The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea

by Pearl S. Buck

  Yul-chun had listened but remained unchanged, reflecting that it was Tolstoy who decided his mind and gave him strength to deny all women, even Hanya. He had been inspired by Tolstoy and when he discovered that Tolstoy had created his greatest novels only when he had ceased to occupy his time and his energy with women, he had determined to renounce women from the first. Why waste any part of his life? Nevertheless, he was too honest not to acknowledge to himself that in spite of resolution he found himself curious about women and what their place was, however he might decide that they had no place in his individual life. In the society of the future it was scarcely sensible to believe that a woman could be allowed only to do the slight work of her own household and her own few children. The problems and labors of the times were immense, and was it just that all solutions and labors should devolve on men while women were permitted to busy themselves with the small affairs of single households? But why was he thinking of women? He would not think of any woman. Since he had sacrificed everything for his country, he would also sacrifice desire.

  … He walked northward through the mountains to Antung, a city at the mouth of the Yalu River but on the soil of Manchuria. Here he planned to rest for a while and learn of what was taking place in Russia before he made the long journey northwest. Since Antung was a city where many travelers met, he would hear news. He arrived at Antung in early summer and found many Koreans there, some in families eking out their livelihood as petty merchants and traders, but most of them solitary men like himself, restless and searching for a means to free their country. All advised Yul-chun against going to Russia.

  “Go to China,” they told him. “The revolution is finished in Russia. In China it is only beginning. The Chinese leader, Sun Yat-sen, has invited Russians to help him, since Western powers have refused him help, and you will see their tactics. We Koreans are more like the Chinese than like the Russians.”

  He followed this advice and after staying long enough in Antung to learn what he wanted to know, he packed his knapsack again and went deeper into Manchuria. In Manchuria he stayed with the escaped soldiers, and found them not dismayed by the failure of the Mansei Demonstration. Instead they were training themselves for the next world war, which they said was surely coming, for Japan was making ready to conquer China now while confusion was increasing in that country. A great new revolution, they told him, was shaping itself like a thunderhead out of the south.

  “Sun Yat-sen needs an army,” they told Yul-chun, “and Russia is training Chinese soldiers for him. When all is ready they will make a second attack, marching along the Yangtse River to the southern capital of Nanking and then they will seize the country and set up a new government.”

  Yul-chun listened to this and much more, and then without telling anyone where he went he headed south again to China.

  … It was nearly winter before he reached Peking and there he was halted by a fierce storm, the wind blowing out of the cold desert and driving the snow in drifts along the country roads. Half frozen and his money gone, he was compelled to stay for a while in the city and he sought out the Koreans he had once known and who had fled there. Most of them were gone, some killed in the south, some killed or in prison in Korea, but he found one whom he had known, a monk who came first from the Chung Dong Monastery on the island of Kanghwa and later had gone as a mendicant monk to the Yu-lin Monastery in the Diamond Mountains.

  The monk was also a Kim but not of Andong and he remembered Yul-chun from earlier days when they had worked together in their own country. Now when Yul-chun stood at the door of the small, poor house where Kim and his fellows lived in the Chinese part of the city, they cried out in joy each at the sight of the other.

  “Come in, come in!” Kim cried. He shut the door quickly to bar the great drifts of snow that blew in with Yul-chun. “Say not one word until you have taken off those wet garments,” he went on, “and I daresay you have had nothing to eat all day.”

  “I am empty as a bag,” Yul-chun confessed, “and a penniless beggar besides.”

  As he changed into dry garments and ate the hot noodles that Kim prepared, they talked, exchanging news and hopes. In the year of Mansei, the young monk had become a member of the Monks’ Independence Movement, and with his fellows, some three or four hundred, they too had printed a declaration of independence. He had traveled among villages, wearing his monk’s robes, but when he came to the capital he was too late for the day of Mansei, and he was seized by the police and put into prison for a year. When he was free again he went on with his work. While he was in the capital he fell in with the young men and women who were reading Russian books, and so he read Karl Marx, for which Hegel, he said, had prepared him.

  Last year, with seven fellow monks, he came here to Peking so that he might learn more about revolution, but after a few months, five of the seven monks returned to the monastery, where they said life was more pure and more safe than among these revolutionaries.

  “What shall we do now?” Kim asked.

  Yul-chun, remembering his printing press, made reply. “We must publish a magazine.”

  “There has been one called The Wild Plain.”

  “We will make no poetry,” Yul-chun said bluntly. “We will call ours Revolution.”

  Long into the night they talked and they ate again and at last they went to sleep. Before he slept, however, Yul-chun made up his mind that he would stay in Peking at least for a time and return to his best loved work, that of creating new literature for the revolution, his home here with his fellows. For this he needed only a pallet for bed, and he had in his knapsack his lacquer rice bowl and the silver chopsticks and spoon which his grandfather had given him a hundred days after he was born. He was happy again, safe among his kind, and he set himself to his chosen work.

  “You make yourself blind!”

  The sound of Hanya’s voice struck a blow across his brain. His hand, holding the chisel, hung motionless above the stone. He did not turn his head, but he knew that she was crossing the brick floor, though her straw-sandaled feet made no sound. She came to his side and snatched the chisel from his hand.

  “They told me you were doing this stupid thing,” she cried. “Do you imagine yourself a god? Can you make miracles?”

  “Give it to me,” he muttered between his teeth.

  He put out his hand to take the chisel from her but she held the tool behind her back.

  “I would not believe it when they told me,” she went on with the same passion. “‘He is making himself blind,’ they said—‘writing the magazine with his own hand, all of it,’ they said, ‘and then carving the letters into stone—’”

  “I am compelled to use lithograph because I can find no printing press in the city, at least none that I can buy,” he retorted.

  “So you will be blind because there is no printing press in Peking that you can buy!” she mocked. She threw the chisel on the floor and took a magazine from the table of rough unpainted wood. “Thirty-two pages! Twice a month! How many copies?”

  “We began with eight hundred, but now we have more than three thousand. It goes to our own country, but also to Manchuria, America, Hawaii, Siberia—”

  “Be quiet!” she cried. And stooping she took up the chisel, and walking to the door she threw it as far as she could into the street.

  He was too surprised to move, not imagining that she could do such a thing. Then he sprang at her and twisted her out of his way but she clung to him and would not let him go. Try as he would, he could not rid himself of her. Arms about his neck, legs around his thighs, she clung, catching his arms when he flailed at her, kicking him when he pulled away. They fought in silence, their breathing hard, their faces set in angry grimace, their eyes furious.

  He was shocked at her strength. Passive he had always said women were, passive and negative, weak frail creatures at best, but this woman he had to fight as though she were a man. He paused for a moment to get his breath and she seized the instant to wrap her arms around hi
m under his shoulders and then he felt her teeth bite into his neck.

  “You—you tiger,” he panted. “You—you—dare to—”

  “Your blood tastes sweet on my tongue,” she murmured against his neck.

  And he felt her lips soft against the spot where an instant before he had felt her teeth. He stood motionless, suddenly aware that she was no longer fighting him. Her body relaxed, she lay against him, yielding, her face in the curve of his shoulder. She was drawing him down slowly, gently, and he felt his head swim. She reached out her hand and between thumb and finger she pinched the wick of the candle by whose light he had been working, and they were in darkness. In darkness she drew him down until they lay on the floor, she beneath him. His whole body was warm and fluid, his will gone, his entire being one swelling urge toward her.

  … This was the story of their love thereafter. He yielded to her and he fought her. When she insisted that he must stop printing the magazine he declared that he was by nature a writer, and never so happy as when he wrote, and he was fortunate that the revolution needed writers. He insisted that he would never yield to her and daily he did yield to her until in desperation he decided to leave Peking and go south again. This he did because she told him one day that she would have a child.

  He forbade her to come with him. “There will be war,” he told her. “It will be dangerous for you. And I must not be hampered by a pregnant woman. I would think of you instead of the battle.”

  They had been living together for more than a year, here in Peking and in villages of North China and Manchuria to which they wandered from time to time, but he had never ceased to believe that it would be better if he were alone and to tell her so. When she said that a child was coming, her black eyes soft with joy and her whole being radiant, he felt a strange new anger against her, a surge of love mixed with hatred, and he cried out now, against her joy.

  “You know I said we must not have a child! You use this trickery to compel me to think of you—you and the child—you divide me! I am to pity you and the helpless child. You make a triumph of it.”

  She heard this, her eyes wide, and she looked at him as though she had never seen him before. “You are not a man,” she said, her very voice wondering. “I have not wanted to believe it, but now I know. You are not a man, and I have loved you, thinking you were a man, believing that in your heart you loved me.”

  She studied his angry face, dwelling upon its every feature.

  “How I have loved you,” she said, still wondering.

  And with these words she turned and left him standing there in the room which for this short time she had made into a home.

  … He waited for her through twenty-three days and nights and he could not believe that she would not come back. When day passed into night and night dragged endlessly toward dawn again, he began to understand that she was never coming back. Then he had himself to battle. He longed for her. He yearned to go in search of her. He dreamed of taking her with him to Korea to his father’s house and staying with her at least until the child was born. He had told her of that house and of his family. Lying quietly side by side in the night after they had made love, she had often asked him to tell her about his childhood. She asked him of every small thing, as though she herself had lived in that house.

  “Did you sleep in the room next to the kitchen, or in the one next your father?”

  “We spread our beds in whatever room we wished,” he explained, “but never in my father’s room. My tutor slept with my brother and me, after we no longer needed a nurse. My brother was a good child, but I was not good.”

  She laughed when he said that. “You are still not good!”

  “Yet it is I who am alive,” he retorted, “and my poor brother is dead.” For Yul-chun knew, as all Koreans knew, how his brother and Induk had met their end, and with them their daughter who would not be separated from her mother and so Induk had taken her to the Christian church that day.

  “Prudent and careful and good, it was he whom they killed,” Yul-chun now reminded Hanya. “You see why I say a man should not have a wife and children?”

  “Be quiet,” she told him.

  It was her usual rejoinder when he said what she did not like to hear. It had come to such a pass of love between them that what he had once said seriously he said at last in play, for he believed she knew that he loved her although he would never tell her so. Part of the play, or so he thought, was her pleading to be told and his refusal.

  “Tell me you love me—tell me only once so that I have it to remember!” This was her plea.

  “I will not,” he always replied, “for if I do, I have no defense against you. You will get so far inside me that I shall never be able to root you out. Words are like iron nails hammered into hard wood.”

  “You do love me?” she coaxed.

  “What do you think?” he asked, biting back the words that would say he loved her.

  “I think you do,” she said in the same soft voice, “and since you do, why not tell me so?”

  “Ah ha,” he had cried, “you nearly caught me, but I am too clever for you.”

  So he had never said he loved her and now she was gone and he could not tell her if he would. He waited seven days more, sleepless with longing, his body demanding her presence, but he would not yield to his own demand. If he went after her, then he would never be free again. He rose one night in the small hours, desperate with weariness and longing, and he packed his knapsack and set out for the south on foot and alone.

  … He traveled three thousand miles, on foot and on horseback, and lived through many months before he reached the city of Canton in South China. He lingered here and there on the way to see how the people lived and whether there could be reason to expect revolution, for he was too just by nature to believe that they should be compelled, nor would he allow himself to use these Chinese land people to strengthen the cause of freedom for his own people. He was not able to make up his mind as he walked the country roads and passed through villages and slept in small inns. The people were a cheerful, cruel people, accepting hardship and dealing hardly with any whom they thought unfriendly, too gay for suffering, although they spoke robustly against the times, grieving that they had no ruler in Peking now that revolutionists had destroyed the imperial throne.

  “Oh, that we had our Old Buddha again,” they told him. “She was our father and mother. While she lived, we knew we were safe. Now who knows what will happen to us?”

  They spoke of the Empress Tzu Hsi. She had died many years ago, yet such had been her power over their minds and hearts that he came upon villages where the people did not know she was dead and when he told them, they were afraid. The difference between the Chinese and his own people was that the Chinese were still free. If they had no government, as indeed they had not, for Sun Yat-sen with all his followers had not been able to set up a new government in the vast and ancient country, at least the people were free to govern themselves according to family tradition and habit, which they did, so that the country was at peace except for the war lords battling among themselves for a chance to rule, and the revolutionists who were young and full of discontents. In spite of all, the land people farmed their fields and the sea people caught fish, and the river people lived in boats, crowding the canals and rivers and the coastal towns. He doubted much that the vast continent and the countless people could be roused to revolution or indeed whether they should be roused. Their lives were stable in custom and tradition and they were not starving and no one oppressed them except here and there a greedy landlord. He heard laughter and lively wit in the teashops where men gathered, and children were fat, and women were busy. Against whom then could they rebel? They asked only to be let alone, and more than once some old man or young would quote to him the ancient saying of Lao-tse, that the governing of a people was like the cooking of a small fish, it should be done lightly.

  The further he traveled the more he marveled that one country could be so vast and
contain such variety in landscape and people. Desert in the north and northwest spread into rich plains, and here the fields were wide and the land people grew wheat and dry crops and they ate wheaten bread and millet and they were tall and fair-skinned and they reeked of garlic, for the favorite food of the countryfolk was a thin sheet of unleavened bread rolled around stalks of garlic. The northern cities were busy with shops of every kind, the markets plentiful and the streets wide. The people wore cotton garments, in winter padded with cotton, and if one wore silk, he covered it with a cotton outer robe.

  In the central part, above and below the Yangtse, a river as wide as a sea for a thousand miles, where steamships of many countries came and went and foreign warships kept watch at treaty ports, the country grew mountainous, but not as his country was. Here the mountains were green and gentle and the valleys were spread in fertile plains between. The people were tall but not so tall as those in the north, and there were many cities, richly crowded with shops. The people were less simple, too, than those of the north, indeed they were often crafty and worldly, even shrewd, but they were gay and full of talk and laughter, the women lively and free in coming and going as they liked, except for the ladies in rich men’s houses who stayed inside their walls.

  One whole winter he spent in the city of Shanghai, for here he found some three thousand Koreans gathered and he soon made a place for himself among those who printed a magazine called Young Korea. Yet again he discovered his compatriots divided, and this time into two main groups, those who still favored Americans—and these were for the most part Christians and educated in the United States, and believed in nonviolent revolution—and the second group who were for the Russian method of revolution and were all for direct attack against the Japanese now ruling in Korea. Both groups received money secretly from Korean patriots in Korea and the exiles elsewhere.