An Affair with Korea: Memories of South Korea in the 1960s

13: Go Peacefully; Stay Peacefully

13 Go Peacefully; Stay Peacefully A spell of cold weather in early December brought five or six inches of wet snow. It was a dramatic change, and the children were happy at first, dimly remembering winter vacations in Vermont. The snow quickly turned to slush and then to mud, which together with low clouds and a bitter wind off the ocean forced us to crowd together inside on the hot floor. The first twelve inches of air just above the floor stayed pretty warm, but from the waist up (while sitting on the floor) the air inside was about as cold as it was outdoors. We used firewood and candles extravagantly by Sŏkp’o standards, and our sliding glass door let plenty of light into one room at least. But the villagers’ houses, with paper windows, small oil lamps for light, and only meager amounts of wood for fires, were dim, cold, and dreary. Bad weather reinforced the tendency of Sŏkp’o’s adult males to gather together in small convivial groups. Confronted with the challenge of much more free time than usual, they consoled themselves with makkŏlli or soju, in someone’s sarangbang, in the store, or in a sulchip. A certain amount of quasisurreptitious gambling also took place in these settings. Both traditional ethics and government regulations prohibited gambling as detrimental to public morality. Nevertheless, a kind of permanent floating card game went on in winter in one or another of the meeting places of the Big Hamlet. If I wanted company and was at all thirsty, all I had to do was saunter down the hill, wander about for a while, and then home in on the noise. Impassioned oratory, laughter, angry shouts, and the cries that accompanied the winning cards made it easy to find each day’s gathering. The first time I blundered into one of these sessions the men made a half-hearted move to hide the money and cards, more, I supposed, for form’s sake than because anyone really felt guilty or threatened. The players quickly got used to me, however, and urged Go Peacefully; Stay Peacefully 209 me to join in, competing eagerly to teach me the rules. I slowed the game down quite a bit and was never really able to master the physical skills—the exaggerated body language and the wild shout of triumph as the winner slammed down his final card on top of the pile. On the other hand, since I contentedly lost considerable (by village standards) amounts of money, I suppose I was something of an asset to the group whenever I played cards. Certainly the men of the Big Hamlet (and their wives who served us rice beer and anju) always made me feel welcome. From their point of view I was a neighbor and unless I had important work to do elsewhere, was a teetotaler, or puritanically opposed to gambling, it was appropriate that I should be part of one of these groups. What really bothered them apparently was the thought of my sitting all alone in my house with only the children for company, or wandering by myself along the coast. These men from the Big Hamlet were mostly my age or a little younger, and partly, I suppose, for that reason the tone of their gatherings was different from that of the sessions in Teacher Yi’s sarangbang that I remembered from eight months before. Some things, of course, were the same: the ripe Figure 13.1 Looking east over the Big Hamlet. My house is in the clump of trees in the middle of the photo. (1966) Vincent S. R. Brandt 210 body smell and everyone’s ability to sit cross-legged for interminable hours. This open-ended obliviousness to the passage of time had, for me, almost mythic proportions, clearly marking off a boundary between Sŏkp’o and the modern world. On the other hand, it seemed to me that the floors of the Big Hamlet were colder and the dim daylight that filtered through the papercovered doors was gloomier than the lamplight and deep shadows on the evenings when Pirate and his colleagues had invaded my bedroom. Perhaps, in addition to age, different class traditions had an effect as well. In any case, the conversation now was a good deal livelier, and I understood more of it. Instead of tomb sites, lineage affairs, farming, and the cosmos, my younger neighbors of the Big Hamlet spent...