Your Republic is Calling You by Kim Young-ha & Kim Chi-Young

Author:Kim, Young-ha & Kim, Chi-Young [Kim, Young-ha]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 2010-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

IF HE CONCENTRATES, Chol-su can hear the billiard balls, faintly, hitting against one another downstairs. He closes his eyes once in a while to listen to their clicks. They sound like heavy snow breaking branches in the dark of the night. Crack. Clack. That kind of snow, heavy with moisture, falls quietly onto branches struggling to remain whole. Tree branches are groomed to reach for the sky, stretching higher than the other branches in order to obtain more sunlight. With too much snow piled on it, any branch will break.

When his father's earnings as a comedian weren't sufficient, Chol-su was sent to his grandparents' house in Hoenggye, in the foothills of Taegwallyong in Kangwon Province, two thousand feet above sea level. Potato fields surrounded Chol-su's grandparents' house. Their roof was built low to the ground to withstand strong winter winds, and it was secured at the ends with rocks. A stroke had left Chol-su's grandfather with a limp, and his grandmother was mentally disabled. Despite his pronounced handicap, Grandfather was able to do everything. Their small storage room was filled to the brim with firewood, and they had more than enough potatoes, corn, and rice. During the last week of October, Grandfather would pick up a hoe and dig holes, where he would bury pots of kimchi for the winter. Grandmother was slow, but she wasn't dumb or crazy. She was consistent, a warm and quiet being who loved Chol-su more than anyone else, and was capable of expressing every ounce of that love. Chol-su's gentle, sweet grandmother was a rare soul amid the stoic grandmothers who populated the hills of Kangwon Province. She wasn't good with numbers—in fact, she knew basically nothing about them, as she had a hard time understanding any number beyond five—and didn't know how to read, but she didn't have any problem understanding what people said. When young Chol-su read his children's books out loud for her, Grandmother would lie on her stomach like a kid, immersed in the stories.

"Oh, this is fun. Like snowmen," she'd say. Or sometimes she commented: "The draft is blowing on a whistle," an idiom of her own creation. She sobbed when Chol-su read sad scenes and clapped when something joyous happened. Even though she loved stories, she never had much interest in TV dramas, frowning and becoming agitated when they came on. She preferred being read to, even if it was the same book over and over again, rather than watching a show where scenes changed constantly and new characters appeared. Grandmother's favorite stories were Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince and Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess. For others, it might have been strange to see his grandmother, living in an isolated cottage in the hills of Kangwon Province, listening intently to A Little Princess, but that was just everyday life for Chol-su. He thought his friends' normal grandmothers were the odd ones, since they always looked so mean and scary, as if they would bare their teeth at any second and growl, unleashing their coarse, dirty breaths.

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