The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea

by Pearl S. Buck

  She slid the door shut again and went away, and he sat the night through alone.

  … Hours passed uncounted. Whether he was in the body or out of the body he did not know. Did he hate the Americans? He could have hated them except that he remembered them as he had gone to and fro among them in their own country, a kindly people, enjoying the manifold benefits of their life, and in their enjoyment and self-content exuding friendliness, though without friendship, as he now perceived. They were still too young for friendship, incapable of the deep bonds which bind one human being to others. Friendliness is shallow though pleasant, and it was unreasonable to expect a depth beyond their capacity. The mind must know, the heart must feel, before there can be understanding, and they did not know the long sad history of his people, nor could they feel the terror of being a small country set by chance among giants. The King had expected far too much. He and his fellows, Il-han himself, had expected too much of the Americans. It was their own ignorance of foreign peoples to mistake the easy promises of friendliness for the loyalty of true friendship. No, he could not hate them. Yet without them he knew his people were doomed.

  What then could he do? His heart urged him to leave his grass roof and go to the King and the Queen and offer himself for their service, any service at any cost. Yet he knew this was only the longing to rid himself of the burden of his own knowledge. The King was no fool—he must know very well by now that he could trust no foreigners, the Americans having failed. And the Queen had never trusted them. The country was like a ship at sea, anchor lost, rudder broken, and captain helpless. He and all Koreans could only stay by their ship, wait out the storm, let destiny take its course. In kindness and forgiveness, he hoped that the friendly people in America would not know the opportunity they had lost and which would never again be offered them. Pray Buddha they would not some day be compelled to pay the costs!

  “Father!”

  Il-han heard his elder son’s voice and was startled, as though he had never heard it before. It was no longer the high voice of a child. It had dropped halfway down the scale, it was cracked and hoarse, the voice of a boy ready to become a man. How had this come about so suddenly? Or was it sudden? He had been too engrossed in the even smoothness of his cloistered days to notice.

  “Come in, my son,” he said.

  He stared at the lad as he entered the room. Surely he was taller today than yesterday, his hands bigger, his bones heavier. And his face was changed, the features thickening into adolescence—

  “Why are you looking at me, Father?” the boy demanded.

  “You are growing up.”

  “I have been growing up for a long time, Father.”

  “Why have I not seen it?”

  “Because you are always looking at your books, even when you teach us. Father!”

  “Well?”

  “I want to go to school in the city.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Il-han closed his book and motioned to his son to kneel on the floor cushion opposite him.

  “You think I am not a good teacher?”

  His son faced him with black eyes as bold as ever. “You teach old books, and I want to learn the new.”

  Il-han was about to reply sharply and then remembered as sharply. In his youth he had accused his father in the same fashion. In his son’s voice he heard his own again. He kept himself calm. “Are there such schools in the city?”

  “Yes, Father, and there are some teachers from America.”

  “They are Christians!”

  His son shrugged. “There are also schools with Japanese teachers.”

  “You wish to learn from Japanese?”

  “I wish only to learn,” his son retorted.

  What could Il-han say? He was wounded to the heart that his son considered him no longer fit to be his teacher, and yet he would not acknowledge his private hurt. He continued his argument.

  “It is all very well to have new learning, but this does not mean the old is without importance.”

  His son replied insolently. “We have had enough of this old stuff!”

  Il-han forgot himself. His right hand raised itself by instinct and he struck his son a blow on the cheek. The boy’s face grew red, his great eyes flashed. He rose, bowed and left the room.

  Il-han heaved deep sighs. He felt suddenly faint and his heart beat too fast. This son—as he strode out of the room he had looked a man, shoulders broad, long legs—ah, he should not have struck his son! What could be done now? Impossible for a father to repent to a son! The elder generation does not ask forgiveness of the younger. And what if the son was right and he was no longer a fit teacher for this time of confusion? What indeed did he himself know now of the world beyond this grass roof?

  He pushed aside the book wherein he had been writing a poem. Of late he had found refuge for his troubled spirit in poetry—Oh, heaven, had not his father also taken to writing poetry, and what of the village poet in the grass-roof hut where the Queen had hidden from her enemies? Poetry was a drug, a vice, a cover for helplessness, or perhaps only indolence. He sat for a long time in meditation, searching his soul, accusing himself, submitting his spirit to a humility difficult indeed for a man so proud.

  For days after that he did not speak to his son. He conducted the lessons for both sons as usual. The elder son took no part, asked no question, did not look at his father, but he came and took his place and remained in silence. After ten days Il-han told the younger son to leave the room, for he had something to say to the elder. The younger son obeyed and Il-han was left alone with his elder son. He called him by name now, for the first time.

  “Yul-chun, I have considered your wish to go to a school in the city. You know I am in exile here in my own house. Is it not dangerous for you in the city when it is known you are my son?”

  “No, Father,” Yul-chun said. “I have friends there.”

  Il-han was amazed. “How can you have friends when I have none?”

  “I have friends,” Yul-chun repeated stubbornly.

  The two gazed at each other. It was Il-han who yielded. So his son had friends of whom he knew nothing! A generation earlier a father would have insisted on knowing who his son’s friends were and how they had been made. But this, this was a new generation, one very far from the past, and he did not ask. He could not, for what if the son refused to tell the father? What force had the father now to compel obedience?

  “Well enough,” he said at last. “Then go.”

  “I shall live with my friends,” Yul-chun said.

  “Well enough,” Il-han replied again. “Only let your mother know where the house is. And you will need money.”

  He opened the secret drawer of his desk and took out a small leather bag where he kept money for daily needs and gave the bag to his son. “Let me know when you need more.”

  He held back the grim words in his mind—with all his independence he takes money from me. There was a bitter comfort in the knowledge and he needed any comfort.

  When his son had left the room Il-han went in search of Sunia and found her in the storehouse, standing by the scales to watch the measuring of rice for the household. Her dark hair was powdered with the white dust of the rice, and her eyebrows and eyelashes were white. It is how she will look when she is old, he thought, and for a moment he was saddened. Then he spoke to her in a low voice.

  “Will you come aside? I have something to tell you.”

  She lingered until the tenant had called out the weight of the grain and then she followed Il-han into the garden where they sat down upon a stone seat in the shade of the bamboo grove.

  “Our elder son wants to go to school in the city,” he told her.

  She was wiping the rice dust from her face with her kerchief and she did not reply.

  “Are you not surprised?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I knew that he would go.”

  “And did not tell me?”

  “I told him he must wait a year,�
� she said. “I told him he was not to trouble you while he was too young to leave home.”

  “And you think he is not too young?”

  “I think he is too old to stay,” she said.

  “So,” he said slowly, “so you have known all along! You have kept it secret from me. How many such secrets have you?”

  She laughed and then was grave. “I have only one purpose in all I do. It is to keep you at peace. If I told you every vagary and whim and ardor that these two sons of ours have, you would be in turmoil. You could not work.”

  “Work,” he repeated sadly. “I am not sure I have a work. An occupation, say!”

  “Work,” she repeated firmly. “Some day all that you write down in your books will be of use. Who else is keeping the record?”

  She had a way, most comforting, of making him value himself.

  “I pray you are right,” he said. “So then, we are to let him go?”

  “Yes, because we cannot keep him.”

  He mused for a moment. “What has happened that the young no longer obey their elders as we did?”

  “They see the havoc around about them,” she replied. “They know that we have failed. They no longer respect us.”

  She spoke the cruel words with such calm that he was afraid of her. Then he rose.

  “You are right. We must let him go, or he will leave us forever.”

  With that he went to his lonely room and took up his pen to brush the characters of a poem now rising to the surface of his mind. It was strange how these poems came to him nowadays, the distillation of his private emotions, of his disillusionment, of his solitude, of his yearning for a future in which, nevertheless, he could not believe. Nothing now could stay the doom he foresaw for his people and his country.

  He was surprised that his household could so easily settle itself into a life without the elder son. Peace became its atmosphere, a peace sometimes too deep, Sunia said, for the younger son gave her no trouble.

  “I miss that elder son’s naughty ways,” she told Il-han. “Nothing happens now that he has gone. Nothing is broken, no wild animals are brought in from the field, the floors are not dirtied, clothes are not torn, shoes are not lost. I hear no complaints about food. I am not used to such peace!”

  “I trust he is not making a commotion in the city,” Il-han said.

  Yet he too was secretly pleased to see Yul-chun once or twice a month when he came home with all his garments soiled and needing to be washed, and with his pockets empty of money.

  “I daresay you are full of new learning,” Il-han remarked in his dry way.

  “Your hair wants cutting,” Sunia said briskly, and went to fetch her scissors.

  Yul-chun shouted after her. “I will not have you cut my hair, Mother! They’ll say I have a country haircut.”

  “I will cut it!” she called back.

  And cut it she did, holding him by the ears and hooking his head under her arm, he half laughing, half angry.

  “I will never come home any more if you treat me like this,” he cried while he looked ruefully into the mirror on the wall.

  “Then cut your hair before you come,” she told him.

  She knew very well that he came back for money from his father and for love from her. He still could not do without her tender scolding and teasing love, and he liked to have her examine his clothes and sew on missing buttons and cry how filthy his socks were and how worn his shoes. In short, he needed to know that however far he went away, she was still his mother. And Il-han watched half sadly, and pondered the difference between father love and mother love. With all his teaching and his concern for his son’s mind and character, Yul-chun did not love him as he loved the mother whose concern was all for his body. Body love was deepest of all love perhaps—woman love in mother and in wife. Yet was it not this love that kept men forever children? Though for that matter, how could he himself live without Sunia? Who would feed him, keep him clean and tended and free of care if he had not her? In his son he saw himself again, and he did not like what he saw.

  Because his son was in the city, Il-han began in his own way to take more cognizance of the changes in the times. He bade his servant go to the city now and then, not only to observe secretly, but also to see what was new and to listen to talk on the street and in teashops and gathering places. In this way he learned that the Tonghak rebels were growing in number and though they were repressed by the King and his forces, nevertheless they broke out here and there through the provinces with increasing success. At last their leader was caught and put in prison for execution, and this roused the landfolk to new frenzy and despair. By this time they had no trust in the government, for they saw how the foreign powers pressed upon the King, and they knew how the Queen plotted to keep the Chinese in power in the war that was about to break between China and Japan as in mutual anger these two nations quarreled in Korea.

  In the early spring, in the third solar month of that year, while their young leader was still in prison, many Tonghak rebels gathered near the capital and they chose forty men from among them as their representatives, and those went to the King face to face to ask first that their leader be released and next for measures to better their hard lives. The King was wise enough to meet these Tonghak with courtesy and good promises, and so they returned peacefully to their homes. Yet the King had fresh troubles, for the foreign powers, whose envoys sat in the capital like vultures to watch all he did, were angry because he had received the Tonghak, for among the requests which they made was that he should set up an anti-foreign policy and expel all foreigners from the country. The King was caught between his people and the foreigners and so did nothing.

  Months passed and when the Tonghak saw that the King did nothing, they rose in greater anger than ever. Twenty thousand came to the town of Poum pretending to make a religious festival there, but instead they demanded freedom from the corruption of their own yangban and oppression from foreign powers alike. Everywhere over the land cries were heard in one city and another. Alas, in the city of Kobu, in the area of Pyonggap, the magistrate outdid all other yangban in corruption, for here he compelled the landfolk to repair the walls of a great reservoir, whose waters were used for irrigating the fields. When these farmers had repaired the reservoir, he levied a heavy tax on the water, which they then used for their fields, and he kept the money for himself. This caused much fury and the landfolk tore down the dam they had repaired, and they stormed into the city and drove the magistrate away from his palace while they occupied the city.

  The King and his cabinet then sent armies from the capital to rout the rebels, and hearing this from his servant, Il-han sent a man to follow the armies and watch all that took place. The man came back after many days to report that the government forces were overwhelmed and the Tonghak had moved on to conquer other cities. The King in distraction next begged for help from the Chinese, who sent their armies and only then did the rebels retreat against such force.

  “And, master,” the man said when he had related all this to Il-han, “whom do you think I saw there in the battles?”

  Il-han knew in his heart and could not speak. “I saw my young master, and he was with his tutor, who lived so many years in your house!” The servant turned away in pity when he saw Il-han’s face.

  The times grew still worse. A Chinese army, fifteen hundred strong, with eight field guns, arrived at the Gulf of Asan and marched to the capital. When the Emperor in Japan heard this he sent an army of five thousand soldiers to meet them. There in the Korean capital they went into battle, Chinese and Japanese, and the treaties declaring the independence of Korea became dust. The greater numbers won. Japan drove out the Chinese and then attacked the rebels and put down the Tonghak. Not content with this, the Japanese soldiers dragged the Tonghak leader from his prison and put him to death and the rebels in dismay retired into hiding.

  All this Il-han heard from his several men whom he regularly sent out to bring him news. They spoke no more of the tu
tor, and Yul-chun came home as usual and said nothing and Il-han said nothing, and in the frightful silence between them, he lived in dread. Now that the Tonghak leader was dead, he knew that indeed the Japanese were in power and the King was dependent upon them for his own place. But what of the Queen? It was of her he thought. She would never give up her love for the Chinese, and her hatred of the present confusion could only increase her love for them. She would not yield or bend her will. Her proud imperious heart was stubborn with love. Even Sunia grew afraid for her, and she paused near him one day on her way to some household task.

  “I hope you will not think of the Queen,” she said. “Let her solve the troubles she has brought upon herself.”

  He looked up at her quickly. “I am not thinking of the Queen,” he told her and knew he lied.

  Indeed, why should he think of the Queen? He could not help her and he would only be blamed if he came out of exile and went to her now. Nor could he keep himself secret if he went. Where the Queen was, nothing was secret. Her every word, her every look, was seen and pondered. Spies surrounded her, and though she was reckless and did what she willed, he who was known as her adviser in the past, if he left his house would be killed somewhere in a side street of the city or in a secret corridor of the palace, and no one would know. He did not lack courage but must he die, he hoped that it could be for a worthy reason and with an effect that lived beyond his death.

  He continued nevertheless in dread of what he would hear, for his private spies, now increased to eleven men, brought him further reports of the confusions which were taking place. China and Japan, these two, were in constant combat for the prize of his country, its trade, its central position in that part of the world, and the Japanese were carrying the war into China itself, and with every victory they seized new territory. Meanwhile they made this war an excuse for their armies to pour into Korea as reserves, and every day Il-han heard of fresh outrage against his people.

  … “The strong have now become too strong,” Il-han’s wise old man servant told him.

  The day was hot, in the midsummer of that year, and Il-han sat in his white undergarments under a persimmon tree in the garden. The fruit was small and green and the tree was overloaded so that some fruit fell to the ground, and his younger son was throwing the fruit against a target fixed on the trunk of the tree.