Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

by Yu Young-nan

  What most appealed to me was the idea of going home with skates slung proudly over my shoulder, when the other kids had never laid eyes on such a thing. Mother and daughter understood each other perfectly in this without having to exchange so much as a word. Although we were struggling to get by in a hovel beyond the gates of Seoul, we were determined to impress those back home. The way we strove to realize our dreams of coming home in style, with a Western dress and ice skates, strikes me now as something out of a comedy movie.

  I don’t, in fact, remember if my friends found the skates a source of envy or amazement, but I am quite sure that they provided entertainment. Winters back then were much colder than they are nowadays. The very next day after we returned home, I took my skates out to the paddies, which had frozen as smooth as glass. With children on sleds watching me with curious eyes, I donned my skates and laced them up. So far, so good. But gliding gracefully? Ha! As soon as I made it to my feet, I tumbled right back down. I am not blessed with great natural coordination, but I felt an obsessive need to prove myself. I struggled so desperately that the other kids didn’t even laugh.

  Fortunately, Grandfather rescued me from the nightmarish ice follies show I was putting on. The paddies weren’t ours, but they lay between the brook in our yard and the wagon path that led out of the village. Grandfather had grown fond of gazing at the outside world through a small piece of glass set into the mulberry-paper door, and when he saw my bizarre flailing about, he shouted out to alert the rest of the family and ordered them to bring me to his room at once. Without even asking what I had been doing, he rapped me on the top of the head with his long tobacco pipe.

  “Don’t you realize you’re humiliating the entire family?” he yelled. “And a girl, at that? Don’t you have any better games to play than imitating a shaman’s blade dance?”

  My head smarted, but it was still hard to keep from bursting out laughing. By then, I was already presumptuous enough to look down on Grandfather, who didn’t even know what skating was and whose limited imagination made him think of a shaman dancing on blades. I’ve never wanted to learn to skate since. I’ve never even put skates back on. The embarrassment of that first hapless attempt has stayed with me all my life.

  Except for that one incident, winter vacation was just as much fun as summer had been. My cousin was extremely cute by this point, and, following Grandfather’s wishes, we celebrated New Year’s Day by the solar calendar. There was delicious food everywhere. Back then, the solar New Year was called Japanese New Year, and the lunar New Year, Korean New Year. The colonial government, of course, encouraged us to celebrate the holiday Japanese style, and schools and government offices were open on Korean New Year, as on any other day. Some people in the city celebrated both, but in the countryside, people didn’t even know when Japanese New Year fell. All this was before the government began to crack down on lunar New Year celebrations.

  New Year’s celebrations lasted an unusually long time in the countryside, almost a month and a half. During the preparations, everyone scurried about sewing new outfits, simmering glutinous candies, pounding rice for cakes, making tofu, shaping dumplings, and joining with neighbors to slaughter pigs. Then followed days of eating, drinking, and merrymaking, in which social bonds were reaffirmed. This period lasted from New Year’s Day until the first full moon, and it included visits to ancestral graves, ceremonial bows from the young to elders, the offer of blessings in return, trips to shamans to have fortunes told, and all sorts of games in which young and old and men and women alike participated. For farmers, it was the longest and most leisurely festival of the year.

  I suspect that what prompted Grandfather to take the trouble of celebrating Japanese New Year was his deep affection for my brother and me. A holiday without us would have been meaningless, so he made sure the festivities coincided with our vacation. That said, however, he always believed that the solar calendar made more sense. Every year, someone sent us an almanac published by the Meteorological Office. The calendar indicated both solar and lunar dates, with the traditional twenty-four seasonal divisions, names of the months, and the days designated in a cycle of sixty. Back then, calendars were hard to come by, so the other villagers visited Grandfather to learn the best days for fermenting soy sauce and bean paste, offering rites to house spirits, departing on long journeys, and so on.

  Grandfather would even consult the calendar and predict whether the year promised a cold winter, flood, or drought. After his stroke, he took to rifling through the book with greater interest, as though it had become a hobby. In the end, he apparently came to believe that he couldn’t just watch idly as the villagers continued in their belief that the lunar calendar was necessary for farming. He felt compelled to enlighten them at every opportunity.

  “Why should you have to come ask me when spring officially begins this year? In the solar calendar, it’s always the same. Stop and think. Which is better, a calendar where the seasons’ dates are fixed, or one where they bounce around every year and you even have to add an extra month sometimes? What difference does it make if the solar calendar comes from the Japs? Let’s call a spade a spade. Do we have to say something is black just because the Japs say it’s white?”

  But no matter how worked up Grandfather became, the farmers never bought his argument. They were used to the subtle charms of the lunar system, with its twenty-four seasons that rotated every year. The only enlightened notions Grandfather acquired on his own were about the calendar, but he lacked the authority to uproot the villagers’ deep prejudices against the Japanese New Year. And so our family celebrated an outcast’s holiday, separate from the rest of the community.

  We pooled resources with the other Pak family to have a pig slaughtered, hiring some villagers to do the dirty work. One freezing night toward the last day of the year, we kindled a lamp by the corner room, flooding the breezeway between the front and back yards with light. A commotion rose among the strapping young men, followed by a blood-curdling squeal. I lay under a quilt in the main room, which had gotten all toasty because the kitchen was attached to it and taffy was being boiled down. Instead of feeling sorry for the pig, I was caught up in the thrill of festival excitement, what with lantern light flickering on the papered fittings, the hubbub of the hired workers, and a squealing hog in the midst of it all.

  Brother, though, witnessed the slaughter and wouldn’t touch either the slices of pork or the blood sausages. The grownups were dismayed. Brother wasn’t just the eldest grandson, destined to carry on the family name—he was the only grandson. His refusal to partake in the delicacies deprived them of meaning. Grandfather was extremely annoyed. What good was it for a boy to be so squeamish? He lost his temper and said that Brother should be force-fed if necessary. Even worse, he pointed at me and said grandson and granddaughter should have come out the other way around. That harsh remark wounded both of us.

  We could afford just enough beef to make soup for the offering table during the ancestral rite. All the other dishes, however—dumplings, meat and vegetable skewers, mung bean pancakes—had pork in them. And so crabs pickled in soy sauce were put on the table exclusively for Brother. Once he polished off a crab, picking it apart with his spoon and chopsticks, I’d take the empty shell, scoop rice into it, and then mix it with a dash of the soy sauce the crabs had been fermented in. I’d done this often at my grandfather’s table before. Even with nothing left in the shell, the rice tasted sublime, far better than from a bowl.

  Crabs from P’aju were said to be the best in all Korea, but the ones where I grew up were every bit as tasty. Since freshwater crabs have vanished from the peninsula, people these days might not appreciate why, if I were asked to name the single most unforgettable dish I’ve ever had, I’d say crabs pickled in soy sauce without a moment’s hesitation. Around the season when rice stalks are turning golden in the paddies, female crabs become filled with a gooey, black substance. Words can’t begin to do justice to how those crabs taste when they’ve been mar
inated and left to ferment. The only saying I can think of that adequately captures it is fairly crude: “So damn good, you wouldn’t notice if your dinner date dropped dead.”

  Brother’s refusal to eat the pork weighed on Grandfather. He seemed to question whether Brother had what it took to become the head of our clan. As we were leaving for Seoul at vacation’s end, he lectured him passionately about what it meant to be a man.

  My grandmother, meanwhile, wrapped a bundle of sesame cookies for me to give to my teacher. Light taffy biscuits—whose ingredients included popped rice, fried beans, and peanuts—were standard fare at New Year’s in my village. They were big, round, and enticing, and made perfect children’s snacks. Sesame cookies, however, were reserved for guests, as they were much more laborious to prepare—thin, airy, coated with black and white sesame seeds fried separately, and shaped carefully into long diamonds. As Grandmother wrapped them, she said that she’d put extra care into them for my teacher.

  None of that mattered to me. I was mortified by the image of presenting my teacher with this bundle, wrapped in a crumpled yellow paper bag that had been used for cement, and then tied off with a coarse string. Back then, I couldn’t even picture my teacher going to the toilet.

  From the beginning, I’d felt left out from her attempts to distribute her affection fairly among the pupils as they tagged along after her. Instead of drawing her attention with such an unrefined package, I preferred to settle into the alienation and inferiority complex of a nondescript child whose name the teacher barely knew. I took the bundle to school but didn’t give it to her. On my way home, I called the other children over to Sajik Park, and together we gobbled up the sesame seed cookies in the sun.

  Making the bundle disappear was the simplest solution to my dilemma. First I handed out a few cookies to children who struck me as easy marks and then, teasing them, told them to stick to me if they wanted more. I ran to the park breathlessly, feeling light and free, as though I had broken out of the shell encasing me and could soar into the air. Some kids began fawning over me, but I pretended not to notice and gave more to a child who seemed to be a hick like me. I didn’t make any good friends out of all this, but at least I felt as if I had put the Seoul kids in their place and gotten revenge on my teacher, who didn’t seem to recognize me. Nonetheless, the incident left me with a bitter aftertaste.

  In early autumn, Mother started her piecemeal sewing at home again, which was a great comfort to me. Knowing she’d be home waiting put an extra spring in my step as I walked the mountain path. Almost all the materials she worked with were elegant, colorful silks—yellow, red, pink, purple, green, and blue. They transformed our gloomy room into a brilliant, new world. After winter vacation and before the lunar New Year, sewing jobs poured in. Mother couldn’t do them all, even if she stayed up all night. She’d chat with me to lighten her worries and stave off sleep. “Want to hear a story from long ago?” she’d begin.

  Mother knew countless stories. There was the folktale about the tiger with the refrain “Granny, granny, give me a rice cake or I’ll eat you up”; the story of the grandfather who tried to sell the wen on his chin; the tradesman who dealt in sweet-smelling farts; K’ongjwi and her evil step-sister, P’atjwi; and those two tragic sisters, Changhwa and Hongnyŏn. I’d heard Grandmother tell these stories several times, but they sounded fresh coming from Mother. And it wasn’t just folk tales. There wasn’t a story Mother didn’t know. Her repertoire included literary works, like The Story of Mrs. Pak, Mrs. Sa Goes to the South, A Nine Cloud Dream, Outlaws of the Marsh, and the Romance of Three Kingdoms. She had a real talent for adapting even the more difficult stories to my age level.

  My favorite was The Story of Mrs. Pak. I liked it so much that I begged for it again and again. When she realized how caught up I was in these stories, which she’d originally volunteered to kill time, she started to worry. “They say you’ll wind up poor if you like stories too much,” she’d grumble, but she’d unfurl her bundle of narratives once more, pretending she couldn’t resist my pestering.

  I don’t think anybody in the world could retell the Romance of Three Kingdoms with Mother’s verve. Raising her hand high, she’d intone, “Cao Cao, prepare to receive my blade!” The needle she held at her fingertip glistened, inspiring as much fear as a real sword. A thrill shot through me. I felt sorry that she was reduced to sewing for a living, when she was more than equal to wielding a weapon herself.

  Mother’s stories throughout our years of grinding poverty comforted me and gave me strength, but they also had a negative effect. I didn’t feel deeply unhappy about not having friends at school and almost came to enjoy my loneliness. I think the stories brimming in my head helped me stay aloof.

  I entertained this thought idly much later as I looked back at my childhood. For six years, I had to pass over a hill to attend school, something that was quite rare in Seoul, but I never felt scared or bored. On the few occasions when someone accompanied me, I found having to make conversation a burden. It was actually more comfortable and liberating to walk alone. The stories triggered my young and hyperactive imagination, and I took pleasure in those moments of solitude. In retrospect, though, it strikes me that the way I developed emotionally was not normal.

  5. The Triangle-Yard House

  BROTHER FINALLY GRADUATED. JUST AS Grandfather and Mother had wanted, he landed a job with the central government. Prior to that, my elder uncle, who’d been struggling to farm on his own, became a clerk in the township office. We just held on to our vegetable patches and gave up some productive rice paddies for sharecropping. As I mentioned earlier, there were no tenant farmers in Pakchŏk Hamlet; we offered the paddies to a villager who had more helping hands than we did.

  Grandfather preened himself on his learning and mocked the villagers’ ignorance all too readily. You can get an easy sense of how odious his yangban mind-set was when you take into account that, regardless of Korea’s political situation, he felt satisfied as long as his descendants were civil servants. Central government, provincial office—it made no difference. He simply wanted their livelihood to come from pushing a pen rather than tilling the earth, and he considered a government position the prize of desk jobs. In the end, you’d have to say that my family’s so-called pedigree was the servility of a petty bureaucrat that remained after you stripped a yangban of his scholarly leanings.

  Uncle snagged his job through a distant relative who shared my grandfather’s generation name and pulled some strings for him. This relative’s father appears in history books as the traitorous soul whose seal stamped the Protectorate Treaty of 1905, the document that sold our country to Japan.* Because of this “service,” the son also had title and rank as a Japanese noble. A job in a township office hardly deserved his mighty influence. It was hard to watch my grandfather fawn all over him in the belief that a clerk’s position meant a notable rise in status.

  This kinsman would come to the countryside on occasion. Despite equal generational standing, Grandfather treated him with the deference a servant shows his master. His insistence on offering hospitality far beyond our means made life difficult for the women in the house well before his arrival. Grandmother joked to my mother and aunts that two visits a year from that old bastard of a nobleman would grind us into bean powder.

  In all honesty, though, for a member of a lowly yangban household like ours to find employment with the central government did mean great honor to the family. Needless to say, Brother’s job boosted Mother’s pride signifcantly. But within half a year, he quit to take a position with a Japanese company called Watanabe Ironworks.

  Mother turned pale when she heard the word “iron-works.” What, she had given him all that education just so he could become a blacksmith? Brother tried to comfort her. Yes, the company might indeed be a large smithy, but he worked in its office and his new salary was more than double what he had been receiving. But Mother couldn’t relinquish an attachment to the government office. She begged Brother to te
ll Grandfather and the others back home that he worked for a company. God forbid he should so much as utter the word “ironworks.”

  The first bonus my brother brought home was more than a hundred won. Younger Uncle and Auntie came over, and we passed around the bluish banknote, admiring it with tremendous excitement. I can’t vouch for the two of them, but it was certainly the first hundred-won note my mother and I ever laid eyes on. There was a drawing on it of a rich-looking old man with a bag slung over his shoulder. We genuinely wondered whether the bag was meant to contain rice or money.

  Brother wanted Mother to stop sewing and take life easy, but she declared that she wouldn’t quit until we bought a house. Brother’s salary of roughly forty won a month and his bonuses meant that Mother had gotten closer to achieving her dream. The money more than compensated for her regret over Brother leaving the civil service. Sewing work poured in as usual, but Mother developed a new hobby. She began house hunting in her spare moments.

  When she went, she’d put on affected haughtiness—and her best clothes. I have a feeling that she did so out of self-consciousness, afraid of being caught out by the real-estate agents, since she had no money in her hands on these practice runs. I doubt she went to look at houses beyond our wildest dreams, but she certainly did go to Seoul’s more upscale neighborhoods. From time to time, she spoke wistfully about the huge gap between the prices of houses inside and outside the city gates. Her words made me think that we’d be escaping Hyŏnjŏ-dong the very day we bought a house.

  But Mother purchased a house all too quickly, and in Hyŏnjŏ-dong, no less. Although she’d been going about her house-buying plans methodically, she wound up taking the plunge suddenly—and all because of me.

  She hated to see me play with our landlord’s child, but even if we’d been mortal enemies we couldn’t just ignore each other while living in the same tiny compound for two years. Kids have a natural affinity for one another. More to the point, forbidden fruit has its attractions for them too. Unbeknownst to Mother, the landlord’s daughter and I became close.