Porcelain and Cipher 3
Let’s sort this out.
Setting the porcelain aside and looking only at the words: if this were merely a letter exchanged between independence fighters, there would be no need for it to take the form of a novel. But anyone could see at a glance that this was a short story. From It was in the winter of that year. to Everyone was delighted, for they had resolved to drink the pickles and the liquor together.—those seven lines were a fable, a roundabout way of saying things. A metaphor for the independence movement going well. When do people write fiction? When they want to show the whole world what they think.
That was what made it different from a letter. That was why this jar was a “souvenir.” They had wanted to commemorate their pride and dignity without dilution, and to show it, too. …And if they were in a situation where they might die at any moment, then they would have wanted to leave something behind all the more. Separately from that, the desire to “leave something behind” was probably also why they chose porcelain, something durable enough to outlast them. And then the last line: When spring comes, let’s farm in your land. That single line was the finishing touch.
Who was “you”? Their descendants, of course. People like us. But why, then, use the word “you” at all? Even at the cost of breaking the tone of the novel and suddenly turning it into a letter. The power of that word was precisely in its directness. “You” was a second-person pronoun. It only became complete when there were two people involved—the one speaking and the one hearing. It was, by nature, a word meant to be addressed to someone.
When this porcelain jar was buried, no one had been there to read the word “you.” So the writing remained incomplete, trapped inside the time of Japanese colonial rule. But when we discovered this jar and read it, the independence fighters’ writing found its listener, and communication between them and us succeeded. It crossed time. That was as far as I explained before coming to my conclusion.
“The moment we read this, we become the independence fighters’ ‘you,’ and communication succeeds. In the end, the writing beautifully crosses time.”
So then, why did the independence fighters want to cross time?
“This is what I think. They probably expected to die without ever seeing liberation. Judging by the fact that this jar was still buried until now, that’s a pretty likely assumption.”
“!”
“But they must have been curious about Joseon’s future. So through the letter, they’re speaking to us in the future, asking to be included in our peace as well.”
“Ah….”
“I think this independence fighter wanted to enjoy that world with us somehow, even if only like this. A world where their dreams had come true.”
I heard someone swallow.
The room had gone so quiet it was as if someone had splashed cold water over it.
The warm drunken haze that had been rising earlier was long gone. “In that sense, the line ‘When spring comes, let’s farm in your land’ makes perfect sense too. At that time, a peaceful life would have meant one where you could focus only on farming. In the end, I think they wanted to feel, through the letter at least, as though they were farming that land together with their descendants. They were innocence itself, in the best possible way.”
Everyone here was probably imagining the same thing, and so was I: independence fighters hiding in a temple that served as their refuge; the suffocating present and an anxious future; above all, the fact that they could never know when their own lives might end. And yet they would not have let go of hope. If they had, they never would have become independence fighters in the first place. In truth, he must have been a peaceful person by nature.
Or perhaps he had simply been a little young. Otherwise, why would he have wanted to play with people who would live peacefully in some distant future? Why would he have wanted to boast to his descendants that the independence movement was going well?
Compared to the solemn, tragic image we usually attach to independence fighters, he seemed far more human—and that made him all the more poignant. One day, he must have looked at the kiln in the temple and had a brilliant idea: a way to leave behind a letter that would not rot with time. A way for someone, someday, to read that letter and for him himself to cross time through it. That was the sort of method he had come up with.
My impression of him, when I imagined that scene, was… oddly affectionate.
It may have been an impertinent thought, but that was simply how I felt.
“You figured that out… just now?” the professor asked.
“The whole thing seemed strange from the beginning. Mixing a novel with a letter, making a souvenir like this in the first place, and above all, using the word ‘you.’”
“How can a single word… make every piece fit together so perfectly…?”
No one said anything.
They only stared in disbelief at the writing on the jar.
Professor Tak’s lips trembled faintly, and the official from the National Heritage Administration wiped at his dry eyes with a face that had gone red.
The writer, who had been taking notes of my words, had long since stopped moving his hand.
It was in that tear-soaked silence, after a long while, that the door suddenly swung open.
The chief monk came in.
He looked at the bottles of liquor strewn across the floor and let out a dry laugh. “Well, well— I knew this would happen. Tsk, tsk.” He brought in the tea tray he’d carried from outside. “Honestly, the moment people come into a temple, they start throwing a drinking party. I brought tea because I knew this would happen, so clean it up already.”
His tone was gentle, but there was backbone in it. He sounded like this wasn’t his first time seeing something like this. But when we stood there as if nailed to the spot, he narrowed his eyes. “...? Is something wrong?” He had sensed that something unusual was going on. At that moment, Professor Lee exhaled a long breath.
The mist in his eyes, blurred by alcohol, had already regained its original clarity. “Yes. We’ll clear away the liquor right away. Let’s take another look at that jar.”
The moment he said it, everyone started clearing the mess.
The chief monk, on the other hand, looked genuinely baffled by the whole thing. “Oh, take your time, there’s no need to rush….”
In the confusion, I picked up my bag and left the room.
By then, I’d done my part. And besides, I was in a hurry.
I wanted to write my own piece based on the porcelain’s text and my interpretation of it.
─┼
I sat on the small wooden porch in front of the Main Buddha Hall.
It was a little scary having the Buddha statue behind me, but surely Buddha wasn’t about to eat me. The far end of the room on the left side of the courtyard was lit brightly. I could hear people quietly discussing the artifact among themselves. They’d probably stay up all night like that. It was exactly the kind of atmosphere that made for good writing.
The early autumn breeze was cool, there was a pleasant amount of white noise, and if a ghost happened to show up, the Buddha would fight it for me. I turned on my laptop and opened a Word file.
Fortunately, the battery was fully charged. Otherwise, I might have ended up writing by moonlight with a brush like Han Seokbong.
All right. Concentrate.
Now that I understood the value of the writing on that porcelain, my head was brimming with fresh language.
There would be plenty of research done on that jar in the future. Most of it would use stiff academic terminology. In that case, criticism had to go in the opposite direction and stay soft around the edges. The tragic grandeur of the word “independence fighter” also needed to be tempered. And that softness would become the charm of my piece.
Then the title should be: If You Are the Kind of Person Who Sends Such an Innocent Letter.
As a reply to that letter, I began: We received a brief letter of eight lines. By “we,” I mean at the very least anyone who recognizes and sympathizes with the value of the independence fighters. Yes. The porcelain unearthed in Yongin last year, along with the words engraved upon it, has value not in cryptography or ceramics, but elsewhere entirely: in literature, in the literary understanding of the independence fighters’ hearts preserved in the writing itself. (…)
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap….
The text on the jar wasn’t long, so I transcribed it in full. I also wrote out the deciphered meaning. Then I added my interpretation calmly, line by line.
(…) I find myself imagining the expression on the face of the unnamed independence fighter when they engraved the word “you.” Of course, they had no way of knowing when they would die. And yet there was hope that the writing would remain and one day reach someone, and belief that whoever received it would be living peacefully in a liberated land, and even the romantic fantasy that the moment that person read it, they themselves would cross time. Ah, how could one not love such an innocent soul?
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap….
I had a lot to say about this “lovableness,” especially because it was written by an independence fighter.
The tragic and the sublime are beautiful. We all affirm the elegance of such lives, and sometimes even imitate them. In the process, cynicism and indifference are born, and sometimes someone gets hurt. But what operates most powerfully in life, when we look back, has always been hope. Especially the hope that only the innocent can possess (…).
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap….
I was writing like that for quite some time when—
“What are you doing?”
“!”
Startled, I looked up to find Lee Heeso standing there with his hands clasped behind his back.
He really did seem like a craftsman, maybe. For a young man, he had the bearing of an old one.
“You could’ve at least made some noise.”
“I’ve been calling you from over there the whole time.”
...If he put it like that, I couldn’t really argue. I’d probably been too absorbed to hear him.
I pointed toward the rooms in the lodge. “Shouldn’t you be looking at the porcelain?”
“I did. I’m done with my part, so I ran away. Like Professor Mok.”
He shook the beer can he was holding.
Then he started drinking with obvious relish.
I thought they’d cleared everything away earlier, but apparently he’d hidden one away for himself.
“Is that all right, with the Buddha sitting right behind you like that?”
He answered, looking slightly awkward. “I am a Buddhist, you know.”
“Then isn’t that even less okay?”
“I’m his favorite disciple. I’ll probably be forgiven.”
He knew how to talk, all right.
Then, suddenly, he said, “By the way, you’re really smart. No wonder everyone kept saying Professor Mok this and Professor Mok that. I mean—how should I put it? I could picture it. A young independence fighter carving those words into the porcelain. I was even thinking it was a miracle the kiln didn’t crack the jar.”
“I told you to imagine it. It’s easier to understand that way. And you, too, seem to have stuck with it until the end.”
“Ah— not because I could literally see what you saw, like Professor Mok. I just heard it was written by an independence fighter. If they died for the country, then it’d be wrong for the descendants’ little brats to give up so easily.”
“You’re more patriotic than you look.”
“Puhaha! Exactly. Patriotic. That’s right.” He laughed openly.
It was becoming clear to me.
The loose, teasing manner, the playfulness.
That was apparently how he showed approval. On the bus, he’d drawn a firm line between artist and critic, but now, somehow, he seemed to want to step over it and look around on this side for a while. “What were you so focused on, anyway? Criticism?”
As expected, he’d guessed it.
“Something like that. I was writing a piece.”
“About that porcelain?”
“Yes. The literary magazine at the publishing house I work for prints one piece from me every season, and I thought this might be a good subject for this time.”
“Can I read it?”
It wasn’t finished yet, of course.
Still, it seemed fine to me. “Go ahead.” I handed him the laptop.
The writer began reading the criticism with a solemn expression.
“…Oh, I thought it was going to be something difficult.”
“The difficult stuff will be written by scholars. Criticism should be easy to read.”
“Ohhh… ah, so that’s how it works. Lovableness, huh….”
He couldn’t finish the sentence.
Then he disappeared into the piece completely.
His eyes moved steadily as he read, following the lines without pause; now and then, his lips moved as he murmured a sentence to himself. It didn’t take him long to finish.
And when he finally tore his eyes away from the screen, there wasn’t a trace of playfulness left in them as he stared straight at me.
His throat bobbed once.
“This is seriously great, isn’t it? It’s completely art.”
I smiled without saying anything.
Art.
For this writer, that was the highest praise he could give.