Pamela Q. Fernandes
“Jeonha, welcome. You are early today!”
He acknowledged the woman genuflecting before him. Despite her work, she had this seductive lilt to her voice. King Sejong smiled, adjusting his richly embroidered red robe before leaving his balmaksin shoes outside. Several lanterns brightened the moonless night. She served him hwachae in a brass mug, the refreshing fruit juice sweet on his tongue.
“I cannot seem to figure out how to draft the consonants,” he told the woman, who in her dark hanbok could rival any one of his consorts. “We were successful in testing the cannon, as per your instructions, but I need more time with the mirror to find out more about the language.”
The woman with her braided hair drawn to the front of her waist demurred.
“Jeonha, that is not how the mirror works. I have told you before, the time it remains open always stays the same.”
He sighed. “Yes, but time is passing quickly. My older brother, Yangnyeong, is out to kill me, and I am not sure I may last another season. Not to mention that all these rumours about us spreading like fire.”
“Jeonha, if this arrangement is uncomfortable for you, then I can move elsewhere.”
He swallowed the rest of the fruity concoction.
“But we cannot. You yourself said so, that this mirror works in very few places. You wasted nine moons trying to find this one.” He paused and smoothed his dark goatee, feeling the burden of Joseon weighing on him. He feared he was running out of time. Yangnyeong had been plotting his revenge. “Maybe I was never meant to become king. Maybe Joseon will do fine if Yangnyeong, its rightful heir took my place.”
King Sejong paused again, thinking about the passing of time. He was only twenty-three but he felt old, having aged quickly over the last two years of his reign. “It is said you can look at the state of the cats by a family’s waste and tell if the family is well fed. I roam the streets disguised in the night and all I see are skinny cats, their bones visible under their flesh. We need advancements in agriculture, irrigation, astronomy, and ironworks.”
“Jeonha, it is time,” she said, interrupting his sudden melancholy.
He forced a smile to acknowledge her interruption. He followed her through a labyrinth of rooms that lead to an underground cellar, then another maze which she navigated through quickly without stopping or hesitating, never letting him memorize the route. He had come here several times, yet he would never be able to find it without her. Finally, he could hear the rush of a waterfall and knew they were close. The door opened to a room that overlooked the cataract. Here she placed her strange contraptions, made of metal and some thin stringy threads. The room was cluttered, every corner with wood or iron objects, knickknacks, and instruments of various kinds littered throughout. He never paid much attention because it was ultimately the mirror for which he came.
He could not see the waterfall, the blackness of night blanked everything, but he could hear it. The rush of the water as it came thundering down, drowning all other sound. And in the flicker of a small lamp, they stood poised in front of the mirror. It was suspended on two iron rods. After adjusting a few switches, she turned it on.
Sejong watched the scene unfold. “What is this?” He frowned. “Where is Sejong? And why are these people wearing such funny clothes? I want to see the other Sejong draft the consonants.”
She smiled, “Jeonha, didn’t I explain, that there are many alternate universes and many versions of us. This is another one of them. There, the people have given up the hanboks and wear far less than we’re accustomed to.”
Sejong edged closer to the mirror as he watched the men sport no hats and no robes, but short hair and shiny shoes unlike the balmakshin he wore. The women had funny hair arrangements and bared their legs, and their clothes revealed their exact shape. But something caught his eye, the boards of the shops. They were all linear.
“Is that Hangul?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper, awed by what he saw. He did not wait for her to answer. He pulled out his quill and wrote on the parchment, drawing out a few of the letters before the mirror went still and the image faded away. For a few moments, all he could hear was the waterfall and the sound of their own breaths. His was fast.
“It is too soon,” he said, growling. “I need more time.”
His fingers were taut on his sheet, the ink on it still wet.
“Jeonha, what is it that plagues you so much? Why would any king worry so much about creating a language?”
He slumped as he looked out the window, keeping his gaze on the starless night.
“In Joseon, the Buddhist monks want us to follow their script, while the poor remain poor. They all hate me. The yangban are the only ones who can read and write and yet the only thing they know is the Ming’s system of words. The poor are fed up with ceaseless servitude. Why can’t we make something for our own people so that the illiterate and the poor maybe be able to read and write as well? How long will my people suffer? A wise man can acquaint himself with Hangul before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn it in the space of ten days. That is what I want Hangul to be. I need help and if they know a woman is associated with this, I might have to execute myself. There are already rumours about who Jang Yeong Sil is. How did he make the cannon? Where did he test it?”
He waited for her reaction because he would like to know himself. Where did she test the weapon? How did she make it, if she never got out of this damn house? Who was she? Where did she come from? Did she have ulterior motives?
“Jeonha, can I make a suggestion?”
He smiled, this time a happy one.
“Jang Young Sil,” he said, “whenever you say that, I know you have something extraordinary in your mind. The great Confucius says that ordinary is easy, but extraordinary differentiates you from the crowd.”
Young Sil bowed reverently. “You are very kind, Jeonha. If you are worried on account of me then I suggest you open a new school of scholars, where people from all social classes may be able to write an exam and participate. You can share with them your desire to create Hangul.”
“They are too talkative. Before long, word will get out that someone is helping me. That Jang Young Sil is in hiding.”
“You can tell them it is a secret mission, that their reports will be unnamed and their findings secret. After all, the work will be credited to the Hall of Worthies.”
“Hall of Worthies?”
“The school’s name.”
He thought about it; she was right. It did sound like a good plan, but how could he explain visiting her repeatedly, especially this late at night without causing rumour. Sejong held up the candle and scanned the room, finally focusing on a small rectangular object sitting on the table. A painting on the wall of a cat and a butterfly, the signature of the painter illegible to him. Were they in colour? Or was the candle flicker playing tricks on him? He had never seen something so spectacular in all of Joseon. “Fine, I will see you in two weeks; till then, take care,” Sejong said, turning to the door.
Before he left for Gyeongbokgung, she reminded him one of Confucius’s quote, “It does not matter how far you go as long as you don’t stop.”
He sat in his palanquin, and on reaching home, he dismissed his servants and reproduced everything he saw on those boards on his parchment. Every shape, every stroke. He had already made a chart from his previous visits; his entire bed chamber was plastered with parchment filled with letters of different shapes. Some parchments were blank. Those were the ones he needed. But he didn’t worry. After what he saw today, he knew the alphabet would be ready someday by someone. He just wanted that someone to be him.
He continued filing up the shapes, pronouncing the sounds, and when he accidentally dropped his quill to the floor, he could not help feeling he had been here before. Had he not seen this same thing happen when he was watching the mirror so many moons ago? Yes, he recalled he had been watching himself scramble, and he noticed the bedchamber filled with sheets. He leaned back in his chair. Had he been seeing the future?
During the next two weeks, a public decree announced the establishment of the Hall of Worthies. Farmers, shoemakers, and blacksmiths sat with scholars of the aristocracy or yangban, writing the admitting examination. There was a buzz among the people, about the fairness and openness about it. Sejong’s public approval soared.
A fortnight passed by as he furiously worked on the Hangul chart. The men for the Hall had been picked and a formal induction ceremony had been completed.
Later, when he followed Jang Young Sil to her discovery room, he was surprised when she asked, “You seem happy, Jeonha. Has the Hall of Worthies quelled your worries?”
“Worries? Why should I have any, when I have the Lady of the Future herself by my side?”
He watched her face. Even in the glow of a single lantern, he could see the play of emotions dance across her face. Surprise, fear, contemplation, reserve, and contradiction.
She stilled and poured herself some hwachae, “Took you long enough,” she said. “What gave me away?”
He pointed to that rectangular object lying on the table. “I saw that in the mirror the other day. One of the men was holding it to his face as he talked. I truly have an excellent memory, you know. Then there was the painting. I’ve seen the monks paint and received plenty of paintings as gifts from the Ming kingdom, none so vivid and colourful as the one you have on the wall.”
She smiled, as she turned to the painting, her fingers tracing its edge. “It is exquisite, isn’t it? An original by Kim Hong Do. Probably won’t be available for another three hundred and fifty years. Many dynasties will rise and fall before that, Jeonha. It’s almost lifelike. There are many objects in the room lying in the drawers and chests with objects from the future. Of course, I did not carry them all here. I did make them, but some of them are useless unless we build the basic requirements.”
He was intrigued. “What are these requirements?”
She smiled. “Slow down, Jeonha. The first step is for you to create Hangul. Most of the people living in your kingdom will be able to create a Joseon that will surpass your dreams, only if they knew how to read and write.”
He swallowed a laugh, smoothing down his robe.
“You are going to become a great king. One who will be responsible for many scientific discoveries and inventions. You will go down in the history books as a hero. Poems will be written about you, and schools will be named after you.”
He shrugged. “How will all this come to be, for the mirror offers me very little at a time?”
“The time space continuum, as it is called by us in the future, lets you look into the future not for you to learn from it, but to instill hope that you can do it. You will have noticed, over the past eight moons, the mirror only showed you what you’ve already done, working day and night on drafting, recreating, and studying the alphabet. Maybe you’re restricting yourself by following Hanja script. Look at the other scripts as well: Phoenicians, Tibetan. Surely, there must be a clue somewhere. “
“How did you get here if you are from the future?”
“I used a Faraday Cage, which uses electric fields. The physics that involves Einstein’s theory of relativity and large sources of energy with a ninth polynomial helped transport me back to a time I wanted.”
He did not understand, but he took her words for what they were. “But why are you here,” he stuttered, “and when will you go back?”
She sighed. “I came to warn and help you. There is no going back to where I came from; the great Joseon is at constant war, divided by communists and capitalists. Several powerful weapons have been unleashed, and the people in the north are starving while the people in the south are indebted to foreign rulers. Therefore, I have come back to tell you that we must make peace with our neighbours, we must perpetuate the idea of non-alignment. Joseon will be great if we accept the good and get rid of the evil, before it has a chance to destroy us.”
“How does Hangul help us to create this great Joseon of the future?”
“We need the help of the masses. Ours is a small nation. We need every man and woman to be part of this great legacy. The only way forward is to have everybody moving in the same direction.”
“And what will I say of this Jang Young Sil? People want to know where I get these ideas from. The cannon was a good example. But the drawings of the rain gauge and the iron printing press, will they be accepted? The cannon was a good invention, it will instill fear into our enemies. The general accepted it without questions. But the rain gauge, charts of the stars, and iron printing press, they are all new inventions, that people have never heard about. My own council will want to know where these ideas are coming from, the same way they ask me how we can create a new language for our people. Do you think I can develop Hangul? And will it be really helpful to my people?”
He watched the woman of the future with her cool stare and wry smile blink, once, twice before she answered.
“It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. Let’s make Joseon great, one candle at a time. Shall I turn on the mirror?”
Author’s Notes:
Sejong the Great and Jang Young Sil were responsible for many inventions. Among them were the sun dial, Chuegugi (rain gauge), the iron printing press, and the development of better agriculture methods to sustain cultivation all year round in Joseon (Korea). Hangul was developed fully by the end of his reign, though it was shunned by later kings who wanted to subjugate the masses. After World War II, which was about five hundred years after his reign, Hangul became the main language of South Korea and remains in use to this day. King Sejong’s legacy, as an inventor and discoverer, has been widely propagated as a man who was far ahead of his time. Jang Young Sil, according to the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty, was expelled from the Courts and no written record of Jang’s death was ever captured.
Jeonha: Your Majesty
Yangban: aristocracy
Balmkasin: shoes worn by the aristocracy
Hanboks: traditional Korean dress
Hwachae: fruit punch
Gyeongbokgung: Gyeongbok Palace (the main palace of the Joseon Dynasty), largest of the Grand Five Palaces. A must-visit palace for first-time Seoul visitors.