Farewell Party 5

The lost sea of Gu Gang

 

1.

Summer evening, the tide rises in height to the garden bottom of the house. A boy climbs the roof and sits on it with his back toward the sea, looking around. There comes into view a village zone familiar to him because it is where he outs every day to play. In a moment, the area begins to have a diamond-shaped look in his eyes. He looks out toward it, and the roof starts a starting point. On the right, there appears his grandfather's persimmon tree as a point, and on the left, two high trees by the village well at the end of it as another corner point. And on the far front side, there stands the bell tower of the Church of Galilee located at the foot of Yong Ma mountain as the third point. In time he turns his body, with his eyesight far toward the little sea, which looks like a puppy, biting a pointed end of the lozenge-shaped sea. And before his eyes, there turn up the other four sides of it one by one.

 The image above mentioned is of the village roughly sketched in Immun's mind. Once, he stood in front of the granite-walled church, looking smaller and dilapidated. The church with its bell tower was as it used to be in the old days. However, the area surrounding the building is entirely different from what it was in the past. Rice fields, fields, and vacant spaces for threshing were all gone, and houses and other structures stand there.

The building located at the base of the Yong Ma Hill was prominent in the village, and many boys living there loved to go to the Church on Sunday when Immun lived in 60 years or so. Every Sunday at dawn, it awakened boys from sleep by tolling the bell. On the evening of December 24 every year, it announced to the village people that it was the very X-mas Eve by tolling the bell. On the X-mas day at dawn, The boy, Immun, awoke from his sleep by the sound of a chant group singing carols near his house, and soon he got up to open the front gate wide up to invite them. At dawn, the boy was deeply captivated by the melodies coming from outside.

In his boyhood, he used to go to church, and after attending service, he would play with the 3rd son of the minister much older than he. Once in the evening, the boy left the house after eating dinner with a short pencil piece. It was to meet the 3rd son of the minister where he had had an appointment with him. As a Sunday teacher, he often said to the children in a bible class that 'because the road to heaven and the road to salvation is getting narrower.' But he was a young man who tried harder on physical training than for the salvation of the soul. He liked to check the changes in his shoulder muscles from time to time while exercising with parallel bars laid on the open ground in front of the building. And also, he wanted his little followers to confirm how nice his body looked. Because the little boys' judgments decided whether he felt good or bad on that day, they always made him happy by judging that his body muscles got much better than before.                                                            ( p.15)

He believed that physical beauty depended on a striking contrast between the shoulders' width and the waist's circumference. He took off his upper body in front of the kids, put a lot of energy into the muscles, and made the kids draw lines concerning his upper back on paper with the pencil, expecting his physical beauty to look much better. They drew pictures looking like a triangle, not a rectangle or trapezoid. They responded like that several times to his request. They knew well that the closer it was to the triangle form, the happier he was. In a sense, he would rather be a boaster who was more concerned with the kids' judgment on his body than their faithful Sunday teacher. In anticipation of the boys' better decision, he sometimes gave them small gifts, such as baked sweet potatoes or boiled potatoes, before taking off his upper clothes.

Another person lived in an isolated hut near the vacant place where the boys used to play. He was called 'uncle Myung Gu' by the boy Immun and 'boss' by the village's young guys of good-for-nothing who frequented the cottage. His eyesight was so weak that he was then almost blind. 

 On a Saturday evening, the boy slipped into the hut, with several cigarette pieces and others he liked kept in his pocket. The shed was a secret hideout where local gangsters gathered to play 'What,' a traditional Korean card game. The cigarettes were ready as the price for the exciting stories told by the owner of the hut. 

The boy entered the somber ondol room and sat by the boss's side on the bottom, putting his two hands under the warmer blanket. As his eyes get used to the situation, the boy silently passed what he brought to the boss. The boss liked them. He turned his head once from the game he played toward the boy's face. Soon after, he played two roles, one as a gambler and the other as a storyteller. He began to tell the boy about the result of the big fight two rivals had on the previous day. It happened on the threshing ground of the village. He informed him of it, with his comments at the end of the description in detail of the fighting. In another case, he told an episode on the two young guys. They flew like a leopard into the backside of a running U.S. military truck on a snowy day. They threw out a U.S. army C-ration box on it and jumped out of it, disappearing in a moment.

After a while, The aged Inmun turned his mind's eye toward the seashore in the remote past. Soon he sees the sea at the ebbing tide in front of the village. His eyes in his mind see several boys catching out crawfish called 'sok' from holes on the muddy surface. Of course, there is him as a boy among them. The boy is absorbed in catching them among his friends with his rump laid on the wet surface. The crawfish catching was so exciting that the boys didn't even know the time when the sea began flowing in. The crawfish in the hole was very agile. So the boys couldn't easily succeed in catching the crawfish. To catch them out, they should concentrate their eyes on the moving of it, with the two strong legs and head climbing up and down to the hole's exit.

(P.16)

At that moment, most boys completely forgot the situation that the sea already began to flow in. so they often hurried to get out of the water not to be trapped inside.

 

 

2.

When it comes to Gu Gang, where Immun lived as a boy about 60 years ago, it reminds him of its tiny sea, which is no more after the government urbanized the seashore area into the factory zone. The sea was where the boy used to swim and play. He would often think that it suddenly disappeared, lured by an invisible hand toward the remote ocean.  

In the old days, The tiny sea fitted the boy's temperament. His eyes got accustomed to the dazzling silvery wavelets in the sunny morning, his ears to the sound which the wings of innumerable winter migratory birds made in the seacoast at dawn. And, in Immun's retrospection, his nose got more accustomed to the sea smell itself carried by the wind at the flowing-in tide in the autumn afternoon. At dawn, the wave sound of the sea awakened him, driving him out of the room. He stood outside in the house yard facing the sea, with sleepy eyes half-closed. The sea always came afresh every dawn, and he always felt his heart fluttering anew every time. 

The sea had different colors, sounds, and smells from season to season. Among them, the boy liked the silver wavelets on the surface of the fan-shaped seashore with plenty of sunlight in the late winter morning.

 When we say the sea in general, most of us think of a giant ocean where high waves are roughly rocking up and down. The sound of the waves you hear is like the reverberation of magnificent thunder. To the wandering travelers onboard the boats, the far-off rough sea seems to be a living and incomprehensible existence that seduces their minds. In the case of sailors, in particular, it is said, they are inclined to believe that the sea is an infinitely vast and wild creature that evokes the illusion that "his body is sinking to the deep bottom" during the voyage. Sailors are inclined to believe that the sea is a terrifying and mysterious being, which arouses sailors in their comfortable home to longing for a distant, alien nation beyond the horizon. Regarding a boundless sea, you had better imagine how such an ocean is, through 'Sea Fever', below, by John Maysfield.

 'Below'

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;

And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

.......

.........

In contrast to this, the boy's little fan-shaped sea was always with him. In the summer evening,                                                                  ( p.17 )

when he was sitting on the floor in his house in the late summer evening, a sea breeze whispers to his ears. Several neighborhood boys swimming with only their faces and heads on the water surface caught his eyes. Under the water's surface where the boys were floating, blue crabs must have guarded the boys above them with their eyes sticking out. On the side of the long breakwater far away, silver-colored sauries and perches in shoals would have been bouncing up in the flowing-in tide. 

The small sea resembled his badly brought-up dog named Badugi, lying and dozing off on the front yard of his house. Or it resembled the slow dance of a seagull turning leisurely in the air. On a windy day, the sea at the low tide stared at the far seaway on the right leading to the big sea far away while listening to the sound of the long reed forest that stretched along the left seashore. The tiny sea did not stay in a place for a moment. 

Around noon, when the boy came back home after playing out with kids, the sea was approaching under the floor of the house. Sometimes The sea was up to the bank's height against the water at the end of the house yard, and sometimes it was ready to creep out toward the flocks of ducks in the distance when the boy woke up at dawn. The little sea was the boy's other playmate. 

The aged man sometimes sees the illusion of the sea. 0n walking or writing, the sea suddenly appears before his eyes and flickers. The illusion has emerged as silvery twinkles in his life for a long time, opening the way to the future. He has imagined that the sea resembled the kid's Baduki crouching down and sleeping next to him, who would sit on the house yard looking forward to the silvery waves on it. The aged man reflects on the lost little sea, the boy's other Badugi. 

 

 

3

The little sea was not where it used to be in his boyhood. However, he does not accept it, sticking to his daydream that it must play in the big sea not so far from him. It must be in deep relation to his psychological disturbance, which resulted from his peculiar experience of having lived as a hermit in the isolated forest in his 20s.

At that time, he spent four years or so under medical treatment in a sanatorium. The aged often felt like he had been to an exotic wonderland, which was not likely to be in the world. Until now, he recollects vividly that in the evenings before going to bed, the young man in his 20s looked out at the cherry flowers in full blossom, and the next day, he was saddened when he awoke to find the flowers all gone. He said that, strangely enough, the four years he spent there were like a moment in an odd dream. And also, he said, that he experienced it for four consecutive nights. By his recollection, there was another anecdote: whenever he looked back upon it, he was reminded of Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving. In the storybook, Rip climbed the Catskill Mountains and took a nap, but in reality, he slept for forty years! (p.18)

The sanatorium he spent in his youth hid at the thick-forested hillside, and the winter was relatively cold. Most patients suffering from the irregular fluctuation of their body temperatures were sensitive to the weather and afraid of catching a cold, as it possibly caused a horrible cough. However, the atmosphere in the long corridor of the old structure made of wood began to liven up after sunset. The electric lights on the wooden corridor's ceiling came on, assuming a dramatic look against the dark forest outside. Outside it was snowy or cloudy. 

The aged man, who had lived through such a psychological phenomenon of disturbance, went on a long journey when he wanted to see the small sea. He initially toured various domestic coastal cities. Then, he traveled to cities on the eastern and western coasts of the United States. Furthermore, he traveled from London to Paris and Berlin, including Andalusia in Spain. Particularly, when he stayed in Portland, he met a flamenco dancer and a girl named Esmeralda learning dance from the dancer's studio.

Meanwhile, he also became an avid flamenco lover. He loved the song much more than the other two elements, both the dance and guitar rhythm. In this relation, a phrase below impressed him profoundly:

"At the opening of the cante, in the ayeo, the voice is pure expression. Its sound is like the wind through the trees. The copla has not yet begun; the beginning of it has no words, it has just sounds, and these sounds tell us nothing......" -Lois Rosales-

By the way, a surprising thing happened to that little sea alive in his mind. It is that the sea, which had disappeared long ago from the place where it used to be, surprisingly came up as an embodied figure, a dancing dancer. It means that the tiny little sea returned to him, he said, as a dancing figure to Masan where the sea had lived in the old times. Knowing better what he meant by it, it was true. It was about the flamenco performance held by him for the first time in the downtown of Masan. The flamenco dance was unfamiliar to the city. It happened a dozen years ago. At that time, a dancer with a guitarist flew to Masan for the flamenco performances, according to his request. It was the first time the flamenco performance was held at Masan. 

And another case, some different from the former, followed it two years later. The second case was that the aged man met another flamenco dancer named Esmeralda in Tokyo. He flew there to meet her.

She was familiar to him because he had seen her several times as a small girl at the former dancer's flamenco studio in Portland long before. She informed him by email that she was to stay two weeks in Tokyo with her flamenco members in Shinjuku district, Tokyo, at the cafe named 'Flamenco.' The story about her is to follow this story of Gu Gang in the very next chapter.  

Then this psychological symptom he has suffered, he retrospects, resulted in a kind of blessing to him, for it let him have a feeling of happiness rather than an inconvenience.

                                                                                                         (p.19)