Kapiolani
Community College Horizons 2003
Kapiolani
Community College
Horizons 2003
Kyong, a bouncing bundle of unrestrained Korean joy, skips
fearlessly down the rolling hills, her eyes wandering aloof, oblivious to anything
around
her.
In
her hand she carries a round glass jar. It is odd and misshapen, and shimmers
with an ugly green hue. Her uncle, a self-taught craftsmen, tried making a
bunch of them for her family but couldn’t quite get the shape right. All of her
family’s jars now have a protruding bump in their see-through bellies.
With this jar, she will scoop up the life force of an entire village, and heal
the mysterious rift that plagues her ailing family.
It is still half an hour till morning comes. She stops at the top of the hill,
and holds the jar up above her head. It shines with the reflected power of
a thousand pounding moons. The moon up above, so high, still gleaming its last
fingers of life, refuses to give way to its over-bearing sister, the Sun.
The wind senses the overwhelming beauty of the moment and suddenly picks up
in intensity, creating an eerie chorus for little Kyong to bellow out a song.
She
sings with sparrow lips, soft and deftly they cackle: Moon, Oh Silvery Moon
What kind of Moon are you right now? Where? Where? Up there in the sky? I am
high
above, up in the Mountains, I am.
She eventually makes her way to a broken quarry. It is filled with brackish
brown and green water that reeks with unrelenting pungency. She squats down
near the
edge of the water and looks deep within it. The mutated-looking shapes of baby
dragonflies squirm in the primordial muck. Their bulbous, congealed eyes pulsate
and laugh at her. In the water, she does not find her reflection gazing back
at her. Instead, she sees the spirits of countless broken lives, still haunting,
still refusing to remain buried in the past like they should. The spirits drift
to the surface to look at her. They are hard to look at, only existing in momentary
flashes. They look to have pale, haggard, bird-like masks for faces. Their
formless bodies seem riddled with hollowed, rotting, bony extensions and sharp
feline
talons.
Fearing to look into those listless eyes any longer, she quickly plunges the
glass jar into the forbidden water. She gathers so much fluid that little droplets
spill from the brim. These droplets fall to the ground, scorching the earth
black, forming paths of tiny tears of sorrow next to Kyong’s lonely,
blissful footsteps. She makes her way to the yard outside her house.
The yard is dry and riddled with cracks. A desert wasteland hungering for nourishing
rains. Her eyes rest on the charred carcass that once was a lychee tree. It
lies there, sad and pitiful, forever stuck in a blackened embrace, oozing miserable
rivers of sweet, milky-white pus. It once towered six stories over the house
and garnered the admiration of all the villagers. Visitors would come from
miles
around to see its magnificence and snatch handfuls of the sweet fruit. So intoxicating
was the taste that it was said you could only eat a few at a time, or else
you would fall victim to a sudden deep sleep. Once you woke up from the sleep,
you
would be mired in a veil of depression and would be slow in reaction and thought
for months on end.
She vividly remembers the day her father lit the yard on fire. Without a word
to anybody, he suddenly stormed outside the house and put a match to the ground,
burning the tree down in the process. He had just heard that his brother, his
very last living relative, had suddenly died. From this point on something
inside him died as well. She remembers standing silently by the window with
her father’s
arm wrapped around her, watching the flickering flames lap onto the living bulwark
of the lychee tree. In her mind she heard the tree’s cries of anguish
for years to come.
Kyong tucks the jar underneath her arm and walks into the house. She tiptoes
slowly across the creaking wooden floor. The soft pitter-patter of her footsteps
carefully moves towards the easternmost room. She peers into the room. Her
eyes glisten, they are wide, wide open. Her eyes are open like a hare watching
a sly
fox wandering too closely. The smoke is thick in this room. Kyong tries to
pull the sticky smoke from her body, but it is no use. It sticks to her hair,
forming
little clumps that don’t untangle no matter how hard she pulls. Her father
is here. The breath of life is slowly oozing from his lips, filling the room
with its unmistakable haze.
You have had many wonderful adventures haven’t you, harrabuji. You have
had so many, that people will still talk of them long after you are dead. Yes
they will. They will talk as you once were. As a young man. Vibrant and brave,
as unbreakable as an ocean rock pounded by a millennia of crashing waves, unrelenting
in the face of horrors that most men will never know. But now, you are tired
... so, so very tired. Too tired for any more adventures. All you want to do
is sleep, sleep a heavy deep sleep and leave your aching, scarred body behind.
You want to drift away to a place where you can finally get some well deserved
peace.
Kyong feels a cold emptiness permeate her chest as she looks into the gaping
hole of her dying father’s mouth. His life essence oozes slowly out. It
wafts up to the ceiling, forming beautiful formations of thin, curling rings.
She doesn’t know how long she stands there. Perhaps she stands there so
long, that she blossoms into a beautiful woman. A beautiful woman fixed in a
strange land, an object of desire to many men. She stands there until her father’s
eyelids gradually open up into little slits. They both stay like that for untold
lifetimes; soundless, formless, deeply understanding each other without any
spoken words. Painfully, his lips begin to twist upwards into a half-grin.
Words begin
to creep out of his mouth.
“Soo Young ... Soo Young...” He mutters weakly.
Kyong feels like crying. She wishes she could say something to comfort him,
but no words can come out of her lips. She knows that Soo Young was the name
of the
half sister she never knew, who died twelve years before she was born. Soo
Young was only seven months old, and was the last child of her father’s
former family. He carried her over 200 miles oboba-style, on his back. He carried
her
through a divided war, between one and many nations. He carried her until he
saw only dancing mirages ahead of him, scattered images that chastised him
forth and toyed with his sanity. Finally, against all odds, after crossing
the border
into South Korea, he checked on his beloved little Soo Young, and found the
last member of his former life dead.
Kyong presses the jar forcibly to her father’s quivering mouth. A few drops
of the thick brown soup wet his lips. A drop of the precious formula dribbles
from the comer of his mouth, hanging onto the edge of his chin. This single droplet
fascinates Kyong. She looks into its dirty, pearly essence. She sees an entirely
self-contained universe held between its transparent watery borders. Globules
of brown material float around aimlessly within it, banging each other, breaking
off into smaller and smaller pieces. She tilts back her father’s head,
forcing the contents of the jar into her father’s mouth. His forehead
is burning hot underneath her hand. He is burning inside.
His eyes are so hot they do not see anything but flames. He sees the face of
his friend, screaming in unholy anguish, his entire body engulfed in the fires
of hatred. He was only 13 years old then. He was a forced miner in a Japanese
mining camp during WWII. His friend was captured trying to escape from the
abysmal conditions they were forced to live in, and was promptly made an example
of to
the rest of the Korean laborers. Two years later, at the age of 15, he would
make the excruciating decision to escape along with 32 others. Miraculously,
out of the 150 original miners, he would be one of four to return home alive.
The flames are burning. They burn so hot and he does not know how to put them
out. He only sees his friend’s face still innocently smiling at him, still
reassuring him after all this time that he’ll be okay and make it back.
His face remains youthful, safe from the effects of age in the confines of his
memory. Through the orange hue of the flames, the whiteness of his friend’s
smiling teeth shine brightly at him like a row of hanging pearls.
Kyong pulls the empty jar away from his lips. Almost immediately she notices
the breath of life starting to work its way back into her father’s body.
You will soon recover from this, harrabuji. This ridiculous folk remedy of
ingesting the sewage water from the village latrine has somehow cured you of
your illness
and saved your life long after every doctor gave you a death sentence. Perhaps,
you may yet live to tell your adventures to a descendant who is willing to
tell them. The glassiness slowly starts to dissipate from his eyes. The spark
of life
wavers in his black irises. Her looks at her and says to her meekly:
“Blood ... The blood ... it cure me?”
She nods her head. This is not the first time he has resorted to ancient folk
remedies. He returned home from Japan deathly ill with tuberculosis. His family
paid a hunter to kill a deer for him. He was carried to the fresh carcass and
drank the still-warm life-blood of the deer. He drank raging monsoons of blood,
gorging his body, throwing up rivers of it. After he recovered, a long, tube
shaped mark would remain on his stomach, forever painted crimson-red.
He gains more and more strength. He looks at her yearning eyes.
He says to her: “You ... are a beautiful woman now, many men from foreign
lands will chase you ... we must dress you up ... we must put ill-fitting, baggy
clothes on you from head to toe, to make you look ugly, otherwise... the American
GI’s would rape you... “
She recalls the story he once told her of his first meeting with her future
mother. Her mother and father both had lost their former families in the Korean
War,
and were matched up because of their loss. As he looked upon his new wife’s
face for the first time, she smiled for him, and he was awestruck by her natural
beauty. He immediately knew what would happen to her if the stationed American
soldiers ever got a good look at her.
He smiles at his daughter now. A pure, genuine smile, full of relief. He is
all right. The smiles of a hundred generations, past and present smile with
him.
She is immediately transformed into a young, carefree child once more. For
the moment she is free. Free of the absolute horrors her father had to face,
free
of the difficult path she would have to face herself. She bounces up to a nearby
hill. At the top of the hill she carefully buries the glass jar in the soft
mud. She stands there still at the top of the hill of her ancestors.
You cry. Yes, you do. For the scars of the past to heal once and for all. You
plead to your ancestors to take away the sorrow and allow you to start anew
on the opposite ends of the world. They take pity on you and answer you back.
The spirits dance on the coattails of the wind, as it careens across the base
of the hill. It gains more and more strength and finally whooshes around her
body, wrapping itself around her face like a cloak of cool, soothing purity.
Kyong faces the setting sun. It has painted the sky in dying embers of orange
and pink. She bellows out a farmer’s song taught to her in her youth
by her father:
Bird, oh Blue Bird
Don’t sit on the patch of Bean Sprouts.
The seeds will fall to the ground, lifelessly
and
The Farmer is going to Cry.
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