LAUGHING THROUGH HISTORY 17 'Even If I Can’t Get Married…'
A teacher and students sit in a traditional house sometime in the early 20th or late 19th century. Courtesy of Robert Neff Collection
Editor’s note
“Bwahahahaha” is a weekly column that explores the roots of Korean humor through the joke book “Kkalkkal Useum,” originally published in 1916.
Traditional Korean education focused on literacy in hanja, or Chinese characters, and was based on the classical Chinese canon. (Although hangeul, the writing system used for vernacular Korean, was created in 1443, it did not become the primary medium of education in Korea until after 1945.) The joke I’m translating today depicts an interaction between a teacher and students, and the description of the teacher as a “writing instructor” identifies the classroom as offering a classical education.
Early examples of modern schools were established in Korea by missionaries toward the end of the 19th century, although such schools initially educated only very small numbers of students. In the early 20th century the relative merits of classical versus modern education were part of larger debates about the direction of Korea's future development, with advocates of modern education arguing that Korea needed to adopt foreign knowledge and thought in order to become strong enough to maintain its independence. As an example of a contrasting view, Park Nogap’s 1948 novella “Forty Years” features a protagonist born in 1905 whose family initially chooses a classical education for him over enrollment in a modern school, as a gesture of resistance against encroachment by Japanese colonial forces — since Japan had aggressively pursued modernization earlier than Korea, and during the early 20th century it could be difficult to separate modernization and Western influence from the influence of Japan. “Kkalkkal Useum” was published in 1916, close to the period described in this novella.
In order to understand the situation in the joke, it should be understood that in this traditional style of education, “reading” means reading aloud — silent reading did not become typical in Korea until the 20th century. The teacher’s suggestion that one of the students should become his son-in-law should probably be read as teasing rather than a serious offer, but since marriage in the early teen years was normal during the late Joseon era, the idea might not have been quite as outlandish as it seems today.
Even If I Can’t Get Married…
A writing instructor wanted a group of students to read their texts they were studying diligently, so to encourage them he said, “Whichever one of you studies well, I’ll choose that student to be my son-in-law.”
But it so happened that this instructor’s daughter’s face was craggy and pockmarked. On top of that, she had a pug nose and narrow eyes.
Whenever they were reading, there was one student in particular who kept pretending he had to go to the bathroom and getting distracted.
The instructor approached him holding a switch and roared, “You little brat! Why aren’t you paying attention to your reading?”
The student replied, “I really, really don’t want to be your son-in-law.”
G.S. Hand is a graduate of the Translation Academy at LTI Korea and winner of the Fiction Grand Prize of the 53rd Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards, and has a master’s degree in Modern Korean Literature from Korea University. He lives in Seoul.