Meeting With My Brother: A Novella by Mun-Yol Yi

Author:Mun-Yol Yi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction, Literary, Literary Collections, Asian, General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2017-04-04T01:15:01.580000+00:00

Unlike the streets of Yanji, the banks of the Tumen showed almost no signs of change. The gloomy North Korean mountains across the river stretched out under a sky filled with a strange yellowish haze, and mid-slope, the giant billboards I had seen two years earlier still read “Chollima Movement” and “Rapid Deployment.” The Tumen River was also the same, disappointingly shallow and tainted by the pollution coming from upstream.

We didn’t have a proper straw mat, so we found a spot along the river where the grass was thick and set out the memorial table on sheets of newspaper. Though I knew it would be of little use to my brother, I explained to him the basics for setting out the offerings: Red East White West—the rule for placing red fruit to the east and white fruit to the west; East Head West Tail—the rule for aligning the fish offering; and finally, Dates Chestnuts Persimmons Pears—our clan’s unique sequence for fruits and nuts.

“I will have to make the offering. If I had my way, I’d offer ceremonial rice and three rounds of drinks, but since we’re making do under these conditions it’ll be enough to offer fish, fruit and a single cup. You pour the soju.”

Though it was mourning from afar in a foreign land, we did it as solemnly as if we were at Father’s ancestral grave. The taxi driver watched us with amusement from the riverbank and the occasional passerby glanced at us curiously, but I didn’t feel at all self-conscious. I must have been moved by a religious fervor beyond the demands of tradition. My brother, also affected by my fervor, performed the role of assistant well—not once did I need to remind him about the ceremonial details.

The real sorrow of mourning finally came as I emptied the glass and made the last bow toward North Korea. I began to weep, my tears flowing uncontrollably, as I lowered my head for the final half-bow and glimpsed the landscape of my Father’s Republic—bleak and gloomy under the pall of yellow dust—a summary of my Father’s life. It pierced my heart.

My father was born the only son of an ambitious mother who was widowed early. His youth was legendary, full of stories that were probably part fiction: an ambitious adolescence, the brilliant accomplishment of studying in Tokyo during the Japanese occupation, the young ideologue. Though he endured occasional hardships, during his thirty-six years in the South there were no foreshadowings of failure.

But his forty years in the North—how must he have looked back on them during the final moments of his life? Of course, Father was guided by the dazzling light of his ideology. He once said to Mother that he would be happy to be a janitor at an elementary school, or a nameless factory worker, if only the Republic in his heart could become a reality. But would such a thing ever come to pass? The wife and three young children he left behind in the conflagration of the South must have torn at his heart like a wound that would never heal.

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