Scenes from the Enlightenment: A Novel of Manners
254
Scenes from the Enlightenment: A Novel of Manners
254Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628970685 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Deep Vellum Publishing |
| Publication date: | 10/14/2014 |
| Series: | Library of Korean Literature Series , #13 |
| Pages: | 254 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Kim Namcheon was born in 1911 in South Pyongan Province, located north of Pyongyang in what is today North Korea--he was, in fact, from the area about which he wrote in Scenes from the Enlightenment. After graduating from high school he went to study in Japan at Hosei University in Tokyo, but he did not complete his studies there. He was active in the proletarian literary movement, and after his return to Korea in 1931 he played a leading role in the Korean Artists Proletarian Federation (KAPF). His early works pursued socialist realism, but he was criticized for focusing too much on the class struggle and not enough on actual human beings living their lives. He sought to rectify this fault, and his efforts resulted in the work for which he is probably best known, Scenes from the Enlightenment. Shortly after liberation from the Japanese he crossed over into North Korea, but it is reported that he was executed in 1953 as part of a cultural purge.
Dalkey Archive Press
Read an Excerpt
Scenes From The Enlightenment
By Kim Namcheon, Charles La Shure
Dalkey Archive Press
Copyright © 1947 PaegyangdangAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62897-068-5
CHAPTER 1
In a certain village lived two families from the Miryang Bak clan. There was Bak Rigyun, whose family had called this village home for five generations, and who made his living selling noodles behind Mr. Gil's smithy, which was next to the herbal medicine shop just inside the Gate of the Visiting Immortal. His younger brother, Seonggyun, ran an inn and stable five houses up. Their children were as numerous as a litter of piglets, but they had nothing in the way of property except the pitiful thatched-roof houses where they lived. Even though they made their livings running a noodle shop and an inn, and even though they had not even a patch of land to their names, they went around calling themselves yangban aristocrats. None of their ancestors had held the post of prime minister, and the family had never produced a high-ranking minister, a renowned statesman, or a famed general. The head of the second generation of their family, after they moved to this village, had been a petty official, who died at a young age; his wife, Lady Seong, had hung herself so that she could follow in her husband's footsteps, earning herself the title "virtuous woman," but leaving behind her their son. This had been recorded in the village chronicle, and when the Bak brothers were in their cups they would recite the Chinese characters of the citation, or mumble its Korean translation as if it were a Buddhist chant.
"Lady Seong, the wife of Bak Gwiseong and eldest daughter of Seong Nonsan, when her husband Bak Gwiseong died, she hung herself in devotion to him, and the people of the village buried her body with her husband in a single burial mound. Lady Seong was twenty-three years old at the time."
The monument erected in her memory was just outside Visiting Immortal Gate, on the left-hand side, beneath the shabbiest in the long row of monument pavilions. When weeds grew in the furrows between the roof tiles and sparrows nested in the corners of the eaves, the Bak brothers would uproot the weeds and clear away the nests with their own hands. But the roof began to sag and the pavilion began to lean to the right. It would take no small amount of money to repair or rebuild it. They propped it up by putting a single pillar on the right side and, although it was still an eyesore, they managed to keep it standing. It was a forlorn sight as it stood there awaiting its own demise—just like their hollow boasting that they were yangban.
Bak Rigyun took aside a customer coming in for noodles and complained, "Who does that Bak Seonggwon think he is? He says he's a Miryang Bak but all he does is ruin my reputation, and who knows what Bak family he's from anyway? That vagabond goes around stealing whatever he can get his hands on, saying that he's a Miryang Bak ..."
There was indeed another family from the Miryang Bak clan living in this village. The head of this family had built a large house at the highest point in the village; it towered above a dozen or so houses, about halfway between the Pavilion of the Descending Immortal and Visiting Immortal Gate, right about where Nine Dragons Bridge was. The master of the house had just turned forty this year, and his name was Bak Seonggwon.
Bak Rigyun may have wondered "what Bak family" Bak Seonggwon was from, but he was, in fact, also from the Miryang Bak clan. It was just that no one knew whether one of his ancestors had been anything more than a petty official. Seeing that his family had no monuments to a filial son or a virtuous woman, he certainly didn't seem to have anything to boast of, not like Bak Rigyun's family did.
He was not originally from this village. He'd moved here some twenty years ago from Eunsan. His grandfather had been a petty official who had schemed his way into some rice from the government storehouse. He'd earned a fortune by lending against rice stipends, or buying them up when they were cheap and then selling them again in the spring or summer, when rice prices had risen. Of course, when the people ran out, he distributed his own rice or the rice he used as collateral, and then demanded it back at the harvest at exorbitant interest, and it was with this money that he would have bought his land. At any rate, Seonggwon made a good amount of money, but his father had squandered it all with his gambling, his drinking, his frequent visits to Pyeongyang in his later years, and even his smoking of opium, which had just been introduced from abroad. When he died an untimely death, there was little left of his estate.
Not long after Bak Seonggwon had finished his three years of mourning for his father, the Revolt of 1894 broke out. At the time, he was a hot-blooded youth of twenty-three or twenty-four. When everyone else fled to the mountains of Gangwon Province, he deemed that it was truly the time for a brave man to take action, and he stayed behind, entrusting his wife and children to relatives who were leaving the village. He traveled back and forth from Jasan to Suncheon, Pyeongyang, Junghwa, and even Hwanghae Province, selling to the soldiers there. Many daring peasant soldiers who had left their farmlands helped transport military supplies, and most of them were paid in silver coins. Seonggwon used brass coins to buy as many of these silver coins as possible, and then buried them in the ground in secret.
When the war was over and everyone returned from their place of refuge, Bak Seonggwon took his wife, concubine, and children from Eunsan and came to this village, looking for a place to settle down. What caused him to leave Eunsan and settle here? According to rumors that made the rounds later, he had poor relatives in Eunsan, and if they found out he had come into money, he would have had to spend it all helping them; so he claimed that he had never had anything but his two red fists, and quietly left to seek his fortune, finally settling down in this village.
Seeing that he built a small house in the Dumutgol neighborhood just after he first arrived, that story seemed likely enough. He put up his wife and concubine in that small house with its few rooms, and he split up his three children between their mothers. But a year later, when everyone who had fled the village returned and sold their houses because they were broke, he bought dirt cheap the street-side house near the marketplace where he now lived, and he redecorated and expanded the small house where he used to live and kept his concubine and her son there.
Until Bak Seonggwon moved to the marketplace, few people had seen his wife and concubine. So the village was abuzz with all sorts of rumors: that some strange fellow claiming to be from the Miryang Bak clan was living in Dumutgol, that he was a brazen young fellow like no other, that he had three sons and was impudent enough to have two wives, that he had money, or that he didn't have money—there were even rumors about the truth of the other rumors.
The first to become curious about him, of course, were Bak Rigyun and his brother. That fellow claimed to be a member of the Miryang Bak clan, but was it really true? Their wives, for their part, were dying to catch a glimpse of his wife and concubine. Yet during holidays they didn't go into the hills with the other women, nor did they appear beneath the swings, nor did they come out to jump on the seesaws.
But when this Bak Seonggwon promptly bought the best house in the village and split up his wife and his concubine, vague hearsay went out the window, and new rumors spread around the village like the measles—the only thing certain was that he came from Eunsan: some of his cousins and second cousins lived there. But one question remained unanswered by these rumors: where did this fellow—who had not fled with the rest of the village, but had stayed behind to make money, yet was, nevertheless, a good-for-nothing who'd left his hometown behind and set out as a vagabond—where did he suddenly get all this money, this house, and this livelihood?
So Bak Rigyun and his brother used their businesses, asking those who came to eat noodles, those who came to sleep at the inn, and those peddlers and traveling merchants who went from village to village in Pyeongan Province like a millstone spins round, and they learned that Bak Seonggwon had earned a great sum while everyone was off taking refuge during the war.
Bak Rigyun and his brother, who had been ready to look down their noses at him, were not only embarrassed, losing their taste for ridicule, they secretly began to fear that he might be more than he seemed. Yet between themselves they said that he could never be a yangban because he was from a different part of the Miryang Bak clan, and whenever they drank, as always, they continued to repeat their mantra: "Lady Seong, the wife of Bak Gwiseong and eldest daughter of Seong Nonsan."
Yet their wives were also curious. Through the open kitchen door or the cracks in the sorghum stalk fence, they saw Bak Seonggwon going to and fro in his dress clothes, strong of body and uncommon in countenance; and they had seen his son, the one who would be five or six this year, in his rainbow-striped coat and with his hair tied with thick, Chinese silk ribbons, following along behind a domestic or hired hand; but they had seen nothing of the faces of the two women. What did his wife look like, was his concubine pretty?—they say his wife is the daughter of a family in the Jeonju Choe clan that lived in Gaenggoji, about ten li from here—so where did he get his concubine, and where did a young man still wet behind the ears get a concubine anyway?—he would have been destitute and poor back then. The more they thought about it, the more they were dying to see the concubine's face.
One day, the women got together and, with an old woman who lived next door and was famous for her backbiting, set out for the shrine on the hill behind Dumutgol. The old woman and Rigyuns wife wore large bamboo hats, while Seonggyun's wife, who was still a young woman, not yet thirty, wrapped herself in a plain cotton hooded gown, and they walked down a narrow back alley toward Dumutgol. After hesitating by the shrine, they followed their original plan and went as swift as an arrow to the house of Bak Seonggwon's concubine. They already knew that, although he often slept here, Bak Seonggwon returned to his own home directly after eating breakfast.
The old woman went in first and said, "We would like a drink of water. We've come from the shrine and we're thirsty ..."
The three of them sat in the house for some time, studying the etiquette of the household and the concubine's appearance, and only left when they'd had their fill.
While the three of them were in near-perfect agreement in their opinions of how the house was kept and of the decorum of the household, they were of two minds when it came to the concubine's appearance. The backbiting old woman and Seonggyun's wife both claimed that no part of her face was without flaw, while the elder sister-in-law—that is, Rigyun's wife—proclaimed that she was a stunning beauty. She said that the old woman was originally a backbiter, so naturally she would say something like that, and her younger sister-in-law finding flaws in the other woman's face could be explained by the fact that she was still young and spoke out of jealousy; everything that she herself said, however, was true to the mark.
The old woman, in her own fashion, spread yet another rumor. All she had discovered was that the concubine had married at seventeen and borne her first child at eighteen, but from this the old woman managed to spin a slanderous tale: that, in the prime of his youth, Bak Seonggwon had won her from her newly-wed husband in a card game. This tale was preposterous, but such fabrications are always fascinating, and it spread as if it were the truth. The sisters-in-law also lied and said they had heard it straight from the woman's mouth. This rumor made the rounds in the village for a long time.
Yet there was not a single person who knew that in Bak Seonggwon's storehouse—a small space as dim as a cave, bounded by walls as hard as stone and half dug into the earth—were three large jars. There were, in fact, two servants who had dug this cellar with their own hands, but not even they knew for what purpose. Naturally, then, no one knew that the jars were filled to the brim with Japanese silver coins. Bak Seonggwon had hoarded these silver coins, the coins for which he had exchanged Korean brass coins during the Revolt of 1894. According to those in the family, and to the servants and hired hands, that dugout cellar was a shrine for special spirits. And it was true that there were a few pieces of white paper, with the names of guardian spirits on them, on a shelf in one corner. But this rumor was spread by Bak Seonggwon himself as a scheme to prevent thievery.
Whenever a good wet or dry field became available, if the price of silver was high, he sold a few of the valuable silver coins, and then used the proceeds to buy the land, without attracting attention.
He was also a fearsome and ruthless moneylender. If a borrower missed the appointed day, he would confiscate houses and land. Houses were fairly worthless, so he generally took the land. In the case of families who were still well off and had land, he would pile interest upon interest over the course of a year, so within two or three years it would grow to many times the original sum. His assets piled up like snow. And yet there were still few in that neighborhood who knew him as a rich man.
It was not long before there was no one left who called him by his name. No one knew who started it, but everyone called him by the respectful title of Assistant Curator Bak. It may have been a title made up by the flatterers who frequented his house, but if you asked Bak Rigyun about it, he would say: "Now look here! People are calling him Assistant Curator, and it seems like a right proper position, but Assistant Curator is just an empty title bought with money, a bought title!" Then he would whip out his pipe from behind his back and puff away at his tobacco to calm his thunderous wrath.
At any rate, he was Assistant Curator Bak. Before he turned forty, at the age of thirty-seven in fact, he was already the father of five children. Up until that time, he had called his eldest son "Big Boy," his son who had been born in Eunsan "Eunsan Boy," and the rest by their birth order, but he decided to give them new names appropriate to their places in the family in order to establish the proper decorum. His father was Bak Sunil, and he was Bak Seonggwon, so there was clearly already a custom of naming children in each generation according to the principles of metal, water, wood, fire, and earth; but when his eldest son was born, Bak Sunil was intoxicated with liquor and opium, and so had not given his grandchild a proper name before he died, just "Big Boy" and "Big Grandson." Bak Seonggwon—no, let us also follow the custom of the people, and from now on call him Assistant Curator Bak—this Assistant Curator Bak was twenty at the time, and he had no particular interest in his children until he passed the age of thirty. Sons had been common in his family since he was a young man, so he was not worried about preserving his line, and there was little opportunity for him to grow fond of his wife or children when he was engaged in various money-making ventures designed to reverse the decline in his family's fortunes. So it was only when he was thirty-seven that he came to name his sons. The character for "Sun" in his father's name contained the character for water, and the character for "Gwon" in his own name contained the character for wood, so all he needed to do was think of a character with fire in it. After all, water bears wood and wood bears fire. After spending an entire day flipping through this book and that, he decided upon "Hyeong," which means "bright," and thus contains the character for fire. He himself shared the second character of his name with his brothers, so, according to custom, his sons would have to share the first character of their names. The names he thus created were as follows.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Scenes From The Enlightenment by Kim Namcheon, Charles La Shure. Copyright © 1947 Paegyangdang. Excerpted by permission of Dalkey Archive Press.
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