Our family could not understand how it had been allowed to happen. The West made no moves to intervene. The League of Nations did not respond to our pleas. Forty years earlier the West had been virtually silent when Queen Min had been murdered in her own Palace by a mob of Japanese assassins, who had hacked her body to pieces with machetes and burned her still-living remains with kerosene in the Royal Gardens. Had the Japanese even attempted such an act on a European monarch, would Japan not have provoked a war, or at the very least been ostracized with sanctions by the world powers? The West’s appeasement had rocked my grandfather.
Millennia of civilization were being systematically destroyed by a Japan drunk on the liquor of new military and industrial power. The last vestiges of the Korean aristocracy were abrogated. Our country was finished, as far as Grandfather could see.
Grandfather had often said that the yangban class had brought the 1894 reforms upon themselves through gross abuse. Corrupt aristocrats used their rank as an excuse to do nothing all day but gossip, smoke pipes, play chess and practise archery. These reprobates still insisted that commoners dismount when meeting them on the road and when passing before a yangban house. For centuries yangbans had had the right to ignore tradesmens’ bills, to exact loans from farmers and neighbours, demand free labour from peasants and unlimited use of their cattle and horses, the right to free food and lodging at the homes of magistrates, and amnesty from the law except in rare cases of treason. Such blatant injustice was wrong and deserved to be abolished along with slavery, thought Grandfather, but he also felt strongly that the class structure ensured civilisation, and with reforms, should remain intact.
Lord Min did not like to understand the success of the Japanese; Japan was amoral, and yet it flourished. Right and wrong were reversed. How could the world be blind to their perfidy? He had said that the Japanese were only accepted by the West as civilized beings because they adopted European haircuts. He was partly serious. Even in such an outwardly trivial matter as hair dressing, he saw the contrasting character of Korea and Japan. Where the Japanese had passively accepted a daft government edict for all men to cut their hair short in the European fashion, in Korea, when the Japanese consul, Inoue, decreed a similar order for Korean men to cut off their topknots, it caused a national furore, and Korean ministers resigned their posts in protest. Although the King himself, out of diplomacy, finally adopted the edict, those Koreans who cut their hair in the country were beaten up in broad daylight by topknotted dissidents.
For Grandfather, who had been raised to pity the barbarian ways of the Japanese rather than to condemn them, being forced to bow to them in his waning years became an intolerable degradation. He grew ill, ageing quickly.
Near the end of his life, Min Gong-ju, now a commoner, returned with a Buddhist monk, to the land he once owned in the stupendous Sorak Mountains, confiscated by the Japanese. Grandfather became obsessed with erecting a family temple on the highest peak, in defiance of the loss of centuries of stewardship.
He ordered the temple to be built in the grounds of a hermitage to symbolize the lonely and vain path of enlightenment, and to represent inviolate Korean sovereignty. The Min name was to be carved upon the temple pillars. Min Gong-ju ordered one thousand chestnut trees to be planted around the temple for longevity, their eventual lushness and strength were to screen it from enemy detection. The temple was constructed in secret by several of his former serfs, who risked their lives to do so. Soon after its completion, my grandfather died. He never saw the temple.
Since Lord Min’s death, the muscular gables of our ancestral house had lost their air of potency and assurance. The calm and old-fashioned grace within its rooms had also vanished with my grandmother’s spirit. She had died six months after her husband. But the heaviness in the household had set in a few years before, with the unhappy behaviour of Yong-lae, the eldest Min son, now in his thirties.
Yong-lae, it was said, had inherited his father’s good looks, intelligence, and fondness for riding a white horse, but entirely lacked his backbone. Where Lord Min had revelled in the responsibility and dignity of his station, dutifully officiating at dull civic and royal ceremonies wherever he was needed, and lending his attention to humble and humdrum estate maintenance, Yong-lae wrote the occasional poem and spent the greater part of his time visiting his tailor in Seoul.
One year, Yong-lae secretly ordered seventy splendid coats to be made for himself. This was a great mystery to us, because we never particularly noticed his new clothes. When the bill arrived my grandfather was enraged. He confined Yong-lae to the estate grounds for two months, and ordered a servant to burn all of his son’s trousers but one scruffy pair, which he was ordered to wear with his new coats.
But this ploy backfired. Yong-lae’s sartorial appetite remained undiminished. Once the dramatic value of grandfather’s action had faded, Yong-lae genuinely needed new trousers. But a weakness for fine clothing was the lesser of his peccadilloes.
‘Going to his tailor in Seoul’ soon became a euphemism for drinking binges, which began tamely enough, but worsened. Predictably, not even Yong-lae’s marriage to a lovely and sympathetic young woman of a neighbouring clan could keep him away from the bars and taverns of Seoul.
Yong-lae’s drunkenness shamed the family. It was an awful cliché, my grandfather complained to him, for an eldest son to be so irresponsible. But Yong-lae did not smile and promise to reform, as he might have done before. It was now as if his father were discussing someone else, whom he only vaguely remembered.
Grandfather, already shattered by the invasion, could not fully fathom that his right-hand son, traditionally relied upon for support and leadership in parents’ old age, was a sick human being, as useless as a broken leg. Towards the end of Grandfather’s life, the look of disbelief frozen in his eyes was terrible to see. The burden of assuaging Yong-lae’s failure fell to my father, Bong-lae, the second son.
Father was silent now as he pushed his bicycle. Although the big house would always be splendid, a symbol of better times, the farther we withdrew from the grand main house, the happier I felt. The hill rose up a gentle slope to our farm, and soon we were home.
How can I describe it? It was nothing special. And yet to me, it was a paradise. Just a traditional Korean farmhouse of wood and white clay, with a winged, grey tiled roof, set comfortably in a crab apple orchard, watched over by jagged blue mountains. Unlike the big house, we did not have a colony of live-in servants, just a housekeeper, and a tenant farmer and his small family in a nearby cottage to perform heavy chores, tend the livestock and vegetable garden, and help with the prodigious work of preparing food for winter.
Above all, home was green. The green of new rice grasses. The green of ripening fruit. The green of a bride’s gown. Out of my bedroom window, wide verdant fields, thick copses, bamboo groves and gracious trees stretched outwards, uninterrupted on all sides. The teasing mists of the East Sea added enigma to the solidity of the land.
My mother, wearing a pale-blue linen han-bok with white ribbons, descended the step to greet us. My little sister, who was two, followed her out of doors and fastened herself onto my father’s leg. He picked her up and gave her a piece of toffee.
I took off my shoes, entered the house, and thirsty from the journey, went straight into the kitchen to get a drink of water from the well. The enormous kitchen was very much the centre of the house, quite literally the hearth of our home.
It