Korean-American finds home on Jeju in 'Stone House'

Brenda Paik Sunoo sits in front of her renovated stone house in the Jeju Island village of Aewol. / Courtesy of Brenda Paik Sunoo

By Jon Dunbar

For photojournalist Brenda Paik Sunoo, life has gone full circle. She now finds herself in her 70s, living with husband Jan in a stone house in the land of her ancestors.

Paik Sunoo is known for her deeply personal books, which explore the world around her while coming to terms with her grief over losing her 16-year-old son Tommy in 1994. In her 2006 book "Seaweed and Shamans: Inheriting the Gifts of Grief," she explores the continuance of life through 21 essays inspiring hope, comfort and renewal. Her 2011 book "Moon Tides: Jeju Island Grannies of the Sea" explores her growing affinity for Korea's southernmost island territory.

For her latest book, "Stone House on Jeju Island: Improvising Life Under a Healing Moon," she offers 25 essays on finding her new home on Jeju Island. Broken into three sections _ "Seduction of Jeju Island," "House Construction" and "Village Immersion" _ she walks readers through the process of her resettling.

"Coming to Jeju it kind of mirrored my inner landscape," Paik Sunoo, a third-generation Korean-American, told The Korea Times in an interview. "Certainly turning 70 and being in the last years, or last quarter or last third or last decade of life, one wants to renew, reinvent, create, and when you build a house, it's really about creating, reinventing, of course healing, and definitely touching base with the ancestral homeland, even though my personal family didn't come from Jeju."

First, she introduces what brought her to the island that she called home seasonally over 2007 to 2009, living in three villages over that time.

"I was always attracted to Jeju because the women and the shamanism and just the history have a confluence of all the things I feel passion about _ there's something that just brought it all together," she said.

Next she looks at the process of building her current house, a "unique and humble" renovated stone house, or "doljib."

"I thought if I'm going to build or renovate a house, I don't want to just build some Western-style house," she said. "I wanted to do something that perpetuated or promoted the notion of cultural preservation. I was dead set to find a stone house we could renovate."

After a painstaking search they located a dilapidated old house in the northern coastal village of Aewol in August 2015. Of the three structures on the property, almost everything had to go.

"We didn't replicate a traditional stone house, but it informed a kind of modern rustic version of a doljib," she said. "I see in building this house echoes from my own past."

One house, built out of cinder blocks, was completely torn down, giving them a nice open yard. The main house also had to be gutted, leaving only some authentic wall materials, as well as clay roof tiles, the hanji wallpaper, the maru (exterior deck) and the floor heating system.

But the third building, a cow stall, remained the most intact. Paik Sunoo had it made into a hwangtobang, a communal room for sitting. She estimates it's large enough for six to sit in a circle.

In her essays she recounts encounters with a giant spider and a snake. But when she asked workers to kill the snake, they refused, as it is a revered creature on Jeju. And in the case of the spider, she and her 24-year-old granddaughter took it outside rather than kill it.

"I'm not really a country girl by design, more of a city girl enamored by country living, and had to adapt to centipedes and snakes and bugs," she said. "I've made peace with all these critters, so if I see a snake I'm just going to say hello and let it slither around and do its thing."

She said her human neighbors were first skeptical of the renovation process, figuring she and her husband were wasting their money. One of their workers even asked them "Aren't you kind of old to be starting a house?"

But after the project was complete, the community welcomed the addition, with one neighbor even repainting his roof so it wouldn't clash with theirs.

"It's nice that it's not competitive and jealous, but collegial and people inspire each other," she said. "They want to see the community improve. After we moved in several others started to build and renovate to even greater dimensions than ours, so ours initially looked like it would stick out like a sore thumb but turned out to be more humble."

Paik Sunoo characterizes her life on Jeju as "simplicity and living with less," citing the low cost of living and good healthcare, as well as the strong community.

"I'd say overall it's living with less, smaller and cheaper," she said. "Those are not bad adjustments, but more of benefits."

For Paik Sunoo, living in Korea is a return to her origins. In 2013 she received an award from the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs on behalf of her grandfather, Reverend Yim Chung-koo, who moved to the U.S. in 1905. An independence activist, he first lived in Hawaii for a year working at a plantation, then resettled in California where he was a minister at a Methodist church founded in 1914.

Because she was his descendant, she was qualified to apply for Korean citizenship, which she did in 2016.

"When I took the oath it was very emotional for me," she recalled. "It reminded me of the Korean immigrants to the United States taking the oath. There were so many stories of how they were emotional and started to feel they wanted to contribute to the country because they were so grateful. It made me ponder more seriously what it means to be a global citizen."

The book is out in print and e-book on Seoul Selection next month. Visit brendasunoo.com for more information including the book's release.