By Andrei Lankov
Have you met Ms. Lee? Of course, you have. Perhaps not so recently, but surely a few years ago. Born in the early 1920s, she is in her late 80s nowadays after all, so she seldom gets out that much.
Ms. Lee is fiction, but there were countless women like her, and we should say something about the lives and tribulations of the average Korean woman born nearly a century ago.
In all probability, she was born in the countryside, in a farming household, since such constituted 86 percent of all domiciles in Korea in the early 1910s.
Her mother probably never wandered more than a dozen miles away from their village, but Ms. Lee was different: at some point of her life, Ms. Lee moved to the city, following her husband, or even her children.
Ms. Lee married early, in her teens, and her wedding might have been the first occasion when she encountered her husband.
Nearly all marriages were arranged in those days, with parents and relatives acting as go-betweens. With the exception of a tiny urban elite, largely educated in missionary schools, girls of Ms. Lee's generation were usually ready to accept this approach, for they knew nothing different.
Needless to say, the arranged marriage did not necessarily become an unhappy one.
Ms. Lee perhaps had no formal schooling at all, although her mother might have taught her basic literacy, as had long been the norm in poorer Korean families.
At any rate, she can read only the Korean phonetic script, hangeul, and has almost no knowledge of Chinese characters, widely used in many documents and ``serious'' texts until the 1970s.
After her marriage, Ms. Lee lived with her mother-in-law, although relations between these two women could be quite bitter.
According to the centuries-old tradition, the young wives had to be obedient and accept all abuse without saying a word, on the assumption that in due time they also would be in full control of their daughters-in-law.
With Ms. Lee it did not really work that way, because her daughters-in-law, born in the 1940s, were less ready to accept the old rules and perhaps even avoided living with her altogether.
This might become a source of serious grievances in Ms. Lee's old age, but let's assume that she was lucky and belonged to a minority of Korean women who avoided serious trouble with her in-laws altogether.
Well, for the sake of our story we might also accept another improbability. Ms. Lee was born when the average life expectancy at birth for Korean women was still below 30, and even if she survived the first year of her life (the most dangerous time for infants, especially in pre-modern societies), she still had the odds stacked against her living through to her 50s.
But let's assume that she was lucky and enjoyed a long life.
Ms. Lee's life was hard and perhaps consisted of untold sacrifices of all kinds, made for the sake of her children and family. She had to take responsibility for raising a family in the most difficult period of Korean history.
The 1920s and early 1930s, despite being better known as a time of national humiliation, was also a period of steady increase in living standards, but after 1937 the chain of wars began and things quickly fell apart, not to recover until the early 1960s.
Ms. Lee spent most of her life being very poor, perhaps even worrying how she and her children would get enough food to stay alive.
Her husband was almost certainly frequently away from their home, and for long periods at a stretch. He might have gone to Manchuria or Japan in the late 1930s, looking for better life there; alternatively he might have been a victim of a forced mobilization of the early 1940s, having been drafted to work in the mines or shipyards in Japan.
The couple was not too old when violent civil strife broke out in the late 1940s, so the husband might have been somehow involved with politics and then been in hiding or on the run, avoiding either Syngman Rhee's ``whites'' or Kim Il-sung's ``reds.''
Both rival forces were equally trigger-happy and did not hesitate a second when an alleged ``suspicious person'' was within shooting range.
Finally, Ms. Lee's husband could have been press-ganged into either the North or South Korean armies during the war (it is possible also that he joined one of the armies voluntarily).
Even if he survived all these tribulations, and eventually came back home, it was Ms. Lee who struggled to keep the family alive.
This probably involved all kind of activities, from backbreaking labor in the family's fields, to running market stalls, or making and selling various handmade items.
Ms. Lee's major concern was for her children. For her, the main worries were not so much about their education (the era of ``education fervor'' came later), but simply about feeding them well.
She had many children: the average Korean woman of her age gave birth six times.
Perhaps one or two of her children died in their early years, but in general their generation was lucky: From the 1920s the spread of modern drugs and basic hygiene meant that survival chances of a Korean infant greatly improved, so by the 1980s Ms. Lee probably had a dozen grandchildren.
Perhaps, the hours she spent among them were the best time of her life: She felt happy, and she knew that her life was meaningful.
In a sense, Ms. Lee belonged to the last generation of Korean women who spent their lives in a recognizably traditional society. The fates of her sons and daughters were different.
Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. He can be reached at anlankov@yahoo.com.
