by Gus Lee
I gave Song Sae the yakimandu. She accepted with both hands and a bow. “Dae-wi, Korean gentlemen offer with the right hand while bowing; the left holds the cuff of the right sleeve. As if you were a court official in the Chinese style.” I was the son of a sailor.
She demonstrated. I imitated. She smiled brightly. The girl also smiled, tears and hope in her eyes.
Her room was twelve feet square: a red bedroll with a small pillow, a portable stove with a simmering teapot, and mother-of-pearl black chest and dresser.
The girl sat in an open space. Rough pine walls. On them hung Chinese geomantic feng shui—wind and water geomancy—good-luck mirrors with red tassels, a Cheju Island calendar and posters depicting the ba-kua— geomantic solid and broken-bar hexagrams of Chinese prophecy and change. Broken toys filled a tall cardboard box. The room was warm and private, and smelled of her, of tea and children and a distant perfume. Filling the room was the sound of a television.
“Who's the tall dark stranger there?… Maverick is his name.” She had been watching Armed Forces TV, writing down the dialogue.
“Your deal,” said a cowboy. “Five-card stud.”
“Let's keep your hands on the table,” said Bret Maverick.
“I watch TV to learn more vocabulary. Dae-wi, it is a miracle that you freed this girl from the Americans.”
I was going to say that I was American, but the gun-shot made me jerk as Jae-woo cried out. My heart pumped; someone in Hollywood had not kept hands on the table. On the television, a body fell heavily. I straightened the furniture I had knocked over.
“I am so sorry, dae-wi. This is a naughty show, but the words are very colorful. I am sorry that sounds are your enemy. The same is true for this girl. You both need to see the wang mansin.” She touched my arm. “Oh, dae-wi, is God not lovely, to bring help when help is needed?”
24
TWELVE MEN
The mountain loomed. The taxi stopped near rusted Quonsets. In the snow, children played soccer and fought while old women gasped for breath in various imitations of cardiac arrest. Girls in discarded Army uniforms waved fans in the red faces of their teachers. The orphanage. It looked like a refugee camp, filled with the children of the world.
“I am proud of this place, dae-wi. Children are safe from GIs. We have built good bomb shelters. Perhaps you will visit and play father-teacher for me?” Her soft hand on mine.
The road was steep. A thousand feet above the valley floor and a hundred feet short of the near summit, the Pony taxi shuddered on the steep grade and died in the mountain air. We rolled backward until the parking brake held.
The driver refused payment; charging the kidae for a ride to the holiest site in the valley would, in the next world, cost him far more than the fare. At the edge, I looked south.
“Buddha temple of Soyasan,” she said. The gold temple spires rose like candelabra from a lower peak. Casey was swallowed by the march of snow-capped ridges that crashed like endless waves of an angry, choppy sea on a small and innocent land.
“Can Jae-woo stay here, or at the temple?”
“Oh, most very yes. Will the Americans try to take her back?”
The Americans. “I don't think so. But there is legal work to do.”
The sky was slate, storm clouds on the horizon. To the north was the Inmingun, Chinese Manchuria, and my past. Ma wanted me to get a gift for Fan taitai and to light joss for two baby boys. BaBa wanted me to buy three coffins, to fix the hasty wartime river burials of our family. And to pray.
Song Sae moved up the path, holding hands with the girl. We stopped at a rude, squat hut: windowless, flat-roofed, half-spackled stucco with exposed chicken wire, a weather-warped door and a worn, snowless path. She opened it to rickety shelves filled with cans, jars, produce, rice sacks and fish.
“Sonmul—present—for the mudang” said Song Sae. The Ville supported her. I put the dried fish from Second Market on a shelf, as if I were part of a village, a foreign feeling for a river man.
Footfalls. An approaching patrol file, careful, inter-valed, the soft tread of Asian men coming. I pulled Song Sae and Jae-woo into the hut, closing the door. The hinge creaked painfully. I made the universal sign for silence as I pulled out the Randall knife, smiling reassuringly at the terrified girl.
Through a crack I saw an Asian GI. Ethnic Korean, bald, hands pink from the cold, a red facial birthmark, about five-seven, one ninety, early thirties, his chest so big that the arms sprouted from it like thick branches from an old tree. In a field jacket without load-bearing equipment or weapons, he was a private dressed for lunch break, moving like a rifleman. He looked automatically for monofilament tripwire and ambush signs. Point man.
I recognized him: one of the immense 76Y supply clerks Magrip and I had seen on our search of post.
Some meters behind was another. In an American patrol, slack man.
He was about five-eight and wide, bow-legged, bald, bare-headed and ungloved. His shoulders advertised years of hard iron work in weight rooms and a steroid bloat that had pushed him over two hundred pounds. He coughed without apology and walked with the air of accountability that weighs heavily on battalion commanders, managers of eight hundred men on a confused battlefield full of fog, flying steel and ripped limbs. His face was sinew and high cheekbones, a sad mouth and the eyes of a hunting hawk. A Korean Magrip. He spat scarlet. A red splotch ran from his left ear to a deep left eye orbit. He was the honcho. I saw his rank: private.
Behind came other men in file. I was certain these were the big Asians who had caught the attention of Henry Jubala and Major Foss, and had made them wonder if we were all part of an Army Peregrine team. But Peregrines were a motley crew of many Asian tribes. All these men were Koreans.
Song Sae and Jae-woo were silent, their eyes agog at me. After a seven-meter interval came another man, a brother in build and rank to the others with a similar skin blotch. All had skin problems, and this man limped. He looked to the left, at the hut, checking the door and the ground.
The next looked above for aircraft. Sound Man, able to pick up enemy air activity at the periphery of air-vibrational sensitivity. Had he been point man, he might have heard the door hinge.
Trail man, twelfth in column, followed fifteen meters later, brushing and sanitizing the path with a pine branch.
Jubala had talked of “a million Inmingun led by thirteen-man Tiger Tails who'll slit our throats.” These were twelve GIs.
Numerology was determinative in Asia; “four” in Chi nese sounds like the word for “death” and is unlucky. “Eight” is round and good. Americans didn't care except for lucky seven and unlucky thirteen, and GIs knew to keep the magic five-meter interval on patrol; crowding invited slaughter.
Song Sae started to move; I froze her with an upheld palm. We waited ten minutes. I spat on the old hinges and opened it. Below us, I saw the twelve men entering three taxis.
“Who are they?”
“They are patients of the mudang. Why are we speaking so quietly? You made us most afraid, how you looked.”
“I'm sorry.” I smiled and so did they. “Let's go.”
I put the knife away. The girl stared. I tried to look at her with jen, benevolence, but now she looked Vietnamese.
The wind stiffened as we approached the last peak. Naked scrub oak gave way to winter ginkgos, stubborn, densely clustered snow-dusted Japanese evergreens in an artificial winter forest.
“The Japanese made us plant the forest in 1910. Their generals lived here. We brought valley soil to replace the rock, and cypress and ginkgo, pine and oak trees, from Cheju-do.”
A two-story, snow-covered Japanese villa with high green winged arches, tiled roof and shoji-screened win-dows, flanked with white rock and a high pine fence above the roof, shielding it from the north wind. Small white winter birds bent the branches of the trees, their gentle fluttering dusting the ground with sparkling specks of snow.
At a stone shrine to the left of the high fence, Song Sae sto
pped. She said the mudang was past sixty years, deep into Chinese Second Life, that she was strong but suffered bad vision and back pain, for which she took viper wine and saengkang cha, ginger tea. The mudang, like herself, was a poor sleeper and dawn riser. Her face was old because she read Chinese winds in her skin. Song Sae was announcing credits.
“She is kwanseum Bosa—Prayer to Buddha. She is hearer of cries and singer to the dead. She dances for her people. She fools the ag-wi—devils at the gates of hell— plays the chango, the hourglass drum. She shields this village, its women. She knows the three Buddhist Sam-sang spirits—but relies on Sanshin, the tiger spirit who rules holy mountains.
“She knows all herbs, active and passive, the Five Primal Energies, the harmonies of female and male. She fears no medicine and wears the cinnabar necklace for nature, the mercury headband for mi-gaey destiny. She has surpassed the Three Realms of Desire.
“When she was a girl, her father drank mokkli and beat her. Mudang knows pain and knows we need men, but, being most honest, she does not appreciate them very much.”
Levine would like her.
The girl rang the brass bell, making a silly, flat sound. Song Sae clapped her hands to draw the attention of the gods, and my two companions prayed, heads low.
Ma had bowed low in the seven-story Wen Feng river-side pagoda near Yangzhou on the Grand Canal, where we dropped cargoes and sold the carp to war-thinned farmers for a few measures of rice.
“River god,” she had said, lighting joss, “your dry ground is good. I thank you for no Japanese soldiers or duchun today.” She clapped for the god's closer attention, then squeezed my hand so tightly it hurt. “Ow,” I said.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “For our laughing happy firstborn son. I owe you much gold, forever!”
Later, she had wept for not thanking the Wen Feng river god for the lives of her two younger sons. Gods, she said to me, punish ingratitude. Owing tears, she cried for my little brothers whenever she saw a river, or a lake, or a picture of water. Crossing to America had cost Ma her good looks.
Song Sae opened the gate. We walked on a complaining, pure-white gravel path to a low portico upon which sat a dozen women in warm wraps. They bowed to Song Sae, who bowed back.
Petitioners. Women with ailing, abusive, drinking, smelly, unfaithful or indolent husbands, unmarried daughters, bad-luck beds, headaches, neuralgia, back pain, painful joints, stomach ills and vapors, all waiting to see the wu. I felt guilty; as a man, rich with Eastern status and special invitation, I had cut the line. I nodded to them as an American male, confusing them.
We removed our shoes. The pronounced hush of the peak, emphasized by the whispering of the pines, the Chinese wind and the shrines, reminded me that I was in the presence of forces I had not respected since childhood.
25
MUDANG
Song Sae opened the heavy oak door. She shouted, at the top of her lungs, “HALMONI! SONG SAE!” A woman shouted back from a corner of the warm house.
“Halmoni means ‘Grandmother,’” she said. Then she spoke to the girl, who bowed and sat. Song Sae pointed at the floor. “Heated by ondol, charcoal bricks below the floor. We are home.” She smiled serenely, removing her coat. Polished hardwood floors, two large, high-ceilinged rooms in a row.
A woman and her daughter, crying in what seemed to be relief, emerged from a third room and left. This room was even warmer and heavy with incense. Rugs of every description, dusted by dried flower petals. Purple, green, red and teal pillows colored a sea of over-sized white cushions. Pink and red accordion and box paper lanterns gilded high oak beams. Bright yellow candles in golden candelabra guttered on rosette tables. Rows of crimson hourglass drums. Stacks of bronze coins and snow-white ceremonial rice in glass jars. Smoke rose from brass incense burners. The scent of jasmine weaved through the pungency of joss and the aroma of flowers. Carmine Chinese calligraphy graced ivory walls.
Hesitate in heart, dream is gone. Tree prefers calm, wind does not care. Man remembers past, woman remembers all.
These were the idioms Mrs. Fan liked to recite.
The mudang sat among great white pillows. A brilliant white robe made her brown skin darker, her mien older, wiser. A bright red necklace encircled a thin neck; a silver headband restrained wild flights of thin gray hair. I bowed.
She ate, sitting in blossom sutra. On a warm day, she might have reached five feet in height. Small back and round shoulders, hands deformed by the pains of cathartic possession. Cataracts clouded feverish eyes that swept me with reptilian focus. The coarsened leather of high cheeks was creased deep, its fissures capturing candlelight like old ravines in a summer dusk.
Her face radiated wrinkles in all directions, for all emotions, from the hub of onyx eyes. She closed them and briefly smiled, the equivalent of a returning bow; she held no affection for men. With eerie eyes hooded, she looked less fantastic and more human. She was a female wu who embodied mystic powers in a harsh land of zephyrs and mortal snows. I sensed her examination of me by other senses. Song Sae sat in front of me and spoke.
“Here, the silence of holy women is bigger than the orders of all males. Halmoni has suffered sin-byong, ill-nesses of prophecy and pain that led her to a life of prayer and divination, above the world and beneath the heavens. She mediates people and spirits.”
The shaman swallowed, burped and yelled at top volume toward the kitchen. A woman shouted back. Song Sae laughed. The mudang touched her and they spoke easily, communing with open, flowing emotion, their faces like theater, reminding me of the comforts to be found in the company of Chinese women.
The mudang‘s infectious cackle and ever-changing face made me smile. It was a tuned device as specialized as a boxer's left hand.
“Dae-wi, I meet to you Madame Chae.” Her voice quavered. “She cleaned her mouth with willow twigs and welcomes you.
“Please sit by mudang, dae-wi” I walked on pillows and sat. She considered me and measured my hands, my chest, my arms, with arthritic, baby-soft fingers. Song Sae gave me a stone cup of jasmine tea while the old woman examined, speaking softly in a gruff, used-up voice, as if she, like Janis Joplin, had torn her vocal cords while screaming, in beat at a demented world.
“She says you do not believe in her.”
“I believe her information. I know medicinal prophets, the wu. They had the confessions of every fisherman on the river.”
Song Sae translated. The mudang squeezed my left hand. Song Sae translated quickly as the old woman spoke.
“She says you were born Horse, but are Tiger with war in your belly. You miss your soldiers. Your mi-gae is to be with danger. You were a boy in the Tao water sign, eating salt fish you swam with to build your yang spirit. God favors you. You miss China, your baby brothers, your grandfather. You pretend at pens but you have death on your lips, bitterness under your tongue. Your ki-bun roams free, without a compass.
“Mudang says you are here because of the same forces that are eating her village. She heard your footsteps across the sea.”
Her villa was a garage sale of icons from my past. Her analysis was shockingly accurate.
“Please thank her.”
The wu spoke. “She says last year in Year of the Rat, three wives died and GIs killed six women in the bars.
“This, Ox year, forty-seven women were murdered, thirty-nine by the foreign soldiers, who beat a thousand other women. Sixteen children were shot through accidents. Guns are in her village.”
I had come hoping for information. I had planned to give none, myself. I considered the repercussions, then told them of Colonel LeBlanc's plan to arm Korean civilians to fight North Koreans. That the American military police had noticed the results, but had been ordered to not take action.
“Mudang asks, are you here to stop the American paksu?”
I paused. “Yes.”
The mudang smiled, leaned forward and caressed my cheek.
“Halmoni hopes this man will not be killed, only improved.
”
“Grandmother, I'm looking for an American kidnapped by other Americans. He may be in Southside. Can you help me get him back?”
The shaman spoke. “She knows of him and will help… on these conditions…” She spoke. “Take him from Osudong-yuk, what you call Southside, by tomorrow. His fate is in the air. He is on the third floor, first Japanese house.
“Enter through the first tabang, teahouse. She expects you not to harm anyone. Perhaps a little violence will occur.”
I believed her and relief filled me. “What happens after tomorrow?”
“Mudang awaits your true question. From where you were near three rivers and bad fortune reached up from the muds of hell to take you by your throat, choking your life. As you know, this is where tigers kill their victims. It is where you, as a man with the tiger in his name, also died.”
26
TIGER's TAIL
In China, to doubt a wu outright would violate ji hui. To believe her now was to know that Jimmy was alive.
“Mudang asks if you know kung-hap, the Chinese horoscope.”
In Chinese, the badze. My badze said it was time to get Jimmy. “Yes.” Mine had been cast in the Year of the Horse, the fifth lunar month, the sixth day, in the fourth hour. Excellent year, good month, fair day, a dangerous time. The sexagenary calendar with its sixty permutations of meaning had been cast and my name selected to ward off evil, invite good, and throw my chances to the wind of yeh, karma, while invoking the tiger, travel, and danger.
“She asks you to go to the peak with her.”
Song Sae opened shoji screens and we passed through the arbor, skirting a precipitously sheer cliff which pro-vided a breathtaking view of the valley. We climbed a path toward the howling of mountain winds until we faced north.
Everything lay before us like a terrain mockup—the valley, the village and light-twinkling canal, rows of endless, dragon-spine mountains, the micro systems of fog, mist, clouds, rain and snow, the panorama of the DMZ and the loom of North Korea and Manchuria. The wind was from China, and the feel of it was like an old teacher's touch.
