Tale of Cho Tong-gwan

The name was Tong-gwan, surname Cho. He didn’t hail from a distinguished line. He had no renowned ancestors to speak of, left no heirs. As for how the name “Tong-gwan” became “Turdcan,” a few words couldn’t do it justice. But this is for certain. What turned an ordinary man like Cho Tong-gwan into an extraordinary character like Turdcan is that he was a creation of the very people who’d known him, built him up, and finally let him die. This is how he became a part of them. Everyone in Ŭnch’ŏk called Tong-gwan “Turdcan” when he was still alive. It didn’t matter if you were a three-year-old boy or an eighty-year-old woman. But if he was close enough to hear, you would be too scared to call him by his real name, let alone something like “Turdcan.”

He was the younger of fraternal twins. Till the day he died, he must’ve been involved in over a thousand scuffles along with his older brother Ŭn-gwan. Turdcan was born with an imposing physique, and these scuffles endowed him with boldness, skills, and no shortage of scars. They also became the cornerstone of the career of the greatest hooligan in Ŭnch’ŏk’s history. Since Ŭn-gwan enjoyed being admired by others, he’d already acquired a third degree (tan) blackbelt in hapkido, fourth in judo, and third in taekwondo. If you added up the degrees, there were ten (sip), so he got the nickname Cho Siptan. Poorly pronounced, it might come off like an insult, so nobody dared to address him by that nickname. When the elusive brothers weren’t around, people would look over their shoulders to see if they were lurking somewhere nearby before saying things like, “Did you hear about Turdcan and Sickdog getting drunk and sitting on that pawnbroker?”

The reason why these tales became such a source of amusement for the people of Ŭnch’ŏk is that back in those days they didn’t have access to television or newspaper or radio. They didn’t have the cash to enjoy those pleasures, nor did it occur to them that they should be enjoying them. The tales of the Ŭn-gwan brothers were their news, their serialized novel, their soap opera, their sports, and—more than anything—their myth.

As Turdcan started coming of age, he began making quite a name for himself as a hooligan. He was practically untouchable. When he was fifteen, it wasn’t unusual for him to turn a store upside down for not letting him run a tab. He’d eat rice on a tab, side dishes on a tab, go whoring on a tab, sip tea on a tab, belch arrogantly on a tab, and read comics on a tab. He’d beat up kids on a tab and then pay for their medicine on a tab. In the midst of all this, what led to Tong-gwan being etched in the minds of all the townspeople as ‘Turdcan’ once and for all was the so-called “Train Station Debacle with the Police Chief.”

Turdcan must’ve begun to feel at a certain point that his stomping grounds had been too constricted because he began expanding his activity perimeter. The train played a crucial role. Facing Turdcan’s house was a station, which, one might say, was the very symbol of Ŭnch’ŏk’s modernization. The area surrounding the station might have been the most bustling in town, with the best-maintained facilities. Nonetheless, soot-dark children naked from the waist down would mill about the open gutter with its dribbling sewage while yellow desiccated shit fell weakly from their asses. The air was always thick with flies, and the dust around the stores built along the low-hanging eaves by the street would turn into a muddy soup when it rained. In the alleyways where the sweet scent of poverty wafted, you were hard pressed to find a single day of complete quiet, what with shouts...