Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

by Yu Young-nan

  Finally we arrived in Seoul. Mother and I, with all our bundles, lagged at the tail of the crowd. Panting, we climbed a pedestrian overbridge that was indeed several times bigger and busier than Kaesŏng’s. Other people’s loads were much lighter than ours, and they could hand them to porters in navy blue uniforms and red caps. Mother, however, flailed about nightmarishly, struggling under the weight of our packages. A long, long time seemed to pass before we exited the ticket gate and reached the plaza in front of the station. Right in the center of it, Mother shed her burden, the way she might pour out buckets of water, and plopped down in a heap. I was so overwhelmed by the crowds passing around us that it didn’t even register with me that we’d arrived in Seoul at last.

  A-frame carriers in tattered dirty clothes rushed to us, like a band of beggars, competing noisily to carry our bundles. Some tried to lift them away unasked. When it dawned on me that we could hire a porter, as we’d done from Pakchŏk Hamlet to Kaesŏng, I felt a semblance of hope return. But Mother shook them all off, saying we’d take a streetcar.

  A tram was running through the street. It was blue, shorter than a train carriage, and looked as though it had horns stretching from its back up to lines in the air. When I saw sparks leap between its horns and the lines, my curiosity turned into fear. Mother stayed sprawled on the ground, and the porters who had scattered approached again, one by one.

  Mother chose a porter and began bargaining, but the criteria she used to pick one were beyond me. She pointed across the street with her chin. How much to go over there, to the other side of Sŏdaemun? The carrier quoted a price. Mother refused. She began pulling down the bundles he’d placed on his A-frame. How much did she have in mind, then? After a long bout of haggling, mother and daughter were at last liberated from their burden. We walked on ahead in front of him.

  We passed a crowded street, dirty and noisy. Its dust and grime were reflected in the clothes of the people who walked along it. After crossing a big intersection through which streetcars traveled, pedestrians thinned out and the road began to look more like the one I’d seen in Kaesŏng. Farther ahead loomed a large gate that blocked the street.

  “That’s Independence Gate,” explained Mother. The A-frame carrier, trailing behind, asked breathlessly whether we’d arrived yet.

  “Just a little farther.” A wheedling smile flickered on my mother’s face.

  “How far is ‘a little farther’?”

  “Over there, Hyŏnjŏ-dong.”

  Before she finished her sentence, he stopped in his tracks. His eyes bulged in anger. Was this some kind of joke? Who’d go all the way up that hill for the amount of money she’d offered? Mother held her ground, retorting with a question of her own: Why would she pay several times more than the tram fare, instead of riding in comfort, if her destination was in the flats of Seoul? She coaxed him onward, saying she was considering adding a tip so he could buy some rice wine. He grumbled, cursing his luck for the day, but followed anyway. Once the name Hyŏnjŏ-dong had come out of my mother’s mouth, though, he became noticeably rude. It was all too clear that he looked down on us. Where on earth was Hyŏnjŏ-dong to make him behave as he did? My spirits sank at the change in his attitude.

  The double streetcar tracks that had accompanied our journey came to an end. Mother entered an alley that soon turned into a series of precipitous steps lined by houses. It was a strange neighborhood. The houses clustered together on a steep hill and looked ready to tumble down its side at any moment. The houses had simple plank gates, but you could see everything that went on inside them. Drainage grooves running along the steps brimmed with a fetid mix of cabbage leaves, rice grains, and urine.

  We struggled to the top of one hill without stopping, but the neighborhood continued. On we went, following an alley that twisted and turned, barely wide enough for two people to pass, until we came to steps even steeper and less regular than those we’d climbed below. Finally, about half-way up, my mother stopped in front of a thatched house, one of the few even in this poor neighborhood. But that house wasn’t ours, either. Mother was merely renting a room next to its gate.

  The room was cramped and gloomy and had a tiny attached veranda. The only furniture was a chest of drawers, papered in a brightly colored pattern of deer, turtles, and the so-called herb of eternal youth.

  Since the women in my family didn’t have to work in the fields, they must have had time to burnish our furniture, for the chests that lined one side of every room in our house gleamed. Grandmother had brought a three-tiered chest with her when she got married. Although some nickel hinges were missing from its doors and they didn’t open properly, the wood of the chest had a deep, subtle sheen. In the corner of one room, an opaque blue-gray vinegar jar with a long neck and fat tummy sat beside the wardrobe. For years, vinegar had been stored in it, its acidity staining the jar naturally. I found the jar very beautiful. It struck me as mystical, just like the shrine to the household spirit in the yard. As far as I could tell, vinegar was made by pouring leftover liquor or rice wine into the jar. Sometimes small moths flew out. My grandmother considered that jar precious, saying our vinegar was the best in the village. If anyone asked for some, she refused, saying she was afraid that her recipe might be stolen. She issued this pronouncement with such solemnity that she didn’t sound stingy, and I felt a mysterious power in her words.

  Heartbreaking images of that long-necked jar, the wardrobe of fine-grained wood, and the harmony they created within the room came to me. It was a scene of paradise lost. My own sense of beauty had developed under the influence of aesthetics handed down for centuries. The chest that confronted me here, with its hasty paper job and tacky colors, insulted my eyes.

  3. Beyond the Gates

  “ARE WE IN SEOUL?” I WHINED.

  To my surprise, Mother said no. “We’re outside the city gates.” In a soothing tone, she continued, “Later on Brother is going to get a job and make lots of money. Then we can live inside the gates and hold our heads up high.”

  I heard people coming and going outside our window until late at night, bellowing out gibberish: “Manju na hoya, hoooya!” It sounded like they were selling something, but I didn’t bother to ask. I wasn’t especially curious.

  Sometimes, back in the countryside, the howling of animals beyond our fence woke us.

  “Don’t tell me it’s those damn wolves again.” Grandmother would grumble and sit up, concerned that they might make off with our chickens. I heard their howling, but I never actually saw any wolves. I longed to be able to fall asleep amid their baying once more.

  From the next morning, I began to adapt to life in Seoul—or, better put, to life in a rented room. I had no choice. When I woke up, I asked Mother where the out-house was, but she told me to wait until the people inside were finished before I went. I’d already learned on the train that an outhouse was also called a “toilet,” and that only one person at a time was supposed to be inside it. The night before, I’d gone to the toilet in the house. I now learned I was going to have to wait my turn even just to go squat.

  Mother went a step further: “Do you know how much trouble it was to get you here? I had to be really careful. I told the landlord that I just had your brother with me. I thought they wouldn’t like you being here because they have kids your age.” Was this my mother, my oh-so-proud mother, talking? How could she pretend I didn’t exist? I’d been spoiled rotten up to that point, and now here I was suddenly finding myself feeling unwelcome. I’d been tricked, I thought. I now saw Mother in a different light. I wanted to go tattling to Grandfather and to ask Grandmother to rescue me, but, alas, they were too far away.

  Being a tenant, though, demanded a whole lot more of me than just holding it in when I needed to go squat.

  “It’d be better not to play with the kids inside. If you fight, the grown-ups might get into a fight too.”

  “Don’t watch the kids when they’re eating.”

  “Don’t touch their toys.”

&n
bsp; “Don’t go acting all jealous either.”

  “The less you go inside the house, the better.”

  Better? Better if she looped a straw rope around my ankles and tethered me to a post. What in the world did she want me to do? Become invisible? That seemed to be what she was hoping for. She refused to understand how difficult all this was for me, a seven-year-old girl who’d gallivanted around our village at will. Even the village’s boundaries were too confining.

  Living in a rented room was hard enough. Worse yet, the school year was fast approaching. Mother said we lived outside the city gates because we were poor, but she’d already made up her mind that I had to go to a good school in Seoul itself. She didn’t care what I thought. Back then, schooling wasn’t compulsory, so children had to pass an entrance exam first. This didn’t mean they could take the test for any school they chose, since each district had its own designated school, just like today. Mother was obviously well aware of this, as she’d already officially transferred our residence to our relatives’ house in Sajik-dong.

  Mother thought about how far I’d have to walk and settled on Maedong Elementary School. To get there, I had to climb over a ridge that skirted Mount Inwang. I’d go up from the center of Hyŏnjŏ-dong just beyond the ruins of a fortress. From there, a path led down to Sajik Park. The track was not steep, but not many people used it. Supposedly, lepers swarmed in the forest just off this path. Mother laughed off these horrid rumors when she took me to the school on a reconnaissance mission several days before the test.

  “Don’t believe everything you hear. Lepers don’t kidnap kids or steal their livers to eat. They’re people, just like us. They can’t bring themselves to do things like that any more than anybody else could. Only idiots are scared of stories that aren’t true. If you meet a leper, just act naturally. Don’t be frightened. Don’t run away. Just look straight ahead and keep walking, and don’t stare.”

  My mother’s tone always had an overbearing smugness that made even reasonable advice come across as a bullying harangue. But I could sense her waver when she talked about the lepers. Of all her advice, what she said about them made the most sense to me, and so I wasn’t afraid of running into them. After our scouting journey, I began preparing for the entrance test in earnest. I’m sure you’ll do great. But Mother’s confidence didn’t stop her from making my life miserable. She’d drill me several times a day on questions she thought might come up. She quizzed me on writing my name, telling time, counting, adding, subtracting.

  I was good at all that, but I hated having to memorize two addresses. The first address my mother taught me was, of course, the one in Sajik-dong, the house where we were officially supposed to be living. Memorizing that was a cinch. It would have been enough, too, but she suddenly became apprehensive about what might happen if I got lost and gave that address, so she had me memorize our address in Hyŏnjŏ-dong as well. It was long, complete with a subdivision number, but I had no trouble with that either. At that age, I could parrot anything easily enough. But Mother turned into a complete worrywart. I assume it was fear sparked in part by a basic innocence, pangs of guilt about a mildly fraudulent application. I mastered both addresses in no time, but then she began to worry that I might get confused and give the wrong one during the test. In trying to acquire peace of mind for herself, she almost drove me crazy.

  Out of the blue, she’d blurt, “Where do you live? Where’s your house? What do you say if you’re lost?”

  Then I had to give our address in Hyŏnjŏ-dong.

  If, though, she said, “Where is your house? Now you’re taking the test in front of the teacher,” then I had to give the fake address in Sajik-dong. Mother was petrified that I’d confuse the two. I wouldn’t have, but the way she acted made me freeze and I’d get nervous about mixing them up. And then everything turned into a mess. With each passing day, I did worse and worse on Mother’s blitzkrieg spot checks.

  My mother sorely regretted what she’d done, saying she should never have taught a stupid girl like me two addresses, and just to forget about Hyŏnjŏ-dong until after the test. But you can’t just forget something because somebody tells you to. The more she pressured me, the more tenaciously my brain clung to the information. Although I’ve forgotten almost all the many addresses I’ve had in Seoul over the course of my life, including the one at Sajik-dong, I still remember Number 418, Lot 46, Hyŏnjŏ-dong.

  And so came test day, with my head in a whirl because of my addresses—and it was hardly certain a question about them would surface. I remember wearing a long, pale green silk coat, the one Mother had brought with her when she came to fetch me from Pakchŏk Hamlet, and getting a fresh haircut at a barbershop.

  As it turned out, there wasn’t a question about my address on the test. Instead, they set down three go pieces in one spot and four in another and asked me how many there were in total. They showed me a picture of a man in a Western suit and a student, and then a picture of a fedora and a student’s cap and told me to match the hats with each figure. Then they showed me smoke rising from a chimney and asked which direction the wind was blowing in. I got only two out of three questions right. I answered that the wind was blowing in the opposite direction from the smoke.

  Mother’s relief upon hearing they didn’t ask my address turned into bitter disappointment when she heard that I’d given a wrong answer. If she had just considered that I’d failed and left it at that, things wouldn’t have been so bad. But she couldn’t conceal her disgust. She pointed vehemently at everything in sight—fluttering hair, billowing coat tails, the Japanese flag waving from the pole in the school playground. “What direction is the wind blowing now? What direction? Good lord! If you don’t even know that much, who’d want you, anyway?”

  Why did the wind have to blow so strongly that day? To make matters worse, we were in Maedong School’s broad, open playground. There were almost no surrounding buildings, and we were exposed to the wind’s full force. That evening, Mother relived her fury for my brother’s benefit.

  “You don’t know what’s under the lid until it’s been lifted.”

  Although Brother was still in secondary school, he was much older than I was because he hadn’t started elementary school until he was nine or so. He was taciturn and thoughtful.

  The result was due to arrive by postcard. Of course, if good news came, it would go to our Sajik-dong address. After waiting long enough for the card to have arrived several times over, Mother dressed me in my silk coat and took me to visit our relatives in Sajik-dong. It was my first trip to the house whose address had practically driven me insane. On the way, Mother kept stressing that the house was located inside the city gates.

  The neighborhood was indeed in much better shape than Hyŏnjŏ-dong, and cozier too. Above all, I liked it because it was on level ground, instead of clinging to a hill. Our relatives’ house had a long outer portion that lay on the street. The inner quarters lay behind a gate. The outer quarters had tile roofs but were shabby, rundown, and smelled terrible—completely different from those in our country house. I learned later that, in fact, the outer section was for the servants; they were not outer quarters as I knew them. In a yard in front that looked like an alley, a maid was washing clothes. When she caught sight of my mother, she stood up, her face beaming.

  “Missus, congratulations! I heard Young Miss passed the test.” She bowed again and again.

  It was the first time we’d ever been addressed as Missus and Young Miss. It was also the first time I saw my mother act so haughtily. With sudden arrogance, she said, “What’s the fuss? All she did was get into elementary school.”

  Once we passed through the inner gate, a different world appeared. A veranda, enclosed by immaculately polished glass doors, rose on gleaming terrace stones of granite. The yard was neatly swept and contained a tap and a cement water basin. The housemaid had followed us in. She scooped water from the brimming basin into a pail. I marveled, filled with envy, at the tap and its infinite supp
ly of water.

  Not a single house in Hyŏnjŏ-dong had running water. Everyone either bought water from vendors or carried it home themselves. On the flat ground below all the steps was a set of communal taps. A long line of pails always stood in front of them. The vendors had pails made of zinc, with wooden handles that had been bored so they could be hooked to a carrying frame. These buckets were different from the ones used by people who carried their own water. The professionals’ pails were rectangular and the size of an oil canister. Everyone else had cylindrical pails about twice as big.

  The water sellers made dozens of deliveries each morning. Their goal was to exert as little effort as possible, since delivery cost one chon regardless of bucket size. Those fetching their own water, however, tried to carry as much as they could on each trip.

  Mother didn’t know how to fit herself with a yoke for carrying water, so she had two buckets delivered every morning. Those buckets had to last not only for cooking and drinking, but also for bathing and laundry. For over a month after my arrival in Seoul, Mother nagged me. She was intent on my becoming, first, a model tenant, and second, a frugal water consumer.

  “Don’t throw the water away after you wash your face. Wash your feet with it, and then use it to wash the rags. When you’re done, I’ll sweep the yard and wet it down with what’s left.”

  Mother called the alley in front of our house “the yard.” She swept it daily, so she could have just cause to look down on neighbors who didn’t follow suit. Sometimes I’d blunder, and the water she had doled out for me wound up in the drain before reaching its final destination. She’d tuttut in dismay as though a prized possession had accidentally been thrown in the garbage.

  The area inside the front gate doubled as our kitchen, and one corner held a jar buried in the ground. The water seller came at the crack of dawn, but I never heard the crossbar being lifted. Either the landlords had already removed it for their own water delivery, or they just left the gate open all night because they didn’t own anything worth stealing. I’d wake to the splash of water poured into the jar. That splish-splash of successive pails being emptied was the most depressing thing of all about life in Hyŏnjŏ-dong. It brought home to me our poverty in all its degradation. Survive all day on two buckets? In the countryside, it had never even crossed my mind to be careful about water, let alone treat it as a precious resource.