there’s not much there, but I feel a lot of emotion coming out of it.

The speaker of the haiku is no doubt a child speaking of their mother, but I imagine a daughter, namely Ishle Park. I imagine Park because I know her as a spoken word artist and her pieces seem to be extremely personal, as if she’s letting a stranger peek into her own life.

The haiku is about her mother, hence the title ‘uma haiku’ (uma means mother in Korean). The mother is circling want ads, which immediately indicates to me that she is looking for something, namely a job. And I feel like when someone is searching for jobs in newspapers, the jobs listed in the papers aren’t ones that require a lot of skill. And I interpret having to look for employment through a newspaper as a desperate attempt to find a way to make some money. The person in search of a job would not be financially stable and in an insecure financial state. And when I read the haiku with Park as the speaker, I associate the mother with being a Korean immigrant in the United States. As an immigrant to the U.S., Park’s mother is probably struggling to assimilate into her new country. The father or husband is also probably having issues with life in the U.S. and has lost some of his power in the family. He probably works a low paying job and is trying to make it in the land of opportunity and I imagine her mother is trying to support her family by looking for a job to bring in more money.

This reminds me of the skewed statistic that Asians in the U.S. make more money per household than Whites in the U.S., but fails to consider that there are more working members in Asian households who are contributing to the total income than there are working members in White households. Here's a little graph to show you from good ol' wikipedia (I think this is from 2005):

Park’s decision to end the first sentence at kitchen and has the one word sentence “Smiles” is really powerful. It forces the reader to pause after the first sentence and again after the word “smiles”. I’m sure that there is a term for this (maybe syntax?), but I’m not entirely sure. But when I read it with a pause, I imagine the mother looking up from her want ads and smiling at her child before returning to the paper. The smile symbolizes optimism and happiness in the mother. The mother appears to enjoy her life no matter the circumstances and can persevere through the times, no matter what happens. And the speaker continues with the last line, “Like that, she breaks me”. What part of the speaker is broken is open to interpretation and the first thing I think of is that their heart is broken. And what I mean by that is that it pains the child to see their mother pored over a paper looking for a menial job that would not likely bring in a large income just to help the family. The child can see the love and devotion in their mother for the family and it seems like the child is helpless.

So, I think this haiku is about immigrants in the United States, their struggle to assimilate into society and how it can be difficult to become successful in the new country. The poem can be taken in a completely different perspective, so does anyone have any other views on this?