By Mark Peterson
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Let me tell you about the village and then let me tell you about the storytelling festival they are holding there.
The village is dying. It's truly sad because the village in Uiseong County called Sacheon is truly a first-class example of a traditional yangban (aristocrat) village, or as people more likely say today, a "hanok village." Hanok is the Korean word for a traditional house, usually with a tile roof and ondol (heated-floor) rooms. Sacheon is as great an example of a traditional village as is Hahoe Village and Yangdong Village, the two villages that are better-known and have been named UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Hahoe is noted for being inside the horseshoe-bend of a river, and Yangdong is noted for its layout on four hills, but Sacheon is located on a large flat plain. And all of these noteworthy villages have magnificent examples of Korea architecture, each having the home today of the heir to a famous Joseon Kingdom Confucian scholar-official. In this case, Manchwi (the penname of) Kim Sawon. He was a famous leader of a guerilla band that rose up to fight the Japanese invasions of 1592-98. The village is the home of one branch of the Andong Kim line, but it is the place where Yu Seong-yong, the prime minister at the time of the invasions, was born. His mother was a Kim of the Andong line.
The village is beautiful and worth visiting. But it is dying. One shocking example is the village elementary school, large enough to house 140 students. The village residents today talk of when they attended the school 20 or 40 years ago when there were over 100 students in the school. Today there are 11!
And to make matters even more dramatic, there are no students in the first grade!
The village also has a middle school/high school building that has long since closed its doors. It is partially used as a community center. They have long since sent their middle school children and high school children to live with relatives or in dormitories in larger cities.
As Korean families are shrinking, as brides and grooms are marrying later, the overall Korean population is reaching a population replacement rate of 0.9 ― meaning the population is not growing, but declining. This has ramifications for economic development and the ability of the population to support its elderly. The Korean government has long since given up its population control policies that have been so effective at convincing families that there should only be one or two children. Now there are 0.9 children, on average. The current policy is to have as many children as one would like. But most people are locked in on the one- or two-child model. And today's young people are marrying late, or not marrying at all. And the residents of the village move off to more glamorous jobs and lives in the city. Leaving the village to die.
This village is looking to storytelling for salvation. Other villages have found some salvation in tourism, and being named UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Andong has its international mask dance festival. Sacheon is definitely off the beaten path and harder to get to than some of the other villages, but still they are putting their hopes on storytelling.
Storytelling is a "thing." There are festivals all around the world that bring in storytellers and spectators who love to hear old-fashioned, like round-the-campfire, stories told with a flair and a flourish by the professional, or semi-professional, storytellers.
On my visit to Uiseong I met Kim Seung-a, a member of the Andong Kim lineage there who has studied storytelling in Toronto, Canada. Kim Hee-yun, the village elder and heir to the main house Manchwi-dang, is a retired teacher who lived in Daegu most of his career, but has retired to the village, to the main house, and he is backing Kim Seung-a's efforts to turn Sacheon into an international storytelling center.
They are planning to host festivals, workshops and even a school of storytelling. They hope to bring in short-term international visitors, and Korean students. Their hope is also that their efforts will help revive the village.
I wish them the best of luck and before long, we should all look for a chance to visit Sacheon, to see the beautiful old houses, appreciate Korean tradition more, and take in a storytelling event or two while we are there.
Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.
