Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics

THE SONG OF the Faithful Wife Ch’unhyang has often been called “the Romeo and Juliet of Korea” for its depiction of the passion and poignancy of young love. And surely its charming portrayal of the playful intimacy and eroticism in young conjugal love, complete with affectionate bickering and sweet-nothing make-ups, is second to none in all of East Asian literature. Still, the overall theme of the work rests not so much on the enduring love of the two young people as on the role of self-realization in the fulfillment of that love.

The psychological richness of the Ch’unhyang story comes from the complex, fully developed personality of the heroine, who undergoes a test of persecution and suffering in which she comes face to face with abandonment as well as death. Life asks of her: for what and for whom do you keep your integrity and faithfulness when both your love and Heaven itself have abandoned your cause? With that question, the story of Ch’unhyang helps illuminate the important Korean concept of han—to be defined not simply as a deeply held resentment against some injustice or unhappiness but rather as the grief of a finite being holding itself together under the demands of an infinite universe. In Korean culture, han is a catalyst and a powerful driving force toward a transcendent worldview. Unlike in the Book of Job, however, in the Song of Ch’unhyang—and indeed much of Korean literature—this worldview is arrived at not by hearing the voice of God in all its power and unfathomable majesty but by the experience of suffering through self-sacrifice and humaneness to the very end, to come out its “other side.” It is a profoundly Neo-Confucian spirituality, and the human journey there is the source of comedy and tragedy so often indissolubly infused together in the Korean literary ethos.

The development of han as an ethos, under the influence of Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian ideology on which Korea’s Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) was firmly founded, will be an important area for future study, helpful for an understanding of both the trajectory of Korean Neo-Confucianism over the course of a uniquely long-lasting dynasty and of its spirituality and aesthetics. For the moment, it will suffice to note that the Song of Ch’unhyang is one of the so-called Songs of the Five Moral Relations that form the mainstay of p’ansori, the genre of popular Korean opera that had its beginnings in the early eighteenth century.¹ The Five Moral Relations refer to affection between parent and child, rightness between ruler and minister, differentiation between husband and wife, precedence between older and younger, and trust between friends, as mentioned in Mencius.² In the reform-minded Chosŏn era, the focus on the Five Moral Relations as the cornerstone of Neo-Confucian ethical practice and social renewal was intense; by the sixteenth century, these were not only a well-established part of the “core curriculum” for advanced and popular education alike but also the object of independent interpretations by scholars, as in the widely respected and ever popular Primer for Youth (Tongmong sŏnsŭp), with its unusual emphasis on the reciprocal nature of human relationships.³

Among the Songs of Five Moral Relations, the Song of Ch’unhyang represents the relationship between husband and wife.⁴ Ch’unhyang is the fifteen-year-old daughter of a scholar-official father—since passed away—and a retired courtesan. The young Master Lee, the only son of the newly appointed governor to the city of Namwŏn (and of same age as Ch’unhyang), falls in love with her and enters into a secret “marriage” after pledging never to abandon her. But after only a year of perfect happiness together, Lee finds himself having to follow his father back to the capital without her. Though he promises to come back for her and they exchange tokens of faith, all communication ceases once he is gone. In the meantime, Pyŏn, the new governor of Namwŏn, is a dedicated womanizer set on having Ch’unhyang for himself. He assumes her compliance to be a natural and foregone conclusion, given her status as the daughter of a former courtesan, and he loses no time in commanding her to serve him. When she refuses his repeated persuasions and threats and instead gives him a blistering remonstration for his depraved ways, he orders her flogged and imprisoned for insolence to an official. On the eve of her impending death, young Master Lee—who in the meantime has devoted himself to his studies, won the coveted top prize in the civil-service examinations, and been appointed a secret censor (amhaeng ŏsa) to Ch’unhyang’s own Chŏlla province by the king’s personal command—arrives looking every bit a penniless beggar. Finding Ch’unhyang’s love for him unchanged in spite of her long sufferings and his own “changed circumstances,” he announces the arrival of the secret censor, sets the city affairs straight, saves Ch’unhyang, and in time reports her conduct to the king, who confers on her the honor of Exemplary Woman.

Despite the main plot focusing on the lovers, the Song of Ch’unhyang does not present a merely one-dimensional idealization of the faithful and otherwise faultless Confucian womanhood. Rather, contained within it are complex, nuanced attitudes toward class, gender relations, the corruption of officials, and laws governing status, sexuality, and even filiality—the whole web of Neo-Confucian values, tensions, and conflicts that by this time had acculturated Chosŏn popular consciousness for several centuries. As literature driven by such accumulated han, every character in the Song of Ch’unhyang—even the most minor ones—as well as the narrative material itself are imbued with a certain “saturated awareness” of the tragicomic nature of life, held together in turn by the basic premise of Neo-Confucian community compacts “to encourage virtue and shun evil (kwŏnsŏn ching’ak).” To take a random scene as an example, the young Master Lee comes upon some farmers singing in the fields as he travels about incognito. In one we hear:

Within the story, the song is a trifling detail that could easily be left out of a performance without being missed. But typical of the p’ansori genre there is a poignancy even in such passing “human scenery,” here specifically in the farmers’ abject suffering intermingled with their sense of irony and resigned good humor. There is hope in the song (of work “almost done” as well as of a good harvest year) founded on a shared community work ethic (finish planting together before each goes home) and humble dreams (lots of sweet rice to eat). But the hope is laced from the outset with awareness of the unlikelihood of their realization (what we have are barley rice and straw mats for blankets), and the farmers take comfort instead in simple, bawdy humor (“you-know-what, you-know-that”), which, too, in their case is not without a certain tragic perpetuation of their condition (“make us some baby farmers”). Nevertheless, in the affectionate deprecation of their offspring-yet-to-be as “baby animals” one senses more affirmation than bitterness or anger. Likewise Pangja, the nimble-mouthed manservant attached to young Master Lee, is described as “cool and full of fun, with a certain je ne sais quoi air to his figure, not prone to troubling anyone, but having no sense of dignity whatsoever, fluttering about here there everywhere without much thought, seemingly thick in the skull when really quick to sense.” He brings a great deal of liveliness to the human interactions with his teasing but basically sympathetic ways—he acts, after all, as a go-between of sorts for the lovers. But his more unremarkable, passing remarks will let on his consciousness of being treated like a little errand boy by everyone, including young Master Lee, who might be of an age with his own son, had he had the means to have gotten married in his youth like everyone else.

Each of these secondary and peripheral characters in the story carry some source of pain and what might be deemed justifiable cause for resentment against a social order that disenfranchises them. Some critics in fact read the Song of Ch’unhyang and the p’ansori genre itself as social criticism only thinly veiled by the humor. There are those, for example, who stress not only the oppressive, corrupt nature of the power wielded by Governor Pyŏn but also the pain Ch’unhyang suffers at the hands of the good but fundamentally uncomprehending Master Lee. But while the frankness of the social criticism and its uncensored wide circulation are remarkable in and of themselves in the context of eighteenth-century Korea, it is not the purpose or even the undertone of the story. The social criticism here is only a natural by-product of the larger cosmological worldview in which imperfect human beings are called upon to coexist with one another in the world.

The constant puns and other plays on words are another expressive device of the tragicomic ethos and a signature element of the p’ansori genre. When Master Lee asks the farmers about the goings-on in Namwŏn, one of them answers: “What do we mere farmers know, but if we speak as we heard our town is a flood of samang” (“death,” but it also can mean “four crazies”). When asked to explain, the farmer replies: “The magistrate is jumang [‘drink-crazy’], his secretary is nomang [‘old-crazy,’ i.e., senile], his staff are domang [literally, ‘escape,’ but can also mean ‘gambling-crazy’], and the people are wŏnmang [‘resentment’]—that’s why it’s likened to a flood of samang.” The delicate balance between the sufferings of the common folk and their ability to rise above it with sense of humor hangs on the fast, lively rhythm of the clever sung/spoken puns. Among the more famous wordplays in the opera are the series of impromptu love songs exchanged between Lee and Ch’unhyang during their early days of wedded bliss. In one of them he tells her, “here, Ch’unhyang, listen. You and I being so affectionate [yujŏng], listen to this song on ‘ jŏng [feeling],’” and launches into a virtuoso rhyming verse that begins with stately quotations of lines from famous Chinese poems ending in jŏng but ends with ever quicker iterations of the designated syllable in an increasingly humorous vein. As Lee develops his theme from jŏng every ten syllables, to every seven syllables, down to four, then almost hip-hop-like every other syllable, the meaning of the designated syllable also runs the gamut from the poetic to rustic colloquialisms that leave Ch’unhyang laughing and adoring his wit. And with such games their intimacy grows by leaps and bounds: “Here, Ch’unhyang, let’s try playing at piggy back.” “Aigo, how can we play at such an embarrassing thing? What will you do if my mother across the hall ever finds out?” “Your mother did a lot more than that in her younger days, they say. Stop hawing and let’s play at piggy back.”

Then carrying her on his back, he sings:

Ultimately, the Song of Ch’unhyang is a love story between two young people. In Romeo and Juliet, lovers from two feuding families are driven to suicide; here we have two lovers from different class statuses reaching toward a transcendent ideal of love and harmony by overcoming hardships, overcoming the Self, and thereby in a sense overcoming even the limits of the Neo-Confucian social order itself. Although the narrative avoids being explicit on this point, by the story’s end it is clear that the self-trust and self-respect each has won for himself and herself through their individual trials will be the foundation on which they will build a new life together as mature partners and contributors to society. It is particularly appropriate that such a Confucian ideal of Self-Other relations gets depicted in the Song of Ch’unhyang, because popular emphasis on filiality as the basis of virtue notwithstanding, the Confucian tradition held the relationship between husband and wife to be the beginning and chief among all human moral relations.⁹

Of course, there is a difference in the nature of the trials that the two lovers undergo.¹⁰ For Ch’unhyang, who carries the conflict of social stratification from the moment of her birth, it is a battle to know what she’s made of. She is beautiful, intelligent, well educated, and brought up to have the bearing and dignity of a scholar-official’s daughter. At the same time, she cannot shake free of the social taint that comes from having a former courtesan for a mother. It is a label that accompanies her wherever she goes, and in the strict Confucian social order of eighteenth-century Chosŏn, where one’s social status depended on the standing of the mother, she cannot realistically hope to become the formal first wife of a man of the scholar-official class, regardless of her personal merits. Although she is free to not register herself as a courtesan and later claims the rights of a married woman in defending herself against the attentions of Governor Pyŏn, it is a constant battle to negate the social expectations of her being an easy, “open” target. It was partly in defiance to this that she had decided—long before she had even met young Master Lee—to live the life of a faithful wife to one husband, whoever that man might be. That she believes she has found a true match in Lee makes it easier for her to commit herself, to trust in the strength of their mutual pledge in spite of the immanent risk in “marrying” a man of higher class without the approbation of his parents. But as the text makes it clear, her fidelity itself is by no means dependent on—or the result of—the strength of her love for Lee as an individual. The battle is rather within herself and perhaps also for her mother who, for all her worldly, talkative, sometimes vulgar ways, must suffer far more from the social contempt she has brought on not only herself but her beloved daughter as well. In that sense, the persecution she suffers at Governor Pyŏn’s hands is a test not so much of her love for Lee as of her own innermost image of herself: when push comes to shove, who am I really? What am I made of?

It is said that children of criminals often go through life wondering if they’ve somehow inherited a “bad gene.” Ch’unhyang must also have wondered, if only subconsciously, whether she really has what it takes to live a life of wifely chastity and fidelity—an ideal she probably holds higher because she was not privileged to take it for granted or to grow up seeing its workaday reality. Would she remain faithful when she has been abandoned after less than a year by a man who had pledged never to leave her? Should she remain faithful when no one seems to expect it of her and when she only gets flogged and imprisoned for it? Is it right to remain faithful when it means the ultimate betrayal of filial duty, leaving her mother childless and without support in her old age? Ch’unhyang does not ask whether it is right for a society to demand that women be faithful to one husband regardless of circumstance in order to be respectable; the Song of Ch’unhyang does not mean to be a Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina. Indeed, the perspective is entirely different. Here is a woman persecuted for trying to live up to expectations of womanhood from which she herself is exempt by birth. For her, faithfulness is a right to fight for as much as it is a responsibility and a burden, just as Zhu Xi had conceived of self-cultivation as a human right as well as human responsibility.

But is that enough of an answer in her struggle between life and death and with questions of “why not?” Why not repay betrayal in kind? Why not cherish one’s life and body? Why not save her mother from a pitiable old age? More than simply a social construct, Ch’unhyang’s endorsement of Confucian principles is founded on an underlying trust that the universe is Good and that she by nature is and ought to be an extension of that Good which transcends life and death, transcends the pain of love, and transcends also the conflicting claims of one’s multiple human bonds. She may have absorbed this trust unconsciously as part of the Neo-Confucian cultural context in which she grew up, but she enters into a much deeper and more personal relationship with it in overcoming her own mortality, as symbolized by the dream where she visits faithful women of the past. In other words, she finds the wherewithal to die a faithful wife not through her own determination alone but by learning to “rest” on a universe that is Good.

For young Lee the trial is different. He has sometimes been cast as a sweet but thoughtless cad—couldn’t he at least have written Ch’unhyang a few times during his absence to give her comfort and reassurance? But a test of silence is a universally established trope, and although in young Lee’s case there was no one to command it explicitly—as for example Prince Tamino is commanded in Mozart’s Magic Flute (1791)—it is clear he nevertheless understood implicitly the higher necessity of silence trumping the lovers’ mutual desire for reassurance. It is possible that for an aristocratic blueblood like him Ch’unhyang is no more than a youthful first love for whom he feels much affection but not a life-and-death passion. But if we take him at his word, the test of silence was for him also a true test of his essence, learning patience and restraint, learning to trust Ch’unhyang, and above all learning to trust and obey Heaven’s decree no matter what it might be.

What makes the Song of Ch’unhyang such an enduring classic is that neither Ch’unhyang nor Lee is presented as imperturbable paragons of Confucian virtue at the outset. Instead of responding with mild-mannered iron discipline to every circumstance, Ch’unhyang lets her passions be known. She might compose flawless poetry and speak in the most gentile manner when occasion requires, but when provoked she gives Pangja as good as she gets. She is sexy, sensual, and not afraid to share bawdy private jokes with her partner. She flies into a towering, throwing-things-around-level rage when she realizes Lee means to leave her behind, and when he is gone she frequently spends her days in tears of longing and despair. These might not register as faults in today’s contemporary Westernized culture, but they certainly challenged eighteenth-century Confucian ideas of feminine virtue. She is scared in prison; she feels all the conflicting, “uncultivated,” natural feelings any one of us might feel under similar circumstances. Lee, too, is shown in the beginning as a mixture of chivalry, arrogance, pride, cowardliness, impatience, silliness, naiveté, and so on. Both are supposed to have been brought up according to the highest standards of Confucian education and noblesse oblige, but Lee is not above fibbing to his father, and even filial Ch’unhyang saves the tastiest dishes for Lee instead of her mother.

These seeming contradictions in their characters have sometimes been criticized as a flaw of the p’ansori tradition. P’ansori was after all a popular art form, developed by multiple voices possibly in a somewhat pastiche fashion, to entertain the common folk. But in actuality the human and spiritual development Ch’unhyang and Lee undergo in the story is a major source of the work’s enduring appeal, and not just in terms of its literary interest. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a time of unprecedented suffering for Koreans. Swept up in the storm of global imperial politics, Korea underwent by turns its first loss of independence, a devastating war, and the traumas of national division, Westernization, modernization, industrialization, and military dictatorship all at breakneck speed, posing again and again the question of Korean identity, its values and raison d’être. The Song of Ch’unhyang, itself brought into existence by the Korean collective popular consciousness of an earlier era, came to represent for generations upon generations of Koreans the pain, the determination, the hope in hopelessness, the ability to laugh at one’s foibles, and most of all the still abiding faith in a moral universe despite all evidence to the contrary and despite even the recognition of their falling ever so short of Heaven’s standards. The fact that a work like the Song of Ch’unhyang could be created not by the pen of a single educated author but by the collective consciousness of the common people perhaps speaks to the great achievement of the Chosŏn Neo-Confucian civil order.

1. Though often called an “opera” for its dialogue-based structure, p’ansori is sung by a single singer singing all the roles, including that of the narrator and even occasional commentator on the performance, creating multiple, almost postmodern perspectives on the story. The singer has only a drummer on an hourglass drum for instrumental accompaniment and a hand-held fan for prop. To sing just one opera from beginning to end could take as long as eight hours without a break, so although it often took singers years to master just one opera and to build up enough stamina to sing it through, it was also common practice to shorten the performance by leaving out parts of the work at the singer’s discretion. Because of this and because p’ansori was traditionally passed down orally from master to master, there can be some differences of text and characterization associated with the various regional schools of style, which is carried through to the many later written versions as well.

3. Although its author was not even known for a time, this work came to be widely used by Chosŏn educators. By the mid-seventeenth century, the work carried a preface by the famed scholar and minister Song Siyŏl (1607–1689). King Yŏngjo (r. 1724–1775) later composed his own personal preface to it, demonstrating both its popularity and importance in the highest echelons of Chosŏn society. For an excerpt of Tongmong sŏnsŭp in English, see “Pak Semu: Primer for Youth,” trans. James Jinhong Kim and Wm. T. de Bary, in Sources of Korean Tradition, ed. Yŏngho Ch’oe, Peter H. Lee, and Wm. Theodore de Bary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 2:37–43.

9. See Zhu Xi’s “Proclamation of Instructions” for community compacts, in Sources of Chinese Tradition, 2nd ed., ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 1:750. Students of Confucianism might be surprised to note that Confucius is attributed as having said of “Guan-ju,” the first love song in the Odes, the following: “The Guan-ju is perfection. Now in its relation to man, the Guan-ju above is like Heaven; below it is like Earth. Mysterious and dark is the virtue it hides; abundant and rich the Way it puts into practice.… It is complete in its brilliancy and order. Oh great is the Way of the Guan-ju ! It is that which connects all things and on which the life of human beings is dependent. The He and the Luo Rivers gave forth the writing and the diagram; the lin [Chinese unicorn] and the phoenix frequented the suburbs; by what means should this be brought about except by following the Way of the Guan-ju, and by taking the subject of the Guan-ju for a model? The writings of the Six Classics are not all devoted to exhaustive discussion, but they derive their matter from the Guan-ju. The subject of the Guan-ju is great! Vast and soaring, ‘from the east to the west, from the south to the north, there is not a thought but does it homage.’ May you exert yourself to emulate it, and cherish it in thought. Neither human beings between Heaven and Earth nor the origin of the Kingly Way are outside its compass.” From Han Ying’s Illustrations of the Didactic Application of the Classic of Songs, as quoted in An Anthology of Translations: Classical Chinese Literature, vol. 1: From Antiquity to the Tang Dynasty, ed. John Minford and Joseph S. M. Lau (New York and Hong Kong: Columbia University Press and the Chinese University Press of Hong Kong, 2000), 96.