One Spoon on This Earth

Father

My father, who led an ill-fated life, must have known that he would obediently resign himself to the hands of death. Without showing any trace of that fate on his face, he lost his appetite all of a sudden and within fifteen days he had laid down his spoon once and for all. During the last three days of his life he was unconscious. The doctor said the deterioration of his lungs caused his fast decline in health. I tried to feed him rice gruel by trickling portions of it into his mouth but his stomach could not handle it; he had diarrhea every time. Even though my father was unconscious, he was still obsessive about cleanliness so much so that whenever there was any indication of diarrhea coming on he woke up startled and frantically looked for the bedpan. This happened several times and eventually he even rejected the rice gruel and calmly prepared himself to meet death.

Even though he was moaning lowly in his attempt to breathe life into his body, his faced looked calm and serene. The low lull of his moaning sounded like the fading ashes of a bonfire settling to the ground ash by ash. As I witnessed the ever-so-natural progression of his death, I was reminded of my father’s gruesome car accident six years ago. My father almost died from excessive hemorrhaging; the suffering he had experienced, until he had shriveled up into the sad figure of a cripple because of a severely fractured right femur, was the cruelest pain of all. Was he so at peace with himself because he had already experienced the sufferings of death? Above all else, he who had a life of turmoil looked like someone who was reconciled with death. Wasn’t this the final victory of a loser?

Overwhelmed by the emotions of gratitude and regret, I put my hand inside the covers and started massaging the bottom of my father’s feet. When I was in junior high school, I used to massage my father’s feet so he could fall asleep. What started out as an act of love later became a loathsome act of obligation. I used to be an obedient junior high school student, but I became a rebellious high school punk who clashed with my father in reckless conflicts. In other words, at the center of my father’s life of turmoil was my share of unfilial acts.

On the day my father breathed his last breath, my younger siblings and I purified our father’s body with scented water before shrouding him in his last garment. At this moment, I realized with every ounce of my being that his body was doomed to return to matter like a chopped up stump, stiff and spiritless. He was emaciated and bony. His skin had lost its luster like a dried-up fish scale, and the leg that had suffered the fracture was severely warped. I was cleaning his pitiful body with scented water and when my hand finally went to his crotch area, I was so overwhelmed with uncontrollable emotions that tears just rolled down my face.

For the first time in my life, I saw my father’s genitals. The tension I felt when I was cleaning that area, and the touch of his skin, evoked emotions I could still feel even after three years had passed. The fact that my very being originated from here was so self-evident that it seemed rather illusory, to such a great extent, that it felt like an enormous burden that overpowered me at that very moment. It was one seed of existence, the place where the existence called I originated by chance, but the origin of life is now returning to ruins. That ruin was my father’s death, and his eternal absence was confirmed in me as a sharp pain. His death made me realize that the reality of my death would find me sooner or later.

I’ve seen many deaths in my life, but I never felt the reality of death so vividly as I did at that time. I can still distinctly feel the sharp pain I felt when I came face to face with death—a death which originally hovered from a distance like a hazy form of illusion, then one day made a surprise attack on my father and penetrated his body. The sorrow and fear of seeing one’s own death too soon were probably embedded in the tears I cried as the eldest son before the spirit of my departed father. Now that my father has passed away, it’s my turn to go; this rude awakening pierced the innermost part of my heart. Birth is an accident but death is an unavoidable necessity.

However, death does not mean the complete extinction of life. Death does not completely destroy human individuality. This is evidenced by the fact that my father’s image still lives on in my heart and soul, even though he has died. Even after his death, my father has been in and out of my consciousness, making me feel as if he had moved into my heart. Actually, isn’t my father none other than myself? I am beginning to look more and more like my father. My father’s life did not cease. It lives on in me, his son. The end is not a discontinuation but a beginning. Likewise my existence is not a separate entity but it signifies the blood ties of one connected link of collective lives.

My father was laid to rest in the family burial plot at the base of Mt. Halla. My uncle was already buried at that graveyard prepared by my cousins and me. Next to him, one grave site away, a second burial mound was created for my father. I took a few measured steps and stood on the plot where I too will be buried. At that moment my thoughts naturally went to the image of my eldest son in his first year of college. Touched by this strange sentiment, I laughed out loud.

The grave site had a good view. In one glance, I was able to see the breathtaking scene of the vast sky and the ocean meeting at the horizon and vying for the blue light, the wide and level green fields, the ascent of the soft ridgelines, and the cloud, like white silken fabrics, that floated low at the foot of the mountain. I would never tire of looking at this wonder of nature. In no time my sorrow evaporated and I became lighthearted. Why would anyone get depressed by the thought of death, with such a luxurious grave site? As I thought about my father’s spirit, which left his physical body and lightly floated nestled inside that cloud like a white funeral streamer, I accepted not only my father’s death but my own death with ease.

Across the path there was one tall cedar tree that obstructed the open view of the family burial plot. I climbed and tried to chop off the top portion of the tree but such a minor task turned out to be so physically taxing that I almost vomited. I could not ignore the fact that I was getting old. On that day, my whole body accepted the grim reality that at the age of fifty, I had fewer days ahead of me than days gone by.

This is how my father’s death made a great impact on my psyche; it changed my way of thinking permanently. I picked up a habit of getting lost in absentmindedness and now and then groping around in the memory of my past, and my feet brought me to my hometown more frequently than before. On an island surrounded by water, the boy who dreamed of entering the world by piercing through the horizon and the boy who left by kicking aside his father who was standing like an obstacle at the threshold, has now become a middle aged man in need of a balm for body and soul, desiring to regress into his mother’s womb. There is no purpose for writing this story other than to relive my long forgotten days of youth through the telling of this story.

Now only my hometown memories of my childhood and youth shine gloriously in my mind when I think about my past, and the rest of time and tide is a meaningless succession of days. While I am on the subject, let me throw in another silly idea. If we live each day like it is no different from any other, then can we really claim that we have lived a whole lifetime? Doesn’t it come down to only one day of living? If we remember what we remember from our past as the true past, then we only really remember today. The past fades by today’s glaring sunlight; today we only remember half of yesterday, and we remember two days ago as half of yesterday, three days ago as half of two days ago. If this is the only way we remember the past, through this endless formula, then the calculation we come up with is a little over a day and a half of time that we spend living the past. My dear readers, do not ridicule me for my absurd sophism. This sophism can also be interpreted to mean that today’s sun is the most important one in the midst of infinite time. But more than today’s bright sun, my long forgotten past is more important to me now.

These days when I go to my hometown, I wander here and there around the land and by the sea trying to piece together all the fragments buried in the darkness of my past. Now I walk around searching for paths of the wayfarer’s footprints that have suddenly stopped in their tracks leading to nowhere in the forest. I shout out with joy when I find a banyan tree dangling with many fruits hidden behind an old hackberry tree nearby a shrine. I try to search for my younger self amid all the objects found in nature that remind me of my childhood and youth. People are not the only ones who raised me. I was weaned only a few months after birth but I grew up being nurtured from the breast milk of nature. Watching a newborn calf that just came out of his mother’s womb suddenly rise up and stand on his legs after touching the ground for the first time gave me the impression that the calf was born through an eruption of the earth. Anyway it’s clear to me that in my hometown, nature played an important role in forming my identity. It was a time of innocence, void of all shame and guilt since nature was a part of my life. It feels like only that period of my life was the truth and the rest was one big lie.

However, the reality is that on that island, Hambagigul Village, which no longer exists on the map, is where my umbilical cord was buried after birth. It may be because I am a writer who is used to seeing the world through metaphors, but since the village had been destroyed by fire during the suppression of 1948, it has been carved out in my consciousness as mere black ashes of ruins. Since that time, I visited that place to confirm that the black ashes of ruins had transformed into green fields of grain. But the only thing that truly stood out in my mind was the bamboo grove that stood at one side of the lot which became someone’s barley field and a crape myrtle tree at the entryway of an alley. Didn’t the sound of the bamboo thicket swaying with the wind, as if muttering some words, and the pile of bright flowers of a splendid crape myrtle tree, which bloomed defiantly, actually emphasize the scorched ruins of that place all the more?

Therefore, I don’t know what to do about this feeling of loss, as if a part of my being had also burned up in flames together with the horrifying fire that scorched that place in 1948. It feels like the first six years of my life spent there—that place of only desolate darkness—had been erased with smeared ink. My perception of this darkness is the sincere truth, but without a doubt it is mostly the exaggerated work of a physiological lapse of memory. Since it was only a short period of time after my birth, my ability to think was not fully developed. In any case, I must simultaneously penetrate the darkness of the black burnt wasteland and the darkness of my lapse of memory, revive the dead village, and confront my forgotten childhood.

Hambagigul, the Origin

The vast solitary darkness of my hometown—perhaps this darkness was related to the darkness of the origin. A gigantic shooting star fell at one point along a line tracing back to hundreds of years of boundless darkness. A meteorite mass of flames, brightening up the darkness like broad daylight, collided with the earth making a grand roaring sound and created a gigantic crater on that very spot. Later water welled up in the crater and it came to be called a thunder pool and a man in search of water began to settle around it. This man was my forefather. The thunder pool,— the place where existence began—was where my ancestors, who vanished into darkness after glowing like fireflies for a short while, lived.

In the vast darkness, I felt a new life stirring. And that was me. I was a fruit of that darkness. After I came out of my mother’s womb, I was dying even before I let out my first cry. I was slapped in the cheek and my entire body was shaken but I was dying, turning charcoal black. Did I wish to return to that darkness? Birth is a pure accident. Life is nothing but a light as faint as the glow of a firefly so it is not worth desiring. In this moment of life and death my grandmother, who was frantically rubbing my stomach, felt something the size of a chestnut. She pressed hard thinking this might be it. As if she had pressed the button of an automated doll, at that moment my windpipe opened up and I cried out my first cry so loud that it hurt everyone’s eardrums.

My existence came about by pure accident, and my family wondered how I would turn out since my beginning was so precarious. About three years after I was born, I was nothing but a piece of soft dough, not a human being. Since I had just come out of darkness I was still vulnerable to the influence of the dark shadow—death. There was a saying that children’s mortality rates were equivalent to yielding only half the crops because it was common for children to die of smallpox, measles, and even a cold. At the slightest provocation, I was on the verge of returning to darkness. I almost had an older brother but he too withered and died after a year.

In this state of uncertain, soft-dough existence I was funneled into darkness. I had the smallpox and the measles, spending more time sleeping than staying awake. One day I opened my eyes due to the sensation of something touching my face. After four long years of slumber, I finally opened my eyes. I vividly remember this moment even now as if this is my first memory. It was saliva that came out of my great grandfather’s mouth. Great grandfather had me on his lap and he was dozing off. A stream of saliva trickled down on his long beard and like a sticky spider web it touched my face. He was very old at the time.

I had been weaned but my mental capacity remained underdeveloped so that I just remember a few fragments of sensational memories, like the distinct feeling of my great grandfather’s saliva. Several months before liberation, Japanese fighter planes were shot down not too far from Maemul, a village on a hill. I remember the enormous explosion but I don’t remember at all about the five skirts that were made from partially burnt parachute cloth, one of which my mother wore for herself, and children who were older than me picking up scraps of metal frames, making slides out of them, and playing on the grass.

Pig’s Nose

But I do remember a pig’s nose. The pig’s nose hung on my neck like a pendant. I must’ve been a premature child because I drooled until I was four years old. Like a cow, sticky saliva slobbered endlessly all over me so wearing a bib was useless as it soon got completely soaked like a damp kitchen towel. One corner of my mouth where I drooled and underneath my neck were always wet to the skin.

My mother and grandmother fed me frogs and grasshoppers they caught and roasted. I was even fed roasted insect cocoons. They always called me into the kitchen whenever they found cocoons on dry wood used for firewood. Was it because of a lack of protein due to the year of the bad harvest? Since I drooled for so long, perhaps it wasn’t simply a lack of protein but rather a curse of some sort.

My drooling must have been severe as they resorted to cutting and hanging a pig’s nose around my neck. Unlike cows, horses or dogs, pigs don’t drool so that’s why they had done this as an amulet. It would’ve been better if it were a pig’s cuspid or toenail. Imagine a child drooling endlessly with a shriveled up pig’s nose hung on a string through its nostrils around his neck! Since I was such a hopeless child, my family was gravely concerned about how I would turn out.

If I were to use the year of liberation (I was four years old at the time) as a basis around which my life is ordered then I could say that I don’t have distinct memories before the liberation, as if they were erased. But I do remember certain things that happened three years before I left my hometown.

My father wandered outside because he was ill, and my mother took my baby brother and went to her parents' place. I was being raised in a house where grandparents often quarreled and loneliness began to infiltrate deep inside my body.

Home

After liberation, people who had been living a life of hell toiling in the coal mines returned. There were some who came back dead as pulverized bones of ashes. For a while my village was wrapped in violent emotions—some rejoiced for the survivors and some grieved for the dead. But what I remember most is the unfamiliar face of my grandfather whom I met for the first time. Grandfather returned after having worked in Osaka as a peddler for several years and he wore his tale of bravery, knocking down a Japanese laborer with bare hands who attacked him with a dagger, like a medal of honor.

The country was liberated but joy was short lived. The grain quota delivery to the government remained unchanged and the people’s grievances mounted all over the island due to the bad harvest. I remember the poverty of that time, inferred from the memory that remained in my palate. I think it’s because for the longest time I was deprived of any fish. I remember a piece of scabbard fish covered with cinders that was grilled on a barley straw fire. It was so delicious that my tongue still remembers that intense savory sensation. I don’t remember much about various events and happenings at the time, but I vividly remember the taste of that scabbard fish which stimulated my taste buds momentarily then disappeared quickly.

Isn’t it odd that the sense of taste and smell that fades away first still remains in my memory when other events and happenings have vanished? During such times of poverty it was unlikely that scabbard fish could be bought with money or traded with grains, so perhaps it was exchanged for a bowl of cold rice. Due to the severe drought even a handful of millet was precious. A woman from the seaside carrying a bamboo basket went around the small alleys of the village yelling out Scabbard fish! Scabbard fish! until her voice became hoarse but I guess no one bought her fish. Because she was hungry and tired, she must have entered my house asking for a bowl of leftover rice and in return she left one scabbard fish.

One day of idleness during the summer season meant ten days of no food in winter, so grandmother and mother were always busy working in the field; needless to say there was no time for them to take care of me. Furthermore, mother had to attend to my baby brother who was two years younger than me. Between working in the field and taking care of the baby, how was it possible for me to experience the loving touch of my mother’s hands? She even had to lay the baby down in the shade in order to work. Later mother told me while badmouthing grandmother that the reason I had less than three months of breast milk was entirely due to grandmother’s nagging. She insisted that if my mother breastfed me for a long time, I would turn out to be a spoiled child and not so smart. She added that one of the shellfish divers began feeding her baby rice seven days after his birth. During the busy farming season even a corpse stirred and worked, so it was not easy for my mother to carry the baby on her back and breastfeed often.

Anyway, I had to let go this sensual and physical pleasure of suckling early on, and my mother had to give up the joy of breastfeeding. Since she was so busy tilling the soil, the only person who could look after me was my great grandfather. That’s why the image of my great grandfather appears as my first memory. Even that consisted of a few fragments of tangible sensational memories—his white ramie-like beard, the smell of tobacco, and the smell of urine from a chamber pot in the corner of the room. Despite the stench, even now it’s a heart-rending memory for me, as if I could still reach out and touch the warmth of his body.

In a house filled with madness and discord, the only place I could find comfort as a child was in his arms. Father was suffering from a mental disorder. He had his first fit the year I turned three years old, so it was the year before the liberation. His illness turned out to be a blessing in disguise at that time when the Pacific War was coming to an end. Father, who was a graduating senior in the agricultural school, was able to get exempted from conscription thanks to his mental illness. His illness could not be attributed to any traumatic event though. The symptoms of his illness included endlessly murmuring to himself and wandering around aimlessly. He was suspected of feigning madness, so he was taken by the Japanese MP and tortured. Fortunately he wasn’t dragged into the battlefield, but he suffered severely for close to three years, until a year after the liberation. He was fine one minute, then he had a fit the next; he left the house after he had a fit and roamed all over the place for several days. When he became tired, he just plopped down and slept, so one cheek was normal but the other side got dark and tanned.

Even when he regained consciousness he couldn’t remember what he did or where he went. One time he took me for a bicycle ride and left me behind at a relative’s house in a different village. My family frantically looked for me. Mother must have suffered the most from his madness. I guess she couldn’t endure it any longer, so she ran off to her parents’ place with my baby brother. Thinking back on it now, my father’s illness might have been hereditary. Could it be the blood that had been transmitted for generations which might have caused the problems? Headstrong and extremely temperamental dispositions of my blood kin—this strong temperamental blood was manifested as madness in my father’s time. My grandfather was notorious for picking fights for he was also hot tempered. Even I caused several commotions, seized by destructive passion when I was young. When my fierce temperament flared up, my mind turned completely blank and I was consumed with reckless impulses. Thinking back on those moments, even now I shudder.

Great Grandfather

My great grandfather spent most of his time lying down due to his old age. From his throat came a ceaseless wheezing sound as if nicotine was burning from the bowl of a tobacco pipe. After my grandparents left for work, the entire house sank deep in solitude all day long, making my loneliness even more intense. I wanted to go outside and play, but my buddy Kyesŏng had smallpox. So crawling insects scattered about on the courtyard became my friends. I gazed at the ants’ procession absentmindedly and played with the cast-off shell of a cicada on the bottom of a citron tree and a mole cricket that couldn’t fly even though it had wings. I even baited a bagworm inside a hole with barley ear and pulled out an earthworm going into a hole after spitting dirt outside and cutting it off at its waist. That kind of mischief was a matter of life and death for those insects but it was fun for me. I caught a beetle bug and broke off its four legs and laid it upside down and enjoyed watching it flapping violently, grazing the ground, turning round and round. I peed inside the hole of an old and decayed persimmon tree trunk swarming with ant larva. I caught a bee inside a pumpkin flower and took out its sting and killed it. But I was scared and disgusted by a centipede the size of the span of a hand and a mushy snail dragging its white slime.

It was not only insects that lived in the house. There was also a yellow-spotted serpent the size of an adult’s arm living in the ceiling. Sometimes it leisurely crawled up the crossbeam. One time I saw the serpent dangling at the edge of the eaves. It swung back and forth for a while then, as if it could not hold up its own weight, it went plop and fell to the ground. The serpent didn’t stir for a while, as though it had been knocked out, then it slowly raised its head. I was so scared that I ran gasping to the room where my great grandfather was lying down.

Grandpa, that serpent came out again! It fell from the roof!

Great grandfather raised his body halfway and clicked his tongue, staring at the serpent turning the corner,

That ‘old man’ must have fallen trying to go around the eaves to eat sparrows’ eggs. Those sparrows live in a hole in the eaves. He must be getting old if he didn’t make it there.

Great grandfather called the disgusting, creepy serpent an old man. This idea of regarding the house serpent as sacred, a protector of wealth, must have generated mixed feelings of gratitude and fear, like being in a god’s presence. The house serpent was an object of appreciation for getting rid of rats that were eating away grains on the one hand and an unapproachable object of fear on the other.

Night

What I feared more than the serpent was the wild cat. I went to a bamboo forest in the back of the house by chance and was shocked out of my mind when I found bones scattered about on top of the fallen leaves. I was told that this wild animal came down at night and attacked chicken coops. Didn’t grandmother say that it not only attacked chickens but snatched away crying babies? It happened before I was born, but one time this wild cat even came into the room. Everyone was frightened and so was the animal. In the pitch-dark room, the wild cat clung to the wall, frantically jumping from this wall to that wall; after a while it finally found the door and left. So every night I was scared to death that the wild cat had snuck into the room. Night, in fact, came during daytime, too. I burst out crying when my eyes were temporarily blinded by the abrupt change in light to dark from being outside in the sunlight and then suddenly entering the dark room. Because of this, I knew that even during the day darkness loomed large.

When the nighttime drew near, the sunlight receded into darkness and the inside of the house got even darker and loneliness arose like goose bumps. I felt dejected and went to the sunny spot of the courtyard where soy sauce crocks were placed. I rubbed my back against the jars, trying to find warmth and went further and further in between the jars. Since the crocks had been exposed to the sun all day long, my chest and back became warm when I rubbed my body against them. The smell of savory bean paste and salted anchovies grazed the tip of my nose. The faint warmth of mother’s body heat . . . mother’s been long gone to her parents’ place . . . the courtyard was getting darker and darker. The dark of night that had retreated during the daytime slowly crawled out to reclaim its place in the house. From the dark ceiling the serpent crawled out and the wild cat crept into the dark bamboo forest. My heart froze. Mother was at her parents’ house with my baby brother and no one knew where father was . . . tears rolled down my cheeks silently.

In the desolate and vast darkness of my hometown, a speck of light was turned on. It was the tiny bean-sized flame of an oil lamp. The shadows of my grandparents and me having a late dinner emerged in that light. Everything was traced in the shadows—bowls of barley rice on the table and the people who were eating. I felt my grandfather’s gaze and I shoved barley rice into my mouth with my head down. I think my cheeks had traces of tears.

"Crying again? Tsk-tsk! Tears come out as easily as peeing. I wonder if you’re going to be okay when you grow up. . . . Go to sleep!" said grandfather and blew out the lamp.

The light only stayed on briefly when we ate dinner and the room was once again buried in complete darkness. I tossed and turned next to grandmother who had her back to me fast asleep from fatigue. From the next room I heard great grandfather’s breathing filled with phlegm in his throat, and the sound of wind rising from the bamboo forest where the wild cat lived. Tears welled up again as I thought about my mother at her parents’ house with the baby and father . . .

Grandparents

I would’ve been less lonely if I had received love and attention from my grandmother in lieu of my mother’s love, but grandmother was also always busy so she couldn’t really take care of me. Grandmother knew nothing but work. After a busy farming season ended, she didn’t even have time to catch her breath because she immediately set out to peddle grains. She took a cow to the slash and burn farming villages of Mudŭngiwat and Mŏngul located to the east of the distant Mt. Halla to buy buckwheat and sold it at the town market. She was a stickler, for she did not even throw away one grain of rice, so her personality clashed with my mother who was a bit slower and more generous. My grandmother always looked around in search of any barley ear on the ground as she went about her business. She couldn’t even pass a useless piece of cloth the size of a fingernail without picking it up. The reason why my father and uncle could graduate from the only agricultural school in town was solely due to my grandmother’s diligence. But my grandfather grumbled terribly saying that grandmother was like a cow who knew nothing but work. He said he could live with a fox but not a cow.

I was afraid of my grandfather. Because he had just returned from doing hard labor in Osaka, he had a foul mouth. He got angry at even trivial things and hit grandmother. Every time he hit her I would go to one corner of the kitchen and cry silently. I think my embarrassing habit of crying started around this time.

I was a crybaby until I entered junior high school. The fact that I cried over nothing was extremely embarrassing. Even when I tried hard not to cry, I couldn’t stop my tears from welling up uncontrollably. How many times did I cry over trivial matters? All those bland tears . . . Even now when I encounter a slightly sad part reading a novel or watching a movie, tears just roll down as easily as if I’m peeing, like my grandfather used to say. Is this called a mechanical inertia or conditional reflex? Or maybe it happened because I cried so often that my lachrymal glands became overdeveloped compared to my other organs and that is why even the slightest stimulation triggered a conditional reflex to secrete tears.

Father

Father’s whereabouts and what he was doing were still unknown. Even when he dropped by once in a while, he didn't stay longer than a day. And he only snuck into the room that grandmother and I shared so my grandfather never knew about his visits. Then he suddenly disappeared again. Because my father was such a mysterious figure, I was not happy to see him, rather I was afraid.

One time he showed up with a kite in his hand and I accepted it with great joy. But it soon became evident that it was someone else’s kite that got its line cut off because it was tangled. If the kite owner showed up while I was flying it around outside, I would’ve felt humiliated. I was so disappointed in my father. Isn’t a father supposed to stay home and do things for his children like making a kite and carving a top? Why can’t he get it through his head that he must decide once and for all that he has to stay home and think about bringing back mother?

I have this image of my father as a gust of wind that suddenly rises and falls because of the speed of his bicycle. Even now I can clearly visualize my father riding a bicycle with only his upper body bobbing up and down, quickly fading away through the barley field.

One time he had me ride on the back of his bicycle and took me into town in the middle of the night. It was my