The US military was, and still is, a secret society, keeping its nefarious skeletons hidden in safes within vaults within crypts. Good luck with unraveling its mysteries or exposing its peccadillos to the light of day. Many have tried. Many have failed. Young GIs, if they knew what was good for them, left these mysteries unsolved and even unspoken. Like docents tiptoeing around the holy of holies, they whispered and pressed forefingers to their lips.
In addition to dealing with the often-unreasonable demands of the US Army, another thing I soon started to notice was the magnificent Asian world swirling around me. I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, or even in Southern California, for that matter.
Probably the first thing I noticed was the food.
Korean food, of course, to my uneducated eyes, was a mystery beyond fathoming. It smelled bad, it was composed largely of odd-looking vegetables in some sort of red sauce, and more often than not it reeked of garlic and fish. What I didn’t know then was that Korean vegetables actually belonged to different species from the cabbage and radish and greens that I’d seen in the States. Namely, Napa cabbage, Korean radish, and Asian turnips, all shaped oddly and looking quite different from what was available on stateside produce stands. These ingredients were chopped up and soaked in brine, along with green onions, salted fermented shrimp, red peppers, and, of course, garlic, along with other ingredients, to make a series of dishes known as kimchi. The advantage of preparing food this way was that it could be preserved without refrigeration, although setting the earthen pots outside during the winter made it last even longer. Kimchi, plus roasted mackerel, say, with steamed rice and a bowl of hot bean-sprout soup, made for a delicious, and nutritious, meal. But at first, to a dummy like me, it looked unappetizing and even dangerous. Keep in mind that in those days, people weren’t “foodies.” Exotic foreign dishes didn’t appear on television. They were not only eschewed but frowned upon. I often heard the refrain, “I’m a meat-and-potatoes man.” So, before I could enjoy a Korean repast, I had to solve the mystery of what in the heck it was. And how in the heck to eat it.
First, I sat down at a low table on a flat cushion. Then I picked up the metal spoon. Or it seemed like a spoon. It had a long stem and a round business end that was almost flat. I wondered how much broth it could hold. Not much, I soon discovered, but it was great for shoveling rice. And then the chopsticks. After being shown how to hold them, I tried but soon gave up. Still, one can do pretty well at a Korean table by just using them as spears. Soon I was jabbing the hot slices of bulgogi, marinated and thinly sliced flank steak, into my mouth. Followed by a spoonful of glutinous rice topped by a chunk of kkakdugi, diced turnip pickled in spicy brine. To my delight, I discovered that it was delicious. Thus encouraged, within a few weeks, I was using my chopsticks and spoon with something resembling alacrity.
Another mystery was the clothing.
As I rode in jeeps and tanks and trucks throughout the Korean countryside, I’d often see old men squatting under the shade of an old oak tree playing a game of baduk, Japanese Go, or janggi, Korean chess. They wore white cotton outfits of loose pantaloons and vests and more often than not carried gnarled wooden walking sticks and long-stemmed pipes with small bowls. But strangest of all was their headgear. Stovepipe hats with flat, round brims made of some sort of black, mostly transparent woven material. I came to find that the material was horsehair and that when a Korean gentleman retired, he cast aside his Western suit and tie and spent the rest of his life wearing the much more comfortable Korean traditional garb of a hal-abeoji. A grandfather. GIs sometimes put on this type of clothing and took photos of themselves as a sort of weak joke. The gnarled wooden walking stick was even more widely adopted. American soldiers called it a “short-timer’s stick,” mainly because the only guys who owned them had been in Korea for a while and routinely carved notches on the stick to indicate how long they’d been in country and thereby calculate how long they had left until they returned stateside.
On holidays and other special occasions, young Korean women often wore a hanbok, a brightly colored dress with a high-waisted full skirt that wrapped tightly across their breasts and flowed all the way to their ankles. This was paired with a short tunic with loose-fitting sleeves that reached to their wrists—not exactly form fitting. I came to find out that the sleeves had inside pockets for handkerchiefs and combs and other items and that beneath the skirt, the women often wore thick long johns, helping them cope with the frigid Korean winters.
Not exactly the bikinis I was used to.
On their feet were linen booties stuffed with cotton, most often covered by rubber slippers with an upturned toe. Excellent for making one’s way across ice-covered streets.
Another thing that mystified me was the problem of language. The vast majority of GIs never made the slightest effort to learn Korean. The few words and phrases they picked up through constant repetition were barroom slang. Words such as irriwa, “come here,” and karra chogi, “get outta here.” Not exactly the king’s Korean. Even in the carpeted halls of Eighth Army headquarters, the honchos didn’t worry about the institutional lack of linguistic skill. They had plenty of educated Koreans working for them, some of whom spoke English as well as, or even better than, most GIs. That was good enough for the brass. After all, the prevailing attitude was that every Korean actually spoke English. When they protested that they didn’t understand, they were just being obtuse. Faking it. “I know he speaks English,” people would say to me, when I knew he didn’t.
A very few of us actually did study the Korean language. There was ample opportunity. Night classes on base, English-Korean dictionaries sold in local bookstores, and plenty of off-duty time to wander a few yards from base and speak to locals using the new, halting words and phrases I had so painstakingly mastered. Once I could read the signs, once I could understand the shouted banter, once I could convince someone to stop and look me in the eye and explain something, such as directions or a local custom or the reason for a dispute, it was as if the world opened up. Vision in the land of the blind. Mystery solved.
But most GIs—from privates all the way up to generals—never bothered.
“What are you going to do with it?” people asked me when they saw me studying.
“Talk,” I replied.
Korean and English developed on opposite sides of the earth. Linguists claim that the Korean language has only one rough counterpart, Japanese, which has a similar grammatical structure. However, the vocabulary is very different, and it is thought that the two languages diverged far back in prehistory. Contrary to popular belief, Korean has little similarity to Chinese. However, because of the long-standing influence of the Central Kingdom, Koreans have adopted many Chinese words and plugged them into their language, in a way very similar to how Greek and Latin have been incorporated into English.
Another thing that threw my adolescent mind for a loop was the unusual grammatical structure of the Korean language. Instead of the subject-verb-object sentence structure that I had grown up with, the Koreans are allowed to shuffle their subject or object around at the beginning of the sentence but are required to save the verb for last. If this didn’t confuse me enough, I soon discovered that the verb is followed by an indicator word that shows the relative social status of the person speaking and the person being spoken to.
This is probably the greatest mystery of the Korean language, and it can be extremely confusing for foreigners. Personal relationships in Korea are hierarchical and strictly defined, based on the Confucian structure of obedience owed by the inferior to his or her social superior. It has been said that if you’re not native born, you will never fully master the complex mystery of Korean social interactions, which meant any American GI who endeavored to study the language would spend virtually his entire time with his foot stuck firmly in his mouth.
The good news is that the Koreans forgive you. You’re a foreigner, and they don’t really expect you to get it. Sometimes, even they don’t get it.
> Another mystery we GIs had to deal with, and maybe the one that caused the most grief, was love. Early on, during our in-processing, a veteran NCO told us, “If you’re going to fall in love, you’d better do it quick.” What he was referring to was the paperwork required to seek permission to marry a Korean woman. It could take eight to ten months, and with only a twelve-month tour in country, that didn’t leave much time. The reason for the extensive paperwork was twofold. First, the US Army wanted to make sure that we weren’t marrying a spy, that our level of access to government secrets wasn’t so high that marriage to a foreign national might lower or even eliminate our security clearance, and that we and the potential bride were healthy and had been fully counseled on the difficulties of international marriage by both our unit commander and the post chaplain. Meanwhile, the South Korean government wanted to make sure that we weren’t marrying either a criminal or, worse, a communist. Also, they wanted to brief the potential bride on the dangers of living abroad and the difficulty of assimilation into American culture and to caution her against falling into the clutches of manipulative North Korean intelligence agents. The real reason for the runaround, of course, was to stall in the hope that the GI would change his mind and not take a woman from an ancient Asian culture back to the American heartland. It is my belief that the brass wanted to keep the statistics on GI-foreign marriage down so it didn’t look as if the Eighth Army was running a dating service, something of which Congress, and your hometown Chamber of Commerce, might disapprove.
The final mystery for me was how to handle leaving. In the few short months that I’d been in Korea, I’d learned much and discovered a world completely different from the one I’d left in Southern California. A world not of year-round sunshine and endless freeways and smog thick enough to cramp young lungs but of thatched-roof farmhouses and earthen pots lining brick walls and families in wooden carts being pulled by snorting oxen and green summer rice fields and white cranes flapping angled wings into the sky. And I’d met people who saw the world very differently than I did. People who knew how precious existence was because they knew too many people who’d lost their existence in the war that had so recently ended. They knew how poignant the four seasons were: summer fading into fall, fall giving way to winter, winter exploding into spring. And how beautiful the distant hills and how gentle the morning mist and how life-giving the danbi, the sweet rain, when it falls like a slowly slackening curtain of beads.
How appropriate that the last dynasty of Korea, the one that ended at the beginning of the twentieth century, was named Chosun, the Land of the Morning Calm. It was bittersweet for this young man to have my eyes opened to a new way of life and then, so suddenly and too quickly, be forced to leave. Slapped wide awake from a fleeting dream.
THE CLAY THAT WE SHAPE
– William Kent Krueger –
“WE DON’T RECEIVE WISDOM,” PROUST FAMOUSLY OBSERVED. “We must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.” Which is a truth every writer, at some point, comes to understand.
When I was a child, if someone asked me a simple question, I never gave them a simple answer. What poured from my lips was always some intricate construct of pure imagination that had nothing to do with the truth. I was a notorious liar, and, to a degree, I still am. For most of my life, the why of this questionable behavior has been a mystery to me. But a few years ago, I wrote a novel that changed everything, that took me on the journey Proust so wisely observed no one can spare us, and that helped me see the truth behind the lies I’d been telling myself and others all my life.
When I was six years old, my mother was admitted for the first time—but not the last—to a mental institution as an inpatient. I didn’t understand everything about her condition then, and probably still do not, but what I knew was that my mother had been suffering for a long time. I still remember the vacant look in her eyes, how she often stared for extended periods at nothing, and how, when she spoke, I sometimes couldn’t make heads or tails of her meaning. I remember my father rushing her to the hospital once with a bloody towel wrapped around her wrist. I remember the long drive from our home in Texas to Wyoming so that my siblings and I could stay with our grandparents while my mother received treatment at the Wyoming State Hospital in Cheyenne. My father returned alone to Texas to continue earning a living, and I spent the next several months dreaming of his return. One of the most poignant memories I have of that time is how, when he finally came to retrieve us, despite all the happily-ever-after scenarios I’d imagined, and in which he’d played a central part, I didn’t recognize him at all.
My mother was an extraordinary woman in many ways. She had ebony hair and penetrating blue eyes, and even as a child I understood that she was a beauty. Her voice was a clear, lovely soprano, and her hands could work magic on a piano keyboard. She’d graduated from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, with a dual major—music and drama. My father often remarked that he’d fallen in love with her the moment he’d laid eyes on her, and how, when she was on stage in the many theater productions she starred in at Drake, she was a magnet for the eyes of the audience. But my mother had another extraordinary talent, which I didn’t become fully aware of or appreciate until I was much older: she was clairvoyant. She knew things. When the telephone rang, she could tell you who was calling. She was aware, even at great distances, of when something was troubling someone she cared about. She grew up Protestant but was always searching for a broader explanation for the things she saw and felt that others didn’t. So she dabbled in many religions and esoteric philosophies and became an adventurer in metaphysics.
She also drank. She was, I understand now, an alcoholic. And when she’d had a few drinks—she often had martinis waiting when my father came home from work—she changed. Those soft blue eyes became chips of ice, and her tongue became a cutting thing. I remember her arguments with my father, beating her fists against his chest while he stood stoic under her drunken, ineffectual pummeling. When she was like this, she was another person, someone I didn’t know, a fearsome wraith, and I did my best to stay out of her way.
During my growing-up years, my mother was often emotionally distant. But she was also physically distant, admitted to mental institutions on four separate occasions. These absences were spaced several years apart and lasted from a few weeks to a few months. Her diagnosis was paranoid schizophrenia, and usually the treatment was a mixture of electroshock therapy, psychiatric counseling, and Thorazine or similar medications. Her institutionalizations were not cheap, and medical insurance didn’t always cover the cost. As a result, for most of my childhood and adolescence, my parents were saddled with significant debt.
I loved my mother, but for much of my life my feelings toward her were tangled up with fear and resentment. I also had a deep, unfulfilled longing for some understanding of her inexplicable behavior and the havoc that it wreaked on my life and the lives of everyone I cared about. It wasn’t until I wrote a novel called Ordinary Grace that I began at last to see with some clarity how her lifelong struggle with reality, and my lifelong wrestling with the truth, were two strands of the same rope.
Ordinary Grace is set in the summer of 1961 in a small town deep in the very beautiful Minnesota River Valley. It’s the story of a Methodist minister whose beloved child is murdered. That’s the compelling mystery component. But at heart, it’s really the story of what that tragedy does to this man’s faith, his family, and, ultimately, the entire fabric of the small town in which he lives. It’s a first-person narrative told by the minister’s son, who, from the perspective of a man now in his fifties, looks back on that momentous summer when he was thirteen years old.
In many ways, I drew on my own life to create Ordinary Grace. In the story, Ruth Drum, the minister’s wife, is a woman who doesn’t want the kind of life that’s been forced on her as a result of her marriage. She’s a beautiful woman with a lovely voice and a love of music. She really has no interest in being a minister�
��s wife or in being a homemaker—she’s not very good at these things—which was the role women were expected to play when I was growing up. In writing the character of Ruth Drum, I simply tapped my own memories of my mother.
For readers, stories have the potential to do much more than entertain. They instruct; they enlighten; they encourage; they inspire. For authors, the blessings are much the same. In writing Ordinary Grace, a story that reflected my recollections of what it was to be thirteen years old and all the emotions I felt regarding my family at that time, I came to a number of enlightening realizations that not only helped me let go of old grievances but also opened a door to understanding the why at the heart of my fabrications.
Here’s a little story to help you understand the kind of dynamic that often existed between my mother and me as I was growing up. The summer I was eleven years old, my father moved our family to a rented farmhouse in northwestern Ohio. He’d grown up in a city, and it had always been his dream to give his children what he imagined would be the freedom of a rural existence. My brothers and sister and I loved that old farmhouse and our first taste of country living. We got to know the kids on neighboring farms and joined the local Boy Scout troop. Every day after my father left for work, we hopped on the school bus, and though we lived a good distance from our nearest neighbors, we didn’t feel isolated in the least or denied any pleasures.
It was a very different experience for my mother, something I didn’t understand until I wrote Ordinary Grace. When I began to look back more carefully on the history we shared, I saw how challenging, and ultimately destructive, that rural existence must have been for a woman like her. She was vivacious, a lover of music, of theater, of parties. And yet she spent almost every day alone in that farmhouse. She had no one to talk to, nothing to occupy her time but the household chores. What she often did was read, and she finally decided she wanted to be a writer.
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