Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

by Yu Young-nan

  I now got to do as I wanted, so I roamed the village with my friends or invited them to the backyard, where before I’d played quietly by myself. Nobody told me that Grandfather’s helplessness meant a vacuum of authority in our house, but I sensed it intuitively. I made the most of it, even turning the outhouse into part of my private playground. The outhouse did frighten me for a while, because that was where Grandfather had fallen over and become half paralyzed. I was scared about what might happen if I fell there too, but I got past my fear soon enough. Of all the spots I played in during childhood, our outhouse excited the imagination most.

  In my village, every tale in which an outhouse figured involved goblins—not scary goblins, but silly and jovial ones, as in the story about a goblin with a stuffy nose who can’t smell anything and spends all night in the outhouse making sticky brown millet cakes out of poo. The goblin believes that the ash there is bean flour and rolls his cakes in it over and over again, carefully molding each one. But he wants to be sure to have all his cakes at the end, so he resists the temptation to taste any while making them. When he finally finishes at dawn, he bites into one, only to spit it out, retching. Then he stirs the pieces back into the original muck, furious. It was said that if you opened the door without a warning cough and surprised the goblin at his work, he’d hastily offer you the largest cake of all in embarrassment and urge you to try it. If you didn’t, there was no telling what mischief he’d play on you.

  There’s another outhouse tale I recall vividly. One winter solstice, a daughter-in-law makes some delicious red bean porridge for that festival. Not satisfied with one bowl, she ladles out more for herself and ducks off to the outhouse. Meanwhile, her father-in-law has absconded there to sneak some more porridge as well. When she dashes in, he is startled and tips the bowl over his head. The daughter-in-law rises to the occasion, however. Thinking quickly, she offers her own bowl and says, “Father, I brought you some more.” The father-in-law replies, “Child, I don’t need it. Look! My sweat is already running down just like porridge.” Grown-ups used to tell these stories frequently to teach us to give some warning before we opened an outhouse door.

  Children nowadays, what with their phobia about countryside outhouses, would probably gag at that tale, but in fact the outhouses where I grew up were clean enough to eat porridge in. They were very roomy, sometimes as big as three or four kan, with a wooden frame in one corner where adults would take care of their business. Kids just squatted on the dirt floor. This area resembled a shed, and its floor slanted to allow turds to roll downward, not into a deep pit, but into a section where ash from the kitchen furnace was dumped. In outhouses, people kept handy a long stick with a rectangular board attached, which children also used to sweep their droppings into the ash (this is why a gangly person is sometimes called a “shit stick”). You need to be aware of all this to follow the story about the goblin rolling millet cakes in flour.

  Grown-ups, for their part, swept the outhouse ground morning and evening, leaving behind clear broom marks. Back then, excrement was used, together with compost, for fertilizer. The population was small relative to the amount of cultivated land, so this night soil was always in short supply. Disposing of the ash in the outhouse covered the feces and increased its value by bulking it up.

  Sometimes villagers went all the way to Songdo to buy human waste for fertilizer, but they complained that the “Kaesŏng skinflints” watered it down. Of course, those who grumbled were just as miserly, for they never peed in other people’s fields; even if they went to visit neighbors, they held on to their full bladders until they made it back to the edge of their own patches.

  I don’t think I was that calculating, being so young, but I’d go off to our outhouse with a pack of friends. If kids are playing house and one suddenly asks, “Who wants to play hide-and-seek?” the others scramble after her. In exactly the same vein, when anyone suggested a trip to the out-house, we’d all follow. We’d squat together, our round bottoms exposed, and strain in unison, even if we didn’t have to go to the bathroom. Back then, little girls wore “windbreaker knickers,” with an opening underneath to make squatting easier. Even at midday, the outhouse was dark, and the girls’ white bottoms looked pale and blurry, like unripe gourds on a roof beneath a hazy moon.

  Although we exposed our bums, it wasn’t a big deal if we didn’t have to move our bowels. Crouching side by side and chatting was fantastic fun. As we squatted in our dim hide-away, excreting little corn ears of dung to mirror what we’d eaten, our trivial tales called forth flights of fancy and elicited histrionic “oohs” and “aahs.” “Did you hear about Kapsun’s dog? It had six puppies, but listen to this! The dog’s yellow, but no puppy was yellow—just black ones, white ones, and white ones with black spots.”

  The most important thing was to deposit plentiful, well-formed turds in the outhouse. We knew there was nothing shameful in shit, because it went back to the earth, helping cucumbers and pumpkins grow in abundance and making watermelons and melons sweet. We got not only to savor the instinctive pleasure of excretion, but to feel pride in producing something valuable.

  And while the outhouse itself was fun, after a lengthy stay within it the outside world took on an extraordinarily beautiful cast. The sunlight glittering on the greens in the kitchen garden, the grasses and trees, the tiny streams—all this was as dazzling as if we’d never seen any of it before. We squinted and sighed, feeling almost as though we’d emerged from a forbidden pleasure. Much later, when I experienced the world’s brilliant strangeness after watching a movie that was off-limits to high-school students, the white collar of my uniform tucked under to conceal my identity, I felt that these outhouse adventures of my childhood were replaying themselves.

  Long afterward, I read Yi Sang’s essay “Ennui,” about a half-dozen children in the countryside who have no toys to speak of. Not knowing how to entertain themselves, they mash grass with stones but soon grow bored. They then stretch their arms to the sky and scream. Finally, all other possibilities exhausted, they squat in a row to deposit a pile of feces each. Yi Sang describes this as a last, desperate gasp of creativity, but even without his explanation, his remarkable talent as a writer evokes a horrifyingly vivid sense of overwhelming tedium.

  However, this vision depends on the sensibility of Yi Sang, who was a Seoulite to the core. People from Seoul are welcome to pity country kids and wonder how they can live somewhere so dull. But it was only after I came to the capital that consciousness of boredom sprouted within me, almost crushing me. To say that the wonders of nature were much better playthings than the toys that kids in Seoul enjoyed is not entirely accurate. We were part of nature, and because nature is alive, changing, in motion, not resting a single moment, we had no time to be bored. No matter how hard farmers work—scattering seed and tending their crops as they sprout, grow tendrils, bloom, and bear fruit—they can never gain a step. Nature has its own busy rhythms.

  Children aren’t any different. We had our three meals a day at home, but we were always on the lookout for snacks and coming up with ways to while away our time in the mountains and fields. There would be new sprouts galore to choose from—sweetgrass, wild rosebuds, mountain berries, arrowroot, bindweed root, chestnuts, acorns, and shinga. When we picked them, we were able to satisfy our creeping hunger and had the chance to please the grown-ups, as when we collected mountain herbs and mushrooms. Some of them, like “jar mushrooms” and “bush clover mushrooms,” sprouted so fast that you could almost imagine a finger pushing them up from the ground when you turned your back.

  Likewise, when we splish-splashed in the brooks that flowed throughout the village, we’d collect tiny shrimp that put on acrobatic displays as they jumped about. All we had to do to gather as many as we wanted was to bring along an old sieve. The shrimp would wind up in our bean paste soup at supper, adding a delicate flavor to it.

  All our playthings were alive. We’d catch dragonflies and then cut their delicate tails and insert l
ong stalks of straw before letting them fly off again. We’d grasp carpenter ants and tentatively lick at their sour-tasting rear ends, even though in the end our own calves wound up bitten by swarms of red ants.

  Sometimes we’d make bridal dolls out of grass, wind their hair into buns, and hold mock wedding festivals. Hollowed crab shells were hung as pots, pine needles became noodles, and golden grass turned into kimchi. As a finale, we’d pull up purslane roots and rub them with our fingers. Then, eagerly chanting, “Light a lamp for the groom’s chamber, light a lamp for the bride’s chamber,” we’d make nuptial lanterns from the reddened roots. We had an unlimited supply of playthings at our disposal and never needed to repeat a game from one day to the next.

  In midsummer, under the blistering sun, we sometimes ventured on expeditions to a small river where all the tiny brooks came together. The rain showers we encountered there offered a magnificent spectacle. Seoul children may think that showers descend from the sky, but we knew the truth: they charged forward from the fields like soldiers. Where we were playing could have been bathed in relentless sunshine, but as soon as thick shadows came down over fields nearby, we’d spy a curtain of rain making its way toward us. We’d fly home at breakneck speed, shrieking, all too aware how fast that curtain moved.

  Our hearts were ready to burst with a feeling we couldn’t articulate. Anxiety? Ecstasy? The fields would awake from their languid sleep to fan our emotions, the grain, the vegetables, and the grasses abuzz in a communal riot. Inevitably, the curtain of rain unfurled over us before we could take shelter beneath roof eaves back in our village. The combination of the dog-day heat and our mad dash set us aflame. When the deluge lashed us, fierce as a whip but refreshing as a cascade, we’d explode at last.

  Ahh, our glee was truly explosive. We’d whoop, surrendering ourselves to the downpour. The fields joined us in our dance of joy. At those moments, it was impossible not to feel as one with the swaying corn and the palmcrists.

  Nature, though, brought not only ecstasy, but sorrow. My first memory of sorrow stands separate from any particular event; it’s just a mental snapshot. My mother was carrying me on her back. As the baby of the family, I often asked to be strapped on for a piggyback ride even when I was past the age for it, so I might have been as old as four. The evening afterglow had taken on an unusually crimson cast, as though the sky itself were bleeding. It wasn’t that our village appeared especially dark or light, but it looked completely different, the way people you know well can appear unfamiliar if seen across a bonfire.

  I couldn’t bear it and burst into tears. My sudden outburst baffled my mother, and I had no explanation for it either. I just felt pure, unadulterated sorrow. Later I had a similar experience, on an evening when the wind was especially dismal. It’s hard for me to describe my overwhelming sadness as I returned home alone after parting from my friends. Millet stalks swayed in the vegetable patch. They were outlined in the soft persimmon tones of twilight against the contours of the ridge. This time, though, I tried to find ways to accentuate my melancholy. What could I do to make that swaying sadder, drearier? I lowered myself, tilting my head to find the correct angle, and wound up lying on the grass on my back. And I quietly waited until the sorrow welling in my heart flowed out in tears.

  In the aftermath of Grandfather’s stroke, our house was a gloomy place, but the slackened discipline meant I was having the time of my life. When he was healthy, he’d been as opposed to my roaming around with my friends as he’d been to the women going to Songdo or working in the fields.

  Grandfather, fortunately, hadn’t become completely paralyzed, but he’d still lost the use of his left arm and leg. Immediately after the stroke, he took out his frustrations on the family, but he gradually made peace with his handicap and sought pastimes that remained within his ability.

  And so he gathered the village kids and taught them to read and write. Our outer quarters became a school. The region lagged badly in accepting anything modern—our neighbors thought of my uncles’ four years of primary schooling as new-fangled education. People still venerated Chinese characters, believing they represented true learning, and looked down on the Korean alphabet, which they referred to as ŏnmun, or “vulgar letters.” One reason for the lack of respect was that our alphabet was easy to learn.

  Grandfather’s school was popular. Villagers from not just Pakchk Hamlet but the other side of the hill sent their sons to attend. The sound of recitation drifted from the outer quarters all day long. The villagers’ attitude toward my family changed. Previously Grandfather had acted arrogantly without real cause, but now it seemed that even the elders nodded to me in deference.

  One day Grandfather called me to the outer quarters, and from then on I was obliged to study The Thousand Character Classic. Thankfully, the book my grandfather gave me had the Korean alphabet written in, glossing the pronunciation of each character. Although I still didn’t know that what people called ŏnmun was in fact our alphabet, I’d already got down about half of it. Mother taught me, but with Mother instruction was equivalent to coercion. She made me feel that since she’d learned it overnight, I had to do the same.

  Mother was learned for a countrywoman. She wrote letters for the others, who would come late at night to ask her help. I’d wake to see her holding a brush and unfurling paper in the dim lamplight. The village women, reluctant to bother her on their own, would come in a group when she wasn’t busy. As she read back the letters she’d written, some visitors dabbed at their brimming tears with their long blouse ribbons, while others sat dazed, mouths agape. Encircled by these women, Mother would undergo a transformation, her expression imposing and her voice solemn. When she experienced this metamorphosis and became so different from both the mother I knew and the other women around her, I felt afraid and proud of her at the same time, and my pulse raced. The following morning, it would seem as though it had all been a dream.

  Although Mother’s familiarity with the alphabet gave her license to act superior in our village, she was totally ignorant about the alphabet’s history, absurdly so. She knew that King Sejong had created it, but she claimed he’d come up with it in a sudden flash while squatting in an outhouse. According to her, his inspiration came from the patterns on the door frame.

  Now you can see where the story could have begun—the letters do look like they might have been modeled on the geometric patterns in a Korean door frame—but Mother stressed this point over and over, just so she could brand as fools those who took a long time to master something so simple. I believed her. Only after liberation from Japan did I learn that the alphabet was no mere set of “vulgar letters” but our proud hangŭl, which King Sejong and his scholars had developed with painstaking care.

  I was obsessed with the fear that she’d consider me an idiot if I didn’t learn the vowels and consonants right away, so I memorized the combination table. But I didn’t master it. I couldn’t manipulate the letters to make meaningful words or sentences, nor did I have reading material at home to test what I’d learned. In her room, Mother had several storybooks she’d copied out herself, but she’d written them in a flowing, cursive style that might as well have been a foreign script compared with the printed form she’d taught me. Master the alphabet? I didn’t recognize a single word.

  After Mother went to Seoul, my grandmother sometimes chanted for me, “Add k to ka, and you get kak; add n to ka, and you get kan,” and so on. If she hadn’t, I’d have forgotten what little I knew. Whether it was inflated confidence in me or pure arrogance, my mother wanted to believe I understood everything after learning just a smidgen.

  I didn’t really understand the alphabet, however. I just pretended that I did. I grasped its logic only as I repeated after my grandfather, “Heaven, ch’ŏn; earth, chi.” Once I figured out that the Korean symbols written beneath the Chinese characters represented their pronunciation, I became more interested in reading the Korean than the Chinese itself.

  I was killing two birds with
one stone. Since I could compare the two writing systems on the sly, Grandfather praised me, saying I never forgot anything I was taught. When he caned a big boy, old enough to be married off by the standards of the time, for having failed to memorize a section of his homework, Grandfather yelled at him, citing me as an example. I felt proud of myself, but I was also anxious about being exposed as a fraud, because the book that came after The Thousand Character Classic didn’t have Korean that I could use as a crib to cheat.

  But Grandfather’s academy didn’t last long. He had another stroke. This second stroke lacked the drama of his collapse in the outhouse, but it was every bit as tragic. It destroyed what remained of his dignity, the very feature that made him who he was. His right arm and leg shook, and although he had managed to resume going to the out-house, that too came to an end. Now he became clumsy even with a spoon, and he’d spill his soup when he ate. A hemp towel lay ready in his lap to wipe away the stream of spittle he produced as he spoke.

  Although he slurred now, his voice remained resonant. He’d call me several times a day to run small errands or to keep him company, particularly when he got tired of sitting blankly by himself or when his temper flared. But being so young, I didn’t want to see him because he looked so helpless.

  Sometimes, when he wanted to write a letter, he’d have me rub down his inkstone to produce the ink he needed. His trembling hand meant it took ages to create a wobbly series of characters. They struck me as completely illegible, and I thought he was having me prepare the ink just to make my life difficult. But Grandfather was the only one in the house at that point to keep up correspondence. My mother and brother sent notes of greetings, and letters came from many others as well.