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But compared to my boarding-school friends, I was fairly virtuous. Like a good Korean child, I was flirtatious but chaste, worked hard at school; competent at sports and the arts, sceptical but conscientious. Got into trouble only once: suspended for smoking a cigarette in the girls’ lavatory. My mother’s rage was frightening: when I got home, she locked me out of the house until dark. To her, I was a barbarian, needing urgent curbing.
Although we got along in a crippled sort of way, with the advent of teenage hormones, communication became untenable. Trivially, I scorned the square clothes she bought me and told her so, while she would upset me by dismissing F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath as a colossal waste of time. She disapproved of my acting in school plays,
‘Vulgar,’ she pronounced.
More distressing, when I tried to confide tremulous worries to my mother, she would respond with an authoritarian maxim or reproval which I would angrily reject, thinking that she didn’t care. Tears were ignored, along with achievements.
‘Mothers are not friends, they are mothers,’ she would say in defence of her sternness. We would make up, and row again. The turmoil was painful for us both. It was like having a diseased tooth; a dormant infection that flared up regularly, only worse. Beneath the irritable surface symptoms lay profound guilt and despair; a sense that I should have prevented it somehow, should have been stronger. It provided the first disturbing and confounding proof that two people could be biologically close, and yet be as strangers. My father and I got on easily, which may have aggravated things. But for all that, I loved my mother fiercely. Although I could not express it to her, I found her strength and principles quite awesome. I longed to please her above anyone else.
Sitting at the dining-room table, acute frustrations between us had relaxed with time.
‘Get a pen,’ my mother instructed gently. Then she got out a battered old address book, and opened it. The writing was mostly in Korean. Thanks to the Linguaphone booklet, I recognised the odd vowel. The pages were yellowed and flaking at the edges. She squinted at the page, and smiled with rare spontaneity. It reminded me of the way she had looked ten years ago, when I spied on her speaking Korean with Hong-do.
‘You must go and see my cousin and his family; he was once my tutor. This is his name and address. And of course, your aunt, Myung-hi, and our eldest brother, your uncle Jin-ho, if he is still alive.’
This last comment chilled me. Didn’t she know if her brother was still alive? Why didn’t she know?
‘It’s complicated. I can’t really say,’ she said. ‘My older brother has not been well, and since my parents’ death, I lost touch with other relatives.’
I was shocked by her refusal to talk about it, or even to think about it. This mention of my other uncle brought a heavy sadness to my mother’s face that I did not understand then, but later would.
She moved on to discussing another relation. I listened, bemused, and grew cautiously excited about these names and places. It was like mapping the first inches of the unknown iceberg of my mother’s past.
Although she was silent, one could sense the importance she attached to bequeathing these family details. After twenty-seven years I was still not wholly ready to receive these names, delivered in her difficult handwriting, in Korean. But somehow, a lazy willingness to try had come, and just outweighed the reluctance.
Between sips of tea my mother mentioned that So-and-so was now president of a hospital in Seoul, and that Such-and-such was a prominent banker, that X was a drunk and a womanizer. Because I had not yet met them, characters became jumbled, and I forgot which of them to avoid and which to pursue. But my appetite to find them began to sharpen.
‘I wish I were going with you,’ said my mother, to my surprise. ‘But I can’t go now. There is too much to do. Another day maybe we can go,’ she said, as if not entirely convinced that she could.
I kissed her good-night. She moved her face away slightly, as usual. Sometimes I had been a bit hurt by this aversion, but my uncle had told me that in Korea, grown-up relations did not express their affection in the casually physical Western manner.
‘Good-night,’ she said, and turned to mount the stairs.
One day towards the end of March, my mother and father drove me to the airport. My journey was to be especially long; I was flying first to London to see an old art professor, on a cheap fare, naturally, and the trip would take a further eighteen hours from London; a punishing London-Paris-Anchorage-Seoul route.
Inwardly, I said goodbye to the pines, and to the long pebbly curve of our drive that was carved by repetition into my bones. The northern sky boiled purple over the roof of the car. The maple trees on the dirt road were in bud, their red-tipped branches forming an untidy ceremonial arch under which we drove until we reached Route 9. I turned and looked back through the mud-splattered rear window. The receding tunnel of maple trees was telescoping smaller and tighter, like a closing lens.
This departure felt different from the rest. How many times had I left home, for many purposes, usually doing so with an ungrateful sense of relief. Like most adolescents, I’d wanted to teethe on a bigger world.
These woods, these fields, were kindly guardians I had outgrown; I had become blind to their possibilities. I had never felt a sense of belonging to this landscape; not like our tractor-driving, dyed-in-the-wool Yankee neighbour, Addison White, and the generations of Whites before him, nor like Judith, the ex-New York sophisticate in the hilltop farmhouse who proudly wore her handwoven shawl, whatever the occasion, the way a grateful immigrant might fly a flag over the front door.
Somehow, this didn’t feel like home. Throughout my life I longed to recognise a picture of home. My heart was an empty frame, waiting. There was nothing wrong with the view out of the dining-room window, but it didn’t fit the frame. It was both too vast and too small. Yet I was grateful to these trees and ditches; for their mute acceptance of their limited role, for being there, unchanged, whenever I came back. I was grateful to the backs of my parents’ heads in the car for the same reason, although I never said so.
A clear purpose began to form as I sat in the car. With the family names as foundation-stones, I might begin to build a sort of makeshift bridge from West to East, between my mother and myself. It was over-optimistic, even a grandiose idea. The bridge would have to be much stronger than both of us to succeed. The help of something far greater was needed; perhaps God, upon whom I depended with shallow irregularity. Despite the unlikelihood of achieving this ambition, a constructive impulse in this direction was a welcome surprise. I felt tentative hope. Then a heavier thought nearly eclipsed it. This journey would take me far away from where I had been before, and deliver me somewhere I might not want to go. It was likely to take a long time. Worst of all, I might have to change.
At Logan Airport my parents and I entered the transatlantic departures terminal. Dad heaved my heavy suitcase onto the luggage belt at the ticket counter, and my mother fussed, telling me as she always did, that I was carrying too much.
‘Don’t take so much next time. You always carry too much. Next time …’
‘Ma …’
‘It’s true, you always …’
‘I know, I should travel more lightly.’
I rolled my eyes at Dad, who smiled. I embraced him goodbye, and he clasped me awkwardly, his cheek rough, big shoulders hunching down to reach me, his usual silence containing patient affection. His clothes smelled of turpentine. My mother looked very serious and her eyes, level with mine, were liquid with tears.
‘What can I tell you? … Be good. Don’t impose on anyone … Make sure to say hello to everyone. I … Too bad I can’t go with you … Write.’
I threw my arms around her small, slightly rigid frame, and squeezed her tightly until she softened. I felt a single sob escape her body. My past petty hatreds melted into intense regret and crooked love for her.
‘I’ll be back, don’t worry. I’ll tell you everything … I want to find the temple on Mount Sorak. And the chestnut trees. I’m going to find them.’
I don’t know what made me mention the temple or the trees. It just came out. I swung a satchel over my shoulder and headed for passport control. I looked back, and my mother and father waved, their gestures small and uncertain. My mother looked forlorn. Suddenly she waved again, this time bigger. She waved again and again.
CHAPTER FIVE Et in Arcadia Ego
Korea Kangwon Province 1936
I looked up at the sky. It was all of heaven to me, and the world. Korea was the world; wide and clear and blue. And it jiggled. I was sitting in the basket of my father’s bicycle, with my head tipped back, laughing. The rays of the sun pierced through my eyes, blinding me pleasantly.
The pebbles on the dirt track made the handlebars judder. My father was not looking at the sky, nor was he laughing. He looked very serious, concentrating on the road ahead. I tilted my head from side to side in the basket, to make him smile.
We were on our way to the marketplace in Yangyang, a few miles away from home. I loved this ritual. For a few hours, it was just my father and me. No interference from my naughty brother or crying baby sister, and he bought me rice toffee. Usually it was the eldest boy who had the honour of escorting a father to market, but Jin-ho made my father so cross, that I, being next eldest, and nearly six years old, inherited the fun.
I wish I could tell my daughter the way it was then. But where would I begin? Seeing her to the airport, all that I left behind comes flooding back as we drive back through this Northern landscape, a landscape that I now accept as having little to do with me. I am a small leaf, blown here by history.
Riding in the big basket of my father’s bicycle, everything was golden. It was spring. Sun glistened upon the pine needles, it danced in the poet’s stream in the village, and it warmed the barley grasses of the fields on our family estate. The breeze washed the scent of jasmine and acacia past my eager nostrils. Exploded cherry blossom hung like pink popcorn in the boughs of trees along the road winding down to Yangyang. There was a slight mist in the valley, and the light was soft, a softness that would be gone by June.
In the noisy marketplace we parked the bicycle outside the sweet shop, and father bought the toffee for us children. I got to carry the little paper packet, and was also entitled to pick out a sweet or two as we promenaded round the market.
The square in Yangyang was like a circus to me. Awnings, tents, carts overflowing with goods, and well-groomed livestock crowded the centre. Villagers jostled each other, and picked their way between tables and groundcloths loaded with bountiful baskets of grain, displays of glistening fish and shellfish, dried cuttlefish and octopus, seaweed, heaped kimchi, pine nuts and chestnuts, fruit, vegetables, rice cakes and dainties. Stalls offered bolts of rainbow-coloured silks, fine handwoven linen and cheap cotton muslin, native canoe-shaped rubber slippers, metal chopsticks, brass, porcelain and celadon bowls, books, lacquer trays and chests, mother-of-pearl inlaid boxes, ink and inkstones, rice paper, linen, calligraphy brushes, ivory and tortoiseshell combs. Familiar vendors crowed and yelled their bargain prices, competing with lowing cows and squawking fowl.
I stared boldly at the other children strapped to their mothers’ backs or holding their grandmothers’ hands. They looked much more babyish than me; I was allowed to roam freely by my father’s side, making what I believed to be adult conversation.
We bumped into Baby Uncle near the well in the square. His name was Gong-lae, but I called him Baby Uncle, as he was the youngest of the Min brothers. Bending down, Uncle pinched my cheek and stole a piece of toffee in one motion. Then my father told me to wait for him by the willow tree while he and Baby Uncle went into a small office to deliver some papers to a colleague. Uncle bought me a rice cake. I sat down near an old grandmother, and inspected the cake, which I dismantled and ate kernel by kernel to make it last as long as possible, and surveyed the crowd, quite giddy with happiness.
My father eventually came out of the little building, and furtively tucked an envelope into his breast pocket. He looked a little happier than before, and swung my hand in his as we walked back down the street to the bicycle. With father’s help, I squashed back into the basket, legs dangling out, and we pushed off heavily onto the dusty track, wobbling off for a few yards as we headed back home.
I did not realise then how terrible those spring days were for my father. That day, as every day since June 1910, we were living under a military dictatorship. Japan, fresh from their victory over Russia, had begun colonizing Korea. Our Emperor Kojong was reduced to the status of King. The same blue sky that entranced me was oppressive to father. For him, nothing would be right and good until Korea was free.
Here, at market, father, aboji, perceived a very different scene to the one I did. Yangyang had once been fairly rich. Now it was poorer and shabbier. On this Eastern coast, there was bounteous fishing and farming, but the best catch and produce were now skimmed off and profits channelled to the occupying Japanese government in Seoul.
Our clan, the Min, were the chief landowners of Kangwon Province, our estates straddling what is now both North and South Korea. We had been rulers here for centuries. Over the course of my father’s childhood he had seen our ancestors’ ancient hereditary and honorary titles stripped from us, and for a pittance, we had been forced to sell major land holdings to the Japanese. We were one of the last yangban families to remain in the province. Father felt that we could not leave, so deep were our roots here. Less fortunate landowners and the middle classes suffered the seizure of their land without payment, and those who opposed this were shot by the Japanese. Many had fled to Manchuria and Siberia to avoid impoverishment and Japanese persecution. Only bankrupt commoners and former serfs stayed on.
The market square was nearly deserted compared to its former self, the grass near the well was overgrown and ragged, even the poets’ stream was now a muddy trickle, drying up in its bed. Japanese officials disguised as Korean peasants roamed the streets of Yangyang for signs of local underground activism, but fooled no one with their blatantly Japanese features, squatter physiques, and pidgin Hangul. But the authorities were correct to be worried about the underground resistance movement. My father and Baby Uncle had that morning been attending an Independence meeting in the ironmonger’s storeroom. Both of them had already been sent to prison once for their efforts.
Yet naturally, I knew nothing then of my father’s political secrets. The grown-up world was a remote kingdom in the eyes of Korean children. One trusted, accepted, and obeyed the word of parents and elders. This was Confucian law.
As the rise of a steep hill loomed up before us on the bicycle, I saw that familiar stretch of the road which led to the green gates of our estate; a view that was the most beautiful I have known. The wing-tipped lilt of the tiled roof-gates made my heart swoop upwards, for within the walls of the estate lay what I can only call happiness. Years later, the silhouette of those gates is still scarred in my memory with the burning iron of loss.
At this point in the road I descended from the bicycle, and walked with my father the rest of the way, shaded by an avenue of gingko trees. Soon the gravel drive forked, and we took the right turning to our farmhouse on the crest of a hill, while the road continued to the left, leading eventually to the grand main house, a mansion, where my eldest uncle, Yong-lae, lived with his family, along with Baby Uncle, who was still a bachelor.
My grandfather, Lord Min, was now dead. I remember him only slightly, but those impressions cast a giant shadow. He was a splendid, rather mythical figure in his red silk court robes, carried aloft by serfs in his sedan chair. At home, he had been no less awe-inspiring in his high black horsehair hat, with his long white beard and gray silk robes. He moved slowly, and walked with a silver-topped cane, a gift from the King.
Grandfather had been the last of the jinsas in the family; jinsa was a yangban imperial scholar’s title, now obsolete, bestowed on him by the late King Kojong. Grandfather had been a courtier to the King in Seoul, and was also a distant cousin of the Queen. But Lord Min – Gong-ju was his first name – was too ambitious for the King’s liking. My grandfather’s private armies exceeded the royal quota, and with some relish, the King exiled him to his Northern estate until his death.
At the time of his marriage, my grandfather had a vivid dream of three birds flying. His wife later gave birth to three sons: Yong-lae (Dragon arriving), Bong-lae – my father (Phoenix arriving), and Gong-lae (Peacock arriving). That he should have had so poetic a premonition was said to be typical of him. He also fathered two daughters, but being female, my aunts had merited no such privileged iconography in my grandfather’s dreams.
People spoke of Grandfather as if he were a god, and we all were happy enough to go along with the indulgent descriptions. Min Gong-ju was princely, witty, a brilliant scholar of Chinese classics from the age of seven, a formidable poet and horseman, never seen merely riding on his white horse across the fields, always galloping. He was considered a good and merciful feudal lord. As a youth, he had been strikingly handsome: fair and rosy, with liquid hazel eyes and shiny amber-black hair. Noble Manchurian blood accounted for the European features of some of the Min clan. I remember his uproarious laugh, quite terrifying, coming from beneath his towering, solemn black horsehair scholar’s hat.
But at the end of his life, Grandfather was rarely even seen in public, much less laughing. When he went to the village he wore a Western Homburg low over his eyes so that no one would recognize him, so humiliated was he by the effects of the Japanese occupation, and our family’s disgrace.
It was Grandfather’s generation that had witnessed the fall of Korea: he had been alive when the rebel army was defeated by the Japanese, and had witnessed the dissolution of the entire Korean Armed Forces by the occupying militia. He had been at Court in Seoul when a group of government ministers had committed mass suicide in protest at Annexation; he had even seen the expression upon the King’s face when the Japanese Declaration was presented to him.
My grandfather stood by politely as Japanese police ransacked his personal library, confiscating heirloom history books and irreplaceable hand-calligraphed works of Korean poetry and ancient literature which had been declared subversive. Grandfather was made to watch as armed police burned his dearest books in a public bonfire, their wisdom vanishing in a column of destructive black smoke.
The takeover was a nightmarish echo of the Hideyoshi invasions of the sixteenth century, when Japan had systematically devastated Korea. Arson had been perpetrated on such a scale that virtually no building in Korea not constructed of masonry survived that invasion: even Kyongbok Palace, the royal residence, was burned to the ground, and later had to be rebuilt. All government buildings and royal libraries holding irreplaceable Yi Dynasty records were burned. Thousands of farmers and civilians had been slaughtered and their property destroyed by Japanese troops. The noses of twenty thousand Koreans had been sliced off their faces. Artisans, doctors, and printers had been captured and kidnapped, taken prisoner to Japan for their technological and medical expertise. Although despised and maltreated by the Japanese, they were never allowed to return home to Korea.
Now the descendants of those Japanese invaders were back in Seoul repeating their public book-burnings – eradicating virtually all of the country’s new historical and political texts, schoolbooks, and works of nationalist literature – and replacing them with their own accounts of Korean history. The Japanese literally rewrote our history, redrafting political events to diminish and excuse their atrocities, and teaching this sanitised version of history to Korean and Japanese schoolchildren. Lord Min was furious to learn that those children whose parents could not afford private education were deliberately being kept illiterate by the Japanese government, who had closed down over two thirds of the schools to this end. Knowing scholarship to be the cornerstone of Korean society, Grandfather said the Japanese could not have chosen a more cynical form of cultural strangulation. Cruder totalitarianism came in the banning of Korean newspapers and of public gatherings, and the changing of street signs from Hangul to Japanese.
Our family could not understand how it had been allowed to happen. The West made no moves to intervene. The League of Nations did not respond to our pleas. Forty years earlier the West had been virtually silent when Queen Min had been murdered in her own Palace by a mob of Japanese assassins, who had hacked her body to pieces with machetes and burned her still-living remains with kerosene in the Royal Gardens. Had the Japanese even attempted such an act on a European monarch, would Japan not have provoked a war, or at the very least been ostracized with sanctions by the world powers? The West’s appeasement had rocked my grandfather.
Millennia of civilization were being systematically destroyed by a Japan drunk on the liquor of new military and industrial power. The last vestiges of the Korean aristocracy were abrogated. Our country was finished, as far as Grandfather could see.
Grandfather had often said that the yangban class had brought the 1894 reforms upon themselves through gross abuse. Corrupt aristocrats used their rank as an excuse to do nothing all day but gossip, smoke pipes, play chess and practise archery. These reprobates still insisted that commoners dismount when meeting them on the road and when passing before a yangban house. For centuries yangbans had had the right to ignore tradesmens’ bills, to exact loans from farmers and neighbours, demand free labour from peasants and unlimited use of their cattle and horses, the right to free food and lodging at the homes of magistrates, and amnesty from the law except in rare cases of treason. Such blatant injustice was wrong and deserved to be abolished along with slavery, thought Grandfather, but he also felt strongly that the class structure ensured civilisation, and with reforms, should remain intact.
Lord Min did not like to understand the success of the Japanese; Japan was amoral, and yet it flourished. Right and wrong were reversed. How could the world be blind to their perfidy? He had said that the Japanese were only accepted by the West as civilized beings because they adopted European haircuts. He was partly serious. Even in such an outwardly trivial matter as hair dressing, he saw the contrasting character of Korea and Japan. Where the Japanese had passively accepted a daft government edict for all men to cut their hair short in the European fashion, in Korea, when the Japanese consul, Inoue, decreed a similar order for Korean men to cut off their topknots, it caused a national furore, and Korean ministers resigned their posts in protest. Although the King himself, out of diplomacy, finally adopted the edict, those Koreans who cut their hair in the country were beaten up in broad daylight by topknotted dissidents.