by T'aejun Yi
“T’aok!”
The cave was filled with solemn silence.
They spent four days together at Pulguk Temple.
For those four days, he thought of T’aok as a piece of Yi dynasty white porcelain. Ostentatious pots fight for a spot, are jealous of their master’s eye, and grow more rowdy and tiresome the longer they are around, but Yi dynasty white porcelain are completely different. Unnoticeable at busy times, they are waiting to one side when it grows quiet. They are vessels from eternity that provide quiet comfort and refreshment and never exhaust.
When he returned to Seoul, Maehŏn sent T’aok an Yi dynasty white porcelain brush rack, which he had stood on his stationery chest and treasured night and day. Autumn came for real, followed by spring and another autumn; all that while he continued his innocent correspondence with T’aok.
Maehŏn agreed with a certain publisher to put out a volume of his writing. It was supposed to appear before the end of autumn, but by early winter he still had not handed over the manuscript. After one month crouched in front of his desk, not only did his sides and shoulders ache, but he began to feel dizzy for the first time. When he had to heat his room as the days grew colder, his dry skin began to contract, and even his heart seemed to be fighting a losing battle. He was not going to be able to finish the manuscript at home, and so he removed himself to the hot springs at Haeŭndae.
It was not far from Kyŏngju, and he contacted T’aok upon his arrival. He asked her not to visit until he was done with the manuscript, but she appeared suddenly without waiting to be asked.
She was in full bloom. She wore a light-green patterned chŏgori jacket, and her face looked like a lotus bloom rising out of a lotus pond. While Maehŏn was aging, youth seemed to have reached its peak in T’aok. It was only to be expected. In conversation she spoke more plainly than in her letters, but Maehŏn inhaled deeply on the warmth emitted by her blossoming youth.
“Were you always this pretty T’aok?”
“Whatever did you used to think of me!”
“I’ve grown old, haven’t I?”
“Isn’t age in the mind?”
“I wonder.”
When T’aok returned from the public bath, she quietly took away his pen, the steam still rising from her hand. Maehŏn closed his dizzy eyes for a while before he was able to get up and walk down to the beach with her.
There was a cold wind blowing by the water. Waves were rolling in too. Maehŏn pulled up his coat collar and huddled down into his jacket, while T’aok ran ahead of him, wearing nothing more than a loosely tied men’s chŏgori jacket.
“Come on.”
He had been to this beach several times, but this was the first time he tried running along it.
“Sir?”
“Mm?”
She was staring out at the water.
“Sir?”
“What?”
“Do you like the sound of the waves?”
“Of course!”
“Doesn’t it remind you of Tagore’s meditation upon hearing waves?”
“I’m a bit too cold to remember Tagore at the moment.”
“If we were to travel around all the coasts in the world, I wonder how much the sound of the waves, and the weather too, would change according to the shape of the coast, the sand, or even whether the water is clean or murky. Where would the waves sound the best?”
“That’s quite some meditation!”
“The sound of the waves never stops!”
“Aren’t your legs cold?”
At the sight of her long, slender legs wearing tight, thin silk socks beneath a black serge skirt, which was flapping in the wind, Maehŏn felt himself newly aware of her sensuality.
It happened that evening. Once a shivering Maehŏn had returned from the beach and drank three or four cups of rice wine at the warm dining table, his whole body was overcome with drowsiness. Sitting back from the table, he had barely exchanged a few words with T’aok before he suddenly dozed off. When he opened his eyes again in surprise, he had no idea how long or short a time had passed, but saw T’aok staring at the ceiling forlornly. He was embarrassed and rolled his eyes vigorously as if nothing had happened, but deep down he felt really sad. A sharp loneliness pierced his parched breast, almost as if he were jealous that her spirit had been conversing with someone else while he had been asleep.
“I fell asleep, didn’t I?”
“You’ve been working too hard for a while now. You mustn’t overdo it.”
“I was hardly overdoing it … so I heard that some Koryŏ porcelain has turned up near Kyŏngju?”
“Did they say Kyŏngju? It was at Kimhae. It looks like the stuff made at Mt. Kyeryong, but every now and then something turns up that is much simpler.”
“Similar to the stuff at Muan … now that …”
Again he nodded off.
“Sir?”
“…”
“Sir?”
“Now that … that isn’t Koryŏ …”
“Why don’t you go to bed early?”
She opened the sliding door and went into the next room. Maehŏn dozed, still sat in his chair. When he woke up some time later, the alcohol had worn off and he felt quite cold. He went to the baths. By the time he had warmed up his body for an hour or so, he felt so refreshed it seemed a shame to go to sleep. Recent experience suggested that if he had slept for a short while early in the evening, he would not be able sleep even if he went to bed. He lit a cigarette and picked up his pen.
But time never passes as quickly as when holding a pen. Sometime later, when his body had cooled down so much that his hands felt chilled, the sliding door quietly opened. T’aok appeared, stroking her disheveled hair with one hand and clutching her sleeping gown with the other.
“Do you know what time it is?”
Only then did he look at his watch. It was almost two o’clock.
“Didn’t I say that you shouldn’t overdo it?”
He put down his pen and stood up, stretching. T’aok’s sleepy face was the pearly red color of a peach flower, all the way down to her softly rounded chin.
“You should go to sleep.”
“I will.”
She went back to her room and returned holding her pillow. Then she switched it with Maehŏn’s pillow.
“Please sleep in my room.”
“Why?”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“Why?”
“Please don’t worry.”
And she laid down in Maehŏn’s bed.
He did not ask again. Secretly kissing the kind heart that had offered him her warm bed, he softly buried himself in that heat from her body, which was even more fragrant than the spring waters themselves.
He had no idea how long he had slept, but it was the first time that he had woken late since coming to Haeŭndae. When he opened his eyes, the sunlight was glaring through the gaps in the ceiling. He felt around the bed for his watch and fumbled instead upon a piece of paper. It was T’aok’s handwriting.
Sir, I have to go. Recently I got engaged. I wanted to tell you this last night as we talked, but there was no opportunity. He is arriving on the morning boat from Tokyo today. I want to meet him in Pusan, and so I have to leave before you wake up. You’ll forgive me, won’t you? I hope you will not work hard but have a good rest and return to Seoul with a wonderful, completed manuscript. Sir, you’ll wish us well for the future, won’t you?
He stood up abruptly. The letter was not the only thing by his bed. She had cleaned his ashtray and placed it on his desk beside his cigarettes and matches before leaving.
He closed his eyes and sat with his head in his hands for a while, and then read her letter again. He pulled the sliding doors open. The room was empty. A cold air wafted out. He picked up his cigarettes. He only managed to get up when he had smoked all the remaining cigarettes, more than half a pack.
“She’s gone!”
He could not settle the whole day. He tried drinking. He kep
t on smoking. In the evening he went down to the beach, even though the wind was even colder than the day before.
The waves sounded the same as the previous night. It was just as she had said, it seemed as if their sound would last forever.
The evening sun over the ocean was beautiful. But it changed with every instant. Dusk was falling far too quickly.
—On the Twenty-seventh Day of the First Month of
the Year of the Water Horse
First published in 1942. Translated from Yi T’aejun,
Toldari (Pangmun sŏgwan, 1943)
UNCONDITIONED
At first I used to go along for the joy of catching fish, then gradually fishing itself became the attraction, but it seems to me that fishing begins long before taking up a spot by the water. Whether it’s time spent mending a broken line or tidying up a net or basket beneath a lamp in the evening in order to set off at daybreak on the following morning, lying beside fellow fishers and entertaining each other with past tales of broken lines, or even writing this story now—all of these too are a kind of fishing.
I have tried fishing on a boat, once at Songjŏn and once at Inch’ŏn. To speak of ocean fishing on that basis alone is not terribly reasonable, but it did seem to be the case that fishing at sea is a little too tumultuous and close to labor; in fact, it might well exert an occupational effect on days when the catch is higher than average.
For its purity, serenity, and lack of burden, there’s no doubt that freshwater fishing is the best.
The first time that I tried freshwater fishing in Seoul was at the Chungnang Stream outside of Tongdaemun. Here the water runs off the paddy fields and apparently meets the sewerage water coming from the direction of Hoegiri with the result that the smell is quite fetid. The most commonly caught fish were catfish, and all kinds of people were up to all kinds of things, from scoop-netting to fishing with multiple hooks on a line, and even bathing.
Next I tried the reservoir at Sorae. You have to take the Kyŏngin line to Sosa, where you can transfer to Taeyari if there happens to be a bus waiting, if not, then you have to walk a long ten-ri road. There are many shallow fields of wild rice, and you have to sit on mounds of stones in places where the water is deep, so the ground isn’t great, and people get too hot. But occasionally you can catch a carp the size of your fist, and so on public holidays up to thirty or forty people gather there.
I learned much later that there are three or four good ponds in the village of Sut’aek, which is over the Manguri Hill, not so far from Seoul. The water is deep enough to earn one of those usual legends of a serpent emerging to swallow a calf, and indeed, the water did reach halfway up my two-and-a-half-k’an fishing line.
If a good place to sit is at least as important as the fish, there’s a wonderful wide-open view of the distant mountains from some well-chosen spots here, in addition to clear water. Occasionally, a carp would appear that was even larger than those at Sorae, and it was not uncommon for a really large fish to break the line, or even swim off dragging a fishing rod in its wake while someone looked the other way. The sight of silver scales leaping out of the water and snowy white herons dozing at leisure made for a perfect waterside scene.
And yet, so very many people began to gather at these ponds. It became a race from the moment of stepping off the bus. It’s not so much greed as human nature to want to sit where the most fish bite, but no one looks good when old people run a distance that takes even a young person fifteen minutes, or they start off running but then fall by the wayside, or even push aside other old people who can’t run any more, just so that they can run on ahead along the narrow bank between the paddy fields.
“Are they taking the bait?”
There’s little sign of the cultivated habit of passing by others quietly. Neither is anyone particularly honest with their answers when in fact many fish are biting. If the float doesn’t move for a mere hour, then already sighs are heard. After two hours, people move to another spot. That’s when they start to curse already. If the dragon king were to show up at their side, he would surely clobber them. Nothing is spared as they sprinkle sesame dregs and paste as bait, as if to attract all the fish in the pond to their line. When those sitting nearby can’t stand it any more, a competition to throw the most bait arises. And so the fish fill up their stomachs without any need to fight each other for a hook. But what I hate the most of all are those who get excited about big fish. They go around noisily splashing the water with these things called nange, from which lead weights the size of walnuts hang down, as if to chase everyone else away. People seem to bring with them all the shamelessness, obstinacy, and envy that are rife in town.
Is there nowhere I can escape these people, even if it’s further away?
Finally, I thought of a place that I had forgotten for some decades, and a faint memory gradually began to grow more distinct. This was a mountain village in the region of Tongju in Kangwŏn Province, where the hamlet went by the name of Dragon Pond because there was so much water, even though it was in the mountains. I had often gone there as a child to visit my mother’s family.
My mother’s father loved to fish. He made his own fishing rod and used handmade fishing line. This was different from the fishing gear we buy today. Because bamboo was hard to come across in that village, he had someone traveling to Seoul buy him a bamboo stalk and a piece of split bamboo of similar length; the two pieces were longer than an arm-span and about twice the diameter of a pipe stem, so that when cut, the ends were as thick as the cap for a letter-writing brush. He used fire to straighten out the stem and bore holes into the joints, just as when making a pipe stem. He shaved and engraved some cow horn, which he mounted as a handle, and then he wound silk thread around the end and sealed it with beeswax to be sure that it would not come undone. From the split bamboo he fashioned a rod to insert in the stem. To begin with, he straightened out any crooked parts and then tidied the split bamboo, using first a knife and then a fragment of porcelain. He would oil the bamboo to avoid any cracking or taking in of water, before finally attaching a stone to the end and leaving it to hang for several months. This rod could be inserted all the way into the stem upside down, or attached the right way up it would stretch out like a pheasant plume on a flagpole with no sag in the center at all. I remember holding my grandfather’s rod several times as a child, and it was nowhere near as heavy as those fishing rods we buy today. For the fishing line, three rolls of silk were dyed using oak before being wound around a piece of slate, oiled, and then boiled in a rice pot. It was no small amount of work. One of the farmhands’ children would be made to bend the hook, and the barb would be large enough that a fish could not easily escape; the snell was braided from white horsehair, which would be transparent once in the water and not catch the fish’s eye. For the rainy season my grandfather wove a fishing basket by hand using broom cypress, and I remember that there were several lines of small letters engraved on its base—something in classical Chinese, although I’m not sure what.
This grandfather would only fish sitting down, in the style that we call “sinking.” I accompanied him several times to a place called the Calf’s Dying Spot. Here the slightly cloudy water of the brook flowing down past the village met with the cold, clear waters of the Hannae Stream, which came down from a valley deep on Kŭmhak Mountain, forming several ponds along the way with names like Seven Pine Pavilion and Gentleman’s Pond. Even during a drought the waterbed could not be seen beneath the rock cliff. Both cloudy and freshwater fish would gather at Calf’s Dying Spot, whose name derived from a tale that a serpent had once emerged and swallowed a calf here. Among the fish were bright-yellow carp, the so-called sorceress carp with its brilliant rainbow colors, the long-nosed barbel with sapphire-like scales, and even the strong-boned black perch, king of freshwater fish. If it was raining or the water was muddy following rainfall, we could catch carp, barbels, and catfish with worms as bait, but once the water cleared up we took mineral bait and fished in the rapids for
long-nosed barbels and perch. The surrounding silence seemed infinite, with no sound apart from the crying of the cicadas and water rushing in the rapids below. If I appeared to be growing bored, my grandfather would leave his line in the water and take me to the hut in his melon field. There we picked white melons in the dirt, covered in morning dew. White and round with green lines in every groove, you could tell they were ripe if they were reddish when you removed the stem. Their fragrance and sweet flavor is reminiscent of the more recent “melons,” but their soft, delicious taste is incomparable.
Yet, I used to prefer to trail after my uncles rather than my grandfather. My uncles found sinking boring and would take nets to places like Gentleman’s Pond or, if they fished, they preferred to play in the rapids. The rods were lighter than those used for sinking, and the hooks were small too, just enough to fit one fly. For a float we would choose the inner part of some kind of wood, which was much thinner than a kaoliang stalk. We would walk into the rapids and let the fishing hook flow with the stream. The fish in the rapids are quite nimble, and the float plays along like one of the fish to attract no suspicion. Because the water flows downstream and the fish must be dragged back up against the flow of the water, the pressure exerted on the rod is at least twice that in other types of fishing. After the rainy season, sometimes a luxurious mumang carp might emerge from the water. A little like a sweetfish, this one has a black back, while its body is green with splashes of red. There’s even a trace of yellow on its stomach, making this the most pleasant fish to be found in the rapids. During a drought, it’s more likely the plain and oily kalberi and nalberi that will bite. On the less than five-ri stretch down from Gentleman’s Pond to the True Pond, it’s not uncommon to fill two nets. Anything big enough to bite is at least the size of a span of the hand, and the bigger fish are sometimes almost as large as one foot.
When we went up to Gentleman’s Pond, we didn’t take the basket made from broom cypress. Instead we took the woven baskets that were used for gathering corn or cucumbers. We would spread our baskets all around a large rock before grinding a stone noisily on the top of the rock, then different kinds of perches and nalberi a foot long would rush out and into our baskets. At Gentleman’s Pond the water was clear and the riverbank tidy, so many people came there to fish. A long time ago, a gentleman was sitting on a rock here reading when the wind blew his book away and he fell into the water and drowned trying to retrieve it, hence the name Gentleman’s Pond. The place was also famous for goblins, and we children were too scared to go there alone, even in the daytime. And yet, it didn’t seem at all dark. The rock cliff had nut pines along its ridge and, with the green dragon to the left and white tiger to the right, it always received the warm southerly rays, and there were endless pebbles and water, which didn’t start to flow away no matter how you swam about in it. Beautiful, smiling wild lilies were spread across the cliff, and Kŭmhak Mountain, its head in the clouds, always looked like a hermit dozing during meditation. Whenever I think of Dragon Pond I find myself yearning for Gentleman’s Pond.