A Hundred-Year Vow
June 1, 1958. Gyodong Elementary School.
Children were pressed tight against the first-floor classroom windows, come to watch a modern wedding and unable to get into the hall — neighborhood children, and the bus conductresses with them. The corridor outside was no less crowded: local residents and wedding guests jammed shoulder to shoulder for a glimpse of the ceremony.
Hansu, already inside, waited for the bride with a tense face. When Dae-ik, presiding as master of ceremonies, announced the bride's entrance, Yeongsu's homeroom teacher struck up the pump organ.
Tan-tan-ta-dan. Tan-tan-ta-dan.
Keeping time with the teacher's accompaniment, Kijo took Hyun-kyung's hand and began to walk, slowly, and the guests broke into applause. He went on slowly, slowly beside her, and when they reached the front he placed her hand in Hansu's.
"Look after Hyun-kyung."
"We will, sir. We'll live well."
Kijo and Hansu bowed to each other. He turned her over, turned back, and started for his seat, and for no reason he could name the bridge of his nose stung.
When the principal of Gyodong Elementary School had finished his address as officiant, a chorus followed — the night-school students Hyun-kyung had taught. They sang a hymn, and not because Hansu or Hyun-kyung were Christians. Choosing a congratulatory song, the students had simply reached for something that sounded solemn and sacred, and so it had fallen out. The hymn suited a wedding.
When the song ended, Hansu and Hyun-kyung came forward and bowed to the couples standing in for both families: Kijo and Sunrye, and Seo-gwang and his wife.
Kijo looked at Hansu in his suit and Hyun-kyung in her hanbok and veil, so lovely, and he so proud of them, that his eyes stung all over again.
Amid the guests' congratulations the bride and groom processed toward the entrance, then came back to the officiant's platform to be photographed. The photographer worked with a magnesium flash tray; when the powder went off with a bang, Hansu flinched and squeezed his eyes shut. Seeing it, Kijo told the man to take the picture again.
When the time came to photograph the families, the people of Cheongsan and the people of Eundae-ri gathered close and became a family for Hyun-kyung and Hansu.
The ceremony over, bride and groom made the rounds of the reception laid out on the schoolyard, greeting the guests. As Kijo had expected, more than a thousand guests and neighbors had turned the yard into a roaring crush.
He watched it all the way through, then took out his notebook and a pen.
Wedding-hall business — groom's tailcoat and bride's gown for rent; photographs taken cheap; the reception handled for the couple; a sedan for hire for the honeymoon. Three or four packages, so a family can choose according to its means.
The difficulties of seeing Hansu and Hyun-kyung married had turned themselves into a business idea. Finding a venue had been hard, and finding an officiant; calling in a photographer had cost an absurd amount of money. The man had demanded the price of a full sack of rice. Cameras were scarce in those days, and he had the nerve to charge whatever he pleased.
It was Hansu and Hyun-kyung's wedding, and Kijo had wanted to leave the two of them a memory, so in the end he had called the photographer anyway — but the cost of the pictures was excessive. More than a month's wages for an ordinary man. Because he knew what film and developing actually ran to, the gouging struck him all the harder.
Preparing the reception had been no easier. Had the bus conductresses and the women workers from Cheongsan Brick not lent their hands, the reception itself might well have been impossible. Hansu was an orphan, and Hyun-kyung's only blood kin was a younger sibling; without the help of the Cheongsan household, a modern wedding would have been beyond them. No one even knew how such a ceremony was meant to proceed. Kijo had stepped in, written out the order of it, explained it to the bride and groom, and given the same written order to the helpers and to Dae-ik, the master of ceremonies.
A modern wedding in the 1950s was something people longed for, and yet they were in the dark about the procedure, and the cost ran high. If he packaged the whole course of it and offered a reasonable price, Kijo judged, the chances of making a commodity of the thing were good.
Even looking ahead through what he remembered, wedding halls stayed booked solid clear through the 1990s, and on weekends they teemed. The great ones ran five or six stories, two ceremony rooms or more to a floor, marrying off brides and grooms the way a factory stamped out goods. As he recalled it, the wedding-hall business had held up well enough until roughly the early 2000s. Forty years, then, in which he could run the thing to his heart's content.
He was turning over the thought of raising Cheongsan Wedding Halls in Seoul and the major provincial cities when Seo-gwang came up to him.
"In-law, shouldn't we be getting home first?"
Seo-gwang called him in-law, half in jest and half in earnest. There was a second wedding still to be held, at the house in Jongno.
"Let's go."
Kijo's family and Seo-gwang's set off for home.
When Hansu and Hyun-kyung, worn out from greeting the guests, came into the house, a traditional wedding was held once more in the courtyard. Hansu had changed into a hanbok and set a groom's samo on his head; Hyun-kyung wore a jokduri coronet, the red bridal dots of yeonji-gonji stamped on her brow and cheeks. In that dress they went through the rites in the old way.
Sunrye, watching beside Kijo, seemed newly stirred, and she asked,
"Dear, do you remember when we were married?"
"Of course I do."
She took his hand and rested her head against his shoulder.
When the two of them had married at his aunt's house in Byeokje, there had truly been nothing. A straw mat spread in the yard, a bowl of cold water set on a low table, and a mutual bow — that was the whole of it. It was the sort of wedding people who had nothing commonly held in those days.
Even so, the villagers had ringed the aunt's house to watch, saying a new bride and a new groom were being born into the world. Neither of them had anything to possess or anything to put forward, and all through the ceremony the guests' words came to this:
"The groom's a handsome one."
"Sunrye's especially pretty today."
"Those two don't look like they'll go hungry anywhere they land. Good faces on them."
"Have plenty of children, Sunrye. You and the groom are both so fair — the children will be pretty too."
Mostly they appraised the couple's looks and laughed together, and offered the kindly wish that the two would manage to eat somehow, so they shouldn't worry — only have many children, and raise them well.
Having come through both a modern wedding and the old rite, Hansu and Hyun-kyung looked exhausted.
Just as the two of them began to let the tension go, thinking it must be finished at last, the young managers of Cheongsan closed in around Hansu. In an instant they had bound his legs and strung him up from the tree in the yard. They threatened the bride: if she would not sing, they would thrash the soles of the groom's feet. Perhaps because they had failed, the day before, to get their price for delivering the wedding chest, a mean heat was up in them.
Hyun-kyung looked pitifully toward Ma-ryang, a glance that begged rescue, but Ma-ryang turned quietly aside. The young managers had pleaded with him not to interfere this time, and he had agreed.
Wang-cheol rolled his sleeves and whirled a laundry paddle through the air, limbering it.
"The groom's got to take it good and hard on the soles of his feet! That's what sends the strength surging up at night — and that's how a man gets a son!"
With that he yanked the socks from Hansu's feet, spat once into each palm, and brought the water-soaked paddle down across the sole.
Smack!
A thick, meaty report rang out over the yard.
"Ah! That actually hurts!"
Hansu shouted, his face twisted, but the people of Cheongsan took it for a rite of passage a man was simply meant to endure, and they all laughed.
When Wang-cheol had landed five blows and finished the warm-up, Tae-sik stepped forward. Tae-sik knew how to hit a man. Careful that Hansu should take no real harm, he laid into the soles with great resounding smacks, and Hansu writhed and screamed.
Watching Hyun-kyung fret and hover, Hyun-su bellowed at her.
"Where's the bride got to? The groom's about to die! You want to save him, then sing! Sing!"
At Hyun-su's demand for a song, Hyun-kyung sang through her tears. She had served in the women's army, and in her fluster she broke into a military song familiar to her ears from the war. The groom's friends jeered.
"Sister-in-law! Sing a joyless song like that and Brother Hansu only suffers worse!"
Dae-ik was the one shouting. The groom's friends called on Hyun-kyung for Hong Kong Girl. When she began it, voice thick with tears, Soon-young could not bear to watch her struggle alone and stepped in to sing along.
The stars murmur together~
Hong Kong's streets at night~
Everyone clapped in time and listened to the two of them.
Only after Hyun-kyung had sung three songs was Hansu let down at last, and she sobbed as she set his swollen feet to soak in a basin of cold water.
The revels ran on late into the night and ended when bride and groom withdrew to the bridal room.
Kijo had forbidden any peeping on Hansu and Hyun-kyung's wedding night, and so none took place.
The next morning.
Hansu and Hyun-kyung left on their honeymoon for the hot springs at Onyang. Kijo and Sunrye saw them off and came home.
Worn out by a wedding that had filled the whole day before, they ate no breakfast and lay straight down to court sleep again. Rising late, the two of them cooked for the children, fed them, and so began the day.
Kijo was getting ready to leave for work when someone pounded on the gate of the house and called out.
"Ma'am? Are you home?"
No one was expected at that hour. Sunrye went out into the yard with a puzzled face, opened the gate, and found a familiar woman standing there with a bundle in her arms.
"Hello, ma'am. My name is Park Young-ok. We met before, up on Indogyo Bridge — didn't we?"
"Oh! Yes, hello. Please, ma'am, come in."
Sunrye remembered that the woman was the wife of someone connected with Kijo, and brought her into the house. Going a step ahead, she spoke to Kijo, who had just finished dressing for work.
"Dear, Major Kim Jong-pil's wife is here."
At that, Kijo started and came out onto the veranda. Park Young-ok, small and thin of frame, held a single large bundle.
"Good day. What brings you here?"
He greeted her as he stepped down. Park Young-ok, who seemed not to have known he would be home, spoke with a flush of embarrassment.
"Yes — I had some clothes I used to dress our daughter in, when she was little, and I thought they might be welcome for your girl."
"I see. Thank you, truly."
Kijo and Sunrye were sincerely grateful. It was not that they could not afford new clothes for their daughter Yeongeun; but in the 1950s, when clothing came dear, handing garments down among kin was no shame. To give was to look after someone. To receive even worn clothes was a pleasure.
Sunrye thanked her again and again for carrying a bundle of clothes all the way from Noryangjin, across the bridge, to Jongno. Then she went to the kitchen and brought out a glass of cool water.
Park Young-ok drank what was offered and said, smiling,
"I didn't even know you were at home, sir. I think I've chosen a poor time."
On an ordinary Monday he would already have left for work. Kijo answered at once.
"We had a family wedding yesterday, so I'm late going in. I'll be on my way shortly — please, talk at your ease with my wife."
He rose. Sunrye and Park Young-ok rose with him, and Sunrye saw him as far as the gate. Outside it, he said to her,
"She's the wife of a man who serves in Army Intelligence. She's a year older than I am, so please address her as elder sister."
Kim Jong-pil, born in 1926, was four years older than Kijo, and Park Young-ok had been born in 1929.
"Yes. I'll look after her properly. Don't worry — go on to work."
Hearing that the woman was the wife of a man in Army Intelligence, Sunrye tensed, just a little. But she soon smiled and sent him off to his work.
She closed the gate, came back in, and started at the sight of the bundle Park Young-ok had spread open. There lay the clothes Ye-ri, Kim Jong-pil's daughter, had worn.
"Oh my, the clothes are so pretty. Ma'am."
Sunrye smiled wide, delighted in earnest.
Watching her, Park Young-ok felt a purity there that she liked. Sunrye had made a good impression from their first meeting on Indogyo Bridge, but she had worried whether the other woman would truly be pleased to receive clothes that had been put on her own child. Still, the welcome Sunrye had given when Young-ok's husband brought Kijo to their house had plainly been a great help to him, and it was out of a wish to repay that kindness that she had wrapped the clothes and come.
When Sunrye brought Yeongeun over and happily tried on whatever fit, Park Young-ok breathed easier. The two of them spent a while dressing the child, then sat over tea and talked.
Curious what help her husband had received, Park Young-ok asked,
"I was told your husband helped mine. Do you happen to know anything of it?"
Sunrye shook her head.
"I heard it was my husband who received a great deal of help from yours..."
"Oh my. Did you?"
The two women burst out laughing at the same instant.
"Our husbands don't seem to tell us the particulars. Mine's just the same."
"No. He never says a word about what goes on outside."
They laughed again, at the likeness of their husbands' ways. When the laughter subsided, Sunrye said to Young-ok,
"And please — speak easily with me. I was born in the year of the sheep."
"I was born in the year of the snake, it's true, but..."
"My husband was born in the year of the horse. Yours is older than that, isn't he?"
"Yes. The year of the tiger."
Between them, the order of seniority settled of its own accord.
Park Young-ok took a liking to Sunrye, with her open face and gentle look. She felt more at ease with her than with Yuk Young-soo, her uncle's wife.
In truth, she might have taken Ye-ri's clothes to Yuk Young-soo. Yuk Young-soo's second daughter, Geun-ryoung, had been born in '54. But in that house the clothes Geun-hye had worn could already be handed down — and besides, Park Young-ok was still uncomfortable with her new aunt, Yuk Young-soo. It was partly that she got on well, back in the countryside, with Kim Ho-nam, Uncle Park Chung-hee's first wife, and with her daughter Park Jae-ok.
Young-ok had grown up watching that aunt — all but abandoned by her husband, raising a daughter alone in the country while she waited on her mother-in-law. When Kim Ho-nam was divorced and sent from the house, Young-ok had wept bitterly, so pitiful did her aunt seem.
The new aunt, Yuk Young-soo, came of a wealthy family and was a woman of refinement. Yet for all she looked warm, there was a cold corner in her that Young-ok found hard to name. That the new aunt was only four years her elder was part of it; even so, she could not seem to draw close.
She had been thinking of Yuk Young-soo only a moment when she saw Sunrye bustle into the kitchen, busily gathering something.
"What are you doing?"
"I've received the clothes, so I ought to send something back with you, elder sister."
Sunrye set aside two strings of dried yellow corvina, the kind Kijo was fond of. Forty fish, bound together on straw cord — she wrapped them in paper and held them out to Young-ok.
"Oh, no. How can you give me something so precious?"
"Neither of us can hide things from our husbands, can we?"
"What do you mean, we can't hide things?"
Young-ok was puzzled.
"My husband will know you brought the clothes. If I send you home with nothing, he'll be hurt."
Young-ok nodded. Even had she come while Kijo was out, he would have seen the new clothes in the end and known she was the one who had given them.
"I understand. My husband won't know I gave Ye-ri's clothes to you, but I'll show him the dried fish and tell him. That we exchanged."
"Thank you, elder sister."
Sunrye was grateful.
In Sunrye there was a simple, unpretending warmth — a warmth she had never felt from Yuk Young-soo. Her husband's friends were almost all soldiers, and with their wives it was hard to speak at ease. Sunrye was not like Yuk Young-soo, come of such tremendous wealth, and not like those women who measured every word and watched every face because their husbands wore the uniform.
A kinship stirred in her. Beyond any doubt, Sunrye looked like a woman who had come from a poor country house, just as she had.
In Seoul, Park Young-ok felt she had found someone on whom to set her heart.