Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

by Yu Young-nan

  One day, a spat broke out between us while we were doodling in the alley with a slate pencil. Brother happened to be on his way home from work and attempted to break up the fight. But now I realized I had strong support to rely on and clawed at my playmate’s face, trying to deal her a crushing blow. Our squabble then escalated into a battle between the adults.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d scratched or pinched another child. I never planned to, but I think insecurity about my skinny frame drove me to fingernails whenever a fight turned physical. Mother kept trying to reason with me. For heaven’s sake, she implored, don’t scratch. Nails leave telltale marks. If another kid smacks you, just hit back. But I wound up using my nails once more.

  Our landlady was furious about the scratch on her daughter’s face. More seriously, given that I generally didn’t get along well with others and retaliated with my nails in a flash, I must have struck her as a real “problem child,” as we say today. What was Mother teaching me? What could she expect of me when I grew up? Her abuse was tinged with sympathy. She dragged Brother into her attacks too for acting as a bystander and not stopping me.

  If Mother believed she was right, she would plow on ahead, consequences be damned. Besides, snobbish as she was, she harbored contempt for the landlord, whose family life was complicated by a concubine and a child from a former wife. Mother took every opportunity to express her disdain for the way they lived beyond their means. The landlady came to borrow money from time to time, and although Mother readily lent it, she grumbled afterward.

  “This takes the cake. It’d be one thing if they couldn’t afford rice or firewood. But borrowing money because she’s got a craving for beef in their soup? It’s not like I have a choice either. If I weren’t her tenant, you can be sure she’d get a real earful as I showed her the door. I wouldn’t give her a single chon.”

  It must have hurt Mother terribly to have a woman she looked down on insult her precious children and tell her how to raise them. But Mother didn’t chide Brother and me or badmouth the landlady. Seeing her like this scared me even more, because I thought she might go and do something really extreme. I once wrote about how we bought our house after this incident in the magazine Economic Justice, so let me just quote passages from it:

  The following day, my mother went out to buy a house and actually ended up signing a contract within a few days. The house was small—a mere six kan, and farther up the hill in the same impoverished neighborhood, but it was unthinkable that we could afford a house unless we robbed someone. Even at my age, for the longest time I believed Mother had gone crazy. The honest truth, though, is that she actually did rob someone.

  Acquaintances from the countryside visited us frequently because we’d been the first to settle in Seoul. One of them arrived with a large sum of money from a land transaction in the hope of starting a business in the capital. He was staying with us for several days, relying on our hospitality, but had to return home for some urgent matter and left the money with Mother.

  Well, Mother appropriated his cash on the sly. She signed a contract for the house, deliberately finishing the deal before she informed my grandparents and my younger uncle about the details and pleaded for their help. They joined forces and raised the necessary money, hastily selling off some land and borrowing emergency funds, in order to avoid humiliation from their acquaintance’s loss.

  In the aftermath, Mother had to cower before my grandparents for a long time to come. Even to my eyes she seemed very odd. How could she have done what she did? . . .

  . . . Until then, I had considered my mother absolutely upright, so for her to behave like a criminal bewildered me. I was still too young to understand that she was driven by the same touching, blind maternal love that would drive a mother to steal cold rice for her starving child.

  Given Mother’s personality, the first dwelling we purchased in Seoul forced her to muster an almost manic courage, and she went through enormous trouble for it. At the very least, the house had a tile roof. Its six kan held three rooms, a kitchen, a veranda, and a gateway, each unit about one kan in size. The house was built on a tiny, awkward lot. The portion that nominally passed for a yard was triangular and came flush against a steep embankment.

  You can hardly expect a day laborer who lives from hand to mouth to keep his home in fine shape. That house, however, was in even worse condition than usual, for its former owner was a tinker with several mouths to feed.

  Back then, every house in Seoul was infested with bedbugs. People simply took it for granted. They even said that if a house didn’t have bedbugs, well, it wasn’t Seoul. It was anyone’s guess when the previous owners had last papered the rooms—traces of blood from squashed insects coated every inch of the torn wallpaper. But never mind that Brother and I were disgusted; the solution to our money problems left Mother elated. Removing all the doors of the house, she scrubbed them with lye, and then used it to wipe the pillars and eaves as high as her hands could reach.

  Mother claimed it didn’t matter that the house hadn’t been well looked after because it had “good bones.” What she meant was that the pillars and eaves were sturdy. She was right. After several days of wiping, polishing, and papering, the house took on a new look. But only much later did I understand why Mother had bought such a spooky house, with a particular eye to its “bones.” She intended to use the house as collateral to get a bank loan and pay Uncle back.

  In those days, the only financial institutions low-income families had ready access to were the banking cooperatives. When a loan application was made, the cooperative sent out an appraiser to consider whether to grant it. My mother waited on the appointed day, having cleaned the house inside and out, just like for a teacher’s visit.

  The appraiser paid closer attention to the overall structure than to the floors and wallpaper, as my mother had expected, and asked what size mortgage she had in mind. Mother had the nerve to muse about whether the house might not be worth eight hundred won in collateral. The appraiser left without saying anything or committing himself one way or the other. Mother, however, didn’t seem worried; she didn’t bow deeply or fawn over him. She didn’t even treat him to a glass of water or a cigarette.

  Nonetheless, an eight hundred–won mortgage came through soon after, and although Mother was able to settle everything neatly, she didn’t act particularly grateful or appear to consider herself lucky. At the time, low-income family loans came easily enough to anyone who followed due procedure.

  My mother bought that six-kan tile-roofed house at the top of Hyŏnjŏ-dong for fifteen hundred won. The mortgage she took out totaled a little over half its price. She neither knew anyone at the banking cooperative nor was she endowed with unusual social skills. She was just an ordinary countrywoman, and her face would blanch when she found herself in front of a government office or a police station. Nevertheless, she wasn’t afraid to knock on the bank door for the loan she desired.

  I stress these bare facts because I’m concerned that people won’t believe me. I’m all too conscious of the universal belief that since Liberation, corruption in our banking system has meant that loans only come via special privileges of dubious origin or a real gift for networking.

  A dreary litany of minor horrors clouded my childhood and adolescence under colonial rule: petty functionaries—lowly clerks at township and neighborhood offices—who spoke to us condescendingly; policemen, whose glinting swords seen even at a distance made us cower and want to flee, innocent though we were; prison guards, who treated shackled prisoners like animals; Japanese soldiers filled with arrogance and murderous spirits; Japanese teachers, whose eyes revealed pitiful disdain for my mother, a barbarian unable to speak a word of their language.

  But amid all that tiresome bureaucracy, the era’s financial institutions stand out. I have no hostility to speak of toward them. Mother was able to acquire loans when we moved to bigger houses as well. I have to point out, of course, that easy credit also encouraged reckless borrowi
ng. Ready loans played a major role in causing more than a few to unwittingly forfeit their assets.

  We called our new abode “The Triangle-Yard House.” We were all satisfied with it. In fact, we loved it. Brother had a room of his own on the other side of the main hallway from Mother’s and mine, and next to the gate was a room that we rented out. The house had an L-shape, with my brother’s room and the gate at opposite points. The line linking the two formed the base of the yard’s triangle and stood along a high embankment.

  Beneath lay the rear of another house. Mother asked the family who lived there for permission to expand our yard outward, so it could become like an eave for the back of their house. She made a flowerbed in the extension. The family below was happy because they had additional roofing, and I was happy because we now had somewhere to plant flowers.

  The flowerbed was just soil poured onto boards shored up by wooden props, but four-o’clocks and marigolds flourished on it. In the fall, we prepared abundant rice cakes topped with red beans to ward off bad spirits and shared them with our neighbors. Although the house was higher up the hill than the one we used to rent, Mother liked the new community better. She stopped telling me not to go out. Her earlier loathing must have been particularly directed at our previous landlord and his family rather than at all the residents of Hyŏnjŏ-dong.

  The house in front of ours belonged to the head of the neighborhood. It sat tidily on a lot with numerous flowering plants. Back then, alleys were narrow, and everyone kept their gates open, so the fragrance of the many plantain lilies in their lot wafted over to our house at dusk when they blossomed. Their dwelling became known to us not as the house of the neighborhood head but as “The Plantain Lily House.” The family had a girl two years older than me, and although she gave us lily roots several times, the plants never thrived at our house. We nicknamed the home next door “The Single-Gate House,” and Mother became friendly with that family too.

  Now that we had rent coming in and Brother had a good salary, Mother didn’t sew to earn money as much as she used to, but when people expressly sought out her craftsmanship, she worked behind Brother’s back. Brother was extremely filial. Whenever he caught her sewing for others, his face fell and his temper rose. Even at my age, I could sense how wonderful it was to have our own house, to plan a month ahead on Brother’s salary, and to live in familial harmony. Although we did not escape Hyŏnjŏ-dong, mentally and materially we began to adapt to urban life.

  But as soon as vacation started, we were off to the countryside. Nothing had changed as far as that went. I continued to have butterflies of excitement for several days before going home, and I still pitied the children who were stuck in Seoul all vacation long. Yet I now thought that I couldn’t live in the countryside forever. What I found especially frustrating was the dim lamplight. When we returned to Seoul with the opening of school, the electric lights, bright as day, brought me a joy just as thrilling as the scent of fresh village grass.

  Brother had to keep working during my vacation. He remained in Seoul with my uncle, who, after years of hardship, had earned enough to open his own store near Namdaemun. That’s why he’d been able to lend us money when we bought the house. His first foray into commerce was an ice store, a result of the connections he’d developed at the fish wholesaler, I imagine. The shop was located in a neighborhood lined with tidy grocery shops and did a thriving business.

  One of the joys of life in Seoul was visiting Uncle and Auntie. They had no children of their own and doted on Brother and me. Before heading home for vacation, I’d show Uncle my report card, and even though I was a mediocre student until third or fourth grade, he showered me with both praise and snacks for the train. He followed Mother’s interpretation of my marks unquestioningly. As long as I was doing well in Japanese and math, my poor grades in singing and gym didn’t matter.

  Being spoiled by Uncle and Auntie was wonderful, but I was also drawn to the atmosphere of their commercial district, so different from Hyŏnjŏ-dong. There, Japanese and Koreans resided in equal numbers. Uncle’s establishment had a large space for ice storage and even a telephone, a rarity in those days. Although he also sold charcoal in winter, in the district his business was known as the “ice shop.”

  Exaggerated rumors about Uncle’s success evidently circulated back home, as a stream of country folk came to Seoul, hoping that he could arrange for them either to work in a shop or even to start up their own businesses. In return, they had to listen to Uncle’s soliloquy about pulling himself up by his bootstraps. He would go on and on about arriving in Seoul empty-handed, and spending a winter living in the attic above the fish merchant’s ice storage. The aid he extended did not go much beyond offering visitors his braggadocio, nor was he in any real position to help. Nonetheless, his shop, a mere stone’s throw from the train station, remained a magnet for country folk.

  Uncle’s ties meant that he was eventually pressured into hiring a boy from our village. He tried to reproduce his own success story with the lad, first building a loft in the crawl space above his ice storage and having the boy sleep there. But my aunt was meticulous and sweet, and in my eyes, the space, as she had decorated it, was wonderful. I longed to live in a two-story house, and climbing the ladder to this makeshift loft with its tatami mat made me feel as though I were in one. I suppose at some level I thirsted for a Japanese lifestyle.

  In this loft, I came across a comic book for the first time, a tale about a sword fight between Japanese samurai. Uncle caught me reading it and gave me a harsh scolding. He also called the boy and slapped him about his closely cropped head with the book—how dare he run up the electricity bill on this, when Uncle was allowing him to keep the light on late to study? I felt bad about getting the boy into trouble, but I couldn’t forget the excitement of the comic book, especially because Uncle treated it as an illicit pleasure.

  For a long time, the drawings remained vivid in my head. I was dying to know what happened next. I’d have stolen the comic book somewhere, if I could have, just to finish the story. It seems incredible now, but that was the first time in my life I stumbled on reading material other than my textbooks. That was partly because of our poverty, but I never saw classmates with storybooks or the like either.

  Mother’s storytelling talent instilled in me a love of narrative, but she of course was oblivious to the desires she had kindled. I quenched my thirst by reading all the tales in my Japanese and ethics textbooks when I got them at the beginning of a semester. When I was bored, I’d read the good ones aloud over and over. My reading pleased Mother, who assumed I was studying. Then I’d stick out my tongue behind her back and feel a strange thrill in deceiving her.

  Brother had a handful of books in his room, but they were mostly novels in Korean and didn’t interest me at all. Since Korean wasn’t taught at school, I was one of the few children who could read and write it, but I wasn’t yet mature enough to take pride in this.

  I could have easily lost my literacy in Korean, as I’d acquired it in the countryside at a very young age. The reason I managed to hold on to it was that I needed to use it sometimes, much as I loathed when these occasions—letters to my grandparents—rolled around. I cherished Grandfather and Grandmother, but to me, hometown and grandparents were inseparable, almost a single entity. If they hadn’t been there, I’m sure I wouldn’t have felt such joy in going home. But I also thought that if they lived somewhere else, I might not miss them so much.

  As far as I was concerned, Grandfather’s palsy was tied to being as firmly rooted in Pakchŏk Hamlet as its guardian spirits. When vacation approached, my heart even ached for the dried persimmons and chestnuts wrapped in the hemp cloth that reeked of Grandfather’s saliva. This yearning was hardly the same as wanting to eat them. It was bittersweet, filled with melancholy. Like wanting to see ears of corn waving against the crimson glow of twilight.

  Who helps light your pipe when the brazier goes out, Grandfather? Cousin is still too small. When I visit during v
acation, I’ll do a good job running errands for you. Just like you say, I’ll do the work of your own tongue. That’s the sort of letter that would have expressed how I felt.

  But Mother wouldn’t let me write the way I wanted to. She believed that letters had to follow a prescribed format. A letter that violated it, especially to my grandparents, was out of the question. She would sit me down and dictate to me as though I were taking a spelling test.

  The letters always began with similar phrases: “I offer this humble letter to Grandfather. Grandfather, I trust that your health remains in steadfast good condition . . .” Something along those lines. Then after inquiring after everyone’s well-being, in hierarchical order, I was supposed to let them know that everyone on our side, again naming all of us in strict order, remained in good health thanks to the benevolent concern Grandfather bestowed on those below him. Then I would have to finish the letter by saying that I was inquiring after his health because the weather was so unpredictable that I felt concern for his well-being, varying this section slightly, depending on which season was upon us.

  I’d squirm with the tedium of having to write it all down. The thought occurred to me that if I didn’t know the Korean alphabet, I could avoid this torture. Not too surprising then, since this was my only use for Korean, that I had no interest in reading anything written in it. I took it for granted that Korean books would be boring.

  “The Triangle-Yard House” was where we ushered in World War II, or, as the Japanese called it, the Greater East Asia War. We didn’t know what it was all about, but it was an exciting time nonetheless. We were being trained to be belligerent. Japan was in the middle of its war with China, which was dubbed “the China incident” in Japanese. We held the Chinese in utter contempt and called them “chinks.” This became the worst epithet to tease friends with when we bickered. The Japanese pronunciation of Chiang Kai-shek, “Shō Kaiseki,” also was readily tossed about when referring to the general, because it sounded so much like kaesekki in Korean—son of a bitch. Every morning, we assembled in the schoolyard and pledged ourselves as citizens of the emperor’s realm. As we trooped to our classrooms in time to a military march, our blood roiled for no particular reason. Our hawkish passion, our sense of elation, made us want to attack something, anything.