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2: Settling In
- University of Washington Press
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2 Settling In Diary Entry: April 26, 1966 After one month in the village: To get here I have followed a narrow, curving, grassy path that separates the knee-high barley from the pine trees. It dips gently from the ridge behind Teacher Lee’s [Yi] house and then makes a long, graceful, climbing turn around the headland some sixty feet above the ocean. I’m lying down in a sunny spot where a blinding streak of shining ocean framed by pine branches leads off to the western horizon. The night before last there was a moderate gale, and the dying remains of yesterday’s big swells make gentle noises on the rocks below. What a place to savor solitude! With no appointments, no place to go, no demands, I do as I please. I’ve talked to at least fifteen people today. I’m pleasantly tired, and it’s nice to be alone. There is so much genuine cordiality here. I encounter smiles everywhere. As I walked up here, a man plowing with his ox stopped to ask when I had gotten back from Seoul, when my family will arrive, and how the new house is coming along. I was delighted because I understood almost everything and could answer. Women walking with babies strapped on their backs and huge, ungainly chunks of baggage balanced on their heads greeted me. Three men repairing dikes in a rice field stopped work and asked me to join them for a bowl of makkŏlli. Further up from the village, boys cutting wood on the mountain appeared suddenly out of the apparently deserted landscape and asked about life in America. A shy girl hanging back on the fringes of the group fiercely pretended she didn’t want her picture taken and then got her brother to ask when it will be developed. My life here consists mostly of Settling In 25 spectacular walks from one hamlet to another, punctuated by greetings and chatter and smiles. At first, without even trying to do systematic fieldwork, I just wandered around the village soaking up impressions and meeting people. They were as curious as I was. I began to wonder about the real reasons that drive anthropologists out of the cozy security of academic life into lonely alienation and physical discomfort. I don’t think many of us come clean in our accounts of these expeditions. Perhaps, in my case, the commitment to research, to getting a PhD, and to the advancement of learning was less pressing than a longing for adventure and a desire to reclaim the lost utopias of childhood. I experienced the pleasantly unsettling feeling during my first weeks in Sŏkp’o of being in touch again with some sort of half-forgotten, elemental, and sustaining reality. I had somehow managed to find my way back through a passage that had been closed off since the age of ten or eleven. Figure 2.1 The men repairing irrigation dikes. Makkŏlli will follow. (April 26, 1966.) Vincent S. R. Brandt 26 Diary Entry: April 27, 1966 Not since childhood have I been able to soak up all the precious trivial elements of the natural world the way I do now. Here everyone lives close to nature. There’s nothing to spoil the simple harmony. All I have to do is conform to the villagers’ way of life. I am finding a whole new, slow-paced way to enter this world. Each day things become more comfortably familiar. I recognize the way certain houses and trees reflect the light against a background of water or hills at different times of day, or how the whole panorama changes with the tide. There is movement, but no hurry. A sailing junk entering the bay hasn’t changed position much in fifteen minutes . Women bending over to weed sweet potatoes make almost imperceptible progress in the distance. My first impression of the village last December was touched with the usual melancholy of an idyllic landscape that is somehow always out of reach. But now all this tranquil beauty is mine to live in! Memories keep coming back of the intensity of childhood experience . Only then was there this same quality of timelessness, when nothing interrupted my direct and total involvement in climbing a tree, or hiding in the grass, or wading in tidal pools. But something else sustained me in Sŏkp’o right from the start, in addition to the emotional satisfactions described in my...