Chapter 7.8.:The Big Flash

7
The Tale of a Big Flash, 1949.



I was a solitary boy. The boy started walking down a slopy hill of Sun Valley (short for Sun Bang Valley), Baikja-dong, Andong-gun. An afternoon vernal wind was crisp enough with a faint fragrance of pines blowing from far-down valleys.

The pines were rustling with a sound of sea waves. The solitary boy of dokka-chon, that is, a mountain village consisting of the only hut cottage, stopped from time to time to inhale and savor the fragrance of pines in the valley. I was on my way from Oksan Elementary School, four kilometers from my home. The cottage was seen from the top of hill, nestled far below.

I was a loner of eight with the height of four feet and three inches in simple starched cotton wears. I saw well, heard well and smelled well. I was a mountain boy. I did not give a laugh often and did not make a face, either. My facial feature was kind of solemn with an aura of coldness.

I was the very person who had been born at Sakitoma-chi (or Sakitama-chi), Nagasaki, Japan. The boy did not know it. He did not remember it. He did not have any memory related to his childhood years from his birth to age six. Many a man and woman of the world takes a great pride on their early memory of his or her childhood years dating even to age two or three. But my memory used to be shrouded in murky fogs. Buried in the whirlpool of the black hole of amnesia.

The discontinuities were irritating, The vacuums were intolerable. There grew inquisitiveness for the quest of his identity and self-doubts about his own origin. Seemingly unrelated images were tantalizing. Murmurs...Unidentified noises...Muted footsteps....Unidentifiable cracks...Mystic crashes...What happened and how did it happen anyway?

Mom began to unravel the threads of memory on a spring afternoon when left alone with her seven-year-old son Dano who started tormenting her again about his blacked-out memory of the earliest years. Her husband had gone to a local bazaar four kilometers away to buy some items including farmland tools.

"Where am I from, Mom?" I asked my mom casually in front of the barnyard, where she was fixing a wooden feed vessel. "Was I brought away from a bridge? Grandma told me."

"You've not been brought from anywhere. You were born from me just like calves are born from mother cows," Mom said. I was not convinced.
"Where was I born, Mom?" I asked. "Here or At Danuishill?"
"You're not born here nor at Danuishill," she said. "You were born in Nagasaki, Japan."

Why did I have to ask such a silly question of Mom? The stupid boy, who has turned 68 now, is ashamed of himself, for what had tormented his mother who had been troubled by tons of chores and worries. I wish I could have exercised more apt speech.

Why was I so inquisitive about such trivial matters? Why was the origin so important? The pines were standing solemn with no question posed about nothing. The creeks of the Sun Bang Valley were running with no question posed about their origin. The crisp winds were coming from nowhere and getting over the hills.

Why couldn't I talk to my mom with tact? Why couldn't I tell her tales of more substantial nature? Why couldn't I make her laugh, or at least smile by saying to her, "I am on your side, Mom!" or, "I love you, Mom!" Why did I make her feel so lonely by siding with her scolding mother-in-law?

There used to be not so many things he could handle. He couldn't decide on the place of birth and the parents he would like to be born from, which was destiny. I had been born Japanese by the Japanese name of Masao. But now he was Korean by the proud name of Jung Cook Park. (My passport name is Park Jung Cook) Dano is another name for this book while I have long passed for in the local online sites by the name of Shimmanni (Shimmanni means a wild ginseng picker). The United States of America turned out a liberator, emancipator and savior that enabled him to live as a citizen of an independent nation.

Mom didn't go further. She would not have to mention the Big Bomb which had been dropped by the U.S. Bomber on Nagasaki City on the 6th of August, 1945. Thing is that she far later mentioned "a snap on the face" she had had on the horrible morning just like you have had a big bee sting. An instant flash which had whacked the entire town of Sakitama-chi (Sakitoma-chi) which was about 100 miles or so distanced from the tragic city. And the melee from the crash which had almost sunk the homecoming ship when she had hit a live torpedo off the shore of Busan Port.

That had been a big story about a Big Flash, which had not been verified by a second witness. The story had not been told by Mom to her son because he had been such a kid. The story of a flash had been so casually revealed to her sons decades later. There had not been any other audience at the time, too, to be so inquisitive about the validity of her revelation.

My mother had not been called in to a specific court to testify about the horrible explosion of the atomic bomb. Which was not necessary. She had been there of course at the historic moment at the small town about 100 miles far from the tragic scene and the snap shot of a sharp flash had hit her, knocking her down as a result.

As she had released an extraordinary story she had gone a step further. "I saw" this and that, she had asserted. She said she had gone to the very Nagasaki city, two or three weeks later after the tragic bombing incident, with some "friends", to make an on-the-spot expedition of the bombed-out city. "I saw the ubiquitous carcass of the burnt cattle standing erect" in the waste land shrouded with gray fogs, she said with assertive low voice.

Her attentive audience nodded as she was talking about the horror but they were harboring skepticism about the validity of her story. Her distortions, if any, could not have been deliberate. She probably might have made the tragic footage she had happened to watch, in later years, on the local television her own hands-on experience. My elder cousin Hyoseo also supported the theory by saying that his 'small mother', or his aunt might not be able to get to the place because the Japanese police had kept the people contiguous to Nagasaki City from approaching.



8
White Rice under the Layer of Barley, 1949


It was a terrific day, on a spring day, 1949, on which stick matches took the place of flints which had been used to start fire. My father bought seongnyang, or stick matches from the bazaar which used to be open at Kilan, Andong-kun. "This is it," Dad produced a small match case from which he picked out one match and started fire with it. It smelled of sulfur, which was very good. A fragrance of civilization. The boys and girls then had been chasing the exhaust fumes which had spewed from the tails of the ancient trucks, shouting with joy.

A crescent moon was going over the back hill, when Dad was heating the cattle feed with wood fire coughing in the crisp early morning air. The roosters were crowing the dawn, Grandma coming out of the anbang to empty the yogang, or the urine pot. The only mutt was whining as if he was dreaming, the only cow blowing her nose while still sleeping. The spears, which were placed on the attic of the barn, were quiet yet terrifying.

Dad was a general to me. He was almost six feet tall, as strong as and as silent as a rock, He was Herculean. He climbed and ran the steep hills with ease. He cut and carried big fire woods like nothing. My Grandma used to make a special food for my Dad once or twice a year, put it in a big urn and preserved it for later consumption, only for himself. I knew much later that it had been the dog meat brewed with liquor of high alcoholic content.

Dad was a major life provider for the seven of us family members--great grand mother, grandmother, Mom, Dad, me and my two brothers. He tilled the fields, plowed them with a cow, gathered a variety of herbs and mushrooms, collected fire woods, sold and bought farming produce. Just like he had crawled with hands and feet in the dark pit of a Nagasaki coal mine, he was hitting the fields and hills with his best regards focused on the family.

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They were all worried a lot about me. I was a loner, with no friends to talk to and to play with. My grandma, as the matriarch of the family, might have thought it her obligation to exert her utmost to "educate" her grandson Dano who had been cast into a rugged valley. A prime mastermind used to be Boolim's mother-in-law and Dano's Naggingma who had been so nicknamed after her constant nagging. So Grandma and her son had made it a rule to send me Dano to Danuishill, their clan village, on every available opportunity with a view to training and enlightening me, letting me have a wide range of experiences about manners and customs of the clan.

I was a lone pedestrian traveler just like my Dad had been. The entire route from Sun Valley to Danuishill was eight more kilometers. He had no road companion for the entire journey. The mountain trail of the initial two kilometers was a creek road which had been resultingly serpentine, rocky and thorny. The road, on which the creek used to run most of the season, was pocked with rocks. Thorny bushes stood just human height long. Dangers rarely lurked that snakes attacked the traveler from the bushes. But he could hear the reptiles hiss among the bushes. He did not have a close encounter with mountain boar hogs. He could, however, see them rush up from down the creek more than once, hiding himself behind a huge pine, which was really frightful.

Words of invitations from a clan family were most of the time a lip service just like most facades used to be deceptive. The young Dano, ages 7, of course hadn't known that at that time. Hardly had he arrived at the village of the Park clan the remote "relatives" five or more times removed came to him and "invited" him to lodge at night at their home or to dine with them the next morning. There used to be many a time that he was ashamed to be there and rebuking himself for appearing there at all.

Formal coughs had been given by him, of course but the intervals between warning and opening the door must have been too short. He had more often than not run into the relatives in trouble, who had been hiding, getting some items hastily back and wearing awkward expressions on their faces. He had not known at that time but he knew later what that had been after all. They had been eating some delicacies.

I had a good supper meal at Sol Halbae's, the previous evening. I had a good night's sleep there, specifically at the halbae's (grandfather's) sarangbang, or guest room. The room was spacious enough to lodge tens of male guests at one time. I was honored to have the night‘s rest beside the halbae who had been the patriarch of the clan. Since I got the next morning's breakfast appointment "booked", I went to Daechu Ajimae, or Aunt Jujube. I was guided to the sarangbang of the house on which I found the room floored with clay and of which I also found the ceiling so low that my height almost reached it.

The room reeked of clay and dust. While a modest breakfast meal, which was served on a small portable wooden table separated from the ajae's (the uncle's), was in progress, a very perplexing scene unfolded before me. A toddler son of theirs began to defecate and the ajime called in a mutt who was playing on the front garden. Then he rushed into the room to relish the shit droppings. After he was done with the feast with smacking lips, he attacked at the butt of the child who burst out crying.

Dano thanked them for the nice treat and headed for the West, which had been named after the location of the residence, in which a distant brother five times removed, who had been reputed to hold lofty moral standards, had been living. Dano ruminated the live scene which had been disclosed before his eyes a few minutes ago. The mongrel, who had been attacking at the asshole of the child, did not look disgusting at all, which had been a usual canine-feeding practice at the time.

Guest Dano naturally did not throw up. What actually irked him then was the white rice on the ajae's spoon he had spotted in a flash of a second and the confused and awkward expressions on his face. The crux of the matter was that the granary meal on Dano's bowl mostly contained husked and steamed barley with a meager mix of steamed rice among them whereas the ajae's meal bowl contained complete rice beneath a thin layer of the crude grain meal.

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Kids, who were older than me Dano, were gathered in front of the wooden portal of the West. What a view! They did not completely understand what it meant by the scene. But Dano of 7, who had been sent by his parents, grandma and great-grandma to be trained to learn from the great places of the clan, did know the meaning of the scene of the moment. Just like he had known the meaning of the whiteness on the uncle's spoon. He could not explain in concrete words to the people around about the reifications of the scene, of course, but he intuited the context of it. Which was that the woman proprietor of the mansion was sending a woman serf away with comforting words, who was parting with her generous master. A poignant vestige in a landed gentry of a ruined country.