by Steven Moore
The finest Korean novel of this period may also be the most derivative of Chinese literature, but what it lacks in originality it more than makes up in charm and sophistication. A Nine Cloud Dream (Kuun mong, 1687) by Kim Manjung (1637–92) was written in Chinese for his mother, a well-read woman who had raised Kim on a steady diet of Chinese classics. (When older, he would read Chinese novels to her for their mutual enjoyment.) Drawing upon the the same Buddhist dream-tales that would serve Cao Xueqin and Li Ruzhen so well, A Nine Cloud Dream concerns a young Buddhist monk who commits a minor indiscretion with eight female fairies, is sent to hell, and punished with reincarnation in 9th-century China, as are the flirty fairies. A bright boy, he rises to fame, romances the eight disguised fairies along the way, and eventually becomes the emperor’s right-hand man and the husband of eight wives and concubines. They live in harmony until old age, when he decides to retire and become a monk, at which point he awakes and realizes it has all been a dream. He and his eight companions are as impermanent as clouds, hence the title. Convinced of the illusoriness of the real world and the vanity of social success, he returns to his studies and eventually becomes the leader of his monastery (which includes the eight fairies as nuns) and finally becomes a bodhisattva.
Kim Manjung, a scholarly official who was always falling in and out of favor due to political factionalism, initially wrote the novel during a year of exile to cheer up his mother, using the Buddhist frame as a convenient structure for a highly aestheticized jeu d’esprit. Worked up from dozens of topoi from Chinese history and literature, it’s a dazzling display of everything he learned from his mother and an homage to talented women like her. Given Kim’s reputation as a womanizer, it’s safe to say the novel also gave the middle-aged exile an excuse to dream up a gaggle of unforgettable girls, and they give A Nine Cloud Dream its considerable charm. Those immune to such charms can natter over the conflict between Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism at work in the novel, as many of its critics have done.78
We get our first glimpse of the girls in chapter 1. The monk Hsing-chen, almost 20, is sent by his Indian guru Liu-kuan down to the undersea realm of the Dragon King to pay his respects. After the monk sets out, eight fairy girls arrive at Liu-kuan’s monastery on Lotus Peak, scattering fairy flowers as they inform the guru that the Daoist goddess Lady Wei has sent them there to pay her respects. After doing so, the girls lollygag amidst the beautiful scenery. “Now that the Lady has sent us here on this lovely spring day and it is still quite early,” one suggests, “let’s go to the top of the peak and loosen our robes, wash our ribbons in the waterfall and make a few poems.”79 Following the source of the waterfall, they arrive at a stone bridge over a river, where the author conjures up one his many conflations of art and nature, reflection and reality: “The spring air was intoxicating. The eight girls sat on the bridge and looked down into the water. Streams from several valleys met there to form a wide pool under the bridge. It was clear as a polished mirror and their pretty dark eyebrows and crimson dresses were reflected there like paintings from a master’s hand. They smiled at their reflections and chattered together happily without thought of returning home and did not notice when the sun began to slip behind the hills” (18). Into this enchanting setting Hsing-chen returns. Having got a little drunk at the Dragon King’s, he too takes off his robe and bathes his hot face in the stream when “Suddenly a strange fragrance was carried to him on the breeze. It was like neither incense nor flowers. It entered his mind and intoxicated his spirit, like something he had never imagined before” (19)—the scent of young girls in flower. Slipping back into his robe, he follows the fragrance to the girls on the bridge. He asks permission to cross, but they tease and toy with him instead. After he pays a “toll” by changing peach blossoms into jewels, the girls giggle and ride away on the wind. Hsing-chen can’t sleep that night, of course, can’t stop thinking about the fairies, and fantasizes what it would be like to be a successful Confucian official who “takes pleasure in beauty” instead of a poor Buddhist monk. His guru senses this weakness and thus sends him off to take a ride on the wheel of reincarnation.
He is reborn into the family of a hermit and renamed Yang Shao-yu. The first half of the novel tracks his progress from a gifted student to an honored member of the emperor’s court (which he accomplishes by age 16), during which he encounters one enchanting girl after another: the reincarnations of the eight fairies. (Interestingly enough, they are all from broken homes or single-parent households, as is Shao-yu: his father abandoned him at age 10 to follow the Dao, and thereafter Shao-yu remains devoted to the woman who raises him. Kim’s own father committed suicide shortly before he was born.) Indulge me as I introduce each of them.
At age 13, Shao-yu leaves home to sit for the civil-service exam, but en route comes upon a secluded house surrounded by willow trees, whose fronds “swept the earth like the hair of a girl when she combs it in the breeze after coming from her bath” (26). Aroused by the scene, he composes and recites a poem about the willow (a traditional Chinese symbol for femininity), which awakens the inhabitant of the house from a nap and brings her to the window: “Suddenly her eyes met Shao-yu’s. Her hair was mussed and her jade hair-pin was askew. Her eyes were still heavy with sleep and she looked dazed. Her eyelids were messy and her make-up was smudged, so that her own natural loveliness, beyond what anyone could describe or paint, was revealed” (26). By the standards of the day, the girl’s steady gaze is an act of shocking brazenness, but this is no standard girl; this tousled beauty is Rainbow Phoenix (Ch’in Ts’ai-feng), the first of the eight grounded fairies. No older than he, Phoenix decides she wants to marry him after he moves on to the local inn, so she sends him a message in verse to that effect, which impresses him as much as her beauty: “Neither Wang Wei or Li Po could have written better” (29), the author has him exclaim, the first of many self-congratulatory remarks Kim Manjung makes about his own creations. Shao-yu replies in verse, suggesting a rendezvous that night, which Phoenix rejects not for moral reasons but for fear of gossip. The next day, however, Shao-yu wakes to find the streets filled with soldiers, responding to a rebellion, and Phoenix is lost in the chaos. Distraught at both the loss of his fiancée (as he now considers her) and the cancellation of the exam, Shao-yu shuffles home.
The following spring he has better luck. Now 14, he leaves again for the capital and en route comes across a pavilion where young men are partying with some singsong girls. The guys have all written poems and submitted them to one of the entertainers, a reserved girl with beautiful manners called Moonlight (Kuei Ch’an-yüeh), who has a faultless eye for poetry. The person with the best poem gets to have sex with her; it isn’t clear whose idea that was, but Shao-yu dashes off a poem, wins the contest, and that night “They made love ecstatically, with happiness beyond what either had anticipated” (40). She too proposes marriage, to which Shao-yu agrees, after he has passed his exam.
And so it goes as he unknowingly reunites with the eight fairies he dallied with on the bridge in his previous life. In the capital, he disguises himself as a musical nun to meet an aristocrat’s daughter named Jewel (Cheng Ch’iung-pei), “more like a fairy than a girl” (45), who possesses an expert’s knowledge of ancient music. After he comes in first in the exam, he becomes engaged to the pretty musicologist, and at her suggestion takes on her companion Cloudlet (Chia Ch’un-yun) as a concubine. Some sexual hijinks ensue as Cloudlet fools Shao-yu into thinking she’ a seductive fairy and then a ghost, and more crossdressing as Moonlight returns dressed as a young man for whom Shao-yu has homoerotic urges. (It’s difficult to remember Kim wrote this for his mother’s entertainment; she must have been a liberal-minded lady.) Moonlight then tricks Shao-yu into sleeping with her friend Wild Mongoose (Ti Chung-hung), another dancing girl who had also disguised herself as a boy. (Shao-yu’s persistent inability to see through disguises feeds into the novel’s real/unreal dichotomy and undercuts his eventual conversion to Buddhism, as I’ll argue later.) When
Mongoose explains her deception, we learn the author’s inspiration for this bedtrick (probably from one of the books Kim’s mother read to him when younger): “Shao-yu was very pleased. ‘Even the famous dancer Yang Chih-fu cannot compare with you. She played the same sort of trick on Duke Li Wei. I am only ashamed that I cannot compare myself to the duke when she came to him in the night’ ” (80). Kim Manjung makes these sorts of allusions throughout the novel, acknowledging where he found the raw materials for his story. (It’s worth remembering that originality wasn’t a virtue at this time; the skillful rearrangement of traditional materials was the true sign of artistry.)
A crisis arises when the emperor orders Shao-yu to disengage himself from Jewel in favor of his daughter, Princess Orchid (Lan-yang, for whom Gale uses the unintentionally louche name “So-wha”), a crisis left hanging when Shao-yu goes off to put down a rebellion in Tibet. One night in camp, an assassin appears out of thin air, a girl fetchingly dressed in a military tunic named Mist-wreath (Niao-yen), but she recognizes Shao-yu as her soul-mate and suggests marriage: “So they went to bed together. The gleaming of his sword took the place of nuptial candles, and the boom of gongs replaced the music of the lute” (99).
At this point, exactly halfway through the novel (the structural significance of which translator Rutt obscures with his chapter rearrangement), Shao-yu falls asleep and has a dream within the dream-novel, descending again to the realm of the Dragon King, whose daughter Whitecaps (Po Ling-po) seduces him into defeating a dragon prince in exchange for assisting Shao-yu’s army. (Whitecaps suggests they should wait until after she transforms herself before having sex—“I am covered in scales and smell fishy”—but Shao-yu gallantly says he doesn’t mind her “scales and fins” [103].) “So he took her by the hand [fin?] to bed, and they did not know whether it was a dream or reality, they had such joy together” (103). Nor does the reader know, for after Shao-yu wakes, there’s evidence in the “real” world that it wasn’t a dream, and in fact Whitecaps will return later in the novel as a singsong girl and become another of Shao-yu’s concubines. Returning to the capital, Shao-yu finds his engagement crisis solved after the emperor adopts Jewel and arranges for a double wedding with her and Orchid (though as a joke everyone dupes Shao-yu into believeing Jewel has died and he’s marrying Orchid’s sister), and soon the other six fairies join him as concubines.
I’ve gone into some detail to show that all eight girls Shao-yu acquires are not generic fairy princesses but distinctive, accomplished young women, boldly independent even by modern standards. Most of them are extremely well-read, and their other talents are showcased in chapter 14, where the author arranges for a hunting picnic to let them make splendid spectacles of themselves. By this point, Shao-yu has a stable of eighty female entertainers, “divided into East and West divisions. Ch’an-yüeh had charge of the East forty and Ching-hung had the West forty” (148).80 Orchid’s brother Prince Yüeh challenges Shao-yu to a contest, pitting his girls against Shao-yu’s, and the latter’s talented concubines win the day. Some demonstrate their archery skills, or horsemanship, or sing, dance, play the lute, or improvise poetry. Especially impressive is Mist-wreath’s sword dance:
Then he and Shao-yu each drew their swords and gave them to Niao-yen, who fastened up her sleeves, took off her sash and leapt into the dance. The swords flashed around her till their silver glinting blended with the swirling red of her dress like late snow-flakes flurrying among the peachblossoms. The music grew faster, the blades flashed more fiercely, the tent was filled with a frosty light, and her body could not be distinguished in the dazzling fury of the dance. Suddenly a green rainbow stretched across the sky, and a chill breeze passed between the cups and dishes. Everyone’s marrow froze and their hair stood on end. Niao-yen had intended to go through all the movements she had learned, but fearing that Prince Yüeh would be alarmed, she stopped dancing, threw down the swords, bowed and withdrew. It took the prince some time to get his breath back. (158–59)
After we catch our breath, we realize this long chapter doesn’t fulfill any narrative function: Prince Yüeh doesn’t plot revenge for his defeat, we learn nothing about the talented girls we didn’t already know, and in fact after this chapter the narrative races through the rest of Shao-yu’s life—about 40 years in four pages—to conclude with his conversion to Buddhism. Just as Shao-yu experienced a dream within his dream halfway through, the novel climaxes with this performance within the performance piece that is A Nine Cloud Dream. Kim Manjung intended to awe and delight his reader as much as Mist-wreath does with her sword dance, and when the monk wakes from his dream at the end, it is analogous to a reader closing the covers of a novel. Of course the experience is unreal, but the experience should enhance one’s sense of the possibilities of life—suggest (to Kim’s original readers, for example) that unmarried Korean girls should be given a chance to spread their wings instead of being confined to house arrest, and that kings should appreciate their loyal ministers—not drive one to renounce life and take religious vows just because the world doesn’t measure up to one’s nine-cloud dream.
Numerous times Kim exposes how credulous Shao-yu is, always falling for clever girls’ tricks and disguises—“I may be stupid, but I would not be duped by a ghost” (69) he boasts after being duped by a “ghost” (Cloudlet)—so when he embraces Buddhism at the end, the consistent pattern of gullibility suggests he’s falling for yet another con. In fact, after Shao-yu learns how Cloudlet duped him, he has a moment of enlightenment: “Now I understand the principle of transmigration” (70). That is, he understands the principle’s a joke, or rather merely a metaphor for the roles people play and the changes we go through in this life, not a cosmic vehicle for the soul wheeling through the aeons toward nirvana. Womanizer Kim had a different kind of nirvana in mind, as the conclusion to this charming episode suggests; a tipsy Shao-yu takes Cloudlet by the hand and teases her:
“Are you really a fairy or a ghost? I made love to a fairy and I made love to a ghost, and now I have a real pretty girl! But I’ll make you into a fairy and I’ll make you into a ghost! Shall I make you into Heng-o, the beautiful woman who lives in the moon? Or shall I make you into a fairy of Heng-shan?”
She answered coquettishly: “I have been very bad to you, haven’t I? But you will forgive me?”
“If I didn’t spurn you when you were a ghost, what do you think I’ll do now?”
She stood up and thanked him solemnly. (70–71)
Hence the novel is more akin to Ho Kyun’s utopian fantasy than to the Buddhist fable it appears to be: one more deception in a novel filled with deceptions, but this time played on the reader instead of on Shao-yu. If you’re truly convinced of the vanity of the material world, you write something like The Pilgrim’s Progress, not something as smart and debonair as A Nine Cloud Dream.
Kim Manjung wrote many other novels, though only one survives: Sa-ssi namjong ki (Lady Sa’s Dismissal, c. 1690), written in Korean but not yet translated into English.81 It is a roman à clef about the palace intrigues that led to Kim’s exile in 1689, specifically about his niece Min Inhyon, who in 1681 married at 14 the 19-year-old King Sukchong (ruled 1674–1720). He dumped her eight years later after she had failed to produce an heir and made his concubine Chang Huibin his queen. (In 1694, two years after Kim died, the concubine was disposed and Inhyon welcomed back to the throne.) Kim’s version is set in China with stand-in characters, but in the 18th century an anonymous author wrote a novella on the same scandal, this time naming names.
The True History of Queen Inhyon (Inhyon wanghu chon) expands on the brief summary above, but like The Record of the Black Dragon Year transforms history into a fairy tale to highlight Inhyon’s superhuman devotion to propriety and decorum. The reader can see the shift from the historic to the folkloric in the first two paragraphs:
Queen-consort Inhyǒn, wife of King Sukchong, 19th king of the Yi dynasty, was daughter of the Minister of Defence, Min Yu-jung, and granddaughter of the Chief M
inister of State, Song Chun-gil.
It was said that her mother, Lady Song, had a strange dream while pregnant, and at last on the twenty-third day of the fourth moon of 1667 she gave birth. Auspicious signs accompanied this birth, and the room in which the child was born was filled with aromatic fragrance. The incident was so extraordinary that her parents forbade the members and servants of the family ever to speak of it.82
From this point on, the plot unfolds with the black-and-white simplicity of a fairy tale. Inhyon is a paragon of rectitude, the concubine as evil as can be, and the king a befuddled man who moodswings theatrically between rage and contrition. The moral opposition is dramatically reinforced by a righteous minister who opposes the king and undergoes a series of tortures without flinching, and by the shamans and an ex-prostitute named Sukchǒng (only a diaeresis mark away from the king’s name) whom the concubine enlists for the black magic that eventually kills Inhyon after she is rethroned. (Inhyon did indeed die in 1701 at age 34, seven years after her restoration.) The good are rewarded, the evil punished, the moral delivered. It’s not particularly good, but it is worth noting as an example of the “court novel” (kungjong sosol) and because it’s one of the few Korean novels from this period that has been deemed worthy of translation.