Peace Under Heaven: A Modern Korean Novel

A Modern Korean Novel

Man-Sik Chae, Kyung-Ja Chun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317463122
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in Seoul in 1938, soon after the outbreak of the Pacific War, "Peace Under Heaven" is a satirical novel centering on the household of a Korean landlord during the Japanese colonial occupation. Master Yun, embodying the traditional ambitions of a standard Korean paterfamilias, by being projected fast forward into a modern urban environment, caricatures the increasing irrelevance of Confucian mores to 20th-century social reality. Depicting the anomic lives of the Yun household in colonial Seoul, Chase Man-Sik, one of modern Korea's best-known writers, uses black comedy to underscore the collapse of ritualistic traditional values in the face of capitalist modernisation. The decadence of the nouveau riche pseudo-aristocrat Master Yun is interwoven with insights into the customary bases of oppression of Korean women into the self-deceptions underlying collaboration by Koreans with the Japanese oppressor. The savage hilarity of Chae's style lends force and historical relevance to his insight into the attitudes of the milieu in which his narrative is set.

A Surplus of People and a Shortage of Goods

DOI: 10.4324/9781315701868-11

While our great-grandfather of seventy-two (purporting to be sixty-five) was negotiating an amorous pact in the bedroom with his fifteen-year-old paramour, elsewhere in the house …

Out in the main room, Kyŏngson had finally finished his supper, and his quarrel with his fifteen-year-old granduncle was over for the time being. At present he was lying idly on the warmer side of the floor.

The others in the family had withdrawn, and Kyŏngson, much to his chagrin, had been stranded alone with his disagreeable grandaunt, the Seoul Mistress, and T’aesik, the mere sight of whom disgusted him. Worse, the Seoul Mistress, a storybook in her hand, was busily moaning like someone with a bad toothache, and T’aesik was grunting a steady stream of nonsense as he stared at his Korean Reader.

It was a rare phenomenon, indeed, to witness small-minded Kyŏngson sitting there in the room, for once unannoyed by the noise of the other two. It was like seeing a cat, a dog, and a monkey playing harmoniously in the same cage. The truth was that Kyŏngson was so engrossed in planning a certain scheme that he was oblivious to his surroundings. The scheme he was racking his brain over was this: there was a rerun of Morocco showing at the cinema, and also a very good documentary on the Sino-Japanese War, and he was determined to see them both, but without any pocket money at hand, first, he had to pick the right target, and second, he had to figure out a promising blackmail strategy.

The fat old man? No! The warhorse in the room across the hall? No! He had taken to calling his grandmother “the warhorse” because of her habit of picking fights with anyone in sight. The Seoul Mistress? No! His aunt? No! Taebok? Well … No, not that stinking miser! Why he was so stingy with somebody else’s money was a real mystery! Mother? Well … Of all the prospects, his mother and Taebok were still the likeliest, for Taebok was the Minister of Internal Affairs, and Mother, after all, was Mother. Here he was, future heir, twenty or thirty years down the road, to a hundred-thousand wŏn, but at present he had to rack his brain, that soft gray matter of his, to lay hands on a lousy twenty or thirty chŏn.

While Kyŏngson’s head ached, the Seoul Mistress, her head propped up on a wooden pillow, was laboring with her seeming toothache.

“And then a singing beggar, strolling through the market…”

As her mirth grew excessive, a nasal quality seasoned her singing voice. It was music, all right. Just what kind of music it was hard to say, but music it surely was.

They say a person in agony longs to sing. Now it may not rise to the dignity of agony, but a restless mind is often enough to make one start humming. To sing of sorrow or to dance for joy is human nature, but when one sings out of restlessness, the trait in question is an animal instinct, a trait shared with the uncanny cries of a bird in search of a mate.

Humans, however, are also bom with a second instinct, one that blindly takes over primary animal instincts, using them for other ends.

An adolescent boy, for instance, out walking a mountain path in search of firewood on a fine spring day, keeps time with his A-frame staff as he sings a song: “Yonder is Kalmi Peak, rain is on the way …”

Or, a kisaeng, not a bad singer, might lie alone in her room on a bleak, drizzling autumn day, lazily singing a song, rapping her fingers on the floor to keep time: “As we lose ourselves in ecstasy …”

Now, that young boy singing all alone deep in the mountains or that kisaeng singing to herself in her room, who on earth are they singing for?

It is what in Korean is called hung, you see, a sort of inner excitement. Like the bird crying to lure a mate, the youth’s song was for the ears of some country maiden, and the kisaeng’s song was for her beloved somewhere. Instinct arouses both man and beast to sing, but a difference soon emerges.

A human sings as fancy beckons, without regard to others. Whether a country maiden is actually within earshot, or whether any man is around to hear is of no consequence to the singer. No such deliberate calculations ever enter the singer’s mind. Restlessness of heart is all it takes to break into song, and once the feeling is out, the singer feels greatly relieved somehow, or more restless still, or more excited–many are the manifestations of hung.

The same applied to the Seoul Mistress and her storybook, Ch’uwŏlsaek. Confucius, it is said, read and reread a certain volume so often its leather cover had to be rebound three times. By this time the Seoul Mistress had read Ch’uwolsaek more than a thousand times. Still she had not let it slip from her grasp. No one could have known for sure whether she intended to read it a hundred thousand or even a million times more. She already could recite the whole story from cover to cover with her eyes closed.

This book, it is true, was no golden anthology of poetry. Neither was it a Bible, or a Compendium of Laws; nor was it the Analects of Confucius–heaven only knows why she buried herself in it and would never dream of parting with it. If the truth be told, the only pleasure she derived from this book was the ease with which the story flowed. After all, she had memorized the whole thing by heart. Whenever she felt restless, she would at once pick up Ch’uwolsaek and lie down. Once in a comfortable horizontal position, she would clear her throat and commence the recitation. Her voice rose and fell, and often her body and her legs twisted and twitched in accord with shifts in pitch. While absorbed in this poetic reverie, her heart grew even more restless and she would tremble with ineffable joy, or feel refreshed and replenished–in other words, hung came to dwell in her heart of hearts.

These recitations of hers thus were no different in nature from the lively folksongs sung by a solitary woodcutter in the mountains, or the melancholy chants of a lonely kisaeng stranded in her room on a rainy afternoon. Whatever the form of song, the more familiar it is, the better it suits the singer. In the same way, a Ch’uwolsaek known backward and forward was very well suited to the Seoul Mistress’s taste.

One might wonder, under the circumstances, if it wouldn’t have been easier, more convenient, for the Seoul Mistress to lay the text aside and just lie down emptyhanded to recite the story. But a rickshawman without a rickshaw to pull would find running insipid, and a fan dancer needs a fan, even in January, or the performance will be absurd. Even though she knew the text by heart, the Seoul Mistress needed that finger-soiled, familiar Ch’uwŏlsaek cradled in her hands to get a full dose of hung out of her recitations. That is the truth of the matter, and that is why she was oblivious when the others jeered at her squeaky voice; that is why she paid no mind to those who looked down on her because she toted Ch’uwŏlsaek about day and night the whole year round; and that is why she started reciting early on this particular evening.

“…and now, at last, with not a sign of his return …”

The Ch’uwŏlsaek operetta by the Seoul Mistress was nearing its climax when suddenly there came an extremely loud bass voice, defying any possible categorization, a voice crashing through the air with the force of abandonment.

“Rain … rain … is, fa-falling …”

“Sister?”

No answer.

“Sis! Ter!?”

“What is it?”

“I forgot!”

“Rain is falling, and the rice seedlings are growing.”

“What?”

“You’re hopeless! Rain is falling and the rice seedlings are growing. You still don’t get it?”

“Hee, hee … rain … is faaalling, see-dle-lings gr-grow-owing, hee, hee, hee.”

“Oh, that’s enough!”

Finally realizing where he was, Kyŏngson leapt to his feet and ran out of the room and down the hall toward his mother’s room in the back of the house. His mother was doing some needlework together with her sister-in-law. They were gossiping under their breath about something, but ceased at the sudden appearance of Kyŏngson.

“Why don’t you stay put in your room and do your homework, and less of this running around?”

His mother’s reproach was a reflex.

“When I feel like playing, why shouldn’t I close the books and play to my heart’s content?” Kyŏngson exclaimed loudly, walking right into the middle of the sewing things and plopping down. Half-stitched pieces of fabric were scattered everywhere.

“What’s all this fuss? When it comes to studies you’re always at the bottom of the class, yet you’re the first to look for an excuse to play …”

“Now, Mother! Just because I’m no good at studying, will that make the family wealth go to somebody else? That idiot T’aesik spends a whole month on a single sentence, ‘Rain is falling, and the rice seedlings are growing,’ but he’ll be a man with a thousand bags of rice … and do you doubt I’ll be inheriting ten thousand?”

“You and your big mouth! Stop spouting nonsense, just study hard!”

“I’ll study enough not to flunk. The students who get good grades are all nitwits. Well, except for my uncle. Isn’t that right, Auntie?”

For some inexplicable reason, of all the men in the Yun clan, Kyŏngson had great respect only for his uncle, Chonghak. But his aunt’s already protruding lips twisted into a pout and she jumped at the boy’s remark.

“Don’t even mention that man!” she cried. “Where on earth could you find such a fool?”

“My uncle a fool? As far as I can see, he’s the best and the smartest in the family. Except me, ha, ha, ha. I’m so smart because I take after my uncle! Isn’t that right, Mother? I am smart, aren’t I?”

“Oh, shut up! All you ever do is jabber …”

“Ha, ha, ha …”

“He must be a dunce if he can’t even get himself a concubine …”

Kyŏngson’s aunt started grumbling, as if talking to herself, but then she paused and raised her head to thread a needle. The anger on her face suggested that a flood of vitriolic abuse against her husband, Chonghak, might burst forth at any moment.

“A man should never take a concubine, Auntie! He’ll end up fathering a piece of squid like T’aesik, squishy-brained, isn’t that right?”

“You don’t understand! Nobody’s stopping him from taking a hundred concubines, but now he wants to divorce the wife that lived with him through the hard times so he can remarry! If that’s not a dunce of a man, tell me what is? And then, what next? Become a police chief? Bah!...