Lost Souls

by Hwang Sunwon

  “I’m too ashamed to go out in public. And scared.”

  “Eat up, woman, and quit your fussing.”

  Tŏkku’s wife hadn’t touched her spoon to her gruel.

  “Whatever made you . . .?”

  “What are you talking about? Samdol’s family’s house? So what if that damned shack of theirs burned down?”

  “How can you say such a thing?”

  “They ought to be thankful their ox wasn’t roasted.”

  “Really, I never thought you’d turn out this way. First the hen at the Chinese Date House. . . .”

  “Damn bitch—how long are you going to keep this up?”

  Tŏkku jumped up, intending to go to Auntie Wart’s for a drink. In the process he accidentally tipped over his bowl of gruel. In a fit of anger he kicked over his wife’s bowl as well.

  “Look at you! Is it such a bother to get some gruel down your gullet?”

  “Bitch! I ought to wring your neck!”

  Tŏkku lashed out with his foot, accidentally kicking his wife in the belly. She curled up in a ball, moaning. He had not intended this.

  It’s human nature not to want to own up to a mistake in front of others, especially if you’re a timid sort, and Tŏkku was no exception. Leaving his wife to wail in pain, her face ashen, he disappeared outside.

  “Why don’t you all just drop dead!” he muttered.

  Yongch’il was already at Auntie Wart’s having some hangover soup. His face was sooty and there were red marks on his forehead and neck. It looked as though he had turned out to help fight the fire along with everyone else.

  Their eyes met, and then simultaneously they looked away from each other. Without a word, Tŏkku sat down beside Yongch’il and poured himself a drink.

  Just then, Samdol’s mother rushed in.

  “Here you are, just like I thought. You’d better get yourself home—your wife’s calling you.”

  Whereas Samdol’s father was coarse and blunt, his mother was on the gentle and compassionate side. After the earlier episode when Tŏkku had returned empty-handed from his attempt to borrow barley from the father, she had secretly taken him some grain. Likewise, she enjoyed doing the dirty work in family crises. She was especially skillful as a midwife, and was called whenever a woman went into labor. It was said that all she had to do was cup her hands in front of an expectant mother and even breech babies would come out the right way. Doubtless she had heard Tŏkku’s wife in distress and gone to her aid, putting aside her cleaning up from the previous night’s fire.

  “Is something wrong, Auntie?” called Auntie Wart from behind the counter.

  “Well, this man’s wife is suddenly hurting in the belly.”

  “How could that be? She’s only eight months along.”

  “I know.”

  Auntie Wart shot Tŏkku a knowing glance. “Don’t tell me you’re up to no good again, Mr. Cho.”

  “How could you kick her like that? She’s passed a lot of blood,” said Samdol’s mother. “It’s too early to tell about the baby, but I hope the mother’s all right.”

  Tŏkku drank without saying a word.

  “Now get yourself up, you. Your wife needs you.”

  Tŏkku exploded. “Go to hell, all of you! After all the slaughter I saw at the front, what’s the big deal here?”

  “All right,” Samdol’s mother tsk-tsked, giving up for the time being. “I’m going to look in on her. You’d better come right along.”

  Tŏkku drained his bowl of makkŏlli in reply. For some reason he wasn’t feeling the liquor. Turning a deaf ear to Auntie Wart, Tŏkku continued to pour himself drinks. A quart of makkŏlli later, he silently rose and left. A peculiar glaze had come over his good eye.

  He too had some words for his wife, Tŏkku told himself. What more do you have to say to me, you bitch? I’m the one who has something to tell you. And I’ll say it before you drop dead!

  But upon nearing his house and hearing his wife’s moans together with Samdol’s mother’s soothing voice, he turned on his heels. He couldn’t very well speak his mind with someone else there.

  Tŏkku climbed the hill behind the village until he found a sunny place to sit. As the warm sun beat down on him, his eyelids grew heavy. Dog tired, he fell asleep.

  * * *

  Dusk had spread over the hill, and the evening breeze had risen.

  Tŏkku passed a hand down his throat, his body shuddering. It wasn’t just that he was chilled. It was that horrible dream; it just wouldn’t go away. He could still picture that bloody lump tumbling along at the end of the rope. A dream that bad must have meant something had happened to his wife as a result of her hemorrhaging. He felt as if right now, in his wakeful state and not in the dream, he were sliding deep down into a pit.

  He started down the hill. He had gone no more than a few steps when he heard a strange sound. Straining to listen, he recognized it as something he had heard upon waking a short time earlier. It was a clucking sound. All he could tell was that it wasn’t human.

  Tŏkku searched until the sound became a vigorous cackling, and then he knew it was a chicken. There it was, a hen warming its eggs in a nest of last year’s dead grass.

  Why would a hen be out here sitting on its eggs? The next instant Tŏkku understood. Damn bird, so this is where you disappeared to! He shot a fierce glance in the direction of the Chinese Date House.

  Once in a while a hen would stray off to lay her eggs, ending up in an out-of-the-way spot. And there she would sit. All the owner would know was that a hen was missing. And sometimes, around the time people forgot about her, the “lost” bird would suddenly appear with a train of twenty or more chicks.

  “The old bag!” Tŏkku snorted. “She had to go and blame someone!”

  He continued silently to harp on the missing hen and to shoot looks at the Chinese Date House. He felt like running over then and there and giving the old woman a piece of his mind. And then he had a thought.

  He reached out, grabbed the hen, and wrung its neck. It soon became still, without so much as a flap of its wings. Sergeant Kim was right—a neck is such a convenient thing. And how little the hen weighed. But there was enough meat to snack on for several rounds of drinking. He gathered the eggs and put them in his pocket.

  He thought of his wife: You bitch—you thought I stole this chicken. . . . One of these days, before you croak, I’m going to give you a piece of my mind.

  Into the drinking house he went.

  “Where have you been?” said Auntie Wart. And then she saw the hen. “Where did you get that?”

  “You really want to know? I paid for it a while back and I just now took possession. . . . Where’s Yongch’il?”

  “He left right after you did.”

  “Too bad. Clean this bird and boil it up for me.” Tŏkku handed the chicken to Auntie Wart. “I think I deserve a drink.”

  Auntie Wart noticed the bird’s belly, which was missing some feathers.

  “Wait a minute—did you take this hen from her nest?”

  “What if I did? It’s not going to kill me if I eat it. Don’t worry, I didn’t steal it. Come on, cook it up. I already paid for it, and then some. . . . Oh yeah—and boil these up, will you?”

  He took several eggs from his pocket and handed them to Auntie Wart.

  “Haven’t you been home yet?”

  Tŏkku didn’t know what to say. What followed next was what he had feared.

  “Mr. Cho, I don’t know what you’ve done lately to deserve this, but your wife just delivered, and even though it’s premature it cries just like a full-term baby. You don’t know how lucky you are.”

  Tŏkku gulped once, his throat hot. Could this be true? But he couldn’t bring himself to express these sentiments.

  “It’s no big deal having a baby—the hard part’s raising it.”

  “Mr. Cho, you’d better start acting like a father.”

  “Put those eggs in the pot, will you? And pour me a bowl of makkŏlli.”
/>   There was now a different reason for him to want a drink.

  “Today’s special, so I’ll let you pay later. But this is the last time.”

  It was indeed a special day, Tŏkku reflected. An unintentional mistake that morning had set him trembling inside, but here his wife had delivered a premature baby without incident. Suddenly he felt relaxed. Wouldn’t it be fun now to be able to show Yongch’il this hen belonging to the old woman from the Chinese Date House?

  “Where do you suppose my pal went? Down to the market?”

  “You know,” said Auntie Wart, “when he left, he was mumbling to himself—‘That Tŏkku’s just plain scary.’”

  “Scary? Is that what he said?” He giggled automatically. Well, so I am. I’m scary. And if you’re the one who set that fire, buddy, then you might find my mouth scary too. And that means you’re not going to want to show yourself in this village again, buddy. But you can rest easy—I won’t say a thing. He gulped his drink.

  “Hurry it up with those eggs, Auntie!”

  Auntie Wart began to peel one of the boiled eggs.

  “Good lord, what is this!”

  She dropped the egg and shrank back a step.

  Where the eggshell had separated Tŏkku could see a completely formed chick, with yellow down and reddish feet all curled up. Were the eggs that old? Tŏkku then realized it had been a good three weeks since the disappearance of the hen.

  Auntie Wart cracked another boiled egg, then put it back down.

  “Where’d you get these eggs?” she asked, tsk-tsking in disapproval. “They’re ready to hatch.”

  “I paid for them, I told you. And I better eat them—they’ll be good for me.” Tŏkku produced another giggle. “I guess you wouldn’t know this, Auntie—on the front line, there’s nothing a man won’t eat if he’s hard up.”

  “Give me one of those eggs from your pocket.”

  Tŏkku did so.

  Auntie Wart held up the egg in front of him. “Look, you can see the chick squirming inside.”

  Tŏkku wasn’t surprised, knowing they’d been laid three weeks before.

  “And listen—you can hear it cheeping too.”

  Nothing so unusual about that, either. Almost absentmindedly he began to produce the remaining eggs from his pocket, one by one.

  “And this one’s pecking. . . . It’s ready to hatch,” said Auntie Wart.

  Tŏkku wondered why the woman was chattering like this.

  “Pour me another drink, will you?”

  “Look at these chicks—I can’t believe it. . . . Maybe we could find a hen for them. They need a bit more brooding.”

  There’s a woman for you. How tenderhearted.

  Tŏkku felt another giggle coming, but it stayed inside him. There was nothing surprising in what Auntie Wart had said, but something in the way she said it had struck a chord.

  The next instant something began squirming inside Tŏkku, pecking at his chest, a faint, whisperlike cry that grew in volume until it became the cry of his newborn baby, and along with it, a peculiar, insistent terror he had never felt before, emanating from the small egg in front of him—the egg he thought he had paid for.

  February 1957

  AFTERWORD

  Aside from his signature story, “Sonagi” (1952; usually translated as “Shower” or “Cloudburst”), the short fiction of Hwang Sunwŏn (1915–2000) has suffered from popular and critical neglect. This may not be surprising, given that Hwang published more than 100 stories in a career extending from the 1930s to the 1980s, in an educational environment in which literature tends to be commodified and compartmentalized for easy digestion by students. Thus, apart from the occasional story anthologized in a middle- or high-school reader, Hwang’s output in this genre, arguably the most sophisticated and accomplished in modern Korean literary history, is not especially well known among general readers in his home country, especially in comparison with the works of household names such as Pak Wansŏ, Yi Munyŏl, Hwang Sŏgyŏng, and Cho Chŏngnae. Moreover, in a literary culture whose scholars and critics (often one and the same) have tended to prize fiction that directly engages with the many upheavals of modern Korean history, Hwang is often pigeonholed as an exemplar of a distinctly Korean lyricism and romanticism. On that basis he does not compare well with writers judged to possess a “historical consciousness,” who use literature as a means of socializing a younger generation of readers to the harsh realities involved in Korea’s transition from a traditional agrarian economy to (in the case of South Korea) one of the most high-tech nations in the world. He is seen by many as a bit old-fashioned.

  Readers of the stories in this volume, though, will hear an author who is not only a gifted storyteller but also strikingly contemporary in terms of his thematic concerns, sophisticated worldview, and multifaceted narrative style. This book comprises three of Hwang’s eight story collections, works written in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, respectively. Composed in the late 1930s while the author was a student at Waseda University in Tokyo, the thirteen stories in The Pond (Nŭp) show early indications of Hwang’s eventual mastery of the short-story form, especially his storytelling skill, the variety of his narratives, and the dualities in his worldview. Some of the tales are modernist narratives set in the city of Pyongyang (and in one case, Tokyo), others are starkly realistic sketches set in the countryside, and still others are surreal portraits that hint at Korea’s anomalous position as a colony of imperial Japan from 1910 to 1945. A precocious fictional voice relates conflicts within the family and between the sexes, describes a colonial society in the process of modernization, and offers glimpses of a sovereign nation emasculated by colonization. The Pond first appeared in book form in 1940 as Hwang Sunwŏn tanp’yŏnjip (Hwang Sunwŏn story collection), at a time when publication in Korean was becoming increasingly difficult in colonial Korea. Although Hwang was only in his early twenties, he was already a published writer, having issued the poetry collections Wayward Songs (Pangga) and Curios (Koltongp’um).

  The Dog of Crossover Village (Mongnŏmi maŭl ŭi kae) was published in Seoul in 1948, the second of Hwang’s story collections to be published but the third in order of composition, after Wild Geese (Kirŏgi, 1951). Hwang wrote these seven stories during the chaotic post-World War II period that in South Korea is termed the Post-Liberation Space (Haebang konggan), a name that attests to the sudden removal of the Japanese colonial overlords after August 15, 1945, and all of them except the short “My Father” (Abŏji, 1947) reflect the turbulent social and political circumstances of those years. Hwang himself had only recently, in 1946, moved with his family to what is now South Korea, leaving forever his centuries-old ancestral home in the north (a fate shared by hundreds of thousands of Koreans). An empathic and curious writer, Hwang in this collection proved that he could write realistically about contemporary problems and, more important, about the people affected by those problems—without sacrificing his trademark command of narrative and dialogue or his insights into human psychology. That is to say, each of the Dog of Crossover Village stories is more than just an account of a contemporary issue. “Booze” (Sul, 1945), the first, is about a struggle among Koreans for control of a distillery recently abandoned by its Japanese owners, but it is also about the unraveling of a good man attempting to remain decent amid an increasingly frenzied scramble for position in post-Liberation society.1 “Toad” (Tukŏbbi, 1946) is a grimly realistic portrayal of the desperate housing shortage in Seoul shortly after Liberation as hundreds of thousands of refugees streamed back from Manchuria, Japan, and elsewhere, but it also shows us the ordeal of a man compelled to compromise his principles in order to feed his starving family. Hwang, who upon resettling in the South with his family lived in the Samch’ŏng-dong neighborhood described in this story, was surely sensitive to the plight of his fellow refugees. “Home” (Chip, 1946) portrays the new landowning class in post-Liberation South Korea and the conflict occasioned by their social mobility in a traditionally class-conscious and
hierarchical society, but it also examines the psychology of addiction—in this case, addiction to gambling. “Bulls” (Hwangso tŭl, 1946) deals with a peasant uprising against the Korean constables who served the Japanese colonizers in Korea, but it is also a coming-of-age story related by a naïve narrator who knows that his father and the other men of the village are engaged in something dangerous and is compelled to follow this herd under cover of darkness as they advance on the county seat. “To Smoke a Cigarette” (Tambae han tae p’iul tongan, 1947) highlights the difficulties of Korean residents of Japan who attempt to resettle in Korea after Liberation, as well as the weakening of interpersonal relationships as people migrate from the ancestral village to the big city, whose denizens grow indifferent to the suffering of others (the protagonist’s concern for the difficulties of the returnees from Japan lasts about as long as it takes him to smoke a cigarette). The title story (1947) is usually taught in Korea as a story of the ultimate survival of Koreans amid adversity (represented by the progeny of Whitey, described at the end), but it may be read just as usefully as an allegory of Korean fears of outsiders (whether the Japanese colonizers or the more recent occupants, the USSR and the United States, who divided Korea at the 38th parallel upon Liberation in 1945 in order to accept the surrender of Japanese forces in Korea) as well as a case study of stigmatization as a means of social and political control. The aforementioned “My Father” is atypical of the collection in that it looks back in history—to the March 1, 1919, Independence Movement in Korea—more than it does to contemporary issues, but it shares with the other stories a distinctive (in this case autobiographical) narrative.

  Lost Souls (Irŏbŏrin saram tŭl), the sixth of Hwang’s story collections, was published in 1958. Previously, between January 1956 and May 1957, the five pieces therein had appeared in literary journals.2 Among Hwang’s eight volumes of short stories, Lost Souls is thematically the most unified. The primary focus is moral transgression and the fate of an outcast in a highly structured society. The stories take place variously in the hinterlands of the Korean peninsula, on the southeast coast, and on the volcanic island of Cheju. Three are directly connected with the Korean War, the catastrophes of which Hwang and his fellow countrymen had only recently survived. Two concern elopement, one of them—the title story—unfolding with all the certainty of Greek tragedy. As always, Hwang’s storytelling skill and ear for speech are everywhere in evidence. In “Deathless” (Pulgasari, 1955), Komi and Koptani defy their parents’ wishes by eloping. In doing so they are committing a moral transgression that will likely result in their estrangement from their families and their ancestral village. Here Hwang is setting the stage for the title story of the volume. Just as Hester in The Scarlet Letter must wear a scarlet A for the rest of her life, Sŏgi will be forever marked by his missing ear as he and Suni begin an outcast life in which they are driven farther and farther from their ancestral home; not even nature welcomes them. The protagonist of “Pibari” (Pibari, 1956), a young diving woman on Cheju Island, is one of Hwang’s most complex female characters. This pibari (the word is Cheju dialect for ch’ŏnyŏ, “maiden”) is an outcast for two reasons: her act of fratricide and her sexuality. In “Voices” (Sori, 1957), the last story, moral transgression is centered not in a single person but in war. Tŏkku, the protagonist, becomes hardened to violence and death while serving in the Korean War, his trauma paralleled by physical injury—the loss of an eye. An industrious farmer before the war, he becomes drunk and irresponsible afterward and before long is a virtual outcast in his village, feared (as is the pibari) by the same neighbors who earlier welcomed him home from the battlefront.