Three Miniatures by Hwang Sunwŏn

Translated from the Korean by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton

The Children

My friend Kim from Seoul has a boy who turned five this year. Living in Seoul, the boy had never seen the ocean until he and his family arrived here in Pusan, refugees from the civil war.

“What’s that?” the boy had asked from a hill overlooking the water. It was the ocean, his father answered. “Wow!” the boy cried out. “The ocean is on top of the houses! And look at those mountains on the water!” Kim tried to correct him: “The ocean is beyond the roofs of those houses, where it meets the shore, and the mountains are actually islands.” Kim told me later that try as he might, the boy just wouldn’t see things that way.

And then the boy noticed a seagull landing on the water. “Look! The birdie’s taking a bath with his clothes on!” The grownups had a good laugh at that one. When I heard this from Kim, I wondered if the boy’s words reflected his discontent with the adults who didn’t want him getting his clothes dirty and catching a cold and wouldn’t let him play in the rain, or even the snow; perhaps the boy envied the seagull coming to rest on the ocean of its own free will.

Another friend of mine, O, lives in downtown Pusan, and he has a son who turned six this year.  At first glance you might reckon the boy is a couple of years older; he’s a cute kid with a round, ruddy face. 

This boy cracked me up. Not so long ago he bartered a family member’s new rubber shoes for some taffy from a ragpicker. But then he outdid himself. 

Among the mementos in O’s study from his service at the eastern front are a helmet and a flare gun. One day the boy sneaked out wearing the helmet and toting the gun and trudged to the temporary army base occupying Kyŏngnam Girls’ Middle School. Marching up to the checkpoint, he leveled the gun at the GI on duty there and shouted “Hands up!” He must have been upset at the loss of his favorite romping grounds, the school playfield, annexed by the MPs. The GI must have sensed this, for he instantly deposited his rifle on the ground and threw his hands up.

Amid the uncertainties and the struggle for livelihood that constitutes the grownups’ world from one day to the next, eliciting scowls from morning to night, thank heavens for these glimpses of the unsullied lives of our lovable children.

December 1950

The Photograph

This happened during the civil war.

The platoon leader of a unit at the eastern front was known to be quick-witted and daring. He volunteered for reconnaissance missions and undertook them alone. And when he returned he never failed to bring back booty such as a bayonet or the field jacket of an enemy soldier he had dispatched.

These items he displayed to his comrades. The weapon was nothing special. But he got a rise out of spreading open the jacket and measuring how close his knife thrust had come to the slain soldier’s heart, and, if tobacco was found in the jacket pocket, rolling a cigarette and sharing it with the men.

On one of his missions snow fell in the hills after his departure. It was the dead of night and he hadn’t returned. His fellow soldiers huddled in silence, waiting for him, and were about to retire when he appeared, blanketed in snow.

“Whew, that was tough. But look, I bet I stuck this one square in the heart!”

And indeed the puncture mark in the prized jacket was the closest yet to his target. 

Flashing a smile of mysterious content, he searched the pockets of the jacket. Well, hell. Nothing there, not even a few shreds of tobacco.

He kept searching nonetheless and finally retrieved a tiny, yellowish photo. 

He smiled again and was about to flick it aside when he froze. “What the….” His face blanched and hardened—an expression very unlike him. There in the timeworn, discolored little photo, illuminated by the dim light of a lantern, was a face—a face that was unmistakably his very own.

May 1958

Metamorphs

Laid low by a gunshot to the leg, the private was attempting to rise when the bayonet penetrated his chest. The final image seared onto his retina was the face of his attacker. The blood from the private’s chest seeped into the reddish-brown soil. It had happened far from home, but in foothills that in his native hamlet would have felt familiar.

The blood emptied into the soil, darkening it, but soon this patch of dirt was indistinguishable from the rest. The private was from a farming family that considered the soil to be their lifeline. Eulalia roots furtively gathered his lifeblood and the private became grass.

A chaotic array of combat boots trampled the eulalia. Come winter the boots became waterlogged and trod the snow-covered grass, stomping on it again and again, too many times to count. But the eulalia survived. After the combat boots were gone, it swayed in the spring breeze, absorbed the direct sun, was moistened with dew and bathed in rain, was coated with snow, and swayed again in the spring breeze. Late in the spring it was cut by a farmer’s sickle and taken to a cowshed.

The private became a bull. And just like the private had regarded his own bull as something most precious, so did the farmer now regard him. The bull worked industriously alongside its master, the harness chafing its hide and leaving it bumpy. But the fortunes of this farming family never improved, the present year the same as the previous one. On a night in autumn after a flood had swept over the dry fields and the paddies, the master wept in silence as he stroked the bull’s neck. The private-turned-bull was sold at the market, transported by freight train to a slaughterhouse, and suspended from prongs in a butcher-shop in the city. His meat was chopped and sold. At which point he encountered the soldier who had bayoneted him on the hillside. This man was begging for food and there in his alms can was a chunk of the private given him by a restaurant. Down the private went to the beggar’s stomach.

The beggar disposed of his bowl, summoned his energy, and walked off in his ragged fatigues, the sleeve of his missing arm fluttering. Arriving at the ironworks where once he had operated a lathe, he marched inside with no hesitation. His foreman was still there.

“Hello, sir.”

The foreman’s displeasure was obvious. He tossed to the floor the cigarette he had been smoking and crushed it with his foot. 

“No need to be upset, sir. I’m not here to pester you. I just want my job back.”

The foreman gave the loose sleeve a dubious look.

“What are you looking at, sir?” Staring at the foreman, he fidgeted as his empty sleeve swayed. “A bad leg from a bullet won’t keep me from operating my lathe, will it?”   

September 1971

Bruce and Ju Chan – new page in draft

Image: Goblet, sheet of parchment and a quill pen from Pixabay.com