Chapter 1.2.3:Yogang...and Coughs

1
Dad Goes to Manchu, 1930s

"The kind-hearted Nipponese," was a mantra my parents used to recite. "They were nice to you," my mother used to say. "You were very weak then and the village doctor at a small town of Nagasaki Prefecture always treated you nice and well," she used to recollect. "The Japanese people were gentle, kind and generous," my father-in-law once told me in my early thirties.

The words of affinity toward the people from across the East Sea, which I had heard from my mother as a child, were ringing in my ears. It just happened that the dormant noises seemed to come to and married to the images, that is, converted into the mobile and living human figures. Two dissimilar things were adjoining. It was just like the ancient chords were superimposed on the Japanese tourists I used to encounter at Namdaemun Market. So transcendental. So mystic.

The major topic of my mother's oft-repeated recitation was "the good Japanese physician." I had been sick and injured so often. I had been taken ill every other month and tripped and fallen so often that she had had to take me to the doctor time and again and at wrong time.

"Ohira san (Mr. Ohira) had not blurted out a complaint," she reminisced. Not even once. He had been always at smiles, warm and nice. He had wanted to know what was wrong with "Masao san." Masao had been my Japanese-type name as a child.

"If a big house is set on fire," Luo Guanzhong says in The Romance of Three Kingdoms "sparrows will leave from the nests of the eaves." It just happens that when a big mountain collapses beasts are bound to be dispersed. Once the nation got ruined the people were scattered like anything.

Although the Chosun Kingdom (1392~1909) had succumbed to the Imperial Japan, lost its national sovereignty, gotten annexed to the mighty archipelago, and plunged into the sorrowful state of a colony, my father had had no time to have the luxury of national mourning.

He bolted one night from a rustic tenant house, took a train to Seoul, and then an overnight train to Shinuiju. He had not been entirely lonely because he had had a four-times-removed distant cousin to keep his company. Away from home, he drifted, hitting every valley of the wild Manchu (Manchuria) and knocking on literally every residential door.

Hunger had been their eternal companion. Their stomachs had almost always been empty, which had made them realize the presence of their real company. They had sought jobs, any jobs, however menial they might have been, to sedate the stomachs in acute craving pain. Rejection was in store. Although they had been rebuffed in front of any residential entrance, they had not gritted their teeth. They had tried to take all the snubs in their stride.

Youth might have exerted its force on them. The rustic pair hadn't had a hard time adjusting to the harsh element of the north eastern Manchu climate and rough-hewn shelter. Survival had been a foremost matter of importance. So any cheap labor would do if it had provided a bowl of rice for them.

The life mode of theirs had been the camaraderie of apportionment. They had had "to break a bean and divide it evenly between them." They had shared everything: crude meals, ill-starched odor-soaked denim quilts, and the derision with which they had been branded stateless waifs.

Homesickness had crept into bone-deep, soaked to their blood and running in their vein. Nearly everything they had encountered along the route of the foot traffic had been the incarnation of homesickness. The two cousins had thrown a nostalgic glance at a monthly full moon seen through the glass window of a foreign shelter on lonely nights as if it had been their mothers' face.

They had had a hard time of it, putting their noses, and feet, to the ground. My father had been a young man of stout build, which had been suitable for a big haul. He had been actually pulling and pushing the cart, loading and unloading the cargo. Lugging the cartload along in the street of 1930's Mudanjang, Henlongjang.

There had to be some wherewithal of any variety. Since attempts had failed to stash away what little money they had earned at some unfamiliar places, they had reached the decision that their earnings, however small in amount, be left with the proprietor of their lodging house, who, impressed by the diligence and integrity of the two young men from Chosun of the unfortunate kingdom, had agreed to take custody of it.

They had written to their parents often at whichever time the exchanges of greetings had been grandiose. It's because, like a locomotive train, a major transportation machine of that time, tidings personal and social had been slow. Extremely slow. Letters had been coming and going at a snail's pace, and telegraphs had been too expensive for a common use.

The words contained in the correspondence had been "long-winded", sent especially from my father to his parents. The epistolary verbiage had been a common practice at that time. Time was fast flowing like water and the earth was revolving around the sun. He wondered, for waking hours or on sleeping beds, whether or not the esteemed bodies of his parents were well cared for.





2

The Spring Famine, 1940s

The spring famine, called the Barley Pass, had been into an ugly phase. The folks of a small hamlet, surrounded by low-lying sun-lit hills at Danuishill, had been occupied peeling the barks of pines, crushing and brewing, mixed with a small amount of wheat flour, to get a lukewarm soup out of it.

My grandpa passed away in his early 40s when I had been hovering in an ethereal realm as a non-form. He had been sick in bed, I heard, for a while with typhus or something, not going to the hospital. The granddad, being a poet and an essayist in his own right, died a lonely death as a citizen of a ruined country, leaving his young pretty wife behind.

Since deprivation had been a major meat of the era, ritual procedures, including funeral, could not be complete. That they had not been able to keep them was more like it. The conventional three-year mourning custom had been passed over.

The household gods, or the dead spirits including the spirit of my granddad's had been starving because the hot rice bowl, offered during the mourning period of the shortened one year, could not be placed on the altar. The grieving survivors, who were much too weakened by the lack of nutrition, could only blurt out low sobs, short of wails or cries.

The valley in the early morning, in which my father, who had returned from Manchu, was scheduled to pay respects to his father's grave, had been shrouded with fogs. The shallow creek had long been dry. A steep hill leading up to his lonely resting place had been covered with stinging thorny bushes and weeds.

A while later, his guide, two-times-removed cousin, who was four years senior to my father, stopped walking. There was a grave mound which must have been freshly formed. Earth was new and green grass had been planted on top, just like quilts. No stone table had been erected yet, which is used for donating offerings at times of seasonal rituals. No epitaph, either.

My father stumbled and fell to the ground. Wails trailed along the hills. Doves and mountain birds stirred and fluttered to the air. He had "much to say" to his father. He had missed him badly. He was so sorry for all the ills and the sudden death. He had sinned, for which he would never be forgiven.


3
A Yogang at Anbang, 1940

My earlier memory hovers around a yogang, a room pot of copper make, which I hear my mom had brought with her at the time of her marriage to my dad. She used to put it under a corner window sill. Country lavatories were usually situated "two and a half miles" apart from the main living quarters of a house because it had been considered best left far alone for hygienic reasons.

As a result, a convenient substitute with a compact size was concocted for human relief particularly during nightly hours for spouses. Which is why a yokang, that is, an urn for urination, had taken a cute place in common households then.

The thatched-roofed cabin, shaped like hangul character ㄷ, which housed two living rooms and other adjacent small rooms, a cow barn and a warehouse for farming tools, was not tight, indeed, because the rest of the residential area around the two rooms was a spacious lot, of which the one room was allotted for the head of the household and male people and the other room was for his wife and other female members.

The husband used to receive guests, changed clothes, dined, and slept in the sarang, or sarangbang, by which it meant the chamber for the patriarch. It had been actually reserved for the male people of different age levels while the wife had spent days and nights in the anbang, by which it meant the chamber for the matriarch. It had also been used by the female population of various age levels.

There used to be a concept of distance, or separation between the husband's habitation and the wife's. That is, they had resided in the same house but had not "lived" in the same room. To elaborate, they had not slept together for most days of the year. To that end, the two rooms had not been contiguous to each other. They had been "far" apart from each other. Herein should lie a partition space called maru, the wooden floor which bridged the two chambers.

A maru had played a role as a podium for the chief who could command domestic functions. He had for most of times directed the household chores and checked their procedures. Most of the country dwellings had been so erected on elevated ground levels that the chief of a specific household could shout directions on the maru from way up to his servants down below, if any, and his inferiors.

The maru as a border line had not demanded visas. It had demanded that you keep a semblance of human propriety or decency. Still, a head of a household had without permission or restriction from anyone been allowed to cross the border and enter the anbang. But it had been regarded as an indecent act for a host of an anbang to cross the maru to enter the sarangbang, which had been considered a taboo.

How indecent? It had been considered indecent to the extent that it would probably be played on the mouths of the villagers, especially women, giggling away. Rumors had usually been milled around the village well from which it would take wings.

There hadn't been a concept of trespasses. The villagers had gotten their living quarters open. Most of them had had no gates. Even if some of them had, visitors hadn't been trapped in or out of the quarters because the village folks had not kept their gates locked and not their doors, either.

They had had no locks. They had known the world out of their houses, of course, in which the locks had been being used. But they had been afraid of biting opinions and gossips of others. (What is there to hide?) That is, they had hated themselves to become the objects of the other folks' gossips and back talks. They had not wanted to be thought of as man-haters or guest-haters.

They had also been ignorant of knocking. They might have developed an instinctive hatred for blunt impersonal sound. Or they had preferred human voice to mechanical noise or otherwise. They had naturally coughed. Coughs had really been humanitarian. What kinds of coughs? Asthmatic or convulsive coughs penetrating the ears of those around? No, not real coughs. False coughs, indeed. You could name them gentlemen's (or ladies') coughs.

Thus they had coughed all along the way. In a decent manner in front of the lavatory (Is anybody in there?), louder and longer before the gate (Hello!), in a low and calm voice before someone's room (Open the door! Or be prepared for my opening it). Then there had been responding coughs from inside the lavatory (I am here! Or you are supposed to wait!) Or there used to be voices from inside the house (Who's there?).