LAUGHING THROUGH HISTORY 26 'Can You Trust an Idle Dream?'

Guard towers are set up over farmland in Korea in 1923. Robert Neff Collection

A rich man dies, leaving behind two sons who wind up fighting over their shares of the inheritance. Because this situation is rooted in such basic family relationships, it has an archetypal quality. There are any number of examples of stories about this kind of brotherly conflict, but within Korean literature the obvious comparison is the Joseon-era story of Heungbu and Nolbu, which centers on a kind-hearted but poor younger brother who is rewarded for his goodness and a rich but wicked-hearted older brother who is punished for his cruelty.

The joke I’m translating today is based on a conflict like this, but it’s played for laughs as each brother tries to claim that their dead father has come to him in a dream with instructions for dividing the family wealth.

In order to understand their dispute, you have to understand the units of land they’re discussing. After the father dies, the older brother wants to give the younger one 10 "majigi" of fields as his inheritance. A majigi was a unit of land, but it wasn’t a consistent size: it meant enough land to plant one mal (about 18 liters) worth of seed, so the size varied according to regional conditions and soil fertility. But as an approximate figure, 10 majigi of dry fields would be around 3,300 square meters. One "seomjigi" of rice paddies (an area about 20 times the size of one majigi) would have been around 6,600 square meters. The point is that this might be enough land to feed a family, but not enough to grow crops to sell for money. If the older brother took the remaining 1,600 acres for himself and sold the surplus crops at market, he would be quite wealthy.

“Can You Trust an Idle Dream?”

There was a rich man with two sons who died of a sudden illness before he was able to divide his property between them.

One day, the older brother called the younger one over and said, “Brother, last night I had a dream. Our father came to me and said I should only give you one seomjigi of rice paddies and 10 majigi of dry fields, and that I should take all the remaining 1,000 seomjigi of land for myself.”

When the younger brother heard this, he guessed that his brother’s intentions were impure. So in the middle of the night after everyone was asleep, he sat bolt upright and started shouting at the top of his lungs.

His older brother said, “It’s the middle of the night! What’s wrong with you?”

The younger brother said, “It’s just that I had a dream. Our father came to me and took my hand, weeping sorrowfully. He told me to be sure to split our family’s wealth evenly between the two of us. I was about to ask him about what you said yesterday, but I was so surprised that I jolted awake. I can still hear our father’s voice ringing in my ears, and see his face in front of me as clear as day.”

The older brother smirked, “Do you think you can believe just any idle dream?”

The younger brother replied, “Wasn’t what you had last night an idle dream?”

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.