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9: Fishing I
- University of Washington Press
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9 Fishing I Along the beach where the boats were moored, poor fishermen lived in a row of ramshackle hovels. Each one had a small plot for kitchen greens, but the soil was too sandy for successful gardening. On the lopsided roofs the thatch was old and moldering, because the owners had no paddy fields to provide them with rice straw. The beach in front of these homes was often a lively, cheerful place, a kind of social center for the Big Hamlet. It was protected from the wind and close to the sulchip—an ideal place to mend nets, work on boats, talk, and drink. One of the places that sold makkŏlli was run by a particularly attractive woman in her early thirties whose husband, Kim Ch’angdok, was often away fishing in the offshore islands. Not only did Ok Hi’s mother, as she was usually called, share a glass with her customers now and then, but she also joked, argued, and flirted, while using extremely earthy language. This kind of behavior was so distressing to the good wives of the Yi households across the mudflats that they either pretended she didn’t exist or gossiped about her in hushed voices. I, however, was well aware of her existence. Ok Hi’s mother had been one of the first women to bring her children to my house for scalp treatments . In warm weather she wore tight, ragged T-shirts that barely contained her breasts, and I doubt that she was unaware of the vibrations she caused by sprawling and stretching on my veranda with her children while I spread ointment on their heads. She would arch her back until the tattered cloth of her T-shirt was ready to split, then change her sitting position to reveal long legs under a voluminous skirt. She also stopped by occasionally to bring fish in payment for my doctoring. In the course of these encounters, I learned that she was ambitious. With money saved Vincent S. R. Brandt 142 from selling makkŏlli and her husband’s meager earnings she wanted to start a small business in Inch’ŏn, where she hoped to live a more “cultured ” life and to send her children to better schools. The trouble was that, like other fishermen, Kim Ch’angdok drank a great deal, and although he earned fairly good money working on the island boats, most of it was gone by the time he got back to Sŏkp’o. One morning in July, two handsome thirty-foot junk-rigged fishing boats of a type that I had never seen before were pulled up on the sand in front of Ok Hi’s mother’s house. Given the usual rhythm of existence in the village, this was something of an event. Sometimes severe storms brought big, lumbering engine-powered boats seeking refuge into the harbor, but nothing as sleek and attractive as these sailboats had ever turned up before. Eager to get a closer look, I headed down for the beach. It was hot, and as I walked past the houses, night soil that had just recently been poured over young cabbage plants and other greens gave off its peculiarly intense, sweetish smell. Metallic, golden flies swarmed along the path, and swallows darted past my head. The two boats were even more impressive when I looked at them up close, running my hands over the hulls and gear. No paint or varnish had been used, but the gunwales, decks, and spars had a hand-rubbed oiled texture that shone dully in the sunlight. The boats were less crudely built and more carefully maintained than those from this part of the coast. Below the waterline, tar or pitch covered the bottom just as on the local boats, but even here care had been taken to draw a crisp stripe. Fishing lines were neatly coiled in tubs on deck, and there was a wooden box lined with stones for a charcoal fire aft of the mast. In contrast to the tattered rags used locally, the sails were made of heavy reddish-brown cloth in good condition. From behind me someone shouted, “Come up here and play for a while!” I turned to see a group of men sitting in the shade of the big pine tree that dominated the hamlet from the top of a grassy knoll behind the beach. It was a lovely spot, just high enough above the rooftops to catch the westerly...