Brother
Anthony (An Sonjae)
In
the autumn of 1993, I went to the Korean Justice Ministry building in Kwachon
and explained that, after spending over 12 years in Korea, and having no
thought of leaving, I felt that I ought to take Korean nationality if that was
possible. The official I was talking to asked a few questions about my motives,
explained what was needed, and commented that though he had heard various
reasons why people wished to become Korean, this was the first time he had ever
met someone who wanted to be naturalized because they loved the country! I was
rather taken aback but it is certainly true that a lot of Koreans, taxi-drivers
in particular, react with incredulous amazement when I say that I like living
here. They tend to be very proud of uri nara in the abstract and not at
all happy with life here in the concrete, which I can understand. Life in Korea
is not much fun for an awful lot of Koreans. Not that my reasons for seeking
naturalization had much to do with fun, I suppose. All I know is that I was the
first person to score full points in the challenging naturalization exam (¡°Write
the name of the present president¡±), the first British person to become Korean
without being married to a Korean, and the first Cornish Korean. All those
firsts made me feel a bit like Isabella Bird, whom I admire immensely.
When Isabella
Bird, aka as Mrs Bishop or Bird-Bishop although she was already a widow, first
arrived from Nagasaki in the port she called ¡°Fusan¡± in January 1894, she was
about a year older than I am now. Her visit to Korea was destined to be
interrupted by the Sino-Japanese war, which led to a rapid departure for
Manchuria where she nearly drowned in a flood, followed by a visit to
Vladivostok and Siberia before returning to Korea for further visits lasting
until 1897. She had begun traveling to various parts of the world when she was
44 and this was to be almost her last journey, apart for an outing to the Atlas
Mountains in North Africa when she was 70.
British visitors
to or residents of Korea ought always to venerate her. Of course, her
experience of Korea was quite unique, for wherever she went, at least away from
the main cities, she could be confident that she was the first, not just
British but European, woman ever to have been there. In many cases, she must
have been the first westerner of any kind. The book she wrote is an amazing
document, so impressive that it makes me feel that I am quite unable to say
anything at all interesting about the country I have lived in for the past 23
years.
At the start of
her book she writes, rather disconcertingly, ¡°My first journey (in Korea)
produced the impression that Korea is the most uninteresting country I ever
traveled in, but during and since the (Sino-Japanese) war its political
perturbations, rapid changes, and possible destinies have given me an intense
interest in it ¡¦ Korea takes a similarly strong grip on all who reside in it
sufficiently long to overcome the feeling of distaste which at first it
undoubtedly inspires.¡± ¡°Feeling of
distaste¡±? I arrived in Seoul on May 7, 1980 at an exciting moment when the
city was astir with demands for the election of a new president and calls for a
return to full democracy. Less than 2 weeks later we were tuning in to Radio
Australia and the BBC in search of news about what was happening in Kwangju, a
lot of the best people had been taken away in the night and were not going to
be free again until 1982 at least, and tanks were stationed at Kwanghwamun.
When I began to study Korean at Yonsei University in July 1980, I had to walk
past a large military machine and several heavily armed soldiers stationed to
protect the campus from attacks by dangerous, bare-handed students. The silence
from the governments of the outside world was deafening and on the whole
remained so. In the autumn I was invited to teach at Sogang University and
began to grow accustomed to the taste of tear gas and to love the students¡¯
songs of resistance as they stood there waiting to be beaten up by the police
(those were days without Molotov cocktails, stones, or steel pipes). It is a
source of pride that the original singer of some of the most powerful songs,
Yang Hui-Un, is a graduate of Sogang University.
One year later,
in May 1981, I was taken to visit some of the families of those citizens of
Kwangju who had been sentenced to death after the crushing of the uprising. It
was a very special encounter with the suffering that is such an integral part
of so many Koreans¡¯ experience of history. One of the most essential questions
in many parts of today¡¯s world is ¡°How can we bring healing to the wounds of
our history?¡± That question can only be answered by those who bear the wounds
and in Korea the range of unhealed (though long hidden) wounds is remarkably
large. Cardinal Kim had asked for brothers from Taizé to be sent because
perhaps we might be able to help the young Christians of Korea deepen their
faith through prayer. We assured him that we would see what we could do. The
only things we had to offer were our shared life centered on community prayer
with its combination of songs and silence.
Isabella Bird
reports her first visit to the Korean town of ¡°Fusan,¡± some way away from the
entirely Japanese settlement at which she arrived. She says that her guide was ¡°a
charming English ¡°Una,¡± who, speaking Korean almost like a native, moved
serenely through the market-day crowds, welcomed by all.¡± I wonder who she was.
¡°Its narrow dirty streets consist of low hovels built of mud-smeared wattle
without windows, straw roofs, and deep eaves, a black smoke hole in every wall
2 feet from the ground, and outside most are irregular ditches containing solid
and liquid refuse. Mangy dogs and blear-eyed children, half or wholly naked,
and scaly with dirt, roll in the deep dust or slime, or pant and blink in the
sun, apparently unaffected by the stenches which abound.¡± Her goal was an
ordinary Korean house in which ¡°three Australian ladies,¡± missionaries, were
living despite the disapproval of the other foreigners of the town. Who were
they? ¡°On my first visit I found them well and happy. Small children were
clinging to their skirts, and a certain number of women had been induced to
become cleanly in their persons and habits. All the neighbors were friendly,
and rude remarks in the streets had altogether ceased. Many of the women
resorted to them for medical help, and the simple aid they gave brought them
much good-will¡¦¡± and she comments: ¡°In the East, at least, every religious
teacher who has led the people has lived among them, knowing if not sharing
their daily lives, and has been easily accessible at all times. It is not easy
to imagine a Buddha or One greater than Buddha only reached by favor of, and
possibly by feeing (bribing), a gate-keeper or servant.¡±
That she
understood the value of such a simple presence among the ordinary people is
touching to me. I came to Korea after spending 3 years living in some of Davao
City¡¯s largest slums and have now lived for 23 years in the same house on the
edge of Hwagok Market, getting about by public transport and eating what people
eat. I cannot claim results because I do not live like that for results but
could hardly imagine living in any other way. One of the other brothers in our
house spends most of his time visiting people shut up in the prisons of Korea
(both Korean and foreigners) and what remains of his time working (with others)
to help and comfort people with full-blown AIDS and nowhere to go, I can only
rejoice.
It is well-known
that Isabella Bird spent a lot of time analysing what was wrong with Korean
society and deciding that the main problem lay with the corrupt, idle, ignorant
officials and the Yangban class as a whole. She is very critical of many things
and I do not intend to bore you with launching into any discussion of what I
reckon is wrong with Korea to parallel hers. Rather my topic finds its
reflection in her response to the beauty of Korea that finds its finest
expression in her evocation of the Diamond Mountain: ¡°Surely the beauty of that
11 miles is not much exceeded anywhere on earth. Colossal cliffs, uprearing
mountains, forests, and gray gleaming peaks, rifted to give roothold to pines
and maples, oftimes contracting till the blue heaven is narrowed to a strip,
boulders of pink granite 40 and 50 feet high, pines on their crests and ferns
and lilies in their crevices, round which the clear waters swirl, before
sliding down over smooth surfaces of pink granite to rest awhile in deep pink
pools where they take a more brilliant than an emerald green with the flashing
lustre of a diamond—rocks and ledges over which the crystal stream dashes in
drifts of foam¡¦¡±
It is here that I
find lines of special interest to me in my present state: ¡°This route cannot be
traversed in European shoes. In Korean string foot-gear, however, I never
slipped once. There was much jumping from boulder to boulder, much winding
round rocky projections, clinging to their irregularities with scarcely
foothold, and one¡¯s back to the torrent far below, and much leaping over deep
crevices and walking tight-rope fashion over rails. Wherever the traveler has
to leave the difficulties of the torrent bed he encounters those of slippery
sloping rocks, which he has to traverse by hanging on to tree trunks.¡± At 65
years of age!
Arriving at the
temple she calls Yu-chom-sa, in the early hours she is invited by a ¡°friendly
young priest¡± who had been traveling with them, ¡°to see him perform the
devotions¡± and I wonder if the form of bell-ceremony she describes still
exists, never having seen it: ¡°The great bronze bell, and elaborate piece of
casting of the 14th century, stands in a rude, wooden, clay-floored
tower by itself. A dim paper lantern on a dusty rafter barely lighted up the
white-robed figure of the devotee, as he circles the bell, chanting in a most
musical voice a Sanskrit litany, of whose meaning he was ignorant, striking the
bosses of the bell with a knot of wood as he did so. Half and hour passed thus.
Then taking a heavy mallet, and passing to another chant, he circled the bell
with a greater and ever-increasing passion of devotion, beating its bosses
heavily and rhythmically, faster and faster, louder and louder, ending by
producing a burst of frenzied sound, which left him for a moment exhausted.
Then seizing the swinging beam, the three full tones which end the worship, and
which are produced by striking the bell on the rim, which is 8 inches thick,
and on the middle, which is very thin, made the tower and the ground vibrate,
and boomed up and down the valley with their unforgettable music. Of that young
monk¡¯s sincerity, I have not one doubt.¡±
Her comment is
admirable: ¡°The general culture produced by Buddhism at these monasteries, and
the hospitality, consideration, and gentleness of deportment, contrast very
favorably with the arrogance, superciliousness, insolence, and conceit which I
have seen elsewhere in Korea among the so-called followers of Confucius.¡±
For me too, the
experience of nights spent in Korea¡¯s temples has been memorable. There is
something quite unique in the sound which awakes you soon after 3am; one monk
walks slowly through the temple beating a wooden fish-head block and singing a
sutra summoning all beings to enlightenment. The sound increases as he
approaches your part of the buildings, then dies away, leaving you wondering
whether or not to get up for the morning chanting that will follow the ringing
of the great bell. You rise, and at this time of year go out to a balmy night
full of acacia and other perfumes while from hill to hill the strange calls of
night birds echo, including the Asian nightingale whose name and call are so
hard to translate poetically: ±Íôµµ.
Yet Isabella had
her blind spots. Listing the main features of Korea at the start of her book,
she includes ¡°Arts: nil¡± which is startling until you realize that she had a
very European notion of art. There were no theatres or art galleries... She
several times reports that all day every day the air was alive with the sound
of the drums and gongs of Shamanistic rituals. She did not consider that vast
repertoire, largely lost, to be part of humanity¡¯s artistic heritage. Yet for
me, the thrilling percussion performances of friends expert in Samul-nori, the
folk songs and pansori performances of An Suk-song, the lovely Shamanistic
Salpuri-chum and other art dances transmitted by Lee Mae-bang and Kim Suk-ja,
the tight-rope exploits of Kim Dae-kyun sitting cross-legged on his rope using
only the fan inherited from his master to keep balance, have been Great Moments
in my experience of Korea.
Another feature
of the traditional culture of Korea that I regret she did not encounter was
green tea. She never went south to Chiri Mountain... the monks of the Diamond
Mountains only offered her cups of honeyed water, that she got rather tired of.
She never realized that, a few decades before her arrival, the scholar-monk
Cho-Ui had helped his Confucianist friends among the governing elite to
discover the delights of tea-drinking at the same time as he taught them
Buddhism. He had probably learned how to dry and prepare green tea during a
visit lasting several months that he made to the very great scholar Dasan,
Chong Yak-yong (1762-1836) when he was in exile at his mother¡¯s home in Kangjin
early in the 19th century. That revival may not have lasted long, I
suppose. Then came the Japanese with their own ways of tea and it was not until
the 1960s that the Venerable Hyo Dang, Ch'oi Pom-sul, began seriously and
systematically to teach a tradition of Korean tea to replace the Japanese
forms. He died in 1979 but his young widow continues to make tea and perform
the tea ceremony as he taught her.
Nothing can be
more beautiful than to spend a night in mid-May in a small house in Chiri
Mountain, with the roar of a mountain torrent to lull you, then rise in the
early morning and go up to the head of the valley, to a temple that Cho-Ui is
known to have visited, and be present as that tea is prepared and offered
ceremonially to the Buddha, then shared among those present. The tea, known as
Panyaro (Dew of Wisdom) has a deep, rich taste that I cannot begin to express
in words. To drink that tea in those surroundings is a sublime, yet a very
simple experience.
Still, I must now
part company with Isabella B in order to speak of poetry and literature. She
felt the poetry of Korea¡¯s natural beauty sometimes, but knew nothing at all of
its written poetry. In any case, modern poetry only began a decade or more
after her visit. I will not trouble you with its history...
In about 1988 I
remarked to a colleague that I was teaching Korean students about British
poetry but I felt that I should also be bringing Korean poetry to people in
Britain, She introduced me to the senior poet Ku Sang and so I began to
translate Korean poetry. Ku Sang was born in 1919 and is still alive, by a
miracle, despite having lost one lung to TB. He was born in Seoul but when he
was a small child his family moved to near Wonsan, in north-east Korea. They
were Catholics and his older brother became a priest. After studying the
philosophy of religion in Japan, Ku Sang returned to northern Korea where he
became a journalist and began to write poetry. After Independence he came into
conflict with the Communists and finally had to flee south, leaving his mother
and family in the north. He would never see them again; his brother was surely
martyred in 1950.
Komo Station,
Mother's Station
Whenever I pass
Komo Station,
my mother is
waiting.
Out in front of
the garden gate, she is waiting,
looking scarcely
older than my wife looks now,
looking just as
when she saw me off
the day I crossed
the 38th Parallel,
out in the lane,
she is waiting.
Living
helter-skelter, day by day,
rattling the
empty lunch-box in my satchel,
coming home from
school by train, as in that childhood,
so now when my
hair is as grey
as my father's
was when he died,
out by the
station she is waiting.
My mother, who
stayed behind
alone in our
North Korean home,
alive still, or
dead, I do not know,
has come here now
and is waiting.
(Note:
Komo is on the outskirts of Taegu, South Korea, and its name means
"Mother-caring, Mother-recollecting". Trans.)
A little later, I
was invited to collaborate in translating Yi Mun-yol¡¯s novel ¡°The Poet¡± which
is based on the true life-story of the 19th-century wandering poet known as Kim
Sakkat. Born into a high-class Yangban family, while he was still a boy, his
grandfather was executed for supporting rebels in the region he was
administering and the family lost its social rights. The boy, an innocent
victim of his grandfather¡¯s act, became a poet whose works were full of satire
and mockery of the corruptions of the privileged classes. The poor people of
the villages he visited loved his poems and memorized them. The novel turns
this into a meditation on the nature of the relationship of art and society but
it derives part of its power from an awareness that the author¡¯s father chose
to support the Communist side and freely went North where he became quite a
prominent official, abandoning wife and children in the South where they had to
suffer black-listing and fierce discrimination in the as ¡°the family of a
pro-Communist traitor¡± in the decades after the war.
The writer whose
work I have mainly translated, though only 2 volumes have so far been
published, is Ko Un, undoubtedly a controversial figure in Korea but by far the
best known Korean writer in the world at large with a long list of readings
given in almost every continent and translations in many languages; he just got
back from a seminar devoted to his work in Sweden. Yet his biography includes
the following evocation of his life as a teenager during the war: ¡°He witnessed
family members being killed. He witnessed them killing each other. He witnessed
friends, neighbors, and his first love being killed. He was forced to transport
dead bodies, carrying them on his back for many nights. These experiences brought him to the
edge of mental breakdown, to attempted suicide. He lost the hearing in one ear,
after pouring poison into it.¡± He became a Buddhist monk for about ten years
then returned to the world. The following years were full of torment and black
despair, culminating in a nearly successful suicide attempt in 1970. Reading by
chance a couple of years later about a young laborer who had killed himself as
a protest against the exploitation of his fellow workers, Ko Un realized the
falsehood of his own suicide-attempts and he was reborn as an activist in the
struggle against Park Chung-hee¡¯s dictatorship. Arrested on the fateful night
of May 18 1980, he was sentenced to life imprisonment by a court-martial and
only released in 1982. He then rewrote all the poems he had previously
published in a spirit of purification and repentance, married and moved away
from Seoul to write most of the 120 or more volumes he has so far published,
including the 15 volumes of Maninbo.
Headmaster Abe
Headmaster Abe
Sudomu, from Japan:
a fearsome man,
with his round glasses,
fiery-hot like
hottest pimentos.
When he came
walking clip-clop down the hallway
with the clacking
sound of his slippers
cut out of a pair
of old boots,
he cast a deathly
hush over every class.
In my second year
during ethics class
he asked us what
we hoped to become in the future.
Kids replied:
I want to be a
general in the Imperial Army!
I want to become
an admiral!
I want to become another
Yamamoto Isoroko!
I want to become
a nursing orderly!
I want to become
a mechanic in a plane factory
and make planes
to defeat the
American and British devils!
Then Headmaster
Abe asked me to reply.
I leaped to my
feet:
I want to become
the Emperor!
Those words were
no sooner spoken
than a
thunderbolt fell from the blue above:
You have formally
blasphemed the venerable name
of his Imperial
Majesty: you are expelled this instant!
On hearing that,
I collapsed into my seat.
But the
form-master pleaded,
my father put on
clean clothes and came and pleaded,
and by the skin
of my teeth, instead of expulsion,
I was punished by
being sent to spend a few months
sorting through a
stack of rotten barley
that stood in the
school grounds,
separating out
the still useable grains.
I was imprisoned
every day in a stench of decay
and there, under
scorching sun and in beating rain,
I realized I was
all alone in the world.
Soon after those
three months of punishment were over,
during ethics
class Headmaster Abe said:
We're winning,
we're winning, we're winning!
Once the great
Japanese army has won the war, in the future
you peninsula
people will go to Manchuria, go to China,
and take
important positions in government offices!
That's what he
said.
Then a B-29
appeared,
and as the silver
4-engined plane passed overhead
our Headmaster
cried out in a big voice:
They're devils!
That's the enemy! he cried fearlessly.
But his shoulders
drooped.
His shout died
away into a solitary mutter.
August 15 came.
Liberation.
He left for Japan
in tears.
But above all
Chon Sang Pyong, who died in 1993 before I could ever meet him, has become my
close companion and I am well-known for my constant frequentation of the
Kwichon tea house in Insadong run since 1985 by his widow, Mok Sun-ok. To have
written this, his best-known poem, in 1970 – only 3 years after being arrested
and horribly tortured for no reason and at a time when he was very seriously
ill both physically and psychically – to say that this world is beautiful,
reveals a very special degree of human vision. That is Korea for me.
I'll go back to
heaven again.
Hand in hand with
the dew
that melts at a
touch of the dawning day,
I'll go back to
heaven again.
With the dusk,
together, just we two,
at a sign from a
cloud after playing on the slopes
I'll go back to
heaven again.
At the end of my
outing to this beautiful world
I'll go back and
say: It was beautiful. . . .