Maninbo (3 page)

On first meeting,

when a person should introduce himself by name,

he just mutters,

bowing his head.

When he leaves condolence money at a house in mourning

he never writes his name on the envelope,

so when the chief mourner meets him a few months later,

he hesitates to thank him, not sure

whether he paid a visit

or not.

Perhaps he hides his name out of humility,

preferring to have no nameplate or house number in this world

where people love to make their names known.

Or maybe that’s not the reason, either.

On general election days

all he does is put a mark on a paper and leave.

When it happens to be a fine day

and flocks of sparrows fly high,

does each individual bird have a name?

Why, a name is a person’s prison.

After the Armistice,

the village at the gates of Camp Reagan

in Pocheon, Gyeonggi province,

flourished as a brothel town for soldiers.

The instant the camp was abandoned

the town fell to ruin.

The leader of the town’s prostitutes

was Rita Kim,

born Kim Ok-suk.

After servicing some hundreds of white soldiers

and some hundreds of black soldiers,

she became the head of the prostitutes’ union,

spokesperson and leader

for the whores of Pocheon county.

Her walls were covered with certificates of appreciation

and letters of thanks from local county heads:

‘For your contribution to the modernisation of our land…’

Once the Americans cleared out, Korean soldiers moved in.

With the whores gone too,

all that remained of the town were a few small shops.

Kim Ok-suk, left alone, quickly aged and fell sick.

She even stopped swearing as she used to,

‘Men are nothing but dicks.’

During the mid-Joseon period,

Korea’s submission to China was abject.

In fact the Ming dynasty was on the wane,

but among Korean nobility

submission became all the more prevalent.

For example, faced with the question why

only Korea’s West Coast has high and low tides,

and not the East, they replied:

‘It’s because

China is the source of tides.

Since the West Sea is close to China

it experiences high and low tides,

whereas the East Sea is far away from China,

so no tides can reach there.’

The moment that was said,

the moon emerged from behind a cloud.

They were like dogs barking in that moonlit night.

She was probably just the right wife for a man like that.

Just right for her husband the wild boar

who did manual labour,

hurt his back

and was laid up in his room.

She was glib-tongued, that woman.

They had two sons

and three daughters,

kids who never took

to anything like school.

Instead, boys and girls alike,

they took to trouble, taking upon themselves

each and every accident,

from the slums all the way up to

the Willow Tree House at the end of Euljiro.

Early on, the oldest boy did time

in the juvenile wing of Seodaemun detention centre.

Beginning with him,

whenever a son or daughter came home after brawling,

Hong's wife would say,

‘Back home? What for?

You should be rotting in the cemetery

in Manguri or Miari.

Scum of a prick's prick,

why haven't you croaked already?

Ayyy! You good-for-nothing, hundred-ton dead weight!'

And yet, though she was a really foul-mouthed woman,

once, when she saw a voluptuous waning moon,

on her way back late at night from the communal loo,

she exclaimed: ‘My my my, just look at that goddamn moon!

Looks like the sweetheart I've spent ten million years longing for.'

Baek Un-hak rented a room in an inn in Wonjeong-dong, Jeju City

as a master of the
Book of Changes
,

of the
Four Pillars
and the
Eight Characters
.

Meanwhile, another Baek Un-hak was telling tall tales

as a fortuneteller in Jongno 4-ga, Seoul.

In fact, that Baek Un-hak took his name

from the famous fortune-teller Baek Un-hak of late Joseon.

Anyway, whatever the reason,

this other poor Baek Un-hak

(the one who’d crossed over to Jeju Island)

wore plain glass spectacles on his plain nose –

perhaps because his eyes alone had no authority –

and let a few hairs grow out in semblance of a beard.

Maybe in order to impress those who came to consult him,

he would add some ridiculous English

to the fortunes he told.

He also claimed that a true interpretation of the
Four Pillars

could be found in the philosophy of
fortunà

as taken back to Italy by Marco Polo.

He pretended to be very intelligent,

very learned.

When he got paid for thus cheating the islanders

day after day, he would go out drinking alone.

Back home, late at night, alone and very drunk,

he would wail and pound on the floor:

Why is it my fortune

that I must ever deceive people?

Such a person, so honest with himself,

might he not be mistaken for the ancient sage Kasyapa

or the apostle Peter?

Seong-suk’s mother

gave birth to her third daughter

as plums outside Jaha Gate were ripening.

On that day, as the plums were falling,

Seong-suk’s mother burst into tears

once she realised it was yet another daughter.

She cried, cried loudly, finding no reward in childbirth,

and feeling no hunger after.

So she had no idea at all

whether Seong-suk was born by night

or by day

or at what hour.

Not only Seong-suk’s mother,

but her father,

her grandmother, too, had no idea.

Seong-suk grew up

without a name,

her birth unregistered

and her mother always grumbling:

‘Begone with you, quickly,

go!’

Her father,

recalling Yi Seong-suk, a girl in Uijeongbu

who once showed him the way,

gave her that name.

Unsure of the day of her birth,

let alone the hour,

she grew up

a very pretty girl,

became a really beautiful young woman,

of such loveliness as is rarely found

even in distant lands –

Portugal, say,

or Sweden.

She’s known as the Generalissima of the dried fish booths

in Seongdong-gu’s Central Market.

If the woman in the next booth over

plays the coquette with a customer,

she cries out, ‘Bloody bitch, gone mad again.

She’s mad to do what she does by night

again in broad daylight.’

When the Generalissima shrieks,

all shut their mouths,
Shhhh!

in the dried fish booths,

in the fruit stalls beyond,

in the fresh fish shops,

no matter who’s in the wrong.

It’s like driest dust being driven from furrows by a strong wind.

Covered by thick awnings,

no sunshine enters the market all day long.

She seizes every opportunity

to squeal like a sow having its throat cut,

cursing her dead husband:

‘That goddamn heel, croaked first,

making all this trouble for me, the bastard.’

When it rains, water pools on the awning

then cascades down over her:

‘That goddamn Heaven,

goddamn God!’

When people buy dried fish from the Generalissima

for their family memorial rites,

their ancestors’ appetites are aroused.

Since the 1970s, cocks seem to crow any time they want,

so the spirits of ancestors can’t make out

when exactly it’s time to leave;

it’s only right, then, that their descendants

should at least arouse their appetites.

‘I hate that song most, “The dawn bell has rung…”

the Saemaeul Song,
*
I hate that most.’

There was a time you had to be ready to be arrested

if you said something like that.

Even speaking such words took too long.

Such is the dawdling dialect of Chungcheong province.

It’s not just in speaking.

Rising

from sitting

takes a long, long time, too.

When they go to Seoul from Daejeon station

they are sure to take the slow train,

which stops at every station,

at every station.

‘What would I take

a fast train for?’

When they cross the street,

they slowly start to cross

after coughing three or four times

long after all the other people have crossed.

If a companion urges them on:

‘What do you hurry for

so much?

If you hurry, even the rice isn’t properly cooked.

‘Look at the moon

at night.

It moves

slowly,

slowly,

as if not moving at all.

‘If we live by minutes and seconds, we’re done for.

It’s the same with living by hours.

‘Therefore we must have

a night

like half a day, like

early evening,

night,

and early dawn

when the cockerel comes late to the first flap of its wings.

What are you thinking?’

Tapgol Park,

a place crowded with elderly folk,

where old men

covered in age spots

grab one another by the collar and sort of fight,

ah!… there he is.

Mansu Coffee Shop

on a side-street in Cheongjin-dong, Seoul,

a place crowded with elderly folk

…there he is.

A place where the elderly roll walnuts in their palms,

sinews squirming on the backs of their hands,

a place where they talk about everything,

shouting this

and that,

and pinch the buttocks of the girl serving coffee,

…there he is.

He’s a young man of thirty,

but when asked why he comes here

he says it’s the only place he feels comfortable;

when asked his age,

he says he’s sixty-five.

They say he was forced to do military service

after he lied about his age,

and his mind was affected

after a beating by a superior in the barracks,

so he was discharged on medical grounds,

and mentally he is old and mad.

Could be so:

the Tang genius, the poet Li Ho, wrote that

at twenty a man is already old.