Eastern Sentiments

T'aejun Yi, Janet Poole

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780231520539
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Korean History
• Index: History

The Confucian gentleman scholars of the Choson dynasty (1392-1910) often published short anecdotes exemplifying their values and aesthetic concerns. In modern Seoul one scholar in particular would excel at adapting this style to a contemporary readership: Yi T'aejun.

Yi T'aejun was a prolific and influential writer of colonial Korea and an acknowledged master of the short story and essay. He also wrote numerous novels and was an influential editor of cultural news. Born in northern Korea in 1904, Yi T'aejun settled in Seoul after a restless youth that included several years of study in Japan. In 1946, he moved to Soviet-occupied northern Korea, but by 1956, a purge of southern communists forced him into exile. His subsequent whereabouts cannot be confirmed, though rumors claim Yi returned to Pyongyang, only to be exiled once more. It is believed Yi T'aejun passed away between 1960 and 1980, but his works were not made available until 1988, when South Korean censorship laws concerning authors who had sided with the north were eased.

The essays in this collection reflect Yi's distinct voice and lyrical expression, revealing thoughts on a variety of subjects, from gardens to immigrant villages in Manchuria, from antiques to colonial assimilation, and from fishing to the recovery of Korea's past. Yi laments the passing of tradition with keen sensibility yet, at the same time, celebrates human perseverance in the face of loss and change. Most important, his essays recount the author's attempt to re-experience the past and keep it alive against absorption into the Japanese nation.

Janet Poole faithfully reproduces Yi's complex craft, retaining his idiosyncratic tone and narrative. A brilliant introduction to a remarkable prose stylist, Eastern Sentiments eloquently complicates the historical, political, and aesthetic concerns of Orientalism.

After Illness

Illness

Sometimes when daily life grows monotonous I think, “If only I were a little sick.” Occasionally I catch a cold, but it feels like a common illness that anyone can catch, rather than a proper malady. It is messy too. Whenever I think it might be nice to take to my sickbed, it is malaria that I have in mind. While I was in Tokyo, now some eight or nine years ago, I suffered several bouts of malaria over the course of two or three years, and in my experience it was one of the most pleasant sicknesses, having something of the beauty of sport. I would suddenly begin to shake, and the shivering would be akin to when the count is full on the opponent and our pitcher has three balls and two strikes. Not even a father’s arms could be so snug and comfortable and make every other desire disappear as did the feeling of lying down in the warmth beneath my quilt! Next there would come the sudden change, like a rain shower, and the fever! Then the silence in the dead of night after the fever had passed through like an express train! As effervescent, as chilly, as lonely as love, that is Miss Malaria! The speed at which she flies through the polar regions and tropical zones, and the utter silence she leaves in her wake, like an empty sports ground … this is what it means to be ill. It is like a love affair or a sport.

But that kind of malaria did not visit me again, instead I just came down with a bothersome cold from time to time, and then somewhere I caught this thing that extremely dull people pass back and forth like curses and I was laid up for fifty or sixty days. What an ignominy! Ha, ha!

Flowers

Some thirty days after I had taken to my sickbed, the most severe symptoms had passed. I still had a slight fever, which hovered around thirty-eight degrees, and emotionally I was tired, but I also felt at leisure. More than anything, I wanted to look at something different. I did not have the energy to read a book or the newspaper, and, though I gazed at the wall, it was always that same old wall. The pictures and calligraphy had become so familiar that I had grown sick of them. If I closed my eyes, I felt stifled, and if I opened them I still felt stifled. I longed for something new on which my eyes could linger and rest. If only there were something that could rinse them afresh like water. I placed my few old vessels in front of me, each in turn, but even grew tired of looking at them. Then one such morning, when I opened my eyes, my spirits suddenly revived. There, where my eyesight would most naturally fall, was a radiant flower garden! My eyes fumbled to count the stems and discovered no more than three or four carnations. White, red, and pink, they looked even sweeter to my eyes than food, for which I was famished. I asked my wife to bring the flower vase closer and then I asked who had sent them. Although my illness was one that people spurn, and the doctor would allow me to see no one, several dear friends had visited me bearing various gifts. When I asked which friend had brought these flowers, I learned that my wife had gone out herself to buy them. I was happy to have recovered enough for her to be able to go as far as the department store and also discovered a rare freshness in my wife, as in our younger days. Those bright carnations sat in the vase for several days smiling, like young girls from the West. The beauty of flowers is such that even when gazed upon for several days they do not repulse; the pure and fragrant oxygen that they emit, once inhaled through my nose, worked as a fine tonic for my cold body.

Faith

I was terribly afraid during this illness. When I thought of how Sim Hun, even with his model robust body, had died in an instant from the same illness, my thoughts did not remain at the level of thought but crept into my dreams, in the form of the scene of me standing vigil throughout the night by the side of his dead body and of the cremation, which had taken place no more than twenty days earlier.* Moreover, the book that I happened to be reading as I took to my sickbed was called The Religious Man, and, according to the afterword, its author was a young scholar who had also died before his time from this precise illness. Such inauspicious memories quietly oppressed me.

From the beginning, my doctor seemed to have sensed the situation and urged faith, even before medicine. He had earned a reputation as a scholar who denied the absolute power of the germ, voicing his opposition to the German doctor Koch, who had discovered the cholera germ. He said that he had drunk a whole cup of cultured bacteria with no adverse consequences, let alone death. He had done this, he said, not so much from any competitive desire to defeat Koch’s theory but from his own firm faith in the human body’s capacity to resist germs, no matter how many of them enter it; and so he had drunk some hundred million bacteria and, with just a few side effects, his body had recovered immediately, or so he said. You would not believe how much strength I gained from this story. I came to truly believe that, “no matter how thickly those germs swarm in my body, if my strong mental powers could only shine through they could kill more bacteria than the power even of the sun.”

Then, one evening as midnight approached, the worst symptoms made their appearance. I did not myself find out until several days later, but all of my copious evacuations were bloody. I tried to speak to my doctor, but my tongue had stiffened. My hands seemed terribly cold, and, when I looked at them, they were as white as paper. Soon, I could no longer raise my hands, and, when I tried to move them, I discovered that my fingers had also lost all sensation. My wife and the doctor were whispering something out on the deck. After whispering for a while, they came back in; the doctor picked up his overcoat, and my wife her coat, and they both left. This time all I heard was the sound of the front gate. I sensed that they had gone to buy urgent medicine. They say that someone came to sit with me, but I knew nothing of it and thought that I was going to die alone. Once my thoughts turned to dying, I already began to lose consciousness. Thus I was unable to give a single thought to anything as practical as a will. All went dark. There would be a brief moment of brightness when I returned to consciousness, but then I would be dragged away again in battle. Yet, surprisingly, I could clearly hear the words of the doctor in the midst of that battle, which took place as though I were in a heavy fog.

“Keep your faith. Illness is not a crime but a test from God.”

I certainly drew strength from this. “It is not yet time to die. I have done no wrong.” This seems simplistic, but I remember that some strong mental power rose up from somewhere. With that strength I fought to hold onto consciousness, even though it seemed as faint as the moon’s halo. One minute, two minutes … that tedious and most difficult period lasted only forty minutes, I later discovered, but it felt never ending, more like the span of one or two months.

That oh-so-faint consciousness was my spirit held in suspended animation. It was only after I received an injection from my doctor that I returned to full consciousness again.

If, in the midst of that dark, dark consciousness, I had not been able to sense those words of the doctor that I had previously drummed into my ears, then I might have remained in the dark forever. Perhaps that is what constitutes death. Needless to say, the doctor’s theory of faith had turned into a resistance more powerful than any medicine, not just at the peak of crisis, but from before and after it too. Now that I am completely recovered, if I were asked whether his theory of faith was useless I would have to disagree.

There is a saying that a medical doctor cures sickness, whereas a holy doctor cures our mindset as well.

Truth

For the most part, the medicine that I took during this illness was the kind that has to be boiled. On the night that my body temperature had fallen completely, I received Western medicine—glucose and injections to stop the bleeding—but it was the power of Chinese medicine, boiled up three times during the night, that helped raise my body temperature all the way down to my feet. My doctor had made some slight changes to the main medicine that I took, according to the course of my illness, but the original prescription is said to be from some famous Song dynasty doctor. I was extremely impressed upon hearing this. Is it not miraculous that a prescription some person from a faraway land had written down in ink in ancient times had brought me back from the brink of death here and now?

The truth is that whose value never dies. And that is what constitutes goodness too.

Health

Having experienced this illness, I am now suspicious of perfect health. While I was recuperating, for some several weeks, I would sleep in the early evening for three or four hours at the most, and then I would pass those all too long winter nights wide awake. During those tedious hours I concocted plots for several novels. They were almost all tragic, and, several times, as I sounded out some conversations between the characters, I found myself crying as if I myself were one of the protagonists. There were several ideas that I was convinced I would write down as soon as I recovered.

Now that I can pick up my pen again, none of these novels seems to be worth writing: they all seem too cheap and sentimental. I thought it was because I had dreamed them up while sick, but I cannot laugh it off so simply, because there are so many pieces I have written in good health only to later wonder how on earth I could have considered them to have the makings of a novel. Now I am well again, but I cannot guarantee that I will never look at what I write today and hear myself say, “You call that writing!”

I wonder when perfect health will ever reach my mind? The thought is disheartening. Perhaps this is the lament of all ordinary people.

On the evening of the fifteenth day of the year of the Red Ox [1937]

* Sim Hun (1901–1936) was a novelist, poet, and filmmaker whose most famous and popular novel, Sangnoksu (Evergreen tree), depicts the student movement to promote literacy in the countryside of colonial Korea.

The New Bride and an Ink Painting of Bamboo

One summer, a few years ago, I visited my hometown and came across two old books. They were written in Chinese and titled Collected Writings of Taesan and Collected Writings of Kyŏmwa. A quick glance at both front pages taught me that Taesan was the nom de plume of a man named Kangjin and that Kyŏmwa was Sim Ch’wije, but there was no way of knowing just who these people were. Moreover, as the collections were not dated according to the Western calendar but marked “the year of the red sheep” and “the year of the yellow dragon,” I could not even tell when they were written. But I was most attracted to the beautiful characters printed in Song dynasty style in Taesan’s collection, as well as to the sincere woodblock print of Kyŏmwa’s collection, and browsed through the pages as I returned home on the train. Collected Writings of Taesan consisted mostly of poetry, whereas Collected Writings of Kyŏmwa contained poems, letters, admonitory precepts, forewords, commentaries, and various other writings, suggesting that Kyŏmwa was more of a Confucian scholar than a poet. Nevertheless, among the titles of his poems was one so lengthy that I read it before all the others.

Composed upon being moved by the young bride from Inch’ŏn, whose family was honest but poor and who brought in her dowry chest just one ink painting of bamboo by Kim Hasŏ.

The poem read as follows:

A slave girl carries the single chest of clothes,

And a pair of ink bamboo trunks beats a thousand pieces of gold.

If our house is blessed with a giraffelike son,

It will surely comfort this heart that has sought the Way all its life.

Such a father-in-law for such a daughter-in-law, one might say.

I only read it through once, but both the title and verse of this poem keep coming to mind.

Kim Hasŏ is an unknown painter whose name does not even appear in the Evidentiary Account of Painting and Calligraphy.^* At that time his ink paintings were probably worth no more than a couple of pennies. But it was a virtuous time when the pure bamboo shade was constant and the father had given the painting to his daughter, who, as a good child holding virtue in esteem, had made an honorable marriage with just that one ink painting in her otherwise empty dowry chest. I yearn for such kindness, purity, and innocence. I can only regard that father-in-law with reverence, for knowing how to accept so sweetly the virtue and sweet etiquette of such a young bride and in-laws. I doubt that I could find such a high degree of virtue and culture in our modern families, modern culture or modern women. “A pair of ink bamboo trunks beats a thousand pieces of gold” and “It will surely comfort this heart that has sought the Way all its life” are lines worthy of our grinding down precious musk and highlighting.

We could refer to an endless number of unofficial histories, but the w...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Translator’s Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Walls
• Eastern Sentiments
• After Illness
• Series List