The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea

by Pearl S. Buck

  “I tell you, Sasha,” he began earnestly one day as they walked side by side, and then paused as he spoke the name. “Sasha?” he repeated. “How can I take you to your grandfather with that name? I shall give you another. Yes, I have it—you shall be another Il-han. Your grandfather’s name will honor you, and may you honor him.”

  His son did not say yes or no, but as the days passed, Yul-chun saw that he would not accept the new name. Unless he were called Sasha he did not answer. For a few days, as they traveled on, Yul-chun inquired of himself whether he should not argue the name, and then decided he should not. It was too soon. The bonds which should have been between father and son since birth must be knit now as carefully as though his son were newly born to him, as in a sense he was. He returned then to the Russian name, and still Sasha said nothing for or against. Studying that closed handsome face, the high forehead, the broad cheekbones, the small dark eyes under flying black brows, the full stubborn mouth, Yul-chun puzzled as to what sort of man his son was. Closed against the world, secretive, brooding, and yet sometimes suddenly impetuous, how could Sasha be revealed to him? He had told Sasha everything and Sasha told him nothing.

  “Will you not speak to me of yourself and your mother?” he said at last one day.

  They were well into Korea now, walking through high mountains, treading narrow footpaths that clung to the cliffs and wound in and out among the rocks.

  “I have nothing to tell,” Sasha said. “Every day was a day of work on the land. At night we went to political meetings. There was nothing more.”

  “But after Hanya—after your mother died, what did you do?”

  “I was put into a Russian orphanage.”

  “And then?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You were sent to school?”

  “Of course. All children are sent to school.”

  “Were they kind to you?”

  “Kind? I had enough to eat and a place to sleep.”

  “But someone was—someone took the place of your mother?”

  “No—there was no need for that.”

  “You missed your mother—being so young.”

  “I do not remember.”

  “Are you—have you ever been in love?”

  “Love? No!”

  “How is it you are a trader?”

  Yul-chun put the question innocently, and he was surprised to see that Sasha turned suspicious eyes on him.

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “Why? Because you are my son.”

  Sasha waited an instant, then answered. “I am restless. I like to wander. Since I am Korean I am not forced—that is, I am free. Also my mother told me to find you if I could, and especially to look for you in Antung. If you returned to Korea you would pass through Antung, she said.”

  “Did she say I would return?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes.”

  “Surely there is more,” Yul-chun urged. “What are your dreams? Where are your hopes? Every young man has dreams and hopes.”

  “Not me,” Sasha said stubbornly, his eyes on the path ahead.

  “Have you known terrors that make you silent?” Yul-chun asked next.

  “There are some things I will never tell you,” Sasha said.

  Yul-chun felt a desperate reluctance to reach home with this son until somehow he had discovered how to open his heart. If Sasha could not love him, the father, how could he love his grandparents, or even his country? Moreover, there was no haste. The Japanese had strong hold everywhere, and the time for revolt was not yet. Why, then, Yul-chun inquired of himself, why should he not linger here in villages as he had in China and Manchuria and near Antung, and sow the seeds of the people’s schools? It would be difficult for Japanese police would be watchful, but he would be wily. He would teach the people Japanese words by day, but at night he would teach them Korean.

  He told Sasha of his plan, and begged his help. Sasha listened, unmoved. “The government should do this,” he said.

  “It is not our government,” Yul-chun replied.

  Sasha shrugged and said no more. Thereafter he sat watching while his father labored earnestly with new and old scholars and then a young student teaching them the way to teach the unlettered landfolk.

  “Son, will you not help me?” Yul-chun asked one day.

  “I read only Russian,” Sasha replied carelessly.

  Yul-chun’s jaw dropped. It had not occurred to him that though Sasha spoke he could not read or write Korean, his ancestral language.

  “How is it you did not tell me?” he demanded.

  Sasha shrugged again. “I am not one for books,” he said.

  “Nevertheless I must teach you,” Yul-chun said firmly.

  And he did so from that day on. Each night, wherever they slept, Yul-chun taught his son. Sometimes in the day, too, if they were in a lonely place, he stopped and gave Sasha a lesson.

  As for Sasha, he learned well enough, neither willingly nor unwillingly, and unmoved as ever. No, not by touch or word was this son’s heart moved. Days passed and months, for Yul-chun continued his building of schools, as slowly they went southward, until almost two years had passed, and Yul-chun, at first wounded, had learned to accept Sasha as he was.

  This was the son he had found, a slim, silent, grim young man, who hid himself even from his father. Urging and persuasion only made him draw the invisible cloak the more tightly about him. Somehow he must be won, but not by force. Thereafter Yul-chun used every device that love and pride could conceive. For already he loved this son. The human feelings he had so long repressed emerged powerfully now from his strong nature, and finding no other object they centered on Sasha. Often in the evening when they sat resting after the day’s travel on foot or in some passing vehicle a landman offered, he longed to put out his hand and touch the warm brown flesh of his handsome son. He did not yield to the longing after the first time. Sasha had endured the touch and then had moved away and Yul-chun let his hand drop. No, not by contact nor by word was this son’s heart to be moved, if indeed it could be moved. Yul-chun, wounded, could only sigh and try to remember himself when young. He, too, had not welcomed the touch of his father’s hand. Now that he had this son, he began to understand how often he must have grieved his own father, and from his present hidden pain he spoke one day, as he and Sasha came out of the mountains and into the foothills below.

  “I hope that my old father still lives when we reach home. I have not seen him for many years, nor have I written a letter, fearing that such a letter from me might bring him into danger. But now, as we walk together, you and I, I think of my father, and I remember many times when my coldness and my abrupt speech must have cut his heart. He never told me so and I was too young to know.”

  To this Sasha made no answer. The thong of his sandal broke and he stopped to mend it while Yul-chun waited.

  And again on another day Yul-chun spoke. “My mind in those days when I was young was altogether engaged in the sorrows of our people. I thought only of our freedom, of our independence as a nation, and I wished not to yield any part of my being to our family or to any claim from the past.”

  He said this and waited for Sasha to say that he too had such feelings, but Sasha did not say so. He looked at his father as though he did not know what had been said, as though he heard a foreign language, as though he listened to a dotard.

  Yul-chun gave way then to silence. In silence they went except for the small necessities of daily life, and the questions of food and drink and a place to sleep at night were all that passed between the two. Yet every day they walked side by side, or one following the other if the path were narrow, but still together, and every day they saw the same landscapes, the magic of the unchanging beauty of blue sky and sea and gray rock and green field, and the stately procession of the tall and handsome people to whom they belonged. Even the poor, even the beggared, had beauty, and Yul-chun himself saw his people with new eyes.
He had lived long among the squat dark people of southern China and he had forgotten how different his own people were, different in the very build of the bone, in the fairness of skin, in the eyes brown, not black, in the hair softly dark, not stiffly black. He longed to tell his son how proud they could well be of their people, how gay they were, in spite of all hardship, witty in their talk, lighthearted singers and at the same time hardworking and thrifty and brave, but he bit back such words, knowing that this, too, the son must discover for himself.

  Soon, to his joy, Sasha did one day speak of his own will and not in answer to a question.

  “I have grown so used to the flat plains of Russia that I did not know how fine the mountains are. As for the sea, what I have heard is not the half of what I now know by my own eyes.”

  They were never out of sight of mountains and seldom out of sight of the sea. They walked nearer to the west than the east, and when they lost the sea for a while suddenly they came upon it again in bay and cove, for the western coast was deeply indented with bay and cove and these were narrowed between cliffs so steep that the tides ran always high.

  This that Sasha said revealed to Yul-chun that his son’s heart was alive somewhere in the depths of his being. He could feel beauty, and he was observing what he saw and not walking without seeing. If Sasha could not be won by the natural feeling of father for son, then it might be that he could be won by the strong beauty of his country. Perhaps through love of country other loves could be aroused. For the ability to love, though a natural gift, may be stifled before it can grow, and what had there been in Sasha’s life to teach him love? His mother had died when he was a small child, he had grown up one of many children in an orphanage, and until now his father was a stranger. As for women, he had yet to know more than the clamor of his male impulse. He did not know how to love, or even that he needed love, and his ability to love human beings could only develop when he came to know them.

  At night, therefore, when they stopped at some inn or in a landman’s house, Yul-chun did not allow himself to sleep early. Instead he sat with the others and led Sasha to do so with him. In this way Sasha could learn something more about his people than he had by mere trading. More than this, Yul-chun too could learn of what was taking place in the underground in Korea and elsewhere. Thus he learned that Kim Yak-san, the terrorist, was still alive and in China, and he had gathered Koreans in the central part of that country into a volunteer corps against the Japanese. The Chinese Nationalists feared this group as revolutionary, and sent them to the front to face the Japanese. Yet many Korean conscripts deserted from the Japanese armies, and helped the Chinese. And he heard that in the heart of China, in Chungking, the city to which the Chinese Nationalist leaders had fled, Koreans had united several factions into one independence society, and Korean exiles came from many countries to join that society and fight the Japanese. The Chinese Nationalists welcomed them at last, and a Korean Independence Army was formed.

  In Korea itself, Yul-chun heard, the Japanese rulers were using every means to change Koreans into Japanese. With his own eyes he read in newspapers that the new Governor-General, a military officer of high rank, insisted that “Japanese and Koreans must blend to make one harmonious whole.”

  “It is impossible,” Yul-chun exclaimed to Sasha.

  He threw down the newspaper he had been reading. As he did so he caught a strange secret look in Sasha’s black eyes.

  “Why do you say impossible?” Sasha asked.

  Yul-chun exploded. “Ask yourself! If it were possible, why do the Japanese need twenty thousand regular police here in our country, and two hundred thousand auxiliaries? Why do Korean workmen get paid only half what Japanese are paid? Why do Koreans cross the Yalu River again as brigands to attack Japanese?”

  Sasha shrugged his shoulders. “You make yourself too hot.”

  Heat went out of Yul-chun and he felt suddenly cold. “Why do you never call me Father?” he muttered.

  When Sasha did not answer, he hid his hurt, saying, “Never mind. It is better that you are honest. It will come. I can wait.”

  … They continued their journey southward day by day and there were times, now and then, when Yul-chun felt some hope that he and his son could some day come together in heart and spirit as he took pains to guide their path through those places famous for beauty, the tombs and temples, the castles, and ancient fortresses. Thus while they traveled along the western coast Yul-chun turned aside often to see the ancient tombs, and while they were still in the north he showed Sasha the dolmens made of great flat stones set on rude stone pillars so that they looked like tables for giants. In reality they too were tombs and within each vast structure was the tomb chamber. While he showed the treasures Yul-chun told of the great men of the past who were buried here, and he told of their great deeds and their high dreams and how their lives too were spent in the struggle to keep their country independent and apart from those who sought always to enslave its people and seize its wealth.

  Temples Sasha would have none of, nor would he so much as step over the threshold of any temple. The guardian gods in the entrance hall only made him laugh in derision.

  “There are no such beings as gods,” he declared, and if a monk came out from the temple he would shout at him rudely. “Are you a man? Or are those women’s robes you wear?”

  Yul-chun passed all temples after this without stopping, and soon he found that the fortresses were where Sasha lingered, the stone fortresses of the early days when the hordes of Manchuria invaded and were driven back, the fortresses attached to great old castles, the fortresses of old palaces, all these Sasha studied with lively interest and he asked many questions of wars and victories and when he heard of defeats he scowled and swore that once the present invaders were sent out, never again must other invaders be allowed.

  “But how?” he demanded one night when they stopped for the night in a village inn, “how shall we rid ourselves of these invaders?”

  He talked easily now with his father, never of himself or of the past, but always of the present and always of their country. The country was winning him, the beautiful country that he was coming to believe was his own. He was still shy with people, but he was ardent with love—yes, perhaps it was love—for the land and the sea and the sky.

  Yul-chun, rejoicing, was careful to seem cool. “When this present world war is over,” he replied, “the Japanese will be vanquished, at least for a generation. We must seize the moment. The instant they surrender, we must step forward and take back the throne and claim our country. The western world is fighting for us now except Americans, who still hold themselves aloof, and though we cannot take our share in the war, yet our enemy is the common enemy and we have a right to our share of the victory. We ask no spoils, no land belonging to others. We ask only for our own country back, which is our independence.”

  He was watching Sasha’s face as he spoke, and for the first time he saw something of what he wanted to see and heard what he longed to hear. His son’s face lighted, his son’s hand was outstretched and his son’s voice spoke with unusual ardor.

  “I will be there, at that moment—with you—” He paused and then spoke the one word which Yul-chun had waited so long to hear.

  “Father—” Sasha muttered, his voice low and still reluctant.

  Yul-chun could not reply. His heart swelled into his throat and he put out his right hand and clasped his son’s hand. For the moment the two were in communion.

  … Three days later the news flashed over all Korea and crept into every village and byway: Japan had attacked the United States. Yul-chun and Sasha were a dozen miles from the capital. Arriving in a small town in the twelfth month of that year toward the end of the seventh day, Yul-chun had decided to stop there for the night, for he had not wanted to go immediately to his father’s house. He and Sasha were travel worn, their garments soiled. Moreover, he had put aside some money to buy Sasha other garments than the Russian ones he wore. Thus they could ap
pear with dignity as members of the Kim clan. And no sooner had they entered the inn of this town than they heard that on that very day in the morning while Christians were meeting in the churches, Japanese airplanes had swarmed over Honolulu and dropped bombs on the American warships in the harbor. The innkeeper told them, his voice a whisper, his eyes exultant as he put his hand before his mouth.

  “Have you heard—”

  “I cannot believe it,” Yul-chun exclaimed to Sasha. “Even the most arrogant Japanese officer could not dream of victory over the United States.”

  Sasha was stuffing his mouth with good Korean bread. They sat at a table in a small room.

  “Believe because you must,” Sasha said. “It has happened.”

  Yul-chun did not hear. His mind ran ahead in hope renewed. Now the Americans would enter the war in all their power. Now the mighty industries of the United States would be put to work against Japan, and what was against Japan was for Korea. For the first time in how many years he dared to hope again. When the war was won, when the Japanese were vanquished, his country would be free. Victory—victory!

  He leaped up as though he were a young man again. “Come, my son!” he cried. “Not a moment’s delay now! We must go instantly to my father’s house. We must prepare for independence!”

  Sasha stared at him, his mouth full. “But—but you said I must have new clothes tomorrow!”

  Yul-chun was suddenly impatient. “Your cousin will lend you something. Come—come!” And with this urging, sooner than words could tell he had paid the innkeeper, who in consternation asked why they left so soon and what was it they did not like in his inn and only tell him and he would make it right. Yul-chun assured him his inn was good, the food good, but the news hastened him, and in less than an hour he and Sasha were on their way again.