Reminiscence of a granny

By Chang Soon-hee

I was born in Uljin, North Gyeongsang Province. It was in a hundred-year-old traditional house with a moss-grown tiled roof in a remote farming village, crystal clear water flowing in the river at the root of the surrounding mountains. The sun rose and set from ridge to ridge. Cuckoo’s tunes told when it was time to retire for the day and roosters’ crows let the villagers know when it was four in the morning.

The traditional amulet for averting evil, a brush painted in Chinese characters pronouncing something like “Everything goes well” was on the columns of the house. Being a classical scholar of Confucian ideology, my father was a fine calligrapher who had created the talisman on the first day of spring.

Among many farming tools there was a treadmill for grinding harvested cereals. It was made of a large single Y-shaped piece of wood about four meters long with a pestle attached at the end of the lever. With my sister-in-law I stepped on one end of the branch to raise the pestle up and let it go. The rounded end of the pestle dropped into the dry cereal in the mortar carved in granite stone.

My mother, crouching at the mortar, stirred the cereal with one hand while the pestle was in the air and pulled it off before the pounder dropped. I prayed her hand was out of the way every time I released my foot.

When snow fell, my mother and her daughter-in-law used to do hemp threading. Under dim lamplight, they used their teeth and a part of their exposed lap, to thread hemp stalks into thin strings for hemp cloth weaving in the spring.

It was a warm winter evening and while I was carrying stream water home in a water jar on my head, my brother-in-law walked into the front yard, unannounced, with a stranger dressed in a dark suit and tie wearing shiny shoes uncharacteristic of the farm village. My elder brothers joined in the men’s sitting room and they started drinking. The stranger didn’t speak in an Uljin dialect. Was that a Seoul accent?

Slipping out of the drinking party, my brother-in-law whispered to me, “cheojae, (wife’s sister), please observe him carefully. He is one of my best friends,” then went back to the room. Hiding myself in the dark, I glimpsed at the city man in the lamplight but I was scared to “observe” him. I knew he didn’t have a chance to see me. If he did, I’d lose my reputation. So that was the scary ``seon,” a meeting, rather one sided, I was belatedly told.

We hadn’t met face to face but were engaged under the mutual agreements of my parents, his family and the man himself, and me too, as I thought I could go to Seoul. I rode “gama” to marry into his parent’s home in the next village. The Gama, or sedan chair, was just big enough for me to sit in, carried by two strong men, in each the front and the rear.

The ride wasn’t comfortable, not for the seasick feeling, but the carriers said that our gama would never yield way to anyone on our way. So the front carrier was a huge man. “No concession today, it’s your day, dear bride, and it’s our custom,” the front man assured me. I wanted get off the gama and walk; there were two log bridges and one stepping-stone bridge to cross over two rivers before I could reach the groom’s home.

We met no oncoming gama and arrived without tumbling over, and I later got to Seoul, and beyond. Everything went well. Now I know why we Koreans do not have enough yielding courtesy on the street.

A half century has passed since that lamplight meeting but I’m still puzzled why the young man took the risk of a blind game. Well, it doesn’t matter for us now but for those millions of youngsters who are struggling to find life partners, I’d say the life itself is a game of chance.

The writer is one of those reserved grandmothers and still active homemakers who once lived with her children in the United States but finds Seoul more beautiful and comfortable. Her email address is ham1940@gmail.com.