Illness
Sometimes when daily life grows monotonous I think, “If only I were a little sick.” Occasionally I catch a cold, but it feels like a common illness that anyone can catch, rather than a proper malady. It is messy too. Whenever I think it might be nice to take to my sickbed, it is malaria that I have in mind. While I was in Tokyo, now some eight or nine years ago, I suffered several bouts of malaria over the course of two or three years, and in my experience it was one of the most pleasant sicknesses, having something of the beauty of sport. I would suddenly begin to shake, and the shivering would be akin to when the count is full on the opponent and our pitcher has three balls and two strikes. Not even a father’s arms could be so snug and comfortable and make every other desire disappear as did the feeling of lying down in the warmth beneath my quilt! Next there would come the sudden change, like a rain shower, and the fever! Then the silence in the dead of night after the fever had passed through like an express train! As effervescent, as chilly, as lonely as love, that is Miss Malaria! The speed at which she flies through the polar regions and tropical zones, and the utter silence she leaves in her wake, like an empty sports ground … this is what it means to be ill. It is like a love affair or a sport.
But that kind of malaria did not visit me again, instead I just came down with a bothersome cold from time to time, and then somewhere I caught this thing that extremely dull people pass back and forth like curses and I was laid up for fifty or sixty days. What an ignominy! Ha, ha!
Flowers
Some thirty days after I had taken to my sickbed, the most severe symptoms had passed. I still had a slight fever, which hovered around thirty-eight degrees, and emotionally I was tired, but I also felt at leisure. More than anything, I wanted to look at something different. I did not have the energy to read a book or the newspaper, and, though I gazed at the wall, it was always that same old wall. The pictures and calligraphy had become so familiar that I had grown sick of them. If I closed my eyes, I felt stifled, and if I opened them I still felt stifled. I longed for something new on which my eyes could linger and rest. If only there were something that could rinse them afresh like water. I placed my few old vessels in front of me, each in turn, but even grew tired of looking at them. Then one such morning, when I opened my eyes, my spirits suddenly revived. There, where my eyesight would most naturally fall, was a radiant flower garden! My eyes fumbled to count the stems and discovered no more than three or four carnations. White, red, and pink, they looked even sweeter to my eyes than food, for which I was famished. I asked my wife to bring the flower vase closer and then I asked who had sent them. Although my illness was one that people spurn, and the doctor would allow me to see no one, several dear friends had visited me bearing various gifts. When I asked which friend had brought these flowers, I learned that my wife had gone out herself to buy them. I was happy to have recovered enough for her to be able to go as far as the department store and also discovered a rare freshness in my wife, as in our younger days. Those bright carnations sat in the vase for several days smiling, like young girls from the West. The beauty of flowers is such that even when gazed upon for several days they do not repulse; the pure and fragrant oxygen that they emit, once inhaled through my nose, worked as a fine tonic for my cold body.
Faith
I was terribly afraid during this illness. When I thought of how Sim Hun, even with his model robust body, had died in an instant from the same illness, my thoughts did not remain at the level of thought but crept into my dreams, in the form of the scene of me standing vigil throughout the night by the side of his dead body and of the cremation, which had taken place no more than twenty days earlier.* Moreover, the book that I happened to be reading as I took to my sickbed was called The Religious Man, and, according to the afterword, its author was a young scholar who had also died before his time from this precise illness. Such inauspicious memories quietly oppressed me.
From the beginning, my doctor seemed to have sensed the situation and urged faith, even before medicine. He had earned a reputation as a scholar who denied the absolute power of the germ, voicing his opposition to the German doctor Koch, who had discovered the cholera germ. He said that he had drunk a whole cup of cultured bacteria with no adverse consequences, let alone death. He had done this, he said, not so much from any competitive desire to defeat Koch’s theory but from his own firm faith in the human body’s capacity to resist germs, no matter how many of them enter it; and so he had drunk some hundred million bacteria and, with just a few side effects, his body had recovered immediately, or so he said. You would not believe how much strength I gained from this story. I came to truly believe that, “no matter how thickly those germs swarm in my body, if my strong mental powers could only shine through they could kill more bacteria than the power even of the sun.”
Then, one evening as midnight approached, the worst symptoms made their appearance. I did not myself find out until several days later, but all of my copious evacuations were bloody. I tried to speak to my doctor, but my tongue had stiffened. My hands seemed terribly cold, and, when I looked at them, they were as white as paper. Soon, I could no longer raise my hands, and, when I tried to move them, I discovered that my fingers had also lost all sensation. My wife and the doctor were whispering something out on the deck. After whispering for a while, they came back in; the doctor picked up his overcoat, and my wife her coat, and they both left. This time all I heard was the sound of the front gate. I sensed that they had gone to buy urgent medicine. They say that someone came to sit with me, but I knew nothing of it and thought that I was going to die alone. Once my thoughts turned to dying, I already began to lose consciousness. Thus I was unable to give a single thought to anything as practical as a will. All went dark. There would be a brief moment of brightness when I returned to consciousness, but then I would be dragged away again in battle. Yet, surprisingly, I could clearly hear the words of the doctor in the midst of that battle, which took place as though I were in a heavy fog.
“Keep your faith. Illness is not a crime but a test from God.”
I certainly drew strength from this. “It is not yet time to die. I have done no wrong.” This seems simplistic, but I remember that some strong mental power rose up from somewhere. With that strength I fought to hold onto consciousness, even though it seemed as faint as the moon’s halo. One minute, two minutes … that tedious and most difficult period lasted only forty minutes, I later discovered, but it felt never ending, more like the span of one or two months.
That oh-so-faint consciousness was my spirit held in suspended animation. It was only after I received an injection from my doctor that I returned to full consciousness again.
If, in the midst of that dark, dark consciousness, I had not been able to sense those words of the doctor that I had previously drummed into my ears, then I might have remained in the dark forever. Perhaps that is what constitutes death. Needless to say, the doctor’s theory of faith had turned into a resistance more powerful than any medicine, not just at the peak of crisis, but from before and after it too. Now that I am completely recovered, if I were asked whether his theory of faith was useless I would have to disagree.
There is a saying that a medical doctor cures sickness, whereas a holy doctor cures our mindset as well.
Truth
For the most part, the medicine that I took during this illness was the kind that has to be boiled. On the night that my body temperature had fallen completely, I received Western medicine—glucose and injections to stop the bleeding—but it was the power of Chinese medicine, boiled up three times during the night, that helped raise my body temperature all the way down to my feet. My doctor had made some slight changes to the main medicine that I took, according to the course of my illness, but the original prescription is said to be from some famous Song dynasty doctor. I was extremely impressed upon hearing this. Is it not miraculous that a prescription some person from a faraway land had written down in ink in ancient times had brought me back from the brink of death here and now?
The truth is that whose value never dies. And that is what constitutes goodness too.
Health
Having experienced this illness, I am now suspicious of perfect health. While I was recuperating, for some several weeks, I would sleep in the early evening for three or four hours at the most, and then I would pass those all too long winter nights wide awake. During those tedious hours I concocted plots for several novels. They were almost all tragic, and, several times, as I sounded out some conversations between the characters, I found myself crying as if I myself were one of the protagonists. There were several ideas that I was convinced I would write down as soon as I recovered.
Now that I can pick up my pen again, none of these novels seems to be worth writing: they all seem too cheap and sentimental. I thought it was because I had dreamed them up while sick, but I cannot laugh it off so simply, because there are so many pieces I have written in good health only to later wonder how on earth I could have considered them to have the makings of a novel. Now I am well again, but I cannot guarantee that I will never look at what I write today and hear myself say, “You call that writing!”
I wonder when perfect health will ever reach my mind? The thought is disheartening. Perhaps this is the lament of all ordinary people.
On the evening of the fifteenth day of the year of the Red Ox [1937]
One summer, a few years ago, I visited my hometown and came across two old books. They were written in Chinese and titled Collected Writings of Taesan and Collected Writings of Kyŏmwa. A quick glance at both front pages taught me that Taesan was the nom de plume of a man named Kangjin and that Kyŏmwa was Sim Ch’wije, but there was no way of knowing just who these people were. Moreover, as the collections were not dated according to the Western calendar but marked “the year of the red sheep” and “the year of the yellow dragon,” I could not even tell when they were written. But I was most attracted to the beautiful characters printed in Song dynasty style in Taesan’s collection, as well as to the sincere woodblock print of Kyŏmwa’s collection, and browsed through the pages as I returned home on the train. Collected Writings of Taesan consisted mostly of poetry, whereas Collected Writings of Kyŏmwa contained poems, letters, admonitory precepts, forewords, commentaries, and various other writings, suggesting that Kyŏmwa was more of a Confucian scholar than a poet. Nevertheless, among the titles of his poems was one so lengthy that I read it before all the others.
Composed upon being moved by the young bride from Inch’ŏn, whose family was honest but poor and who brought in her dowry chest just one ink painting of bamboo by Kim Hasŏ.
The poem read as follows:
A slave girl carries the single chest of clothes,
And a pair of ink bamboo trunks beats a thousand pieces of gold.
If our house is blessed with a giraffelike son,
It will surely comfort this heart that has sought the Way all its life.
Such a father-in-law for such a daughter-in-law, one might say.
I only read it through once, but both the title and verse of this poem keep coming to mind.
Kim Hasŏ is an unknown painter whose name does not even appear in the Evidentiary Account of Painting and Calligraphy.* At that time his ink paintings were probably worth no more than a couple of pennies. But it was a virtuous time when the pure bamboo shade was constant and the father had given the painting to his daughter, who, as a good child holding virtue in esteem, had made an honorable marriage with just that one ink painting in her otherwise empty dowry chest. I yearn for such kindness, purity, and innocence. I can only regard that father-in-law with reverence, for knowing how to accept so sweetly the virtue and sweet etiquette of such a young bride and in-laws. I doubt that I could find such a high degree of virtue and culture in our modern families, modern culture or modern women. “A pair of ink bamboo trunks beats a thousand pieces of gold” and “It will surely comfort this heart that has sought the Way all its life” are lines worthy of our grinding down precious musk and highlighting.
We could refer to an endless number of unofficial histories, but the wife of Chŏng Sudong is the first woman who comes to mind in this regard.† Sudong was a strange man: he had no time to lament the situation when his wife worried about the rain leaking through the roof of their house; instead he watched the drops of rain falling here and there and began to sing the Song of the Xiang and Xie Rivers: “An urgent situation at the end of the eaves, as one hundred waterfalls gush down …” After he passed away in someone else’s home, a gentleman who had treasured him sent his widow rice and firewood when the winter grew harsh. But Sudong’s wife refused to accept these offerings. The gentleman was astonished and asked his servant,
“Why did she say she would not accept it?”
“She asked who had sent it, and when I replied ‘my master,’ she said that your lordship had no obligation to send her fuel and food.”
The gentleman slapped his thighs,
“Oh, what a mistake! Go back quickly and don’t say that I sent you. Say that the mistress of the house sent you.”
Only then did Sudong’s wife accept the rice and wood.
The height of cultivation, manners, and self-respect lies in this ability to uphold consideration and etiquette, even when shivering and hungry.
There can have been no age before this modern one when words such as cultivation and self-respect were so frequently used. But does this degree of cultivation and self-respect govern we moderns and our modern women with such certainty?
I can only be thankful for the interest, or should I say kindness, of those who read my unworthy works and then go so far as to send me their impressions, even if they are critical. In the past I have been so moved by a letter that I have read it through two or three times and written a reply on the spot. That was how genuine and simple I was back then, or was it that I had more time? Sometimes I push to one side letters that even arrive with a stamp for my reply or that ask advice on wretched circumstances, casting aside all sense of shame, as if we were old acquaintances, and eventually I even lose the envelopes. Should we just say that is how cunning I have become?
“I will reply by writing good works.”
There are two letters I have received recently that I would like to make public. I will just pass on the contents of one of them. The letter informed me in a roundabout way that the skylark that had appeared in Ch’oe Myŏngik’s story “Patterns of the Heart,” which I had praised extensively in Munjang, only appeared to be a skylark, but was actually a bird called a paengny ŏnjo that is good at mimicking other birds. It also informed me that some years ago in a travel piece on Manchuria that I published in the Chosŏn ilbo I had used the wrong character for “slowly,” writing “tedious” instead. I am truly fortunate to have such readers.
The second letter I will simply transcribe here.
I found the following postcard as I was rifling through an old book.
“A long time has passed.
We have moved to Sungi-dong. My wife rinses the rice, and I make the fire…. We are like children playing house. Will you come up to Seoul for the state funeral? If so, be sure to drop in and share a meal with us. All you have to do is bring the drinks and side dishes. Ha ha ha.
It has been so long that I send my kind regards with just these few words. Ch’oe Haksong.”
I can almost picture the happiness of Mr. Ch’oe as he sets up home for the first time. The letter was sent to my father, and I am happy to give it to you if you would like to use it in your book.
What amazing news for someone who was a close friend of Sŏhae before his death!* How vividly he seemed to come alive! Readers, please do not scold me enviously when I tell you that I replied immediately to this letter.
There is a kind lady in our neighborhood who tells our family fortune each year. According to her, my new year’s fortune this past year was that of a fish going into the sea from a stream. When I asked whether that meant I might die in moving from freshwater to saltwater, she said it meant that I would move from an impasse to somewhere wide and abundant. We all laughed merrily. Not because we particularly wanted to believe her words, but because, after all, something good is better than something bad.
I have forgotten last year’s fortune, but I know it was not good. Moreover, it was the year of the red rat, and because everyone else was nervous we too, having not experienced a red rat year before, felt ill at ease. Within a few months, the February 26 Incident transpired in Tokyo, Ethiopia had fallen, civil war had erupted in Spain, and here in Korea there was a succession of frost damage and floods, so it did indeed unfold just like an ill-fated year. What with dozens of private Presbyterian schools all losing their principals at the same time, such a year would only have to repeat itself several times and our shallow-rooted culture might even drown completely. Last year was unlucky the world over.
At the individual level, too, it seems to be rare to find someone who ended this year happy, and many laid the blame on it being the year of the red rat. In our house, as well, I do not know how many times we blamed events on that. Just as I was thinking of publishing my novel The Madonna, which had occupied all my time over the previous six months, it was secretly buried, and the future looked grim for the prospects of continuing to write Hwang Chini. But the climax to our unlucky year occurred when, for three months in October, November, and December, three of us came down with an infectious disease, though we were unable to hang the rope warning off evil spirits on the door for all three of us at once. I have no idea why this year is named after the rat, but what kind of fortune could we expect from that animal?
When all three of us were fortunate enough to rise from our beds and put on new clothes on the morning of the new year, the joy in our home was one of rebirth. Moreover, as the new year did not belong to a treacherous little animal like the rat, but to the benevolent and majestic ox, our hopes were all the more enticing. On top of that our new year’s fortune read “lucky,” and so you can imagine our feelings as we greeted the year of the ox.
The truth is that I have liked oxen ever since I was little. Many of my friends preferred horses, but I was scared of horses and would not go near them. I would go right up to oxen, however, even a bull. Their eyes always looked more innocent than those of whoever held their halter. Oxen not only carried the sacks of threshed rice but also the wicker baskets full of rice cake and taffy. Then there was the tale of the soybean mouse and the red bean mouse, which my grandmother used to tell me: the red bean mouse’s mother dressed him in new clothes and took him to the party, but the soybean mouse’s stepmother told him he had to fetch water with a jug full of holes and pound a whole mat full of rice in the mortar. A toad quickly helped carry the water and sparrows dehusked the rice, separating out the chaff from the grain. The soybean mouse still cried because he had no clothes to wear to the party, but then a black ox appeared from the sky and produced silk clothes and shoes and even a palanquin in which to ride to the party. I still recall how at this point in the story I would be clapping my hands with joy and gratitude to the ox, as if I myself were the soybean mouse. And when I myself was orphaned and everyone was wearing new clothes on a holiday, I would secretly look up to the sky and hope that such an ox might appear before me. That was one of the secrets of my lonely childhood.
A yangban on an ox, bob bob
A yangban on a horse, bob bob*
This was the song we used to sing as children when we saw someone riding an ox or a horse. I recall that I preferred singing this song when I saw someone on an ox rather than a horse. Horses were frightening enough in and of themselves, but the people who rode them were generally not kind: the masters before whom everyone in the village would cringe and bow rode horses, and sometimes police came to the village on horses, with their long swords hanging down. Consequently, the words yangban on a horse, bob bob did not emerge easily if I actually saw a yangban on a horse.
Such frightening people did not usually ride oxen. Instead of a saddle, ox riders would perch on top of the grasses they would feed to their ox and whistle or sing songs such as “Sweet Sixteen.” They were good people who, when teased with the song “yangban on an ox, bob bob,” would smile happily and pass on by.
Maybe Laozi too was a good and friendly person, as it seems that he often rode an ox. In pictures of him leaving the gate of the secular city, he is either standing or sitting by the side of an ox. Somehow an ox seems to suit the status of a Daoist more than a horse or a donkey. For people who transcend the realm of those who inspire fear it seems the horse is insufficient, and the ox more appropriate. The ox is bigger than the horse and can bear a greater load.
The ox is benevolent. I do not mean by this the utility of his strength, his flesh, and even his bones, but his appearance, which makes him the gentlest looking of all animals. His horns are not a weapon. He is big but not treacherous. In the tale of the soybean mouse and the red bean mouse the ox plays the benevolent role. When Zhuangzi said, “If you call me an ox, I am an ox, if you call me a horse, I am a horse,” he meant that blame cannot be laid on the world’s rights and wrongs, on good and bad, but he used the ox as a metaphor for the right and the good.
It is not just that the ox looks benevolent. He is always calm. His freedom from distraction is reminiscent of Daoists and virtuous elders who believe in “nurturing purpose by calming the mind.” The ox must look like this to people in both the East and West, past and present, for there are many tales of oxen in Aesop’s Fables, one of which reads like this:
Once, a mosquito was flying about and landed on an ox’s horns to rest. After a while, the mosquito got up and spoke to the ox,
“You don’t mind me resting on your horns a little longer do you? If so, I will fly elsewhere.”
The ox replied:
“Please do as you wish. I didn’t even notice when you came and sat on me. You say that you will go, but how would I even notice?”
This is the year of such an ox.
Our garden is only a few p’yŏng in area, but how grateful I am just to be able to stand amidst the trees!* Apart from some dozen cherry trees that form a kind of hedge, there is a persimmon tree, apricot tree, date tree, and peony as well as one or two white birches—these are all precious guests for whom my family must care.
They provide us with flowers, fruit, green shade, and fragrant air, and in return they receive nothing from us. When there is a drought, we give them some water, and when it is cold we wrap straw around a couple of trunks, but this is nothing, truly nothing, compared to the beauty, flavors, and fragrant shade they offer us. What friend or rich man would be satisfied with giving this much and receiving nothing in return? By way of these trees, nature nurtures us and teaches us many lessons.
The trees are standing in silence just now. It is as if spring is still several thousands of miles away. But if I stand beneath a tree I can immediately sense its approach. When I take hold of a branch, each of its fattening buds seems to whisper that it will flower with just a light evening rain and a morning of warm sunshine.
Spring, come forth!
Whenever I walk under the trees in winter, I cannot wait for spring to arrive.
Every time my family picks a date or a persimmon, or the cherries ripen, we think of the former owner, not so much for passing on the house to us but for passing on the garden. The persimmon tree bore its first fruit only after we had moved here, meaning that the former owner planted the tree and left without ever reaping its fruit. We do feel awkward, as if we are harvesting someone else’s field. Several times I have recalled a short story written by a certain French writer under the title of “The Indian Cottage.”* It tells the story of a scholar who travels the world in search of the truth: when he is finally on his way home, having failed in his quest, he encounters a storm and ends up entering an Indian man’s hut. The hut’s owner is a member of India’s lowest class of untouchables known as Pariah and lives a life completely isolated from culture. But this Pariah provides the scholar with a clue to the truth that even the greatest monks and literati had not been able to teach him. I still recall this from what the Pariah said in their conversation:
Whenever I pick a fruit and eat it, I always bury the seed in the earth before leaving that place.
This is not so that I can come and gather fruit there again when that seed has grown. It does not matter who gathers fruit there. By doing this I am simply following the way of heaven …
How simple, yet how great this is! I have no idea whether the former owner of our garden also thought that he was following the will of heaven when he planted these fruit seeds, but as they produced several fruit trees, which both look and taste good and give us great joy in the harvesting, this is a blessing that my family can never forget.
Yet from time to time I change my mind and even feel somewhat dissatisfied. Perhaps I ask too much, but I feel it rather unfortunate that the former owner planted several small trees. Even if it means no fruit, I would rather walk beneath one large tree than several small ones.
The taller a tree the better. The older the better too. I can certainly appreciate the elegance of a small branch heavily laden with blossoms or fruit, but what I yearn for is less a tree I can prune than a tree whose canopy will cover me, my house, and even my garden and that will stretch up to the sky like a mountain peak, so that I can walk humbly beneath it and always be made to see just how small I am as I gaze up at it with big round eyes like those of small child.
In the villages and gardens where wise and virtuous men used to walk, we usually see large trees. In the village in Onyang, where the duke Yi Ch’ungmu once lived, there is a hill where he is said to have practiced archery.* It was there that I saw two strapping gingko trees rising up to the sky like cliffs, although now half dead. I was happier to see that pair of trees than the knife, arrows, and other things left behind by the duke himself, and I bowed my head before them.
Although they were old, they were still alive. No matter that they cannot speak, those two gingko trees are the only living things left that were there alongside the duke Ch’ungmu.
The trees had grown freely over the course of many years. It looked as if it would require quite some arm strength to throw a stone up into their upper branches, especially as they stood on a hill. It was their height and imposing shape that attracted me. A dull common tree or a pine tree decorating a stone mountain could never be as precious as these two giants, even if the smaller trees had been planted by the great Duke Ch’ungmu himself. My head bowed down before these huge trees as they soared into the air like the faces of great warriors or mountain peaks.
Even if it means having only one tree, I would prefer to live beneath a tall one. Rather than linger between low fruit trees while licking one’s lips, how much more noble it is to stroll with a pure heart and joy beneath an old tree shining brightly in the moon and feel only the refreshing breeze! To live in a shade as deep and green as the ocean in the summer and to let those leaves bury the entire garden and house in the autumn…. What a luxurious harvest that would be! How the wind would resound on a winter evening, like the ululations of the largest organ! Our lives may feel as if they hang on a thread, but I would like to ponder my remaining days while resting beneath such a large tree and gazing up at the stars in the sky far above.
The last third of the first month of the year of the Red Ox [1937]
When my wife says we still must beat our starched clothes though it makes them feel more chilly, when the cold air penetrates even the closed shutters, and on those days when it is so cold outside that the soybean soup brings a welcome fragrance to the dinner table and the frozen narcissi lift their heads in the steam from the scorched-rice tea, that is when I feel the onset of winter. When my wife’s red hands pluck chunks of ice out of the jar of cold radish soup, I can feel how cold it is without eating even one mouthful. It is because our body temperature is warm that winter feels so cold. If we were like the frosty snow or the plum blossom and the winter were warm, what would we do?
The snow on the mountain out front has been white for several days now. There are times when it feels claustrophobic to have a mountain so close to our deck, but lately it looks as if a folding screen has been wrapped around our garden. The dusky pine groves and the copses of strapping bare trunks are dense in places and sparse in others, creating a balance reminiscent of a work done in brush and China ink. A wander through this valley when the mountain shadows are at their longest, even if not on a donkey, provides some of the flavor that the Tang poet Meng Haoran must have experienced when going in search of the plum blossom.
Although winter should be cold, it felt too extreme when the temperature dropped so much that we could not even plant a plum tree in the garden.
In the deep snow of the next village
A blossom opened last night
When we read poems such as this one, it seems that the very nature of the plum is to blossom in the snow, but a Seoul winter freezes even the frost and the snow, and, after all, the plum is only a flower! My fondness for the plum stems first of all from my yearning for the refinement of gentlemen of old. Last autumn, I came into possession of the following piece of calligraphy by Wandang, although I have no idea who the original poet is:
A seeker of the Way, who is inclined to wander with no taste for sitting still,
Closes the door for ten days in order to wait for the plum to bloom.
It was my ardent wish that winter should come quickly so that I might place a potted plum beneath these words and shut myself away for ten days.
The plum blossom is not so much pretty as pure, and color is not its finest point, as it tends to be harsher even than that of berry blossom. Convinced that compound leaves drape heavily on the plum, I went in search of a single-leaf white plum, not yet in bloom, and that was where my problem began. I selected a plant with just a few buds that were still green and brought it home. But the buds gradually reddened as they opened into blossom and, to make matters worse, it turned out to be a compound leaf: possessing all the splendor of a peacock, how could my plum be a companion to this fastidious crane! I could not help but feel a little disappointed, until one morning I was greatly surprised. My wife had absentmindedly left all the plants in our round attic one night when the temperature dropped down to minus ten: the narcissi and orchids were badly frozen; only the plum, despite being red, cheered its owner with some lively pistils and stamen as distinct as a young lady’s eyelashes!
Some call the chrysanthemum “icy frost,” but its forbearance cannot match that of the plum. If our house had been properly heated, I would not have been able to understand the unwavering integrity of the plum, even if I kept some thousand potted plants. They say that the cold and poverty give birth to an integrity that emerges from enduring difficulties. If what they call love, life, and happiness are real, then I do not believe they will be found outside this realm of forbearance.
This coming winter I will try once more to find the single-leaf white plum that I failed to find this past winter.
It is a fine thing to read through the new translations published by Paeksu Publishing Company, but sometimes it is also good to rifle through the moldy leaves put out by Sinmun’gwan or Hannam sŏwŏn. I sometimes hear of people who only read Western books, but then, amidst all the cries of “our classics, our classics,” try to read our Korean books for one evening only to express their disappointment that very night. It is hard to believe one could sample even one tenth of a classic’s nature with such a rushed reading, even if it were a classic from the West.
Koryŏ celadon and Yi dynasty white porcelain are not valuable simply because potters are no longer able to reproduce their green and white color. In fact, people who are not craftsmen are even more extreme in their prizing of the green of Koryŏ celadon and the white of Yi porcelain. This must mean that a classic possesses some interpretation or some sensation that transcends its production.
O moon, rise high
And shine far abroad
If we ask someone, singing this verse and slapping his thighs to the rhythm, “Well, what is so good about this?” his reply will most likely be no more remarkable than “It’s just good, isn’t it?”
“O moon, please float up higher and higher in the sky and shine your light brightly into every deep valley. Make the night road bright for my husband who is on his way home so that he may not lose his footing and arrive as early as possible …”
When we try to interpret the verse in this way and even add exclamations of admiration, such as “It’s really quite a clever verse,” we may be guilty of committing that arrogance of the moderns in disdaining people of old.
O moon, rise high
And shine far abroad
Of course, this is a marvelous phrase, but we could equally find such special phrases among the works of our contemporary poets. Is it not belittling to our ancestors to be amazed that they could think up such a verse?
The way of the classical spirit may rest forever in the idea of “retaining the old and learning the new,” but this does not mean the physical beauty of the classics is something that can be felt through intellectual appetite alone. That is why the beauty of all classics partakes of the solemn nature of the antique. If we separate the beauty of age from Koryŏ celadon or the Chŏngŭp ballad,* then what is so beautiful about them?
“O moon, rise high”
Paekche resonates from within this one phrase that transmits the emotions of generations of real living people. With this nesting of the distant past, our lips can sing the verse and savor it.
Just as it is courteous to be humble before our elders, we should straighten our collars as we approach a pot or song because they are also old. Unless we approach them with the heart of one visiting a mountain temple, wearing straw sandals and carrying a bamboo stick, and not as if driving a car to a hotel, the classics will always remain a cold skeleton, and their warm hearts will not jump out at us.
If we try to interpret before fully feeling, we will not avoid being trespassers of the classics. Their classical nature is not something we can know, but something we must first feel. This is what I think.
“Please don’t drink,” would be the earnest request of those who care about me.
“Please learn how to drink,” would be the polite request of friends who know me well.
“You should neither force yourself to drink nor not to drink,” is the advice given by some of my most trustworthy friends.
I have not really been torn between these different opinions and only regret that I was not endowed with a strong liver. I have no problem with “passing by the barley field without stopping for a drink,” as it were, but if I do drink I turn bright pink at the first drop. Spoiling my friends’ drinking is less my concern than how to avoid the derisive smiles my color provokes at drinking parties.
Most of my friends who write also like to drink. Ch’unsan, Usan, Wŏlp’a, Chiyong, Int’aek, and Hwaam, in particular, all have strong livers and meet up day and night.* There have been more than a couple of evenings when I have felt like a lonely shadow hovering on the sidelines.
I am not the sort to insist on disparaging the virtue of wine just because I am unable to follow the path of Liu Ling,† for how can we deny that alcohol is more than a mere drink when we pour wine for the spirits, as we burn incense to freshen a room? What I do despise is the so-called drink demon who harasses people to buy him a drink.
Those friends who press precious bouquets of wine on others as if it were drinking water do not know the virtue of frugality; those who drink with their muscles rather than using their minds and then want to engage in public displays of weight lifting are gatecrashers who invade the peace in the land of drinking; and those who become garrulous and entice those near them into keeping them company are not gentlemen drinkers. Nevertheless, sitting cross-legged in silence could hardly be called proper drinking manners either.
“How do you hope to live as a writer if you can’t drink?”
Occasionally I am perplexed by this question, and it is true that if Li Bai, the Gentleman of Jin, or Omar Khayyam had not drunk wine, their poetic spirits might never have come to fruition. The literary eyes of old—in the world of both prose and verse—were telescopes that gazed upon the cosmos.
Perhaps it is fortunate for such poor students of drinking as myself that our modern literature has grown so shortsighted.
My drinking capacity may be weak, but perhaps I am not totally blind to the laws of alcohol, for whenever a good friend visits my home I feel the urge to offer him a cup of wine in the place of my less tasty friendship and when sad I think of wine as medicine for an ailing soul.
There are those who slip gracefully into the land of inebriety, as if in a painting: as they drink, their cheeks take on a lustrous tinge; a peaceful haze cloaks their minds; they keep an eye on how much their friends are drinking and enjoy the wise talk of those friends. We might think of these drinkers as the saints of wine. They do not speak of its virtues, but are themselves those virtues. Neither is friendship something of which they talk, rather they embody it in all sincerity. Have the laws of drinking degenerated to the degree that we ignore such examples, only to learn disorderly conduct in their stead?
The suffering of the poor drinker lies in the drunken mistakes of his drinking companions.
Now that materials are at their most expensive, we have finally begun to build our house that has been so long in the planning. All through the dog days of summer we have watched the trimming of timber and flattening of the earth, so that now I can actually feel in my bones just how precious a house is.
Of our five carpenters, four are in their sixties. One of them, known respectfully as Sŏndanim, always wears a horsehair skullcap and could not be far from seventy. Apparently there is no carpenter in Seoul who does not address Sin Sŏndanim as Teacher. A famous carpenter, who once stood tall whenever a royal palace or a shrine was built, he makes his living by drawing the ink lines at each worksite. This Sŏndanim is the one who chooses the wood and cuts it. Our house is a smallish job of around ten kan, nevertheless it is quite marvelous to see how he measures everything so accurately on his hands, without writing anything down.
At first, I wanted to hire the carpenters on contract. Although my budget was barely sufficient, I did not have time to supervise them. But the carpenters said that they quickly lose interest in their work when it is on contract. What with having to worry about taking a loss and leaving enough for their wages, they lose all interest in the actual carpentry, and once that happens the whole job goes badly. I was moved by their honesty and realized that building a Korean house would mean savoring the simple and generous spirit of Yi dynasty architecture. As it would be impossible to express that tradition without the hands of these old-style craftsmen, whose affection lay in their work more than in money, I considered this a rather fortunate turn of events and decided to pay them on a day-to-day basis.
They are in many ways craftsmen who lag well behind their times. They wear horsehair skullcaps; they loosen their belts, from which dangle spectacle cases and tobacco pouches, all the way down to their groins; they carry bamboo fans and fairly long pipes—for laborers, that is; and they wear canvas shoes over their cotton socks. The two old men in charge of sawing wear straw sandals. There is no sign of those “towels” that have become so common, rather they wipe away their sweat with a black cotton rag. As for their tools, their saws, plane, adze, and ink pad case are all handmade and have no trademark affixed. Their conversations, too, are rich; here I will record a couple of them.
“Last year you know, I was doing a job over at Chin’gogae. I kept wondering what this kochi kochi word meant, but I’ve just found out that it’s a nail.”
“Kochi, a nail? Ha! You sure learned that well!”
“What is it then, this kochi thing?”
“Kochi is ‘over there,’ as in ‘over there’ … a nail, now that’s kugi.”
“Kugi … like, Hurray for the Kugi?”*
“Dear Gods, help me …”
They had barely even laughed before the conversation turned to another topic.
One day the old men were sawing and had stopped to wipe their faces and drink some water.
“I drank some expensive water once!”
“Where?”
“It was on my way home from a job over at the front of Kaemyŏng. Must have been the worst of the heat then too. I finished up work and was going home, but, lord, my throat was dry. That was when I found this thing … oh, what do they call it? It’s all in these Western-type cups. They put a little in a cup, and all this crumbly ice and water. My, it was cool on the throat …”
“Ah, that must have been what they call ashikuri.”
“Now was it some kind of kuri? But let me tell you, it was daylight robbery!”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Well, it was so refreshing I had two cups, didn’t I?”
“How much did that set you back?”
“Well, it’s just frozen water with a bit of sugar mixed in, right?”
“Frozen water. That’s right. Not even hard enough to be ice. It’s like they try to freeze it, but it doesn’t freeze properly.”
“Right, and in between these tiny bits of ice, as tiny as birds’ eyes, there’s a bit of water? And for that, they want twenty chŏn!”
“Twenty chŏn! No way.”
“It blew my mind. How much water would you get for twenty chŏn? Maybe ten loads? And they’re asking what we pay for twenty pails of water … the thieving devils!”
“That ashikuri thing sure is expensive.”
“You bet. The whole summer none of us at home could drink water without thinking about it …”
“Whatever next!”
And then, once I overheard this …
“These people called doctors, I tell you, they’re no different from shamans and blind fortunetellers!”
“How come?”
“They say they can tell what’s wrong with a man, but how can they be such liars?”
“Isn’t that all the mystery of nature?”
“Mystery in a magic glass, more like. What makes them think they can see what’s inside someone else when the person who’s sick doesn’t even know?”
“That’s right! The shamans may be useless, but we’re sure to hold a good ceremony for the spirits come October.”
“And why’s that?”
“If there’re no ceremonies, then how would the likes of us ever taste a rice cake?”
These old men said that they live somewhere over in Wangsimni, but they would arrive in this corner of Sŏngbuk-dong before sunrise and would not quit work until it had grown so dark that they could no longer see their ink lines. They are not as quick and agile as younger men, to be sure, but they are diligent. And they are as sincere as if it were their own home they are building. Their tools are not too sharp, but they get the job done. The traces left by such tools are blunt, but trustworthy and natural-looking. I am quietly and joyfully hopeful that our house, which they are building with their own hands, will not be shoddily built, however new it may look.
With the recent development of sports, even fishing has been included in the category and is now spoken of in the same breath as baseball or golf.
This may well be the result of the naturally lively tendency of sports to socialize, but the profundity of fishing actually lies more in its spiritual than its physical nature.
A green mountain rises up in the foreground, with a stream flowing at its foot. This hilly spot possesses a certain calm, and one’s footsteps loiter on the rocks.
When a quiet gentleman takes up a spot here for the day, it is not merely because he has an eye on the fish swimming by.
It is in order to be alongside the calm of the water, and to share in its leisure, its languidness, and its purity.
And it is in order to be with the fish. The joy of fishing lies not so much in catching fish as in being with them.
Although fish do get caught, fishing is nothing like hunting with a gun. The hunter chases the beast and shoots it, even as he listens to its screams, and finally he sees it shed blood. There is nothing so bloodthirsty about fishing.
It is true that fish get killed, but fishing does not involve chasing down a running beast with the muzzle of a rifle and aiming at its vital parts. The fisher must lure the fish toward himself through clear or cloudy water. If he loses the fish, then he simply smacks his lips in regret, and that is all. Unlike deer or tigers, fish do not scream. Once they make their way into the straw baskets or nets and start splashing about, it is a beautiful sight. There is nothing gruesome about it at all. Death comes as silently as sleep, as if the fish linger in a region where life and death are one like the sages.
From this perspective fishing is of a kind with neither sport nor hunting.
Fishing varies according to each region and the water, as do the words used to describe it as well. I have never lived by a large river. My own experience has been fishing in small valley streams, unnamed and unmarked on maps, that rise and fall with just a single day’s rainfall. Thus all I know about fishing and its terminology is inevitably based upon our local streams in Ch’ŏlwŏn.
There are three kinds of fishing with which I am familiar.
Splashing
When the rainy season sets in and the water turns red, the catfish, eels, and mandarin fish, which usually hide beneath the stones, move in search of food into larger pools as they fill up to the brim. These fish tend to emerge more frequently at night than during the day, and so it is at night that we go fishing with the appropriate gear to catch these fish. The rods are about half a man’s height and quite sturdy, even a thin ash tree will serve the purpose. The lines must be thick and the hooks large; for bait we use dragon worms, and we hang a stone or piece of lead the size of a chestnut from the hook so that the line will sink down deep into the pool. No matter how lightly a fish bites on the taut line, the rod will immediately pass the sensation on to the hand, so, rather than watching for a fish, the fisher must feel with his hands and pull the hook up with a jerk the instant the thought “It’s biting!” passes through his mind. The rather heavy and struggling creature that emerges is usually a catfish, an eel, or a mandarin fish, or sometimes even a carp, but just occasionally a snake pops up, in which case throw the rod down quickly! Because the rod makes a splashing noise each time it is lowered into the water, this kind of fishing is known as splashing. It does not feel particularly pure or clean, but has something of the pleasure of listening to ghost stories when sitting in a wood lit by fireflies.
Sinking
Sinking refers to regular fishing with a long rod and a fine line, where we set up in one place, sink the rod, and wait for the fish to approach. The bait differs according to the water. If the water is cloudy and there may be carp around, we use worms, but if the water is clear and there is a possibility of finding goby minnow, brook perch, or barbs, then we also use watery bait, shrimp, or soy paste maggots. If the water is fairly deep, but the fish are not gathering in any one particular place where the hook might be sunk, then we have to create such a place. First, we look for a spot where the water seems still and deep enough to reach up to about chest height. Then we wade in and feel with our feet for a space about six feet wide on the riverbed. After pushing any stones out of the way so that there is only soft sand remaining, we dig out a small hole in the center. Then we come back out of the water, gather a large fistful of mud and sesame dregs, and drop it into the center of the hole. Once it has settled, we press it down hard into the sandy bed with our feet and come out of the water again. With such a cozy, soft bed and the smell of sesame wafting around, all kinds of visitors will soon arrive. In some instances, they will just eat the sesame and not bite on the bait, in which case we move onto another place for the day and return to the original spot on the following day, by which time it will be positively bustling with visitors. The sensation of a light pull on the bronze hook, hanging from a float made of kaoliang stalks, the immediate leap in the heart, and the jadelike fish flipping around at the end of the line once the hook has gone down … this is the stuff of pleasant tales to be retold the whole summer. Even if the hook never even so much as quivers, it is still quite nice to listen to the song of the cicadas in the hill across the way and think of the one for whom we yearn, left behind in the city.
Playing in the Rapids
Playing in the rapids is a kind of fishing we enjoy during the rainy season, when the water is beginning to drop once more but the current is still swollen to about 50 percent more than its normal height. We move about the shallows with a rod and catch fish such as catfish and minnows. The rod should be light, the line thin, and the hook small. Flies are the best bait.
Playing in the rapids provides the subtlest pleasures of any kind of fishing. First of all, the surrounding landscape actually changes as we move downstream with the water. Then how magical it is to come across the sparkle of a large mouth and tiny scales in shallow water that seems empty of fish. Ripples kick up to the surface, and finally a fish is pulled out of the water. Life flows at length, just like that water we follow between the green mountains on a summer’s day, so, when we feel the sensation of lively resilience from silver scales jumping at the end of a fine thread, it is as if we have entered an enchanted land.
I am a little dissatisfied that people in the East are more drawn to painting in the Western style than in the Oriental style. If I could only hang a single painting in my home, it would have to be an Oriental one. It is not as if they are so rare that they are hard to find. Recent works by our Oriental-style painters, however, seem like sketches, so far removed are they from art. Anyone who knows even a little about the fine arts, takes pride in himself as an artist, and thinks about self-expression almost certainly paints in the Western style. I wish that painters with such creative powers would show an interest in Oriental painting. To make my position clear, it is as follows:
1. They say that the fine arts, like dance and music, have no national boundaries, but ultimately this is not true. When we look toward the east and west of the oceans, the boundary seems to be especially clear. Not only does Ch’oe Sŭnghŭi make Korean dance seem easy, but no matter how much Chaliapin practiced he would not be able to match Yi Tongbaek with his folktunes.* I do believe that all fine arts present some kind of national boundary, though the degree to which this is so certainly varies. There is no need to even question the fact that for Koreans it was easier to become a Tanwŏn or an Owŏn than a Cezanne or a Matisse.† There has to be some reason to abandon what is easy in favor of something that takes far more effort. Call me a simpleton, but I cannot seem to come up with any such reason. If someone says, “I hate the masters. I paint in the Western style simply because I prefer it,” this is perhaps a matter of personal taste and not something a third party should comment upon, and yet, though it may be rude of me, I am going to be a little dogmatic here. Those who prefer Oriental to Western-style painting are more cultured people. I am saying this in defense of Oriental painting rather than in praise of those people, but I admit it smacks of an outrageous dogmatism. How can those who argue that Western painting seems more alive—not on the basis of well-painted nudes but because of principles of color—fail to appreciate the Sŏn, which is the highest expression of cultivation in the Orient?
2. When Orientals paint in the Western style it seems ill-suited to their environment. This is true from an economic point of view, but is it not also true of the subject matter itself? If we look at our natural surroundings, they simply do not resemble those found in Western paintings. In photographs of several famous Western paintings, we find naked bodies either sitting or lying down in grassy fields or on mountain slopes. Try doing that in Korea and the first thing we would have to worry about is being scratched by thorns and the like! We encounter a similar problem when painting the human body. Do not the muscles of Korean women look much less solid than those of Western women? And is not that lack of solidity actually what makes Oriental women so beautiful? One would imagine that just as the human body in the West well suits Western painting then so does the character of its natural surroundings.
3. One has to know how to agonize over one’s own contradictions. It is preferable for the artwork and daily life to come together as one. I rarely see anyone in Korea painting in the Western style who actually enjoys the kind of lifestyle that produces Western-style paintings. Producing an artwork in which one cannot oneself live—if that is not a dream then is it not mere labor? Such thoughts are truly depressing.
4. Orientals must take on the mantle of Tanwŏn and Owŏn, and within the Orient Koreans especially should do their part. This is not merely reasonable but also our common desire. Westerners live far away and do not attempt to become the ancestors of Tanwŏn. It would be as difficult for them as it is for a Korean painter to become a second Cezanne. Compared to Korean literature, does not Korean art also have a much richer heritage? Whence comes the need to leave that heritage to rot in order to gaze at the Eiffel Tower on some distant horizon?
For these reasons I am foolish enough to hope that a vigorous campaign will come about advocating a renaissance in Korean painting through a transition away from the Western style and back toward the Oriental style.
I would like to address a word here to those who are already painting in the Oriental style. Several years ago I heard that there was to be a show by a great artist and went to take a look. An album was on display that seemed out of place on such an occasion; it was a scrapbook of reviews and comments advertising the works. I was more than a little annoyed. Had not the artist heard the anecdote of Tanwŏn, who would give two hundred nyang for one vase of plum blossom, even though he could not afford to buy rice or salt, or of Owŏn, who sent only an eight-piece folding screen to the king, when twelve pieces had been asked for, and ran away when summoned back to the palace? The greatness of Oriental painting is to be found in its spirit, not in its handicraft.
Our elders do not always brandish their authority. Sometimes a quiet withdrawal to the lowest seat can be a beautiful form of humility.
There is no elder in our home. Sometimes I become arrogant. The only thing older than me is the water dropper that my father once used. I only have to gaze at it in a quiet place and think that it was once used by my father, and a scene of which I have only heard, of my father who enjoyed calligraphy, permeates the room along with the fragrance of ink. Adjusting his sleeves to sit in quiet contemplation is a true lesson that my father passed on by example.
I inherited this object, which suffered tribulations together with my father for I do not know how long. Although I was young when I saw that water dropper at my father’s bedside along with several brushes, the memory is by no means faint: the life of an exile with no promise of a land in which his body might be buried, those winter nights in Vladivostok where even the sea would freeze and the sound of the waves fall silent, and then my father’s passing away, his heart still gripped by resentment and regret. This was the water dropper that my maternal grandmother had always carried in her waistband, waiting for me to grow up, saying this is something your father once used. It was fired at the royal kilns and shaped like a heavenly peach—a light blue body with red spots.
Of course this one item of stationery belonging to my late father is hardly the only thing to have suffered together with men of old. I have gradually come to respect the objects belonging to earlier generations. From time to time I recall a phrase from a Whitman poem, which reads “Oh, beautiful woman, old woman!” But when I think of the everyday grime of past people’s lives, which had seeped and spread into each crack and broken rim of perhaps their only teacup or wine jar, it is not an old woman’s wrinkles that come to mind, but rather the beautiful colors of twilight.
Chosŏn period porcelain, no less than Koryŏ porcelain, is gradually making a favorable impression among pot lovers around the world. Yi dynasty vessels in particular were not developed as commodities, unlike those of China or the Japanese metropole, and so although the hands of the craftsmen were expert, their hearts were as pure as children. Pots made by experienced hands with hearts lacking in worldly desire are closer to nature than to artifice. These pots may not catch the eye at first glance, but the eye never tires of looking at them, and so an attachment is formed. Once our troubled eyes or hearts reach there and find comfort in the absence of words, we begin to think of the distant past, which appears immense, but there is no sense of suffocation, only a pure heart remaining.
When Li Bai climbed the mountain of Jingting, he recited the following poem:
The myriad birds high in the sky have flown away;
A lone cloud floats leisurely by.
We look and neither of us grows tired,
That can only be the Jingting Mountain.
When my twittering children have all fallen asleep, and even my wife has retired to her bed like a lonely cloud, that is when we look and neither of us grows tired; at one with these antiques, I am unaware of the deepening night.
It is not enough to value them for their age or to appreciate them solely for the technique and vigor with which they were made. What makes old things seem old are the traces they hold of having lived together with the people of the past. Foreign arts and crafts are so ornate that with just one little crack they are already rendered useless. Like people who wear silk clothes and yet have rough hands and feet, the more the traces of life remain the less beautiful such objects seem. However, our Chosŏn period arts and crafts are so simple in their nature that they grow ever more beautiful as they soak up dirt and food. This is not only the case for porcelain. Woodwork is like this too. Pillows, clogs, dishes—all enter our lives and tend to become more beautiful the more they soak up the grime of their users. Although of late Western books suffer the fate of becoming only more dirty and ugly from the day they are bought, our Korean books have to soak up a certain amount of dirt in order that their covers shine and their pages turn smoothly. A few days ago, by chance I acquired the Letters of the Enlightened Teacher Dahui.* The edition goes back more than four hundred years, to the time of the Jiajing emperor,† and used to belong to Ch’usa Kim Chŏnghŭi, whom I hold in the highest reverence. His seal is affixed, particles have been added throughout the volume, and there are even annotations in places, although I do not know whether they are his. Letters is such a difficult text that I can barely understand even one line properly, yet I only have to hold it for a while and look at its cover, with the title standing there unchanged for so many years, or open the pages and see the traces where our ancestors read, or think of how this one volume was created over several months or years, as stroke by stroke each character was written and then carved out in rows, before I feel a kind of contrition at how today, thanks to print, we so discourteously publish all kinds of writing in haste, whether well written or badly composed.
It would be rash to consider the appreciation of antiques to be a pastime of the rich or the hermit alone. To satisfy one’s acquisitive desires with money is merely to seek entertainment, and to desire that which lies beyond one’s reach is vanity itself. The appreciation and enjoyment of things as a professional activity, rather than a mere hobby, has little to do with either idleness or vanity.
When objects are no longer of any use, we usually refer to them as koltongp’um, “antiques.” This playful manner of speaking is not only used to refer to objects but to people as well. We jokingly refer to those old-fashioned people, who appear to exist at a remove from the present, as antiques. Koltong is used as a substitute for “useless” or “worthless.” Sometimes this substitution is extended in meaning to refer not just to the antiques themselves but also to those lovers of the past who treasure antiques. The somewhat groundless expression arises from the idea that those who collect antiques are useless and worthless people in reality.
Of course, the two characters for koltong,
meaning “bone” and “to lead someone the correct way,” are Chinese. The characters kodong,
, meaning “old” and “to lead someone the correct way,” are also used; in fact these characters are used as phonetic replacements for kodong,
“old bronze.” That bad habit we see in Chinese writing, of casually substituting the proper characters with homophonic characters of a different meaning, reached as far as this “old bronze” too. But whereas old is a character with a profound reverberation that those such as Ch’usa wrote with great pleasure, bone is a character that one might pick out in a crematorium, a character suggesting a gaunt death! Think how much life is stripped from these antiques when they are referred to using this character for bone. As language is the possession of the masses, we cannot correct it just as we please, but when possible I choose to refer to antiques as kowanp’um,
“old playthings.”
Recently, even young people are becoming sick of the “new style.” We see this same passion for the classics in antique shops too. Even four or five years ago it would have been hard to meet someone young in an antique store. There were mostly old men who would upon entry remove from their head a faded fedora, which looked as if it had been worn for a century or more, and then would bend over, taking out their spectacles in order to examine the objects. Nowadays, it is not so difficult to meet those same young gentlemen we once saw in Western goods stores in antique stores instead. This is a positive development that is breathing fresh air into our antique stores.
It is not as if the daily lives of old men are essentially morbid, but for some reason I cannot help but taste the gloom of buying funeral cloth whenever I see an old man buying old objects.
Nevertheless we must reflect upon how young people literally lose themselves in play. Perhaps there is a necessity to keep watch on young men in sofar as antiques are concerned, especially for we Orientals who are already aging too soon in so many other respects. When we talk about Korean antiques, we are generally talking, aside from calligraphy, about pottery and especially Yi porcelain. With the exception of some small items of stationery, these are women’s toilet accessories and kitchen utensils. Teabowls and wine jars are, of course, also kitchen utensils. However, some lovers of old things have much more than stationery items in their rooms. Plates that used to hold greens or leftovers are hung on the wall and jars that once held grain syrup and flour are arranged respectably in front of famous works of calligraphy and paintings. Things like powder cases, salt bowls, or spoon and chopstick holders are resurrected as ink pad cases, dishes for washing brushes, and ashtrays. No one feels the need to delve into their origins or the class of their owners to see what use they once served. Perhaps compressing our current lives into these vessels, which supported our ancestors’ lives for so long, is the proper interpretation of the classics or tradition after all. But it does seem awfully easy for yang-ban to fall into a narrow and timid way of life as they pick and choose from women’s kitchen utensils and arrange them in their rooms. They must look quite petty to the adventurers of the world. It is easy to fall utterly and completely under the charm of “pouring drinks and writing poems for each other, or taking solitary pleasure from planting flowers and moving stones.” We are able to easily shut ourselves up for several days enjoying the hanging of a picture anew or changing the place of one empty dish. We become immersed in stillness and a sense of proximity. It is because of this that the extreme short-sighted nature of antiquarians is apt to form. It is an empty dish and empty vase. It does not contain rice cakes or water, but silence and emptiness. Already it is no longer a vessel but a world, a universe. To someone else it may look no more than a fragment of porcelain, but to its owner it is an endless landscape and a sublime temple. This is the extreme realm of the antique, but the owner must realize that this is also the realm where he himself is taken prisoner as a useless human being.
For young people to lose the “present” is not the same as old people’s inability to monopolize the realm of the antique.
Rare books bring honor to old scholars simply by virtue of being in their collection. However, let us say that a young scholar takes possession of a rare book of his dreams, such as the Items from the Three Eras of Silla.* If all he does is add it to his collection, then where is the honor? Of course, to keep something as a mere antique is not the worst kind of hobby. But if collecting is his only business, that falls into the realm of greed. For without some degree of research or criticism, appreciation also becomes less a case of licking the surface of a watermelon than being drawn toward a base attraction without discovering the true meaning of the old vessel. Furthermore, if one’s own spirit actually becomes depressed, this can cause no small amount of damage.
If we stop only at the point of preserving the classics or tradition, then that is death: it is digging a grave. There is no reason for us to use time and money in order to turn our studies into graves.
When young intellectuals acquire pottery, they should do so with the same purpose as when they collect old books. They should not stop at appreciation or the desire to possess, but discover their proper modern interpretation as a work of art or craft. We must shake the dust of death from the old object and help turn it into a phoenix of new beauty and life. That is the point where I believe the antique can truly be brought into our daily lives.
This happened some years ago. I met the father of one of my friends from the countryside for the first time in several years.
“They say that you’re making quite a name for yourself recently with your writing. What kind of writing is it that you do?”
When I hesitated, not knowing how to answer, his son answered in my place,
“It’s called fiction. They say he writes pretty interesting stuff.”
A frown passed over the old man’s brow, as if this was unexpected,
“Fiction? You mean those storybooks?”
He asked, and I replied,
“That’s right.”
He was a little flustered,
“Well, what do you do that for? From old, fiction meant those common stories collected by low-rank officials. Nothing more than market gossip …”
At this, I felt rather cowed and was grateful to be able to think of writers such as Tolstoy.
I might have been thoroughly disheartened had I not at that moment suddenly recalled once seeing Tolstoy and Hugo’s photographs among those of other great people in a picture postcard store.
I realized just how truly thankful I am to those early translators who brought us the literature of the West. For it was in the West that fiction was transformed into literature for the first time.
If those Western novels had not usurped the throne of literature, I wonder how many writers in the East, and especially in places like Korea, would have been happy to find their vocation in writing those stories despised by so many as market gossip.
I have always felt more than a little displeased with terms such as market gossip or tales of the street and alley. Why must fiction necessarily concern itself with clouds of dust, spattering spit, bloody smells, and screams? To the extent possible I have tried to write in a way that avoids the dust and the spit and eschews bloody smells and screams. Perhaps this stems from a slight lack of awareness regarding “fiction,” which itself arises from my resistance to the way fiction is considered vulgar. It was in those remote classics written in Chinese that they coined the terms market gossip and tales of the street and alley. Yet how clearly they understood the nature of fiction already! Fiction does not progress; today’s fiction has not departed one bit from the definition that was bequeathed by Chinese writings. That market gossip would best equate to the newspapers in recent times. It is, in fact, the newspaper of humanity, edited effectively and with one goal in mind. Its sensibility and style are good, along with its intellect and appearance, but in the end do such things amount to anything more than the nervous exhaustion of pale young prose writers trying to enhance themselves? “A record of the most energetic attachment, without a moment of rest, to the various phenomena of the current world”—a ceaselessly flowing human river in writing—it is here where the real identity and dignity of prose and thus fiction lies. With fiction, the first question must be not “who wrote” but “who read.” Perhaps the main thing that today’s writers need to reflect upon is their weak vision and, to borrow a classical idiom, the way in which in their attempts to craft prose they “fall into stupidity as they strive for refinement.” I write these words more to myself than to anyone else.
Recently, Chinese characters have begun to appear in fictional sentences. This is an unfortunate development for the true nature of “market gossip.” I myself experimented with using Chinese characters some years ago in a short piece titled “Old Man Uam.” It is a most effective way of evoking the flavor of the sasosŏl and the air of the anecdotal essay. But, in their turn, abuses soon arise. In order to try to protect the harmony of phrases in which Chinese characters appear, I try hard to use less onomatopoeia and those words that mimic behavior. But where does that leave people like us who use such words so precisely and abundantly in our everyday spoken language?
She Wrapped a Red Ribbon beneath her Radiant hair, Pinched a Pearly right cheek, and bit down on her lips …
[From Yŏm Sangsŏp’s “Telephone”]*
Whoosh whoosh, a stream rushes by, splash splash, another stream over there; streams from all ten valleys collide into one, and, helter-skelter, leaping up, spraying out, dangling tendrils down, dripping … waves crash, splash, and rumble into the folding-screen rock over there …
[From “The Picnic Song”]†
Such passages, almost entirely free from any Chinese words as they are, reveal a tenacious energy rather than being what we might call concrete. How could one take clay that is so delightfully sticky for sculpting a world of prose and think it strange enough to need sand added for refinement? In other forms of writing, it is fine to enjoy the fun of Chinese characters, but in fiction and “tales of the street and alleys,” which offer few rewards for such effort, is it not better to be wary of possible failure in advance when forcing the conceptualization of one’s self-expression?
It is not necessarily good for students to read fiction. This is because they might become so absorbed in it that they pay insufficient attention to their other studies. Of course it is fine if they read fiction while also paying due attention to those other studies. In fact, I would say that we should encourage them to do so. To know nothing of the way of the world or human emotions is not naïveté, but stupidity. There are many educators who do not know the difference between stupidity and naïveté and who openly express disdain if you even mention the word fiction. They are those musty Confucian scholars who lecture that the Essentials of Enlightenment constitutes true literature.* Their extreme emphasis on sobriety, both at home and at school, is their only weapon to try to hide their own ignorance and sloth, rather than to protect their students as they proclaim. In the East still today, regardless of how society has advanced, these narrow-minded dullards have in their ignorance trampled all over the gardens of our young people’s emotions!
This happened back in the countryside when I was still in middle school. I had gone to pay my respects to a certain old man. He sat on the wooden bed near the fireplace, holding a fan in one hand and fingering his beard with the other. I bowed quietly on the spot where I stood just outside the sliding door. And then I retreated without saying a word.
The next day I saw the old man in his yard.
“When did you get here?”
“Yesterday, sir.”
“You rascal, and you didn’t come and say hello …”
I received a mild scolding. On the previous day that old man must have been looking down, absorbed in his thoughts.
Once in the past, a country gentleman visited the Taewŏn’gun and bowed outside the sliding door in the upper room.* When the gentleman looked up, the Taewŏn’gun was still leaning silently on a cushion, looking down at a book. The gentleman thought the Taewŏn’gun must not have seen and so he bowed again. At which the Taewŏn’gun suddenly shouted so loud that the gentleman jumped with shock.
“What kind of outrageous act is this? Bowing twice to a living person, do you think I am a corpse?”
The gentleman replied deftly and quickly,
“Oh no, sir, the first was a bow of greeting, and the second a bow of farewell.”
The Taewŏn’gun nodded with delight to have found such a good man.
Apparently it could sometimes be polite to be impolite. If it was a cold day and one saw an elder coming from the opposite direction, one was supposed to quickly hide in a side alley. This was not because it is troublesome to bow respectfully, but because it would force the elder to remain longer in the cold in order to receive such a greeting. What if he were to even stop and talk in the cold wind? How indebted one would be for the trouble caused! This was the extremity of etiquette.
They say that Chŏng Widang was once passing through Namdaemun Street when he encountered a certain old man; he placed the book he was carrying down on the road and quickly knelt down to bow in the slippery earth that had once been frozen but was now in the process of melting.* Later, when questioned by his companion, Chŏng replied that the old man had been his teacher. That was not so long ago. Now, if we were to see such a scene in front of these buildings where the cars race by, it would be more miraculous than picking up a piece of Koryŏ celadon in the street!
In recent years, the forms of greeting that we regularly exchange have degraded to a most deplorable extent. At a distance of three to four steps, our hand reaches to our hat. The movement could not even definitively be described as seeming to remove one’s hat, let alone actually removing it. While pretending to finger one part of our hat within easy reach, we draw closer and move quickly to grasp the other person’s hand. From time to time I reflect upon this habit of shaking hands and realize that there is no real standard. It is quite similar to the way we put our hands to our hats. The one hand does not even race with confidence toward the other. It might not even feel the need for a handshake depending upon the degree of intimacy. Often both parties are taken by surprise and simply pass each other by discretely, or else one side goes so far as to reach out a startled hand while the other side begins his preparations only upon hearing the words “So how have you been?” But it is not until he looks down by chance and sees the outstretched hand that he finally grasps it with an exclamation of “Ah!” He might then shake it with renewed effort or, if he is not alert or had been walking along engrossed in his own thoughts, he might even just pass by, although he has clearly seen this hand reaching out, or he might hold out his hand too late, when the first hand is already withdrawing, and barely manage to shake one finger. The funniest handshake is when one side is so slow to reach out that not even a finger ends up being grasped and so both hands are held out and then dropped, having merely signified an intention.
Done properly, the handshake is of all greetings a good one, which gives a sense of a person’s “real feelings.” Even a blind person would be able to recognize Mongyang from his handshake.* Then, in complete contrast to his strong will, there is the characteristic passivity of someone like Minch’on, who would also easily disclose himself to a blind person.†
At any rate, it seems to me that the individuality of the handshake and the lack of individuality of the bow sufficiently suggest the difference between Eastern and Western cultures.
I recall a fascinating passage about hands from an essay by that great Swiss scholar Harudi, which I will translate roughly here:‡
A person’s hands are the best way to get to know someone. There is the hand of the serious man that reaches out with self-respect, the slippery outstretched hand of the lady socialite, the hand of the insincere egoist who considers important the mere holding out of the hand, the cold and clammy hand of the man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, the decorated hand of the person who is lazy at work, and the hand that is rough from hard labor. All these hands reveal themselves more truly than does the mouth or even our eyes. One of the most delightful things is a child’s hand, which reaches out eagerly, full of a trust that comes from deep within an innocent heart. This hand, just like an animal’s paw, is also a perfect symbol of intimacy. In contrast, if the hand gesture is frivolously affected, if the arms are completely spread open, or if the handshake lacks decorum, if two hands are held out at once, if the hand is shaken with a fuss or is grasped for too long and not let go, this always leaves a suspicion on the other side that there might be the intention of trying to leave a certain impression.
A long time ago, a man named Kuo took some of his poems to Wandang and asked for a title upon which to compose more poems. It appears that in Wandang’s title were included the words “Make the two poets Feng and Li the focus of your efforts.” He was referring to Yushan Feng Minchang and Erjiao Li Jian, both new poets of the Qing dynasty who would not have been well known among the Yi dynasty literati, immersed as they were solely in the poets of the Tang and Song dynasties. Kuo was unable to find the writings of Feng and Li, and so he visited Wandang again, upon which Wandang gave him a handwritten booklet about Feng and Li. It included the following appendix:
There is no document in my bundle to bear witness to the old writings of the two poets, but there is this small book recorded by hand. With this fallen feather and piece of a scale perhaps it is possible to trace their origins back to the larger kingfisher and whale.
Fortunately, this booklet has been passed down to us intact today, and it includes twenty poems by Yushan written in honor of Du Shaoling and another twenty written in honor of Han Wen-gong.* For Erjiao, it includes his writing on poetry rather than his actual poems. His brilliant, unrestrained spirit seems certainly to have been a major source for Wandang himself. These writings on poetry alone are sufficient to constitute a major piece of art theory, not merely from the Qing and Yi dynasties, but from all times spanning East and West. Allow me to introduce it here:
The gentleman-scholar is born in the wake of his ancestors,
so how could he not follow in their footsteps?
At first, he masters all the schools,
and finally he raises his own spear.
He serves in a regiment and becomes a great leader.
With a commanding voice, he orders his soldiers to attack great enemies.
In his one life he suffers many lives and deaths,
and with his learning as a resource, he survives a hundred battles.
When he reaches the precipice, there is no more easy step,
so he raises his voice to a higher pitch and the flute, too, breaks;
He draws an arrow and stone seems to turn to flesh;
he sharpens his sword but the water is already red.
What is essential starts with the beginnings,
though his true spirit will leap up and penetrate the rainbow.*
And finally,
People of the world look at me, but I shut the door tightly.
The vines of ivy reach dark and deep, while white clouds float outside my door.
The lonely night is long, and I caress my zither.
Who will hear this tune? What I cherish is my own heart.
After this short verse, Wandang, who even took “A man of sorrow” as his nom de plume, added a short verse beneath the phrase “What I cherish is my own heart,” writing in especially tiny characters, “The four characters, ‘what I cherish is my own heart,’ explain the hearts of writers since ancient times.” Have writers’ hearts really been like this since of old?
Furthermore, after each selection of writing, Wandang has written his own comments upon the personal character of the poet and his works. These are worth considering for many reasons. I record briefly just some important parts here:
Feng Yushan … when he was a young man he took as his teacher the Old Master Beiping, and was praised by him greatly. After following his guidance for a long time, Feng’s knowledge was deep. Whenever mention was made of the Old Master, Feng would immediately bow his head in respect, and when he spoke of his teache’s instruction, he would never tire of repeating it. When he paid his respects to his grandfather on the first day of each month, he would follow the exact same protocol with his teacher from beginning to end…. Li Erjiao … his poetry begins with Shangu and then moves into Du Fu. He has drawn discipline from Daxie, strength from Changli, profundity from Changji, beauty from Yuqi, a certain leanness from Dongye, and eccentricity from Langxian.*
Whenever his teache’s name was mentioned, he bowed his head in respect, and on the first of each month he paid respects to his teacher along with his grandfather. This is beautiful virtue on a par with the moral laws of the universe.
Are we not equally surprised by Wandang’s magnanimous yet delicate poetic eye? A great writer does not lose his critical eye when choosing his intimate friends.
July 2 (Thursday)
At five o’clock on a drizzly morning in Anbyŏn, we disembarked from the train headed for Ch’ŏngjin when, with no time even for a glance around, the train for Kansŏng pulled in.
Hemp-skirted women with white cotton towels tied around their heads stepped on and off, chatting in Wŏnsan accents. Old grandmothers carried wooden bowls stained with fish scales; from their conversations wafted the smell of freshly gathered oysters. A couple of stations later the ocean appeared. The ocean! I wanted to clap my hands. The East Sea was stained a deep indigo, but in the mist it seemed as dim as a dream. Our train skirted around the sea as if avoiding a picture being painted. Here and there sandy beaches entreated us to stop and walk upon them. Fishermen wearing raincoats, in groups of ten or more, hauled in their fishnets. What kind of fish? But our train passed by such scenes.
Last summer I had actually come as far as Songjŏn for a short while. As Usan had told me it would be convenient to stay in Kojŏ, I then left Songjŏn behind, but any affection I might have had for Kojŏ vanished the instant I laid my eyes on it. I felt as if I were in the bottom of a storehouse, which is exactly what the characters for kojŏ mean. All the roofs were made of galvanized iron, the earth was dark, the sea was faraway, and even Ch’ongsŏk Pavilion looked to be at least ten li from there. The inn had electricity and a telephone so I suppose one could call it convenient, just as Usan had said, but it did not possess even a smattering of character. Give me any day the cozy lodging at a village inn from which emanates the smell of cloth leggings belonging to those traveling by foot. This place was half Japanese, and so it had fusuma quilts spread out on paper-covered floors. Worst of all, the floors in the corridor were so thin that each time rubber slippers flipped past I leaped with surprise. I could not get any sleep at all. And why were all the electric lights hanging from the ceiling as if this were some kind of cell?
In the evening the lights came on, and it grew a little cozier. I forced myself to change my mood and pick up my pen.
I had been determined to write at least one episode of my novel before I went to bed, but just then a gramophone was turned on in the room next door. It appeared that the Japanese language teacher from the local school boarded here.
When he called the servant boy, he pronounced the three characters of his name with a precise Japanese accent, as if he were calling on a pupil in his classroom. Then the gramophone began to play a popular jazz song, “Uta wa kikumono, odori wa mirumono … Songs are to be heard, and dance to be seen …” From rooms here and there people gathered, greeting him respectfully in Japanese, “Good evening, teacher.”
Anger welled up inside me, but after a while even that awful row seemed to gradually improve, like swallowing a cheap ice cream with no thought of spitting it out.
I never set eyes on that sensei, but he must have left his hometown some thousands of li away to come to this remote place, only to be harassed by his students all day long. When I thought of him seeking some consolation in his exhausting life with a few popular songs of an evening, I almost shed a few tears on his behalf.
Even if I could not write the daily installment of my novel, I decided to first write this at least.
July 3 (Friday)
I decide to leave Ch’ongsŏk Pavilion for tomorrow and go to Songjŏn.
I wonder why a place as nice as Songjŏn is not more well known, and why it does not have a nice clean inn or a villa to rent. There are only two inns, both no more than lodges: one of them has no name, and the other has a large sign reading “East Sea Inn.” I opt for the one with the name.
Just as Kojŏ is like the floor of a storehouse, Songjŏn is like the field of pine trees that comprise its characters. The village, too, is half buried in pine trees. As the trees have grown up in ocean winds, they have thick trunks but few branches; they all lean over backward and are of quite the most fashionable shape, almost like parasols. If one were to spread out a mat underneath, each pine tree would make a fine pavilion.
I only have to look at the pine trees and it feels like spring. They are not merely green but positively shimmering. If I look at the earth, then it feels like autumn. The sand is soft and so blindingly bright I can almost hear it crackling.
The path from the village to the sea is good. Such wide paths with pine trees lining both sides can be found in many places, and not just Songjŏn to be sure. But I have rarely walked down a path as clean and pretty as this one. It is the kind of path that a new bride and groom should walk down after coming out of the ceremony hall. At the end of the path there is open sky and wide ocean, and stretching out firmly into the air is something so unexpected I feel as though I have entered a surrealist painting—an iron bar that has harmonized with the scenery. I run toward it, hoist myself up, and just about manage four chin-ups.
The ocean waves are rough: a misty ocean spray covers the coast like a snowstorm. Here and there rugosa roses flutter in the wind, as if trying not to be forgotten. Their fragrance is strong but, buried by the scent of the waves, it only reaches the nostrils if one breaks off a bloom. The ocean always appears to be young.
My window was so bright at night that I mentioned it to the owner, who told me it was because of the full moon. It was cool enough to feel chilly in my thin summer jacket, but I stepped out of the inn once again.
On the path that had been so empty during the daytime there was not even the trace of a human shadow at night. Instead it was full of the moonlight. With each step I advanced, the waves from the moon seem to scatter in splashes. A vast ocean belonging to the moon lay over the path, over the pinewoods, the railway tracks and the majestic ocean itself. Oh, how small the watery waves appear beneath this ocean of the moon!
This lunar ocean is sacred!
For whom does the moon shine so bright, when there is not a single bird singing in the pine trees and only empty villas with tightly shut windows? Whether people come outside to gaze upon it or not, the moon shines brilliantly even here, where there is no still water that might capture its reflection but only the crashing waves. I wonder in how many unpopulated places and how far and wide this moon shines? In the endless desert, over the endless ocean, and on each deserted island, on the highest peaks, the polar regions of the north and south, and even on the worlds belonging to each of those countless stars hanging in space, the moon is terrifyingly large and lacking in worldly desire! As a human being of no account, I would gladly give all my affection to the moon!
July 4 (Saturday)
The morning is dazzling.
The sky looks as if it might crackle like fresh wrapping paper.
Directly in front of my room lies the unfenced sports ground belonging to the local normal school. At the sound of the school bell, I too went outside. I walked into the pine trees to the side of the ground and observed the morning assembly.
After each class leader had stepped forward and herded the students into lines, the oldest-looking teacher, who must have been the headmaster, stood up on a platform about half a man’s length. Then, as if in chorus, what looked like an army of no less than three hundred students all bowed at once with the greeting,
“Sensei ohayo gozaimasu. Good morning teacher.”
The headmaster put one hand in his trouser pocket and, after clearing his throat, began his official announcements. He told students not to pick fruit from the cherry trees, for not only would they get upset stomachs but what would happen, after all, if they were to fall from the trees as they climbed?
“The cherry is the one fruit that is not for eating,” he concluded, and with those words he stood down. Next a teacher wearing a shirt and no jacket quickly jumped up. With no further ado, the whole yard was absorbed in following along with the radio exercises.
I was more than a little pleased. I have already tried three or four times without success to learn these exercises. Even if I manage to follow when someone is showing me, when I try them alone I forget either the movements or the order in which they should be done. As I had been wanting to try some exercise anyway, this was an opportunity not to be missed. I hid behind a pine tree, so that I could see them without being seen myself, and followed along. I do not know how the children could move so quickly, but I was only able to copy about half of each exercise. Still I managed to shuffle through until the end and only then did I look behind me. I had thought that there were only pine trees, but a farmer driving an ox had stopped along his way and stood there watching me. I tried flashing him a smile, but my new friend turned out to be rather rude, for he just spat once and plodded on.
When the bell rang to signal the end of classes, the boys ran out into the front yard and the girls rushed into the back. The girls split once more into groups. The first and second graders scattered randomly to play, whereas the slightly bigger girls, who looked to be in the fifth or sixth grade, gathered their heads together beneath the fence, where they stood whispering, singing, and chattering along happily. A few loners stood to the side sniffling: some just stared at the ground while others would seem suddenly distant and look up at the sky. I wonder what reflections shone in their bright eyes.
Whether it was time for lessons to begin or end, the sound of the waves persisted ever the same.
July 11 (Sunday)
On the way back from a trip to Kaesŏng to see Sŏsa Pavilion, I dropped by my home and brought my family back to Songjŏn with me.
My barefooted kids loved the golden sand that was right outside our front door. I too am all for walking around barefoot.
This was the first time our children had come to the seaside. The smallest, Sonam, jumped about wildly, while Yubaek stood still and stared before wanting to go back to the town because it was too noisy. Only Somyŏng was so busy collecting mussel shells that she did not even think to look at the sea. I guess that our individuality reveals itself most clearly when we are young.
July 14 (Tuesday)
More than anything my wife loved the fact that fish are so plentiful. A string of about twenty leaping flatfish costs forty chŏn for big ones only; freshly gathered mussels are eight or nine chŏn for a string; a fish called kkongch’i that is good salted and broiled costs just ten chŏn per string; and then, on the more expensive side, there are sea cucumbers and abalone, which if still alive and kicking begin at fifteen chŏn for a string of cucumbers and twenty-five chŏn for the abalone. For several days my wife bought more than she had time to eat, tempted by the bargains, but now she seems to be sick of the very smell of fish. Now she says she wants to eat chicken.
In the evening the old lady next-door dropped by with an old hen after we had mentioned we would pay seventy chŏn.
“Could you please kill it for us?”
We are all fierce eaters when it comes to chicken, but none of us could have actually cut its throat.
The old lady asked us for a knife and went off to the flax field. However, after a while she still had not returned. We went to find her, thinking that the hen had escaped, but the poor old lady just sat listlessly with tears in her eyes, one hand holding the hen and the other the knife.
“Why are you sitting here instead of killing it?”
“I just don’t think I can kill something that I brought up,” she said and stood up.
“Then what shall we do?”
“I’ll go back home, and when my son comes in the evening I’ll get him to do it.”
The startled-looking hen was carried back home again, clueless as to what was happening.
July 19 (Sunday)
The weather has been fine for days in a row. The sand is so hot that you cannot walk on it with bare feet. I went down to the sea, and a young boy was fishing in some very shallow water. I wondered what on earth he would catch in such a place, but when I looked again he had caught a fish that was truly beautiful; its scales shone brilliantly and it was really quite large. He told me it was called a yellowtail. I immediately ran home and fetched my fishing rod. I had caught two fish by lunchtime, but mine were both tiny little things the size of fishing floats. Still, it felt satisfying.
July 20 (Monday)
In the morning I forced myself to sit down and write two installments of my novel, and then in the afternoon I went to the sea with my family. My feet and my back felt as if they were scorching. I have never jumped into the water in as great a hurry as today. The breeze was coming from the sultry continent to the west and was as unbearably hot as the air from the heater they use on your hair at the barber’s. As soon as we came out of the water our bodies were dry, leaving white traces of salt on our shoulders. Our skin began to burn badly. We headed to Omaeri to watch the fishing boats, which were clearly visible to the left in the evening sun. The women from the village were waiting for the boats to return, holding bowls of millet and jars of soy sauce. It looked like a scene from the ancient past. It was not long before these tiny boats, no bigger than the skiffs on the Taedong River, began to return one by one. The women pushed forward to meet them. On the fishboats there were just flatfish and sculpins; the fishermen exchanged fish for goods, counting the fish they put in the bowls according to the goods they were given in return. On the clam boats there were mussels, sea cucumbers, and abalone, and half of these too were exchanged for goods. We bought mussels and flatfish with money. The fishermen liked our money best.
July 22 (Wednesday)
A fresh breeze is blowing off the ocean and also through the pine forest.
On the distant, semicircular horizon, a tiny steamboat drags a thread of smoke behind it. I would like to sail far away. Rolling my trousers up, I run down to the bottom of Omaeri.
I wrote four installments of my novel and went to Kojŏ to mail them off. I wish they would open a post office here in Songjŏn and that I could send registered mail and cash money there too.
There was about five hours left before the return bus would leave for Kojŏ.
I go past the harbor construction and on to Ch’ongsŏk Pavilion.
Once I am past the harbor, the graves appear: graves amidst the sound of the waves and the seagulls, graves looking out onto a vast gulf of water and sky. Even the dirges here seem to be more plaintive.
Pass these graves and the Ch’ongsŏk Pavilion has still to come into sight, but one can begin to sense the rock clusters. The massive, iron-colored crystallized rocks all hold up their heads like fortresses facing enemy ships.
The rocks are hexagonal, whether lying horizontal or standing up. The first couple of these fortressed ridges are lying down, but the rest stand straight up like folding screens and hang out into the water. On the top of the rock formation stands a pavilion, looking as if it might at any moment fly away.
There is no need for a sign to know that this is Ch’ongsŏk Pavilion.
A closer look reveals that these are not cliffs connected like a folding screen but stone pillars standing on slender bases. Much like the columns of Roman ruins, each rock stands by itself in the water. To look down from the height of these stone pillars makes one dizzy: the water below is as dark as poison, leering like a beast of prey. All energy drains from my body in an instant.
Climb up to the pavilion and it is somewhat displeasing to see the calligraphy of Haegang hung on the front, mixed in with praise for the cliffs written by the local school heads.*
Sit in the pavilion and a cold wind blows up, as if from the polar regions, and my eyes seem to reach out endlessly into the distance. To the far right floats the dim shape of the Outer Diamond Mountains, and to the northeast an infinite country of water. To the east of the East Sea there is little sense of the east.
It is a fine background for arousing a sense of the military spirit of these rocky cliffs, which stand to attention, awesomely still despite all the waves of the East Sea that seem to drive up against this one spot. As scenery it is perhaps too dreadful to enjoy. Could these really be called birds, these seagulls that seem to swoop joyfully in and out of these rocks in pairs? I return on the six o’clock bus.
An Enormous Space
I took a night train to Pongch’ŏn, after spending the day in Pyongyang at the instigation of friends I had met on the train.*
It was my first trip north of Pyongyang in more than twenty years, and the first time in my life that I had gone north of Andong Province. Anju, Chŏngju, Sŏnch’ŏn, Ŭiju … these are all places in my memory that I would like to see again, places that I had passed through on foot after my money had run out in Andong Province as a boy. But, as it was the night train, I had no option other than to close the curtain and try to get some sleep.
The lower bunk in a third-class cabin … it was good not having to perform the acrobatic trick of climbing up and down to the top bunk, but with someone less than three feet from my face, and then yet someone else lying above that person, the atmosphere was heavy and claustrophobic, as if I was at the bottom holding them all up. I had laid down still wearing my jacket with all its pockets full of stuff, so it was uncomfortable to turn over even. I could try to remove the jacket, but there was no obvious place to hang it, let alone somewhere it might lay folded up. I did try to sit up in an effort to straighten my clothes out at least, but I hit my head on the bunk above me. I tried sitting, too, with my neck bent like a crane, but lying down turned out to be more comfortable after all. A space as large as my body should suffice lying down, but in truth I could not manage to shed all worldly desire like a bag on a shelf. I thought of that philosopher who once lived in a barrel. But it appears that some training is necessary to be able to gather one’s thoughts in a third-class berth.
The continent … is a landscape for which I have long yearned. When I was in Tokyo, there was once an exhibition of new Russian art. A landscape painting that I saw there, titled “Rainbow,” is still freshly imprinted on my mind today. It showed an endless horizon stretching out in the clearest of colors after rainfall, fields scattered here and there with no roads in sight, and a rainbow with just two roots sunk in a field like an arched gate, reaching out over the widest of spaces. I have from time to time seen landscape paintings in other exhibitions since then, but never such an enormous space as in that one.
An enormous space … that is what impresses itself upon us in Russian novels. When China pressed down upon our Eastern State over those several centuries in the past, that must also have been through the machination of its enormous space.
My train was cutting through the night, racing toward that continent, that space.
At first, the idea of “going there,” whether that meant to the people or to nature or whatever, seemed to have excited me, for even after midnight I could not sleep. Finally, when the train reached Andong Province and the customs officials jumped on, the carriages grew noisy. Everyone got up, and all the luggage was pulled out. I opened up my bag for inspection too. The train stood still for thirty minutes and, as if loudspeakers maketh the border, announcements were constantly repeated from beginning to end for the entire duration of the stop.
With the train departed once more, all the passengers laid down again. “They will sleep through these places!” I suddenly realized and thought of Sŏng Sammun.* Back when Sejong was creating these letters with which I now write, he ordered Sammun to go to Huang Zan, a scholar at the Ming Royal Academy, and ask about phonological structure. It is said that Sammun went to and from Huang’s place of exile on the Liaodong Peninsula a total of thirteen times.
Back then he would have traveled by horse at best. Each day he would have covered sixty or seventy li. When I think of it now, lying down as we travel a thousand li on the night train, it seems like a legend from a very long time ago! He did not even make one or two return journeys, but thirteen all together. Sŏng Sammun’s sense of service was amazing, and I can only bow before Sejong’s resolute statesmanship.
The train seems to be racing along in a straight line without a single curve. On this enormous earth, through this enormous space and the night that covers it, this train is like a tiny mudfish, crawling along the ocean bed.
Earth, Earth
In a wink I was asleep, and when I awoke the window across from me was dimly lit. Dawn must have broken! I lifted the curtain at my head without rising from my bunk. White specks passed by in the distance, but this was the westward side and it was still more night than day. When I looked at my watch, five o’clock had long passed. Even here the sun seemed to rise somewhat later than in Seoul. I got up and washed before going to the dining car with its wide windows. Houses passed by in a hazy mist. Their silhouette was different from that of the farmhouses in Korea. There were only straight lines. It was as if one long building had been cut into pieces: a windowless wall rose up with the roof cut off and no eaves to either the left or the right. These were the kind of houses that painters in the Oriental style usually paint in Korea too.
In a continuous stretch of countless straight lines, long-furrowed fields opened up and folded in layers, like the ribs of a fan. There was nothing to block either the back of the villages or the edges of the fields. There was, of course, not a single mountain or hill in sight. A field would pass by, and then another one in succession, and just when the eye grew bored a group of five or six poplars would appear, followed by a drab farming village that looked as if it had been cut out with a knife. Gradually, people in indigo clothing could be seen one by one on the roads, and then there were signs I could read from inside the carriage—here too they read “Jintan Pharmaceuticals,” “Ajinomoto,” and the like. The scenery was the same for miles around. A layer of thin ice covered the ditches, while white frost lay over the rice stalks in the fields. Wherever I looked in the distant mist, the line between earth and sky was murky. Not a single wall, but earth and more earth, the dark color of ground acorns, and the wide, flat ridges of fields, which looked as if a horse had galloped along trailing a line behind it. Beyond that field lie more of those same ridges, a world of furrowed fields that does not disappear no matter how far ahead our express train races. Inside the carriage, I did not even realize I had unfastened my jacket button and taken a long gulp of breath at this field of vision, which was as vast as might be seen from the peak of some great mountain. Before my eyes passes an image of the red faces, their veins protruding, that first lay this railroad on an ocean of earth, with no target other than the drifting clouds in the sky, and that still clutched to their hammers as they embarked on the first test journey. All stages allow glory to their main players alone.
Of those who sit at this window and gaze out upon the unbounded earth, it must be our immigrants who are most moved by its essential nature as earth—yes, they who have left behind a homeland because it would not offer them any earth. At first, they must have been surprised, exclaiming, “Ah, there’s so much land!”
Then, when they saw those people in blue clothes who stood at the head of each field with tools in their hands and stared joylessly at the passing train, our immigrants must have thought, “But, wait, all these fields have owners, don’t they?”
The dreams in their tired heads, born of an arid life, must have made them dizzy.
After we had traveled for a while, past some station ending in the character tun, meaning “camp,” a large stop appeared by the name of Sogadun.* Here we stopped for more than four minutes. The station workers and policemen all wore yellowish uniforms. Once we had left Sogadun, the conductor appeared and announced that we would soon arrive at Pongch’ŏn. That was the final stop for this train, and I thought that, having come this far, I should get some idea of the place during the few hours I would have to spend here.
I disembarked the train in the early morning, just before eight o’clock. The low morning sun pierced the dark shadows of the unfamiliar buildings and deserted streets of this foreign city and dazzled my eyes. I turned back to the waiting room at the station.
A Sense of Kin
No sooner had I entered the station than a salty smell, like an ocean breeze, penetrated my nostrils. It was the body odor emanating from the clothes of a people for whom water is truly precious. The posters and articles in the store were exactly the same as those at Kyŏngsŏng Station.* I bought a Guide to Pongch’ŏn and went into the third-class waiting room. People in white clothes were dotted here and there among the crowd that packed the room to capacity. The people covered in what seemed to be Pongch’ŏn dirt were probably rickshaw drivers, whereas those with bloodshot eyes blinking listlessly, or those snoring away despite being curled up on their bundles in any spot just large enough for crouching, appeared to be the so-called free immigrants from our homeland. They had arrived by train either last night or this morning and were waiting to transfer. A young man wore a winter cap but no coat, an old lady sat next to a grandson with disheveled hair and mumbled away as she ate fried beans, and at their side were bundles wrapped in faded indigo or thin, worn quilts dangling pieces of gourd, both large and small, like hotel address labels. I went up to the old lady and asked her where she was heading. She continued to crunch on the beans as she pulled a crumpled brown envelope from her trouser top and showed it to me. On it was written an address of somewhere near the Moran River. Apparently her youngest son had moved there three years earlier and had not starved, and so he had asked her to come stay with him and avoid hunger for her remaining days. She had left a village called Suinch’ŏn in P’yŏngan Province together with one of her eldest son’s children.
I went to the second-class waiting room where there was also not a single free seat. Next I tried the washroom, where I found a woman in Korean dress had taken off her bright red cotton top and was washing her neck, even though it was not a ladies-only facility. At second glance, I realized there were several Korean women beside her: a swarthy woman who looked to have left thirty way behind, a young girl with fluffy down who could not have been more than sixteen or seventeen, and three more women of around twenty-two or three, including the one washing her neck. They were brassy, healthy-looking women, although not of particularly fair complexion. They had pulled out red and blue bottles from which cheap perfume wafted around and were busying themselves with their toilet. I approached the woman who finished applying her makeup first.
“Excuse me, but this is my first time here. May I ask where you are all heading?”
“What?”
She was surprised, and then all of their eyes, which had been fixed upon me, turned toward an older gentleman off to one side who had looked as if he had nothing to do with them. This yellow-bearded gentleman flashed a pair of small, sharp eyes and stroked a gold watch chain with one hand as he walked toward me.
“Excuse me, but will the train to Shingyŏng arrive soon?”*
“You don’t look like the kind of man who would have to ask the time of a train...”
His eyes grew even sharper. I feigned innocence, saying, “It is precisely because I don’t know that I’m asking. Aren’t you going to Shingyŏng?”
“We’re headed north.”
He looked me up and down with a glance and then headed off to the store where he bought enough five chŏn packs of Miruku to give one each to the women. They gulped them down as if they were famished. Each flashed a golden tooth and called the old man “father.” No doubt he was the boss of some inn or pavilion somewhere like Beijing or Tientsin. I could not help but feel a new sense of kinship with the fishy-smelling flesh of these young girls, who painted their eyebrows as they chewed on Miruku and seemed so carefree and happy despite being dragged off to a dangerous foreign country.
The Pongch’ŏn Museum
Following my Guide to Pongch’ŏn, I took a taxi to the Yamato Hotel. This elegant four-story inn, said to be of the “American renaissance” style, soared to one side of a large square that had a war memorial celebrating victory at its center. A chalk palace with many open corridors, it seemed more suited to the luscious greenery of southern countries than here in the north. I entrusted my bag and coat to the clerk, and went straight to the dining room. Blue-eyed ladies and gentlemen sat in corners drinking fragrant coffee and eating colorful fruit. I too took breakfast according to the fresh morning menu and then visited the travel bureau to order my ticket for the Asea Special Express train to Shingyŏng. Only then did I go out into the streets. As if out of nowhere, two rickshaws came running up at the same time. They were far lower than rickshaws in Korea and looked luxurious with small lanterns hanging on both sides and colorful tassels dangling down by the seat. I sat in the cleaner-looking of the two and gave the order,
“Hakubutsukan!”
The driver flashed his yellow teeth, but clearly did not understand. Even when I took out my map and showed him where the museum was, he did not seem to recognize the city, but he ran off with me in tow anyway so as not to lose a customer. We made our way for a while with me shouting at him to stop and taking out my map every time I saw someone who looked as if they might be able to read. They would invariably make a noise among themselves for a while and finally not be able to help the driver find the museum. For his part, the driver kept on running forward. No doubt he calculated that he would earn more running along than resting, no matter whether his customer reached his destination or not. In the end, I had to fight my way off this blindly running rickshaw and switch to a taxi.
The three-story chalk pavilion at the intersection of Third and Tenth Streets was once the private residence of Tang Yulin of the former northeast military faction. Its important collections include bronzeware from the Zhou-Han period, pottery from the golden ages of Liao and Song, and calligraphy since the Song and Yuan dynasties. Its woven silk and embroidery are all noteworthy examples of the crafts of dyeing and weaving. I unexpectedly discovered some colored pottery engraved in free brush style and a woodblock print by the Frenchman Caussin of an original picture by the world-famous G. B. Castiglione.* Although the Oriental paintings were mostly landscapes, there were many interesting paintings on fans. Altogether more than thirty-five hundred works easily give the impression of the vitality, leisure, delicacy, and maturity of the continental peoples, but there was nothing that could appeal to a more sensitive nature in the manner of the sentimentality and humor of the Koryŏ and Yi dynasties. Moreover, in terms of both quality and quantity, it is a rather weak museum in that it does not give a sense of the importance of Pongch’ŏn as the home of the great Qing Empire that ruled the Han people. I regret that I came to Manchuria but did not get to see the Taeryŏn Museum, said to be the best museum in the East.*
Next I took a coach to the Hall of Common Good. As the Hall of Common Good is an institution that has deep relations with poor people, the coach driver understood me easily.
The Hall of Common Good
The Hall of Common Good is a large charitable institution that takes in more than seven hundred unfortunate souls, including orphans, beggars, and paupers, as well as kisaeng and barmaids, prostitutes and illegitimate children. It was founded more than thirty years ago as the operation of an individual named Zuo Baogui and has become one of Pongch’ŏn’s most well-known sites, deserving special mention for its facilities and the morality it displays, both of which are of a kind rarely found in orphanages or old people’s homes.
From the office, where a large plaque reads “Never tire of doing good,” countless buildings in both the Western and Chinese single-story style lead back to the right and the left. There is a hospital, carpenter’s workshop, printing shop, textile factory, and even a kindergarten and school, but the places that leave the deepest impression are the maternity wing, the rehabilitation hall, and the life-saving gate. Naturally the hall takes in old people who are no longer capable of supporting themselves, but it also accepts all kinds of prostitutes, including women forced into prostitution and bar girls who have fled abusive employers. It offers such women proper guidance and even protects women who have been beaten by their husbands. In the case of such women, their husbands usually come asking for reconciliation within three months; for those women with no one to take them away, whether prostitutes, virgins, or wives, the hall finds stable marriage partners. Because these women tend to be good at running households, requests for a bride are received from all sorts of men, from bachelors to widowers. An even stranger sight is the “life-saving” gate at the maternity wing, where in order to prevent the killing of illegitimate babies any woman who asks for help with childbirth is welcome, even if she is clearly not poor. No one asks the woman’s name, address, or circumstances of pregnancy. Once her child has been born, she may leave it at the hall, while she covers up her traces and moves on with her life. The actual gate is tall and located in a back alley. A basket, which is just large enough to hold a young child, is placed in a hole inside the gate; if a child is placed in the basket it presses down and rings a bell. Anyone who is struggling to raise a child can leave it in this basket and walk away without going through any formal process or even showing her face. This is a holy institution: it simply helps the unfortunate, irrespective of their sins.
When I reemerged it was past one in the afternoon, or thirteen o’clock, as they say here. I took a coach into town and passed once through the business district, with its dust and smattering of gold and red signs. Back at the hotel I picked up my bag and hurried off to the station without even time to eat lunch.
The dark-green bulletlike streamlined form of the Asea Special Express runs between Taeryŏn and Habi and is known as the fastest train in the whole of the East.* It left Pongch’ŏn with no time to rest and picked up speed immediately, running lightly at a constant speed with almost no vibration. The sensation is a bit like having one’s head shaved with one of those new shaving machines. Outside the window there is nothing but flat plains. I thought of my friends who like mountain climbing and wondered what would happen if they came to live somewhere like this. It was funny to think that, depending on the person, even a flat plain could be hell.
I ate lunch in the dining car, where all the waitresses were Russian. One was white, very pale, and had a square forehead, which made her look like Sonya in the film “Crime and Punishment.” White Russian daughters with no nationality, poor young girls who spend their lives looking out onto the monotonous plains without even a homeland to embrace with their homesickness … the cup of coffee served by them emitted a whiff of romance that was almost as strong as alcohol. While I sipped repeatedly on that coffee, I worried about becoming a lonely shadow on the endless plain where I was to visit an immigrant village the following day.
Shingyŏng
We arrived in Shingyŏng after six in the evening. A cold wind clipped my ears as I came out the station; streets radiated out from the square and seemed to disappear into the dusky night. The buildings, both old and new, were all dark as if empty. I pulled up my coat collar and waited a while for a small taxi. I asked to be taken to the Mansŏn ilbo newspaper building on Yŏngch’ang Street. We drove down the largest street in front of us; it was asphalted and the hills were laid with stones that rippled out in waves like pieces of bean curd. The town was not all flat, but had high and low areas that reminded me of Tokyo. Every two or three large buildings or so we would pass a boarded fence with a sign saying this company or that store was under construction.
As there were few pedestrians on the street, the cars could drive however they liked. After about fifteen minutes, we stopped in front of a building with a red flag.
My friends Hoengbo, Yŏsu, and T’aeu were still at work and greeted me joyfully.* I felt as if I had come to the ends of the earth, and these familiar friends who were working and living here seemed like different people entirely as they sat at their desks. We immediately set off for Yŏsu’s house, where we ate a freshly prepared dinner in front of the cozy pechka fireplace while indulging in tales of Shingyŏng and of the immigrant villages and lamenting our own situations.* Then, with T’aeu in the lead, we went outside to see Shingyŏng at night.
The sun had long set, but the far western horizon of the sky still glowed azure. Bright stars shone and a soft wind blew; all I could hear was the jangling of coach bells, the clip-clopping of hooves, and the cracking of whips passing by from near and far. All the lights in the houses were dim, as if they were under attack, and the strong outer gates were shut already in the early evening. We took a coach and gazed up at the flickering stars in the sky as we headed toward the masses of neon signs in town. First we went to a dance hall called Monte Carlo where a whole room full of men and women gently swayed to a doleful waltz, like duckweed on the surface of a pond. T’aeu was the only one of us to jump into their midst, while Yŏsu sat drinking tea with me; even if he were to live in Shingyŏng ten more years he would never manage to learn to dance, he said. Next we took another coach for some ten li to find an inn run by Manchus, but they were all full. We had no choice but to find some other inn and by eleven o’clock were out on the street again. We visited one of the brothels here known as kaip’anzi. They are shaped like inns from the outside, but inside a hall opens out like a courtyard, surrounded on all sides by three or four floors of guest rooms connected by corridors and rails. We were led up to a room on the second floor that was furnished with a teakettle on a table, some wooden stools, a wide bed, a mirror and a dressing table. After Yŏsu had undertaken some negotiations, a great clamor began, as sudden as if a light had been turned on, and some dozen Manchu girls came rushing into our room from all directions. Three that we pointed out remained behind as the others all left again. Each hour spent eating watermelon seeds and talking costs one wŏn, but after midnight the nature of the business takes a sudden turn and they become prostitutes. Yŏsu and T’aeu were happily laughing and chatting, but for me, who knew only the one word of Manchu manmandi,* it was like cows and chickens. Frustrated, we did not even stay a full hour, but came out and passed by a street where many white Russians live. Their drinking establishments, known as cabarets, have their own music bands and dancers, although any guest can go there to enjoy dancing in the exotic atmosphere. At any moment the crowds include a mixture of five races—Russians, Manchurians, Germans, Greeks, and then us.
In front of every ten or so of the closed businesses that we passed on our way back a black shadow was either sitting or standing. These guards had been posted to deter robbers and would have to stand or sit throughout the long night even in a cold of minus forty degrees. For each evening of work, they earn one wŏn and a few chŏn. Apparently only white Russians do this work. What a depressing street and nightlife!
Jiangjiawopu
When I woke up the next day I went to Yŏsu and asked him to introduce me to several people who knew about the situation in the immigrant villages.
I learned that the place with the longest history was also the place that had seen the biggest problems, and that was the area of Manbosan where the first huge water ditch built with Korean hands flowed through the wasteland. Of the several villages in Manbosan the most convenient to reach from Shingyŏng was a place called Jiangjiawopu. But, when I asked, even traveling there turned out to be far from easy. From Shingyŏng one had to take a train going to Paeksŏngja,* get off at the second stop, and walk at least thirty Korean li before immigrant houses would begin to appear. There were only two trains a day—in the morning and evening—and I had already missed the morning train. Then there was the problem of the thirty li. Not only was it an empty plain without many houses, but I would not be able to ask the way, as I knew no Manchu. I tried, without success, to negotiate for a coach and then asked about small taxis, to no avail either. Having come this far, I wanted to visit a village where new immigrants were digging their hoes into virgin ground, but to see such a village it seemed I would have to go to Kando Province or somewhere where group settlement was underway. Because that was happening under the aegis of either the Mansen Colonization Company or state policy, it would be hard to visit without some kind of position, and, in any event, this would mean going to such places as Ando Province. To reach these would involve getting off at a station called Myŏngwŏlgu,† from where the nearest settlement was some fifty or sixty li and the next some one or two hundred li into the heartland. Apparently, in such places the situation is so precarious that the protection of a policeman or guard is necessary, even if all one wants to do is chop down a tree. Traveling there alone would involve arming myself as a prerequisite, and even then, without some kind of firm resolution, I might not return. Just as I had given up on reaching those new settlements and decided to visit somewhere like Jiangjiawopu in Manbosan, the news came that a group of Koreans from there were at this moment in Shingyŏng and would be returning on the train the following morning. I spent a relaxed day in Shingyŏng before heading out the next day for the train. Both Yŏsu and T’aeu came along and helped me meet up with a young Korean boy wearing Manchu clothes. He introduced us to two people wearing Korean-style winter coats and a middle-aged couple who were so-called free immigrants. The wife was sitting with a young baby on her back and a young girl held close to her, while the husband wore no outer coat but carried a pack the size of a mountain and dangling gourds. He looked around nervously, having nowhere to rest his load. The carriage reeked of a smell that seemed to come from the blue clothes and dirty copper coins. We were supposed to depart, but it was manmandi … more like a succession of postponements than an attempt to embark on a journey.
My traveling companions had come to Shingyŏng to sell hemp cloth and pigs. Usually they sell their grain in one lot in the autumn to other Koreans who own rice-processing businesses, but if they need some extra money and have rice left over, they sometimes sell it in smaller amounts. In town they buy cloth, socks, ointment, soap, matches, chinaware, thread, needles, pots, seeds, and writing paper. One had even bought a gramophone record. It was something called the “New Tobacco Song.” Protruding from one bundle was a piece of board used to coil cloth that must have come from a linen shop. Here there are two precious commodities: stone and wood. It is impossible to buy stone, and so hardly any houses are built on foundation stones. Instead they use even a piece of board the size of a nameplate that can be bought in Shingyŏng.
“The leaves must be coming out in Korea around now?”
“Have the azaleas bloomed on the sunny slopes?”
Their eyes misted over as they asked me questions, recalling the homeland that they had left behind some five, six, or even ten years before. The mother swiveled the baby on her back around to her breast. The eyes, which had been startled with all the noise going on around her, now lit up that gaunt face with a faint smile as she looked down at her child. Her husband stood still at her side with nowhere to sit.
Gourd Dippers
Fifty minutes later we got off at a station called Sohamnyung.* An armed guard stood at the station, inspecting every single bundle and letting people pass one by one. The station buildings were made from brick and the lower half of their doors covered in steel so that, if necessary, the entire station could become a fortress and respond to attack. Outside the station there were two railway office buildings, a hut run by natives that served as a bar, and then the plain. It was hard to tell if there was a road at all.
“Anyone who needs water should drink it here before we head off.”
We went into the bar, from which some people seemed to emerge having drunk more than water. Apparently there would not be much chance of finding something along the way. Some people carried cloth bundles under their arms and on their backs. The mother carried her child on her back, while her young daughter clung tightly to her mother’s skirt and dragged her large rubber shoes noisily, and the head of the family adjusted his shoulder strap so as to carry all of their belongings on his back. I walked behind them all, watching the gourd dippers dangling from his bundle.
How Koreans like their gourd dippers! They use them to scoop fresh water, rinse rice, beat out tunes, and even feed a new mother her first meal.
Wherever Koreans go, they dream of living beneath a roof entangled with gourd vines; the tale of the brothers Hŭngbu and Nolbu breaking the gourd in half must be the eternal truth, morality, and joy of these simple people.* In this northern country, where the frost attacks before the gourd has time to ripen, those pieces of gourd brought from the homeland are ancestral utensils, the only album to invoke memories of the old home.
No matter how far we walk, the scenery never changes. One by one native houses appear, with their mud walls and mud roofs, but unfortunately they never disappear again from sight. We meet just one person driving a herd of some dozens of pigs, and a family in a horse-drawn cart who seem to be going to Shingyŏng, but otherwise we do not even see crows or other birds.
“Where did you come from?”
“We’re from Kijang,” replied the owner of the gourd-laden bundle. According to him, Kijang is somewhere near Tongnae in South Kyŏngsang Province. Some of his neighbors had moved here first and urged him to come too, saying there was plenty of farmland.
Once we had walked some fifteen li to the northwest, a yellow stream of unknown depth flowed by, dragging pieces of ice. They told me that the immigrants had built a dam upstream, where the land is somewhat higher, and use this stream to irrigate their rice paddies. We sat down to rest for a while in the middle of the road, because there was not a single rock anywhere on which we might sit. Then we walked a further fifteen li before rice paddies began to appear. In the paddies, the rice plants had been planted firm and deep, but the rows were not planted evenly and the dykes were crooked too, as if made by children. For the first time in a while, I saw white washing spread out on a fence. Then yellow thatched roofs and stacks of straw appeared on the far horizon. It looked as if we would have to walk a long way to reach them. A ditch appeared. This was the ditch of the infamous Manbosan incident.*
It was a large water ditch some twelve to thirteen feet wide at the bottom, twenty-one to twenty-two feet wide at the top, and more than twenty li in length. Many local coolies had also helped, but it was mostly the sweat and blood of our own immigrants that had brought this large-scale project to completion.
By the side of the dry ditch a girl in Korean clothes, looking some ten years old, carried a baby on her back and stood still watching us. A hill of golden turf or a riverbank of golden sand must seem like the stuff of fantasy to her.
The Village with a Full Stomach
We passed the village by the ditch but still had to walk a while before we reached the larger village of Jiangjiawopu, which has a school. The building with a red tin roof was the school. The village was even dirtier than the empty plain. Here and there were bogs so that we had to choose our steps carefully, and pigs passed by in herds. Viewed close up, the houses were buried behind kaoliang stalk fences. There were stacks of bound kaoliang stalks and straw, and thus dried grass everywhere. It looked as if the whole village would burn down if just one cigarette were dropped. Children appeared from behind this and that fence, dogs ran out, and chickens had to be chased away. Each of my companions invited me to his house for lunch. I went into the home of Mr. Pak, who wore Chinese clothes.
Mr. Pak’s house was also surrounded by a kaoliang stalk fence over which the wind howled. There was a mountain of rice straw and kaoliang stalks in the yard. They burn grasses throughout the year here because there is no firewood. We walked through a door at the center of the straight-lined house and into a kitchen with an earthen floor. There were rooms to both sides with earthen floors as well, a high Chinese-style heated floor known as a k’ang, and an empty space just large enough for removing shoes. Reed mats covered the k’ang.
I looked out the windows from where I sat on the mats. To the south there was a window large enough to have sliding doors fitted horizontally; the walls had been papered with the Mansŏn ilbo newspaper and a map of Manchuria hung. On the northern side they had spread reed mats, which were not large enough and so they had also used piles of grass. Looking out through the glass fitted into the window, I could see a thatched hut about the height of a man, three armfuls round and tied several times with kaoliang stalks. Inside there were no husks, as one might expect, but the rice that they would eat, as they did not have a separate storeroom. When I asked whether they had no problems with mice eating their rice, the reply was “well, how much could they possibly eat?” Chickens and pigs also poke around from time to time. I was happy to hear that they were so generous with their grain, as it did not seem that feeding a guest would be too much trouble for them. I was hungry. My legs ached. Not a single sound could be heard. Only the sky showed through the window glass; open the window and all there would be was the dazzling white space across which we had just panted, as though swimming. The enormity of the monotony stifled me. All energy to ask questions or even to think evaporated in an instant. In such an environment all I wanted was to let my mouth drop open like an idiot and lie down.
My spirits revived somewhat at the sight of the lunch table. There was plain boiled rice, which was so yellow it looked like brown rice. The soup was made from dried radish leaves, and somehow we each had a shrimp too. There was pickled cabbage, in which the pepper seeds were more radiant than the peppers themselves, and then whole peppers placed on a small brass dish. It looked as if they had first dried any peppers that had grown old and gray or had frozen black and then steamed them in a rice pot. I waited for the man to begin eating so that I could see how to eat them; he just dipped them in soy sauce. I tried one, all the time breathing heavily. Even with just these three side dishes, which were almost in their original form as raw ingredients, the taste was the sweetest I have experienced since my intestinal problems of the year before last. I ate all four heaped bowls of rice that they offered me.
“Now we just fill our stomachs with anything …” With these words Mr. Pak urged me to eat more rice. I repressed my urge to lie down, though I kept yawning with drowsiness, and began to ask him about this and that.
Local Legends
“What kind of things do you farm?”
“Rice, millet, kaoliang, buckwheat, soybeans, corn, and potatoes … usually these, and, of course, vegetables too.”
“Do people who come to live here generally share the same standard of living?”
“I can’t say that we are all the same. It’s already been several years, hasn’t it, since the Manbosan incident erupted in Jiangjiawopu? This is probably the most established of all the immigrant villages. When inspection parties come, they are usually brought to this village.”
“Do you all own the land in this village?”
“There are hardly any of us who own our land. Because we all rent from Manchurians, this is really tenant farming. The first people who came here to Manbosan got together to collect enough money to rent some wasteland.”
“Oh, could you explain exactly how that worked?”
“We paid a percentage to someone local and rented five hundred sang of land (one sang is the equivalent of two thousand p’yŏng) from a rich Manchurian in Changch’un. I’ve forgotten now how that contract worked.”
“I see.”
“But the native Manchurians in this area all protested vigorously.”
“Why?”
“They were angry because they said that if Koreans came here and planted rice paddies their own fields would be ruined.”
“Why would their fields be ruined?”
“You must have noticed on the way here that all these plains are just like laminated floors? That’s why the water from the paddies has nowhere to drain away. It just spreads out in all directions as it likes, and so if there are fields to the side they are in truth ruined.”
“Well, couldn’t those people also change their fields to paddies?”
“They have no notion how to follow. Some say that if they eat rice then they need side dishes as well, and then that they get stomachaches. Even if they do farm rice they have no idea how to sell it … So they think that it’s safest just to grow what they will eat in their own fields.”
“How did the opposition movement come about?”
“Well, it was those same people who rushed about when they heard we were going to dig a big water ditch more than twenty feet wide. Some several hundred people ran to the government office. They said they would lose their living because of us Koreans, and, even though the office had given us permission to reclaim land, it irresponsibly denied all knowledge of this. The people stopped selling food to Koreans and wouldn’t let us use their wells. When I think about that time … well, finally it became a matter of life and death, and we had no option but to fight back. We had used all the food and money that we had brought with us on renting the land and building the ditch, which was almost finished. Where could we go when they told us to leave? We had no travel money, and if we moved we would need money to set up farming, wouldn’t we? Even if they paid us compensation, think of the blood and sweat we had expended on a ditch of twenty li … still they kept on telling us to move. The natives kept on filling in the ditch we had dug in places. Then we would run and threaten to kill them and dig it out again. It may sound funny, but this was a battle over life and death. We would even dig through the night. Later on the natives went back to the government office and raised a commotion, so that finally the Chinese army came out and started firing their guns. Bullets were flying over our heads, but we just kept on shoveling the dirt out of the ditch; after all, what difference did it make whether we died one way or another?”
He rubbed his dry forehead several times, as if that scene were still fresh before his eyes.
If the Mountain Is Not High, the Water Won’t Run Clear
Mr. Pak said that no one was actually hit by a bullet back then. Maybe it was because they were threatened from afar and the bullets shot past them through the air. Several youths were captured and locked up for some days before being released, but that was all. He regretted greatly that the bloodshed had occurred in Korea.
Aside from the army attack, if natives had really enjoyed taking lives, they could easily have made the Koreans victims of their clubs.
He took me on a tour of the village and the school. There were no more than twenty houses in all, and they were spread out without a center. They were the same shape as Mr. Pak’s home, sitting inside a kaoliang stalk fence as if folding their arms and basking in the sun. Since the sowing happens late, and the harvest early, the slack time in the farming schedule here is at least twice as long as in Korea. Brewing is unregulated, and once the alcohol is ready neighbors enjoy inviting each other to drink. The pleasure of individuals lies in dreams of winning the lottery. The tickets for the ten-thousand wŏn lottery can be bought from Manchukuo for one wŏn each. Anyone who lives here can buy them, and each month one person will be a winner, which means that you spend one wŏn and win ten thousand. Among the Koreans here, an old woman who sold oil in Shingyŏng and a young lad who worked as a clerk at some company had both won.
“If we could win the lottery, we would go back and live in our homeland again! Otherwise we have to live like this day by day and be buried at the head of a Manchu’s field!”
This was the source of their hope as well as their sadness.
The school was built by stacking up earthen bricks known as t’ukoe, laying a tin roof on top, and inserting glass windows. The floor was made of earth and not wood. He told me that up to two hundred children from the villages within ten or twenty li gather here. It was holiday time, so only seven or eight children from this village were kicking around a worn-out football. This place had been established and run by the immigrant villages at first, but now Manchukuo had taken the schools over and was running it according to their policies. It would not be long before the textbooks and teachers changed. In fact, because the whole area of Manbosan lay adjacent to the capital and was not a Korean immigrant zone, one could never know when it might be subject to reorganization like the border region.
At three in the afternoon I set out alone from Jiangjiawopu to catch the seven o’clock train to Sohamnyung.
When I thought about how, within a day or two, I would enter my homeland of embroidered rivers and mountains, which had been given the name Koryŏ because of its high mountains and clear waters, I had not the heart to look back at those people remaining on this vast plain.
I walked with my head down. When I reached the earlier village by the water ditch I found three boys of eight or nine years old. They wore glasses fashioned from kaoliang stalks, pretended to smoke the kaoliang stalks they had rolled up like tobacco, and sang this song:
Yukuri, ch’ŏnch’ŏnhi, manmandi
Tabakko handae ch’ŏuwenba*
I later found out that ch’ŏuwenba was a Manchu word meaning “let’s smoke tobacco.”
An hour later, the thatched roofs and fences covered in white washing had all disappeared. Not a single bird flew through the air. There was only the sound of my footsteps plodding along like those of a young child. Several times I stood still and strained my ears. Not a sound came from anywhere.
The eternity was even more desolate than the ocean.