The Guest by Hwang Sok-Yong

Author:Hwang Sok-Yong [Sok-Yong, Hwang]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-583-22972-9
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2011-01-04T05:00:00+00:00

I, too, know a little bit about Brother Illang.

As I told you before, I went to night classes for a while before I left your orchard to go and work at the mines in Ŭnnyul. In those days, I used to go to the village sarang to practice writing or to read leaflets all by myself. That was back when Brother Illang was still Ichiro. In the winter, the young ones in the village like your brother Yohan and some of the older men were constantly in and out of the sarang. They would always stay late into the night, so we never really had a chance to share the thoughts that lay deep within our hearts. Because he’d spent his entire life serving others, Ichiro hardly ever opened his mouth. You remember, don’t you? And the man always shaved his head. He might have let it go for a month or two, but just as it started to get a little bushy he’d go into town on a market day and have it shaved clean with a pair of hair clippers.

It was after the autumn harvest that I finally became friends with Brother Ichiro. I, too, decided to start spending my nights in the village sarang. You see, no matter how bland or boring a guy seems, if you start sleeping together in the same room every night you’re bound to develop a sense of kinship. There were plenty of branches to be pruned off the trees in the orchard, so we had more than enough firewood. We stuffed the furnace full of them, and by the time we entered the room the floor was always boiling hot. We cooked peas and steamed sweet potatoes together. Every now and then you boys would bring us some tongch’imi, and then we’d take a bite of sweet potato and wash it down with tongch’imi juice that still had bits of ice floating in it. We’d pick out the crunchy slices of radish that floated in the tongch’imi bowl and chew them up. I saw that Brother Ichiro was in the habit of sleeping without a blanket—without any covering of any kind, actually. The floor might have been warm enough, but the room could get quite chilly, especially at dawn. I asked him, Brother, why don’t you cover yourself with a blanket when you sleep?

I’ve never had anything to cover myself with . . .

I was so dumbfounded that I asked him again, You mean you’ve never slept with a blanket, not even when you were a child?

That’s right. There aren’t any blankets up in the mountains. The first time I ever saw one was after I came down into the village.

That’s when I realized he had lived in the mountains, in the slash-and-burn fields, ever since he was a child. I tried asking him a different question.

Brother, doesn’t it make you angry when little children talk to you in low form?

They are all the precious offspring of my masters—why would I

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