There a Petal Silently Falls

Three Stories by Ch'oe Yun

Ch'oe Yun, Bruce Fulton, Ju-Chan Fulton

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780231512428
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Ch'oe Yun is a Korean author known for her breathtaking versatility, subversion of authority, and bold exploration of the inner life. Readers celebrate her creative play with fantasy and admire her deep engagement with trauma, history, and the vagaries of remembrance.

In this collection's title work, There a Petal Silently Falls, Ch'oe explores both the genesis and the aftershocks of historical outrages such as the Kwangju Massacre of 1980, in which a reported 2,000 civilians were killed for protesting government military rule. The novella follows the wanderings of a girl traumatized by her mother's murder and strikes home the injustice of state-sanctioned violence against men and especially women. "Whisper Yet" illuminates the harsh treatment of leftist intellectuals during the years of national division, at the same time offering the hope of reconciliation between ideological enemies. The third story, "The Thirteen-Scent Flower," satirizes consumerism and academic rivalries by focusing on a young man and woman who engender an exotic flower that is coveted far and wide for its various fragrances.

Elegantly crafted and quietly moving, Ch'oe Yun's stories are among the most incisive portrayals of the psychological and spiritual reality of post-World War II Korea. Her fiction, which began to appear in the late 1980s, represents a turn toward a more experimental, deconstructionist, and postmodern Korean style of writing, and offers a new focus on the role of gender in the making of Korean history.

The Thirteen-Scent Flower

1. North Pole Calling

A late-winter day the year he turned twenty.

His schooling in the ancestral home behind him, he had come to Seoul and worked at a variety of jobs, drumming up business for a dealer in Chindo dogs whom he had met in his peregrinations along the thoroughfare of Chongno and at regular intervals helping out at a moving company. These jobs he worked in order to live were made possible by his ability to drive, a skill he had picked up for the most part by following his uncle around. For what it was worth—and this hopeless period did not last very long—these jobs allowed him to stand on his own two feet.

This uncle, his senior by six years, had left the ancestral home and the few of his relatives who still lived there, establishing himself early on in the big city; he had been forever concerned about his nephew’s future, and then one day had suddenly died. Whereupon the uncle’s small truck had passed down to the nephew. It had been Uncle’s dream to be a pi lot, and from his early teens he had worked as an auto mechanic, finally going into business on his own as a truck driver. He liked to putter around with junked-car parts—as if this would help realize his dream—but it needs no explaining that fixing up old cars and learning to pi lot aircraft are two starkly different enterprises.

Uncle’s dream was not to be just any old pi lot but a fighter pi lot. But he had never earned enough money to take flight lessons. And even if he had, never in his adult life had there been a war that would have allowed him the opportunity to pilot a jet fighter. And so his dream had become worn and tired. Poor Uncle.

It was Uncle who had put him through high school and who, in hopes that his nephew, if not he himself, might someday pi lot a light-speed jet fighter, had given unsparingly of the meager earnings for which he had worked himself to the bone. Every time Uncle completed one of the strange contrivances he assembled from auto parts, he would show it to him. Most of these were playthings more than practical mechanisms.

“When I say ‘pilot,’” Uncle had said, using the English word, “I don’t mean the Pi lot brand of fountain pen.”

Uncle’s lack of any opportunity to realize his overly ambitious dream had made him feel inferior, and his inferiority complex had in turn led him to add “I mean” or “I don’t mean” to practically everything he said. He had never been able to rid himself of that habit. And now Uncle was gone for good.

He himself was educated enough to be able to read newspapers, so when Uncle had one of his grieving spells he was able to offer an explanation such as the following: “Uncle, if you really want to be a fighter pi lot, you have to be born in the right country. Take the United States. Look at all the wars they’ve been through—domestic wars and foreign wars. Someone in a country like that can be a fighter pi lot, easy.”

Uncle had had the foresight to prepare a will bequeathing all of his effects to his nephew, on one condition—that his nephew not bury him. And so he had had Uncle cremated, scattering his ashes along the stream in the ancestral village. And this was how he had come to inherit Uncle’s truck and all of Uncle’s various odds and ends. The majority of these were items of everyday use, nearing the end of their life span, but there were also numerous maps, half a dozen pairs of binoculars, and a dozen or so compasses. He wasn’t sure what the latter items had to do with Uncle’s dream, but he kept every last one of them, treated them with care, and always took the least used of them when he went out in the truck. The routes he drove, though, were not so complicated as to require the aid of a compass, so he never really had to use it. But on the odd occasions when he drove a quiet byway, he liked to stop, produce the compass, and take a bearing.

“Hmm, north by northwest.”

And sometimes the knowledge that he was heading north by northwest was a source of great comfort.

His decision to work as a truck driver for the time being was partly a matter of his inability to think of another way to make a living, but it was also a gesture of respect for Uncle, who had spent a significant portion of his life driving a truck.

His dream, though, was to be a denizen of the Arctic. For a time he rented a room on the outskirts of Seoul, in the home of a man he had met in his comings and goings on Chongno. He signed up for work at a delivery company, driving his truck into Seoul when he was called for a job but otherwise doing repairs or fixing up his landlord’s run-down house. He had steady work with the delivery company, and not once did Uncle’s truck break down as he drove it around.

During the evening hours he would stare absently at a secondhand television that received only two channels, and he would listen to a handful of tapes of popular songs, or sing along with them, on Uncle’s old stereo system, which required a gentle kick to set it in motion. In between these activities he might also gaze at the parts of the ancient mechanical devices Uncle had left him.

Around this time his insomnia had worsened, and when late in the evening his thoughts roamed so far and wide that they interfered with sleep, he sometimes took the truck out onto the expressway. There he entertained notions of making it possible for people who were physically distant from one another to enjoy a deep conversation simply by communicating mind to mind. And there had to be a way to make a ballpoint pen that would automatically record your thoughts if you stuck it over your ear like a carpenter did his pencil. He held especially high hopes for the pen. To explain its uses to the world, he would travel far and wide, expressing himself freely even to those who spoke different tongues, and to those who gathered around him with exclamations he would offer a humble smile. Often, while thinking such thoughts, he would discover that it was after midnight. He was well aware that these nocturnal thoughts were the meaningless musings of the lonely. Still, they were less cruel than Uncle’s dream of becoming a fighter pi lot; indeed, they represented his best attempt to ward off infection by that dream.

Another way he spent his time was to call to mind the faces of people whose lives had intersected with his only in passing, or the faces of nameless girls who for a moment in time had quickened his heartbeat. Or there would be desultory thoughts, like a spray of water droplets from a spinning tire, of girls his age from the ancestral town, girls who worked at the beautician’s or in the factory or in the grocery store. Faces and thoughts that surfaced in the absence of any others.

And so it was that on a frigid winter morning he had set out for downtown in his freshly ironed suit—it was a black one, he had no other—with a red muffler coiled around his neck. He felt like the wretched turkey he had once seen at the zoo, its unremarkable tail spread haughtily wide. Like someone hoping for a miracle or attending to a crucial business matter, he scurried about the city center for the entire day, hands clenched tight in his pockets. You would have thought that had his feet stopped for even an instant, any miraculous opportunity he might have come across would disappear for all time. But when evening finally arrived, not a single miraculous instance had arisen—no person, nothing sufficient to bring cessation to the unutterable loneliness he felt. He observed the young people striding along the cold streets, their energetic smiles. Even their breath visible in the chill air seemed to exude sweetness. They looked no more than twenty, the same as him, yet how could they possibly be the same age?

Enough was enough, and he returned home. Folding his quilt and leaning back against it, he indulged himself in his one and only luxury—beer—and selected one of the maps Uncle had left him, a map of the world. He mounted it on the wall.

And thus began his dreams of the Arctic. When he had nothing better to do he would remove this map from the wall and say out loud the difficult-to-pronounce place names—Ulan Bator, Vladivostok, Sierra Nevada. But the place where his thoughts always came to rest was the Arctic. Ellesmere, Etah, Thule, Reykjavik—he imagined himself traversing Arctic islands, vast snowfields, finally coming upon a tiny settlement. In this way he gradually penetrated the frozen wastes.

Every night he walked the Arctic expanse by himself, the tiny lights of dwellings clustered in the ice retreating before him. The lights seemed to be shining in the distance, and then when he approached they would recede. “If those lights off in the distance don’t start getting closer right now, I’m going to end up sprawled out on this ice field.” Panting, chilled to the bone, he would mumble this to himself as he put one frozen foot in front of the other and willed himself not to collapse.

One of these nights he would meet a good-hearted Eskimo woman and settle down with her. They would have a nice, dependable reindeer and, to transport their foodstuffs, a team of huskies, and in time they would have children. And when the children were old enough they’d go out on the tundra with him to hunt. His progress through the Arctic snowfields was arduous; he would collapse on the ice, and just before he sank into a final sleep he would awaken.

He wondered, should he actually go to the Arctic? Was the Arctic really a necessary part of this modest dream of his? He would ask himself such questions when he awakened at night to scratch the soles of his feet, feeling as if he actually had gone there and gotten his extremities frostbitten. And the very instant he fell back asleep, there it was again, the Arctic falling away from him for hundreds of miles in all directions, a place without sound, gravity, pain, or sorrow.

And then one night during this period of Arctic trekking, the phone rang from across the flat expanse. It had to be a wrong number, this ringing from the Arctic’s frozen wastes, and so he kept moving forward. “Hmm, the air’s so nice, it’s so still and quiet, the Ice Age must have been like this,” he mumbled. And then on the icy plain there appeared a dwelling. He went inside, and that’s where the phone was ringing. He picked up the receiver; it was cold to the touch. Loud static at the other end—strange. And then a faint sigh, as if from right up close. In the languid flow of Arctic time, five minutes must have passed. And then the line went dead.

On the following day, and the day after that, with nightfall came the phone call. When he answered, a voice said hello—always the same voice—and then there was silence. The Arctic woman wouldn’t speak unless he spoke first. If he didn’t speak for a while, she didn’t either.

Meanwhile, he continued to work. People were forever on the move in this city, leaving one home and moving to another, countless people, and there were stretches when every morning without fail he was called on, and so he crisscrossed the city, sometimes to transport dozens of oil drums, sometimes to move a beat-up wardrobe and a pedal sewing machine, or maybe to help with the belongings of a woman who had been sent packing from her home. But there were also days when he arrived at the assigned place to find that the people had canceled at the last minute, and there were days when he wasn’t called at all.

And still he knew nothing about the Arctic apart from a few photos and—long before, something he remembered only faintly—a television program about a day in the life of an Eskimo man and wife. At night he still talked to himself about the Arctic before falling asleep.

He dreamed he was a young Eskimo man named Byehagit’u. He was on his way home from a journey so long he couldn’t remember when he had departed. He had wanted to return with much meat and many skins, but the winter ice had crushed his raft and the only thing he had managed to save—and that barely—was himself. He had survived the winter blizzards with a family of seals, had assisted in the birth of a pup on a bed hollowed out of thick ice by the mother, her teeth visible among icicle-festooned whiskers. In the meantime, many changes had taken place in the Arctic. Sixteen at the time he had left his family’s igloo, he was now a fully grown man. Compass in hand, he walked and he walked in the direction of home, but his settlement did not appear. He walked ceaselessly across the dark ice fields, for if he stopped he would freeze and die. And on one white night when he could no longer remember how long he had walked, he came across a lone Eskimo woman hauling a funny-looking beat-up sled. . . .

2. Green Hands

Gonna run out in front of the next car that comes along. It was late at night and she was concealed by the blackness of the woods that shaded the highway. Once she’d made up her mind, she had walked hours to get here, found a bend in the road that suited her purposes, and hunkered down inside a stand of bushy young pines. She had crawled through the brush to reach this curve, the branches of the pines tickling her cheeks and making her giggle, the forlorn lights along the highway filtering faintly through the growth.

She had already watched several vehicles pass by. Not gonna jump in front of just any old car, she muttered again as she shivered in the chill air of early spring. Talking to herself like this served to steel her ever-flagging physical energies. From where she sat, the lights of oncoming cars could be seen in the distance. The bend in the highway curved toward her so that she would have ample time, when finally she decided, to run out in front of her chosen vehicle.

She wasn’t counting the number of vehicles she had watched pass by since she’d crouched down in this spot. She was more concerned about the illusion she had of being pushed back over a non ex is tent outcrop behind her. I’m not afraid, she had told herself countless times during the hours it had taken her to walk here. A shadow sprang from the gloom. She jumped up, saw it was only a feral cat, but at the same time stumbled and fell forward. This trifling incident gave her a fresh taste of fear.

Not gonna jump in front of just any old car! She bit down hard on her lip. That lower lip was unusually plump and fleshy, owing to the many sorrows she had experienced as a child, causing her frequently to pout and bite down. The cold air made its way beside her, and with a faint shiver she began to sing a song from her childhood while she awaited just the right car.

Her ancestral home was about as remote as you can get in the mountains. She had no siblings and her parents were no longer alive. When she had opened her eyes to the world for the first time there was only her grandmother, by then so old she appeared to be more than a hundred. There was much she just couldn’t understand—how she had come to be born in the first place, how she had spent her first twelve years tucked away high up in the mountains, how she had moved from her hillside town to the small city, and from the small city to the big city, and how at every turn she had met with bad luck. Nor did she know why she had been sent packing from every place she had ever worked, finally to find herself on the road back to her ancestral home.

So many things had happened to her, too many to find space in her still-developing brain. She imagined the inside of her head consisting of small containers that were just the right size but slightly the worse for wear, kind of like the paper box of cookies with the picture on it that a distant relative had left her grandmother after a visit to the home deep in the mountains, small containers full of items from around and about home—bits of string, dried leaves, and shards of stone—on which the covers never fit tight and that were worn at the creases. There were keys to unlock these containers in her mind, but she could never remember where they were.

What she did remember was the whirlwind that had swept her up the moment she made the decision to throw herself in front of a car, a spur-of-the-moment decision she had made on the bus back to Grandmother and the ancestral home. And yet she couldn’t have explained what was compelling her to take her own life. She was sixteen years of age—sixteen. Death to this sixteen-year-old girl was something easy to carry out, something sweet, a nymph hovering, offering to solve her difficulties. For some time she had carried on a conversation with this honey-voiced nymph, starting the day she was sent packing, for the flimsiest reason, from a home where she had looked after the daughter, steamed the rice, and cooked the stew. But she couldn’t say it was due to these conversations t...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Weatherhead Books on Asia
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• There a Petal Silently Falls
• Whisper Yet
• The Thirteen-Scent Flower
• Afterword