By the time I started to attend K Girls’ Junior High, I wore glasses all the time. I was the one born to know, and to know, I had to see. My desire to know was so overwhelming that I wished I could see what was happening around me when I was asleep. But it wasn’t until I witnessed a shaman’s exorcism for Grandmother that I had the experience of seeing the invisible. My eyes finally met ghosts.
Summoned by the shaman, the unseen spirits were hovering over Grandmother’s face, dancing with shapeless bodies and crying and laughing in unheard voices. The shaman talked to them in a trance, her eyes barely open and her mouth moving without a sound. She was twisting her legs and arms in the motions of the spirits, gyrating her torso in a wide circle to follow their frantic gestures. Contorted with their pain and woe, the shaman’s face was lifted toward the sky as if to look for an answer.
Her wardrobe was of dazzling bright colors, designed to counter the sadness a shaman was supposed to express through her body. Flowing down to her calves in a radiant purple, the long, wide, buttonless coat seemed capacious enough to conceal wild physical movements. The white folded collars attached on top stood for the pure mental state one enters after cleansing the dirt in one’s soul. The purple and the white created an ensemble of rapture and peace, the two antithetical feelings one reaches at the end of an eternal road. But one could arrive at such a spiritual land only after a long pilgrimage of frustrated passions and unrealized dreams, and her shirt under the coat, red like fresh blood, symbolized this essential journey. Because she was covered by the half-sleeved coat, only parts of this red were visible on her arms. Perhaps the bright purple of the coat covered most of the red to emphasize the eventual joys that come from suffering, to envision the final laughter born of tears. Her broad sash, used to belt the coat, was also blood red. It represented a passion denied, and the failures that make one bleed during one’s trek toward success.
My grandmother was my family’s loudest advocate for the Confucian patriarchy that had ruined her back and her health and had left her a de facto slave to an unfaithful husband.
“I meant no harm, no grief, no lament, no sorrow, and no breakup!” she suddenly bellowed. “Blame me, blame me. I was the culprit and I still am!” She lowered her face, looking down on Grandmother who was sitting mute on the floor in the living room. “I did nothing for the son I gave you. You had to break your back to raise him. See what you’ve done for our son all by yourself. Shame on me and the gods praise you!” The contrition in her face and voice was so moving that I almost thought the shaman herself was apologizing to Grandmother.
“Who’s talking to Grandmother?” I whispered to Mother.
“Your late grandfather,” Mother whispered back.
“Grandfather?” I nearly cried in surprise. I had never heard anything positive about him from Grandmother. I wanted to know why he was begging her for forgiveness. “What happened?” I asked.
“Sshh,” Mother hushed me. Talking in the middle of an exorcism would irritate the gods.
“I had no choice,” the shaman kept on. “I was doomed at birth, doomed at life, and doomed at death. I didn’t mean to steal your husband away. My fate did.” She swung her arms in the air in a chaotic fashion, wailing in the soft, plaintive voice of an elderly woman.
Grandmother was sitting like a statue, her eyes fixed on the floor and her hands folded on her lap. Even her usual bitter expression was gone, her face impassive. I was dying to know who this new female ghost was. I could only guess that Grandfather had left Grandmother for her a long time ago. Only later did I learn that she was Grandfather’s second wife, called his Small Wife and the Small Mother of his children.
“My children! Oh, my children!” The shaman broke into a loud sob. She continued to speak in the Small Mother’s voice, “I want to see them one more time. Dead and gone, they are drifting here and there, nowhere between this and the other world.” A smile of hope shined through her tears. “Oh, but I have one here in this world! He’s a good boy, a good, good boy!”
“Who is this boy?” I couldn’t resist asking, but Mother pressed her finger to her lips.
“Why, he lives in shame!” The shaman went back to sobbing, pounding her fist on her chest. “Why? He wishes he were dead just like his brother and sister.” Her arms shook, making the wide sleeves dance.
For a moment, Grandmother’s lips trembled slightly, but the blank expression came back to her face.
“He wants to see you, you, his Big Mother, but he can’t.” The shaman squatted down on the floor, facing Grandmother. “I, his Small Mother, his real mother, brought the curse upon him. I provoked the gods.”
“Doesn’t she know Grandmother will be buried beside Grandfather?” Big Sister murmured, sitting beside me. “She doesn’t have a grave. Her son doesn’t have a last name. She brought it upon herself.”
“Sshh,” Mother hushed.
“Big Mother, Big Mother,” the spirit-bringer resumed in a new voice, a young woman’s voice, while walking away from Grandmother, her purple coat fluttering. “Forgive me, forgive Small Mother, my mother, and forgive my living brother and my dead brother, your Small Sons. I didn’t mean to kill myself. I didn’t know I would have to roam around nowhere and everywhere, forever stuck in between this and the other world. I am trapped in the place for those who commit suicide.” She stood still, her face lowered, her legs and arms together with a maiden’s plaintive shyness. “Oh, but have mercy on me. The gods don’t know how I suffered before I left this world. I still suffer, for I can’t go to the other world.” She closed her eyes, clasped her hands in prayer to the gods, bowed deeply three times, and walked back toward Grandmother.
But she had to stop as Little Sister sprang up from Mother’s lap to grab an apple on the ceremonial table and Mother ran after her, gasping, “Aigoo!”
“No trouble, no trouble at all!” The shaman, restored to her own body, burst out laughing, holding Little Sister by the arm. “The gods enjoy mischievous little ones. Let her have what she wants.” She picked up a piece of fried beef on the table and handed it to Little Sister. With an apple in one hand and the fried beef in the other, Little Sister smiled, looking at Mother for approval, and Mother laughed as everyone else did. Even Grandmother chuckled.
“Look at your little offspring,” the shaman spoke to Grandfather’s ghost, still holding Little Sister by the arm. “Your last one, your precious, precious little one. If you want to make it up to your Big Wife, follow this little one around and keep her from all harm.” She picked up Little Sister and plopped her down on Grandmother’s lap.
There was another round of hearty laughter as Grandmother put her arms around her little one and yelled at her husband’s ghost: “A womanizer can’t give his habit away to a dog! You can’t! But you can make it up to your grandchildren! Guide them well, help them to succeed!”
There was nothing funny about her grief and anger, but we laughed because it was all too familiar to us. I laughed out of joy, watching her holding Little Sister on her lap with an affection she had never shown before. Her amused eyes were following the fried beef and apple as they disappeared into the tiny mouth. I felt certain that by now she had completely forgotten that she had called her a worthless chick. Little Sister was her flesh and blood, the last child of her only son whom she had had raised alone and with nothing.
“Look how special your grandchildren are,” the shaman spoke to Grandfather’s ghost cheerfully. “How striking they are! Look at the youngest one especially and the peculiar way she eats her apple!” She pointed her finger at Little Sister, who was making a thin circle around the middle of her apple like a ring. She always sank her teeth into the center of her apple first before eating other parts of it.
“Even when she’s hungry, she doesn’t forget to show off her artistic talent.” The spirit woman turned to Grandmother. “Yes, he was a worthless womanizer, but look at what he gave your little ones. He gave them his gift, his flair, his delicious touch of deviancy, his passion for beauty, and his love for creation. Wide, wide roads with no stop signs are waiting for your grandchildren.” She raised her voice and addressed Grandfather, “You see what you left to be with that Small Wife of yours! You left a jewel. You left this woman, this woman who made you flourish with a hoard of smart, healthy, pretty, and handsome offspring.”
“Ah, but have mercy on me,” Grandfather pleaded. “I would have given my life to my second Small Son had I been able to. How I wished I could pour my breath into his body when he was dying from encephalitis! He was only seven, dying when his life hadn’t begun. I saw his mother, my Small Wife, cry until her eyes bled with red tears.”
The shaman lifted her face toward the sky to push down Grandfather’s tears gathering in her eyes. I had never seen a man cry, but I saw Grandfather cry through a shaman; perhaps when men wept as ghosts, they didn’t have to feel shame.
“Show your big heart, woman, to the people who buried their children,” she spoke to Grandmother. “Stretch your loving hands toward your husband and his Small Wife, your hands that’ll never lay your children in the ground before you die.”
Grandfather’s Small Wife had three children with him, one of whom died as a little boy and another as a young woman. His first Small Son—my illegitimate uncle—was alive and well somewhere in Korea, but his second Small Son, as Grandfather’s ghost had lamented, died from encephalitis at seven. His Small Daughter committed suicide for a reason I couldn’t figure out.
“Big Mother, Big Mother,” the shaman resumed in a little boy’s voice, standing up and sitting down alternately, her red skirt sweeping the floor. “I know you wanted to adopt me, me, your enemy’s son. My mother, my Small Mother, stole your husband away from you, but oh, generous, loving Big Mother, you cared for me. You let me eat with you, let me sleep with your children, and took me to markets with you. You bought me fruits and candies, packed my books, sent me to school, held my hand when it was cold, and fanned me to sleep when it was hot.” Sitting down in front of Grandmother and holding her hands, the shaman pleaded for the boy. “For my sake, Big Mother, please forgive my mother. She loved me as you loved me. I love her as I love you.”
A flash of tender sorrow flitted across Grandmother’s face, but passed as quickly as it came. Still holding her hands, the shaman continued, “If you forgive everyone who hurt you, gracious woman, the gods will reward you. They will give your offspring long, prosperous, and healthy lives.”
To force Grandmother to look at her in the eye, she tilted her face downward and almost touched Grandmother’s nose with her own. A funny sight, it brought a wave of laughter in the living room, cracking open a sunny spot in Grandmother’s cloudy face.
“You want your girls in here,” the negotiator said, pointing her finger respectively at me, Big Sister, and Little Sister on Grandmother’s lap, “and your boys out there to achieve every prize and fortune they wish for, don’t you? Especially for the boys who aren’t here now, you want to forgive. You want to give them good wives with plenty of sons. You want to forgive everyone who hurt you, don’t you?”
The shaman’s differentiation between the boys and girls made me notice, for the first time since the exorcism had started, that none of the men in the family were present. Only women, including some from the neighborhood who had dropped in out of curiosity, were at the scene. Why only the girls? Girls who were called “strangers of the house” or “outsiders” because they would be given away to their husbands’ families?
“Where are Father and Brothers?” I asked Mother.
“Men don’t take part in things like this,” Mother replied, frowning at me to be silent.
“You forgive, then?” The shaman wouldn’t relent. “You are nodding, aren’t you?” She kept looking at Grandmother’s impassive face, and as the old woman nodded ever so slightly, she cried ecstatically, “This generous woman has finally forgiven all! Gods of the universe, watch her and reward her offspring!” She turned to the audience, “Applaud, applaud!”
Everyone clapped thunderously, laughing. I clapped until my palms felt sore.
“Take this little one out of the house,” the shaman ordered the woman from next door, picking up Little Sister from Grandmother’s lap. “Take her to your house and let her stay with your little ones. Lock the gate until my knife dance is over.”
“You want to play with my girls, don’t you?” the neighbor coaxed Little Sister, who didn’t want to leave. “The Three Vampires is coming on TV in a moment—on our color TV! If you miss it this time, we won’t let you in again.”
Mother gave the woman three large apples, one for Little Sister and two for her little girls. “Follow her,” she said to Little Sister. “She has your apple and the color TV you like so much. Be a good girl.”
As a faint smile appeared on Little Sister’s face, the woman took her hand and left the house. When the neighbor came back in a few minutes, the shaman ordered everyone, “Go down to the front yard and leave the door of the living room wide open. Stay as far away as you can from the old woman. You don’t want to be touched by my knife.”
She took a butcher’s knife out of her large pouch and held it vertically, standing in front of Grandmother. It was one of those knives used by merchants at a market to butcher chickens for their customers. Razor sharp and polished until it shone blue in the sun, it made a chill like the February wind run down my spine.
“You, evil spirits in here and out there, in this and the other world, and inside and outside this woman’s mind and body!” the shaman bellowed. “You, evil spirits, listen to the gods, get away from her!”
The knife danced wildly but purposefully. Was this chaos the pattern of the evil spirits? Did evil ghosts have no logic? Could anyone get caught in their random trails?
“Try to hamper her, to enter her, to stop her, to make her hate and to be cursed by the gods. They will look out for her, make her forgive, bless her heart, and reward her offspring!” she roared. “Take her and be damned!”
Maneuvering like a boxer, she leaped about the living room, following the rectangular edges with her back to the walls. There was a horrific beauty in the hair-raising precision with which the shaman wielded the butcher’s knife. The living room was being cleansed of everything that could curse Grandmother to be angry and bitter.
“Get out, get out,” the exorcist kept on, “or taste this blade, this blade sharper than the needle of a syringe. Fly away, fly far, far away.”
Completing her galloping dance, she came back to the center and lunged toward Grandmother. The blade halted a fraction of an inch from Grandmother’s nose, ready to behead her with one strike. But there was not a shred of fear in Grandmother’s emotionless face. It was I who had to struggle not to scream. Terror made me sweat in the freezing February wind, forcing me to cover my face with my hands. I could understand why the shaman had sent Little Sister away.
But something in me pried my eyes open. They were going to see the evil ghosts being exorcised. I blinked my eyes, registering every bustle of the skirt and every flap of the coat. The red and the purple in the costume whirled, the snow white of her collar standing out against the determination in her face.
“Try to enter her and be cursed,” she warned the evil spirits again, the tip of the blade poised at Grandmother’s forehead. “Tempt her and be cut in a million pieces by the gods’ weapon.” She slowly lifted the knife above Grandmother’s head, making wide circles several times, repeating, “Leave now and be saved. Leave now.” For a moment, she was silent, moving the knife rapidly up and down over Grandmother’s unmoving torso. Nobody uttered a sound. We were all mesmerized by her movements.
Before she spoke again, a picture came into my mind. The knife wielded by the shaman looked eerily familiar; I knew I had seen it before. It was the blade I had imagined throwing, in my furious fantasy, at Grandmother on the day of Little Sister’s birth, when she had said, “Your mother had a worthless pussy.”
“The gods will let you go,” the shaman sang, “free as the wind, random as the air. Farewell, farewell!”
A shriek tore out of her throat, the sound of shearing metal. It was the cry of one particularly tenacious spirit refusing to leave Grandmother.
“You, the carrier of remorse,” the shaman regained her own voice. “You’re the only one still here. Everyone else has left. Leave quickly, now, or the gods’ blade will cut you in pieces.”
Another metallic cry soared in the air, and the shaman stabbed it, bringing the knife down vertically until it almost touched the floor.
“Come on in and eat,” she commanded the audience in the yard after a deep, slow breath. Her voice was hoarse, her face wet with sweat. Her appearance had taken on the peaceful stillness of a tree after a raging wind.
Little Sister was fetched back from the neighbor’s house and the feast started in the living room as all the women were seated around the lacquered ceremonial table. It was burdened with various items of fancy food, little lumps of choice ground beef held by short, thin wooden sticks, huge, salted croakers steamed slowly and thoroughly on a low fire, and a dried octopus soaked for hours in water to be boiled in graduating temperatures. There were bowls of soup, patiently simmered with blended pieces of radish, clam, mussel, and squid. Beside them were scores of little rice cakes delicately cut in various shapes. The large, square chunks of pork, from which the fat was drained by repeated boiling, were deliciously matched with spinach, bracken, bean sprouts, and bellflower roots, boiled slightly and then toasted in oil and soy sauce. These greens were to be mixed with perfectly steamed rice in a huge metal bowl and then doled out in a dozen or so small porcelain bowls. There were whole stalks of deep-fried green onions and squarely cut malted rice; the dark red of the dried jujubes were striking against the yellowish white of the peeled, raw chestnuts. The trays of whole pears and apples and persimmons, behind which the cooked items were arranged in double lines, tempted my eyes, too, with their seductively contrasting colors.
I thought I was going to have the rare privilege of sharing some of the painstakingly prepared beef and croakers, but Mother picked most of them up from the table and put them in an icebox for the Three Men of the Family. All that was left for the women who had honored the exorcism by waiting patiently on a freezing February day were the greens to go with the rice and the soup, some of the apples and jujubes, and a large lump of white rice cake cut into square pieces. Even the pears and persimmons were hidden away in the icebox because they were more expensive than the other fruits available in winter. I felt my appetite dwindle to the size of a pea.