Welcome to Ganghwado (2)
Yi Won-beom had taken Taesu in for a reason more important than simple human decency.
It was the wild boar the two of them had dragged in on a rope—too large to be hoisted onto a carrying frame.
The next morning, a modest feast was held in the house of this exiled criminal.
Yi Won-beom, who had been grunting and straining as he held down the boar’s stiffened leg, finally wiped his forehead after Taesu chopped through it with his axe.
“You truly are a master with an axe. I’d never even call myself a woodcutter now. Come to think of it, that axe handle and blade aren’t ordinary either, are they? Is it some kind of precious blade?”
Taesu, who didn’t know why butchers and doctors were considered professions demanding special training, assumed Yi Won-beom was making a mountain out of a molehill. The bastard must be after an extra piece of candy.
The two amateurs scraped meat from the bones and gutted the entrails for cleaning.
Their awkward, ridiculous, almost heartwarming atmosphere was like one of those variety shows where celebrities cook in a country hut.
Only there was no unseen staff member ready to hand them anything they needed without fuss.
“Don’t you have scallions or garlic?”
“You say you’re a monk, and yet you still think of killing, eating meat, and now scallions and garlic?”
“You took off with my candy yesterday and came back at dawn. If word gets around in this tiny village….”
“There’s some kimchi pickled out back.”
Taesu, who went trotting over to check just in case, flew into a rage like an Italian whose pasta had been broken in half.
“That’s not kimchi, that’s just cabbage!”
To be fair, Joseon kimchi in this era was advanced enough that even shops selling to the envoys to Qing had appeared in China. The problem was that this household’s kimchi simply wasn’t very advanced.
Taesu immediately began looking for other options.
“Do you have ssamjang?”
“What’s that?”
“Cooking oil?”
“And what’s that supposed to be?”
“You must at least have soy sauce, right?”
“I see now the fellow who came in isn’t a monk at all, but a mother-in-law.”
Yi Won-beom grumbled relentlessly.
But his body was honest enough to go next door and borrow soy sauce. Refusing to make the same threat twice—now that was a true royal talent, different from the rest in every way.
Yi Won-beom’s kingly qualities didn’t stop there.
Before Taesu, who was trying to make something like bulgogi by any means possible, Yi Won-beom displayed the virtue most demanded of a Joseon king: frugality.
“All right. From here to here, we’ll need to trade for grain…. Take these off and dry them…. And put only this much in to boil.”
Not long after, Taesu stared at the finished meal in misery.
The soup was less a meat stew than hot water slicked with grease—vegetables were scarcely present at all. The strange mixed kimchi was impossible to identify by ingredient, and a staggering heap of millet rice stood ready to welcome the modern man.
* * *
It was so damn unfair.
When you were getting hit with a bomb of carbohydrates and sodium, wasn’t the least they could do make it taste good, setting health aside?
But this—this was beyond even me, a guy who’d once survived on discarded triangle kimbap.
The rice, which made up the largest portion, was especially absurd.
It couldn’t even hold together on the spoon; it just crumbled away in a shower. Blow on it, and it really would fly off.
I’d heard that some Joseon king once paid his soldiers in sand, and now I understood how that was possible. Sand and rice were basically the same thing.
I missed rice. I wanted white rice so pure it looked like snow, the kind that sent your blood sugar into a spike. If I ever made it back to Korea, I would never forgive those health YouTubers who treated sacred white rice like poison.
There was at least some shrimp paste—technically another creature’s flesh—so I reached out with my chopsticks, only to think that this village’s shrimps must be made entirely of salt.
Should I just sell the golden axe and buy rice and beef?
Just as that thought crossed my mind, Yi Uk, who hadn’t been visible at all while we were butchering the meat, finally spoke.
“With a guest of honor here, it’s been a long time since we’ve had meat like this.”
Wasn’t that just a placebo effect from seeing a boar head sitting right there? I wanted to feed it to him with a black strip tied over his eyes.
Sure enough, there had been a reason for that sudden praise.
“So here’s what I was thinking. After you finish your meal, would you and Won-beom go out to the market beyond the south gate? It’s market day, after all. Usually it’s just bundles of firewood, but today we’ve got quite a bit of meat too.”
What did he mean, “so here’s what I was thinking”? The connection made no sense at all.
Still, I did need this guesthouse for the time being.
It wasn’t as if I couldn’t serve as a porter while I was under someone else’s roof. I nodded.
* * *
Modern Korea may be one of the world’s leading land-reclamation nations, but the people of Goryeo and Joseon understood the value of reclamation too.
The coastline was complicated, and all three countries liked rice just the same.
The trivial difference that Goryeo and Joseon didn’t have trucks or excavators was no reason to give up reclamation.
What, rice could just be replicated—so what if there were no heavy machines? They might not have had equipment, but they did have time in abundance and lives that were cheap.
Over hundreds of years, the two dynasties reshaped Ganghwado’s map itself. Seokmodo, for example, had once been several islands before King Sukjong welded them into one.
As a result, by the time of the reigns of Yeongjo and Jeongjo, Ganghwado had lost much of the geographic defensive strength that once made it the monarch’s traditional panic room.
When the Qing invaded again, even the Joseon court—which had long sworn it would not repeat Injo’s failure this time but instead perfectly imitate Seonjo—decided that fleeing to Ganghwado was no longer an option.
“Ganghwado is already full of rice fields and can be landed on easily, so it can hardly be called a rough strategic point.”
Only Germans would be lamenting that sort of thing.
Contrary to what they might think, the purpose of a nation is not war. If anything, it meant Ganghwado had become far more livable than in ancient times.
Sea transport had become easier, farmland had appeared, and the population had grown dramatically.
There was no island in Joseon more prosperous than Ganghwado.
The noisy Ganghwa South Gate Outer Market proved it.
* * *
The Mountain Spirit launched into a local-history lecture of roughly that sort.
[Well, thanks to all those humans who filled in the sea, our earth gods ended up with quite a few more posts, did we not? As for the dethroned Dragon Kings and sea gods, they just snarled that they’d wait and see when those ugly Western bastards came across the water.]
So that was your system? Fine, I suppose. Truly, it hardly mattered. It really didn’t.
Using the Mountain Spirit’s explanation as background music, I looked around.
If the market was a battlefield, then the stench was like artillery shells and bullets.
“Shops” in the most direct, modern sense, along with roadside stalls, lined the street one after another, and not a single one of them looked like it could possibly pass food-safety inspection.
The fish market was clearly a major offender. From the fish being chopped with cheerful, stabbing whacks of a knife, a foul liquid flowed everywhere, seeping into every radish-green, every meat stall nearby. I had no desire at all to learn the identity of the liquid the flies were devouring so greedily.
Still, the Mountain Spirit said with a wistful tone,
[Buying and selling live fish like this is something only Ganghwa can do. Even kings usually have to be content with boiled dried fish.]
…I’d better save the tuna can from my backpack for the greatest moment of my Joseon life. So that was not something to waste recklessly.
[Why are you making such a fuss? The smell from you—hauling that boar meat and the guts too—is far worse.]
Come to think of it, Won-beom also seemed to be moving away from me rather quickly. Hey. Just how clean do you think you are?
But Won-beom wasn’t avoiding me because of the smell.
The place where he suddenly quickened his pace was a shop that might as well have been called a curtain store.
Long bolts of cloth were hung from poles or piled on the stall, and most of them were white.
[That’s a drapery shop—a place that sells cloth. It’s been ages since the market was filled with women who wove cloth every five days…. Let’s see. Tsk, tsk. Their skill is terribly rough. These days they collect rent in money, so the virtue of women’s weaving has declined.]
As the old nagger of a Mountain Spirit said, there were a lot of women on this side of the stalls.
But according to my historical knowledge, didn’t Joseon women come out wearing something like a Middle Eastern veil over their heads?
[You mean a jangot? Women from respectable households won’t be coming to market wearing that, will they? And there’s no reason to wear one while working.]
So that was how it was.
Ah, wait. Now I get it. Won-beom, you little bastard—so that was your target.
There she was. Bong-i, the girl Won-beom was mooning over.
Sure enough, the man soon exposed his lecherous fangs.
He pretended to rummage idly through the cloth while sneaking glances at a girl so small that, to me, she could only look like a child. Bong-i, too, kept stealing shy looks back at him through the cloth whenever their eyes didn’t meet. Well, well.
Knowing what those two had been doing last night, I couldn’t help seeing the whole thing as far more indecent than it appeared.
Could they really get away with that in Joseon? Was this country far more liberal than I’d thought?
Apparently not. The Confucian dragon inside me—no, the Mountain Spirit—howled.
[What a pair. In a little while, they’ll be rutting in broad daylight on the market ground. And what are all the women around them doing, not disciplining those two sternly?]
Have you ever seen a middle-aged woman interfere with romance? Look at them. They know everything and are pretending not to.
I’ll pretend not to know too. That so-called modernization manual or whatever it was probably included free love as well.
I set down the carrying frame too, intending to give Won-beom a pleasant time, help modernize the nation, and, while I was at it, take a short break myself.
Only then did the market’s scenery settle more leisurely into my eyes.
The Gakseori troupe was singing and dancing in front of the fish stalls when they were hit by a splash of filthy water; elsewhere, two drunken merchants were shoving and brawling.
Hmm. It felt like watching a healing YouTube video. The folksy richness of Ganghwa market could be felt through all five senses. Welcome to Ganghwado.
Then, over there, I saw a face that embodied that very same folksy richness.
He looked like Won Gyun from one of those comic-book biographies of Admiral Yi Sun-sin.
The first thing the bastard said after coming over here made me doubt once again that Won-beom was really royalty.
“Aren’t you the third son from that exiled criminal’s house?”
* * *
The intelligence reports sent to Macau by Thomas Choe Yang-eop, a Catholic priest in nineteenth-century Joseon, contain an interesting passage:
“His Majesty the present king (Cheoljong) … on market days worked as the cheapest of laborers, and was beaten almost daily by a master who lacked even a shred of kindness.”
It was a rumor, so its truth is uncertain. But if Father Choe had thought such a thing impossible in Joseon, he wouldn’t have included it.
The people of Joseon held a stern sense of rule of law: even if someone was royal blood, a criminal was still only a criminal.
This is proven by the fact that when Yi Won-beom was suddenly picked as king three years later, the townspeople came swarming in and flattered him by saying divine energy had been spreading through the village since three days earlier and other such nonsense.
Besides, Yi Won-beom was, by the nearest royal line as measured from Yeongjo, a bastard’s bastard’s bastard’s bastard: the illegitimate son of the illegitimate son of the illegitimate son of Grand Prince Jeonggye.
Discrimination between legitimate and illegitimate blood is Joseon’s national identity. The core of Joseon’s state religion, Neo-Confucianism, is distinction. To expect anyone to regard a fourth-generation bastard as royalty is absurd.
So it was not that strange that O Bong-gil, the overseer of Ganggot Ferry guesthouse for pedestrians—a lodging place specializing in accommodations—and the saekjang, the practical manager of government offices, commercial guilds, and markets, behaved as he did.
O Bong-gil approached Taesu and Yi Won-beom, wrinkling his short nose.
“You don’t look hungry at all—did you go off and steal something somewhere? You came today to sell firewood again… no, what’s this?”
As if it were his own, O Bong-gil lifted the cloth covering the load on the carrying frame.
Then he frowned.
“Did you go and butcher an ox on your own? Don’t you know how strict the state law is about the ban on cattle slaughter?”
Taesu didn’t bother hiding his incredulous expression.
It wasn’t that he knew, historically, that the slaughter ban meant nothing in this era. The ox bones laid out like a floor mat at the cattle market he’d seen on the way here had already been enough.
But as Taesu also knew well, laws are made for the people you want to punish.
Yi Won-beom understood that principle too. Snapped out of his romance in an instant, he bowed his head repeatedly.
“Master Saekjang, what are you saying? This isn’t an ox—it’s a pig. We happened to catch a wild boar that was charging people, so we brought it back.”
“You’ve butchered it all into slices and turned it into blood sausage and meat all mixed up—how am I supposed to know whether it’s ox or pig?”
“Come now, Master Saekjang, you do tease too much. How could these stiff, long hairs be ox hair? Even a child could tell the difference.”
That was exactly the point O Bong-gil had been waiting for. He barked in outrage.
“How dare you say I’m no better than a child! Do you have any idea whose favor it is that a traitor’s family like yours can still wander the market every day and sell firewood!”
“Oh, goodness, how could I have meant such a thing? I always keep Master Saekjang’s kindness carved into my bones.”
Having thoroughly beaten Won-beom down, O Bong-gil advanced his real purpose with practiced ease.
“I’ll take this. We’ve got honored guests staying at my place. I was wondering why there wasn’t a single chicken in the cattle market today, and now here’s the answer.”
“Pardon? Th-then the payment….”
“Payment?”
O Bong-gil kicked out his foot.
Yi Won-beom went tumbling. It wasn’t because the blow was especially powerful, but because he knew he ought to collapse.
“You little brat, and after all that you still want to be punished for violating the royal ban? Fine. Here’s the price of the meat. Well? Not enough? I’ll throw in more!”
The payment for the meat, delivered in kicks, rose to a grotesque mark-up. A grinding sound of teeth came from Taesu’s mouth.
In that very moment, Bong-i, who had just come running out from the drapery shop, rushed to support Yi Won-beom.
“How can such outrageous bullying exist in this world?”
“Ohho….”
Taesu’s first impression had been more or less correct. Saekjang O Bong-gil looked from one of them to the other with the same Won Gyun-like eyes.
“Well, this is convenient. Since I’m taking the meat, bring that girl over too. If she’s come all the way to market, her prospects are already obvious. Since the tavern mistress is laid up after being beaten by her good-for-nothing husband, you can pour the drinks instead— oof?”
It wasn’t Yi Won-beom or Bong-i who clamped a hand over O Bong-gil’s mouth.
It was the boar’s liver, wrenched free by Taesu from the carrying frame and stuffed directly into O Bong-gil’s mouth by force.
O Bong-gil could taste Yi Won-beom’s sincerity through his tongue. It was indeed a pig’s liver, not an ox’s.
But there was no time for him to flaunt a gourmet judge’s tongue.
Taesu’s huge fist drove into his face and cut off consciousness altogether.
Author’s Note
1. The character 色 can mean not only “color” but also substance or material reality, as opposed to 空, emptiness. That’s why in modern terms it appears in practical administrative titles and departments, like materials supply or facilities management.
From government offices such as seungjeonseok and jeonseonseok to the manager of the dining hall at Sungkyunkwan, the title saekjang was used for practical overseers; the lower-level managers of merchant guilds and inns, who are the relevant case here, were also called saekjang.
2. O Bong-gil is a real historical person, though his job has been altered slightly here.
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