YI SANG
The following is a short selection from the piece originally published on pages 5 - 12 of Issue 27.4.
ENCOUNTERS AND DEPARTURES
by
Yi Sang
Part 1
I’m twenty-three, it’s March, and I’m coughing up blood. One day I took a razor to the beard I had cultivated for six months, sparing only a butterfly of a moustache beneath my nose. Then, with ten packets of herbal medicine, I went to a secluded hot spring called B that had just opened.* I would’ve been happy to die there.
But immediately my stubborn, lingering youth clung to the medicine bowl and refused to let go. There was nothing to do about it except to sulk every night beneath the lamplight of the inn and curse life’s unfairness. By the third day I couldn’t bear it any longer, and with the old innkeeper as my guide, I set out for the local kisaeng** house, where the beating of drums could be heard every night. That’s where I met Geum-hong.
"How old are you?" I asked.
Though she appeared small and naive, I could tell this one was sharp. I was thinking she was maybe sixteen, nineteen at the most, when she replied, "I’m twenty-one, sir."
"How old would you say I am?"
"Well, forty? Or thirty-nine?"
To this, I merely grunted "Hmm" and sat back, folding my arms in what I thought to be a dignified pose. We parted that day without incident.
Next day, my painter friend K came to visit me and kept poking fun at my moustache, so I shaved it off. And as soon as darkness fell, we hurried off to see Geum-hong.
"I think I’ve seen you somewhere before," she said.
"The gentleman who was here last night — you know, the one with the moustache? I’m none other than his son. We even have the same voice, don’t you think?" I said, going along with the joke.
When the night’s entertainments were over, I stepped out into the courtyard with K. "What do you think of her?" I whispered. "She’s nice, isn’t she? Why don’t you give her a try?"
"No thanks, but you go ahead if you want."
"We could take her back to the inn and toss a coin to decide."
"Fine."
K slipped away, however, under the pretense of going to the bathroom, and I ended up with Geum-hong by default.
That night Geum-hong confessed that she had once borne a child.
"When?"
"At sixteen I put up my hair to get married, and the next year, I had a baby."
"Was it a boy?"
"A daughter."
"Where is she now?"
"She died around her hundredth day."
Tossing aside the medicine I’d brought, I spent the entire night absorbed in making love to Geum-hong. It might sound foolish, but the force of passion seemed to hold back the blood in my lungs.
I never gave Geum-hong a tip, because day or night she would stay in my room or I would go to hers. Instead of tips, I gave her an introduction to a Mr. Woo who had studied in France and was something of a libertine. Taking my suggestion, Geum-hong accompanied Mr. Woo to a "private bath." Now, this was a rather shady establishment, but it didn’t bother me when I caught a glimpse of their shoes side by side on the door-step of the place. I also recommended Geum-hong to a lawyer named C who occupied the room next to mine. Moved by the earnestness of my proposal, he eventually went to visit her as well. Even so, my beloved Geum-hong remained ever close by my side. And boasting playfully like a child, she would show me the ten-won notes that she had gotten from Mr. Woo or Lawyer C.
Then one day I had to return to Seoul for the first anniversary of my uncle’s death. Before my departure, Geum-hong and I spent a beautiful day together in a field where the peach trees were in blossom and a small stream flowed past a pavilion. At the train station I slipped a ten-won note in her hand. She began to cry then, saying she would use the money to reclaim her watch from the pawn shop.
__________
* The reference is to the town of Baekcheon, Hwanghaenam-do province, in what is now North Korea.
** Similar to Japanese geishas, kisaengs were trained to provide various forms of entertainment, such as singing and reciting poetry and some of their own compositions, while the male patrons drank. Though it was not uncommon for a kisaeng to have sexual relations with her customers, she was not considered to be in the same category as prostitutes.
Part 2
By the time Geum-hong because my wife, we were deep in love. We agreed not to bring up each other’s pasts. Since I had no past worth speaking of, this meant that I promised not to ask about hers.
Though she was only twenty-one and appeared to be seventeen, Geum-hong was more mature than a woman of thirty-one. And to her, I looked forty, though I was twenty-three and sometimes behaved no better than a boy of ten or eleven. None-theless, we blissfully cuddled together in marriage.
Time passed idly by. A year came and went, it was August. Sometime between late summer and early autumn, Geum-hong became nostalgic for her previous life. She must have grown bored because I lay about the house sleeping day and night. She began going out to meet interesting people and do interesting things. In other words, she was feeling cramped.
The odd thing was, this time she didn’t boast of her adventures. In fact, she tried to hide them from me. This wasn’t like her at all. What did she have to hide? I wouldn’t have cared if she had told me. I wouldn’t have cared if she’d been proud of it.
But I didn’t confront her with it. Instead, to make it easier for Geum-hong to enjoy herself, I sometimes left the house and stayed with P, who, when I think of him now, seemed to have put up with me out of pity.
It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in wifely virtue and loyalty, but I tried to look at Geum-hong’s adultery as her way of rousing me out of my stupor. So, keeping up the front of being the "virtuous wife" was her one big mistake. For my part, I went along with the charade, leaving the house more often and offering up my room for her business. And thus time went by.
One day, for no apparent reason, Geum-hong game me a severe beating. I ran out of the house crying in pain, and I was so afraid that I stayed away for three days. When I finally came back, there was no trace of her, save for a pair of her dirty socks in a corner of the room.
As stupid as it sounds, that’s how I lost my wife. Several friends of mine came by, trying to console me with what seemed like useless gossip about Geum-hong’s whereabouts, but I couldn’t understand what they were getting at anyway. They told me they had seen her with a man, boarding a bus that was headed as far as Mount Gwanak near the town of Gwacheon. Well, if that was true, the man must have been a real coward to have run so far away.
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