[korean short stories]youn dae nyeong, raising the swallow

Korean Short Stories

Youn Dae-Nyeong Raising the Swallow 제비를 기르다 Translated by Gabriel Sylvian

Information This work was previously published in New Writing from Korea .

Please contact the LTI Korea Library. library@klti.or.kr

About Youn Dae-Nyeong Yoon Dae-nyeong was born in 1962 in Yesan, South Chungcheong Province. He graduated from Dankook University with a degree in French Language and Literature.

He admitted, however, that in his college days he attended more Korean literature classes than French ones. His early boyhood was spent with his grandparents before he joined his parents at the age of eight. Yoon's family was semi-nomadic and he lived in a variety of places, but always in poverty. His habit of reading seems to have been established very early and by the time he attended junior high school, he devoured all the books that he could find around him. Yoon's first short story, Circle (Won), was published in Daejeon News (Daejeon Ilbo) in 1988 and republished in Monthly Literature & Thought (문학사상) in 1990. With his following works, My Mother’s Forest (Eomma ui sup), Sweetfish Memorandum (은어銀魚 낚시 통신通信 Euno naksi tongsin, aka Silverfish Memorandum), A Memorandum: Miari, 9 January 1993 (1/9/93 미아리 통신 Miari tongsin), and Once in a While, a Cow Visits a Motel (Soneun yeogwan euro deuleo onda gakkeum), Yoon Daenyeong established a reputation as a writer who captures the ethos and sensibilities of Korean people during the 1990s.

LTI Korea eLibrary: http://library.klti.or.kr/node/239

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Raising the Swallow My mother is from Ganghwa Island and she turned sixty-nine this year. I'm told that she was born on the morning of the third day of the third lunar month, the day, they say, when swallows return from south of the river. A flurry of the birds actually had arrived that afternoon, and flew in dizzying circles above the house where Mother was born.

Then a pair from the flock swooped down and took up residence in a nest in the house's rafters. The family was convinced it was the same pair of swallows from the year before, returning to reclaim the nest that had sat empty all winter. Their chirrups had drawn Grandmother out from the room where she had been resting on the warm ondol floor.

She'd stepped out onto the wooden veranda and looked up at the nest, waving her hand to greet the swallows as was the custom of the time. This practice was called pungdeung, believed to bring a good harvest.

Ever since she was a little girl, Mother had always known her birthday was the day the swallows returned to the north. And also that the birds headed back south of the river on the ninth day of the ninth lunar month, around the first frost of autumn. It was amazing how the swallows kept to the same routine, year after year without fail.

On her birthday, after finishing her breakfast of steamed rice with rich seaweed soup, Mother would go out to the veranda and wait there all day for the birds to reappear.

But the birds rarely showed up on the appointed day. They tended to return a few days early or more often, a few days late.

Still Mother would plant herself on the hardwood floor of the veranda, chin in hands, and wait until the swallows arrived. The grown-ups in the family would sneer, or sometimes express concern, that the girl was already pining away at such a young age.

Girls like that end up lonely, or make others lonely, they said. The year she turned nine, the swallows had returned fifteen days late while Mother, on her tenth day of waiting, had given up and taken to bed with a high fever. The doctor rode out from town on his bicycle. He checked her pulse, then clicked his tongue softly and said that the girl was suffering from a broken heart. Grandfather pretended not to have heard and forced a little cough on his way out of the room. Glaring down at her young daughter lying there on the mattress with her forehead covered in a cold sweat, Grandmother heaved a deep sigh. When the doctor picked up his bag to leave, Mother half-opened her reddened eyes

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and asked, "Doctor, where is south of the river?"

The physician did not have a ready answer to the question. Neither did anyone else in town. I myself didn't know for the longest time, not until I was 24. South of the river was actually the faraway country of Thailand. I learned this from an army buddy while on border patrol duty in the town of Hwacheon in Gangweon Province. He had been an ornithology major at university before entering military service.

I returned to the barracks after my shift. Wrapped under a cotton blanket, I wrote Mother a letter by flashlight.

It was getting along daybreak and we were in the middle

of a blizzard. Dear Mother. A reliable source tells me that south of the river is Thailand.

That was the extent of letter. After morning roll-call, I took it to a clerk at the administration office and asked him to post it without delay. I tuckea pack of cigarettes into his shirt pocket, although I doubted it would make much difference. Ten days later, Mother's reply came.

But where is this Thailand place? Is it somewhere I could travel to?

Mother was only 48 that year, an age when she could have easily made it there and back.

But as it turned out she never made the trip. Father flatly refused to consider the idea, and Mother did not have the courage to travel on her own. Father was a man who had long lived with the weight of loneliness bearing down on him like a destiny. Deep beneath his enduring loneliness lay a conflicting love and hatred towards Mother, neither of which could ever be resolved. It was inconceivable that in such a state Father would grant her wish. For Mother, south of the river would always remain an unknown land far beyond her reach. From the day the swallows left until the following spring when they flew back, Mother pined only for herself and no one else.

I too, had grown up waving at the sky when I saw swallows flying by.

2 Dad wasn't the only lonely one. When the frosts came, I, too, grew restless, and a fear I had managed to block out of my mind would well up within me again. Once the swallows were gone, Mother would keep entirely to her self. She'd bustle about in a

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muddle as though her soul had been snatched from her body, refusing to even look her own husband and child in the eyes. She would sit in the kitchen without the slightest thought of cooking a meal, and stay there the whole night, fully awake. Dad would pour drinks for himself in his dimly-lit room until he dropped asleep. I would go next door to ask the neighbors for some supper. If life had gotten no worse than that, I guess I might have been able to stand it.

At first snowfall, Mother would get dressed up and leave the house, and not show up again for two weeks or even a month. Nobody seemed to know where she'd been. She always returned quietly in the dead of night and Father would immediately take her by the arm, drag her to the backyard shed and give her a thrashing. No matter how harsh the beating, Mother would not open her mouth. And when winter came around again the following year, she would again make the same mysterious disappearance. This routine had a crippling effect on Father. He ended up bringing home a hostess from a pub in town and installing her in the small corner room. It was the year I turned ten. I called the pub woman "aunt" although no one had instructed me to do so. None of this seemed to bother Mother. But hardly two months had passed before the aunt in the little room decided to pack her bags. She disappeared without saying goodbye. Something about mother had scared her off.

Loneliness struck me that year as well. It was mid-June and a sweltering heat had set in early that season. Four baby birds had hatched in the swallows' nest wedged in the rafters. Just a few days later, one of the chicks had fallen from the nest onto the veranda.

I was home alone when it happened. I carefully collected the baby bird in my hands and looked up at the nest. Because it was too high for me to reach, I brought out the sewing machine chair from the room where Mother kept it, and stood on it to look, leaning in closer to better peer into the nest. The hatchlings, thinking their mother had returned with food, cheeped with all their might, their yellow-edged beaks gaping in the shape of diamonds. I started to return the chick in my hand back to the nest, but instead I got down off the sewing machine chair and carried the bird to the backyard shed. I placed it in an apple crate, then covered it with a scrap of corrugated cardboard. My heart was pounding as though I'd just raided the neighbor's clothesline and seized a pair of their daughter's panties.

When I left the shed and came back around to the front of the house, Mother had

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returned from her trip to the market in town. She was sitting on the incriminating sewing machine chair, glowering at me.

"What have you done?" "‌.."

The grim thought raced through my mind: I was going to get into trouble no matter what I said. One baby swallow, now I was in for it. I stammered that I'd taken a peek inside the swallow's nest out of curiosity.

"That doesn't explain why one baby is missing."

"Weren't there three to begin with?"

"There were four, as you certainly know."

I lowered and shook my head. Mother got up from the sewing machine chair and pried out a good-sized switch from the bush clover broom standing by the kitchen. She walked over and began thrashing me without warning.

"Tell me what you did with it!"

Mother was no stranger to the kind of thrashing. I wriggled back, forth and sideways like a snake, yelling all the while.

"I said I don't know already! Why hit me?"

The thrashing continued and in the midst of it, the bitterness toward Mother that I had been holding in came pouring out. My words further fuelled her, and made her beat me harder still. Her face was grew icier and icier. When she cried out, I found myself doubting my own ears.

"Those are my babies! I'm their mother! You bring it back right this minute!"

I continued to resist, enduring the pain pouring down my backside.

"I dropped it down the outhouse hole and killed it!"

Through the opening under Mother's lifted arm, I could see Father come through the front gate into the yard, returning from his job at the farmer's land union. He stood there for a moment watching Mother and me, then kept walking to the veranda where he proceeded to take off his shoes before stepping inside the house. Witnessing this was how I figured it out. That at some point in time Father had lost all affection for me, and it was all because of his resentment towards her.

So I secretly ground up millet seed to feed the little swallow in the apple crate, or gave it bugs I'd caught in the grass, going to great lengths to care for and raise it. Each time I

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lifted the cardboard cover I'd fashioned, the swallow would chirrup excitedly as though it were seeing its own mother. With each passing day the swallow grew little by little.

Feathers began to appear on its body, and it would waddle and wobble around inside the crate. When I lifted it up and placed it on my palm, it would awkwardly try to flap its little wings. Then, when I replaced the cover, it would immediately grow still as a chimney.

July came and went. In August, the swallow seemed to be trying to fly. I realized I could no longer keep it in the crate. So I took the apple crate outside and removed the cover. The swallow, crouching its body low, shuddered, then flew up to the edge of the box and perched there.

"That's a good bird. Now fly. You can go wherever you want."

But the swallow couldn't fly any further. It bobbed its body up and down for a while, then flew back down into the crate where it sat, pressing itself into a corner as if afraid. I put the crate back in the shed, went to my room and lay down in the daylight with the covers over my head, captivated by my own thoughts: "When you fly south of the river, I am going to leave home as well.

Around mid-August, the swallow finally flew up and out of the crate to a branch of the red date tree in the back yard. But it showed no intention to fly beyond the wall. It stayed around for almost two weeks. Sometimes I couldn't see it, but before long it would return again to the red date tree. When it saw me, it would chirp twirrup tweet tweet tweet tweet. That's right, I raised you. You're my little swallow.

The swallow disappeared for good on the day of the first frost. So I went to my room, stuffed my belongings into a book bag, changed into some warm clothes and left home. I took the bus to town and then boarded the first bus I saw headed for Seoul. My destination that night was my youngest aunt's house in Noryangjin. Aunt came running out to the yard and took me in her arms.

"What's going on? What are you doing here by yourself?"

I confessed the whole truth.

"I ran away from home but didn't have anywhere to go. Let me stay here for just one night. Please don't tell on me."

I was in fourth grade at the time. To reassure me, Aunt fixed me dinner as though everything was fine, then tucked me in freshly-starched floor bedding. That night I

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slumbered so soundly under the crisp covers, I could hardly believe it myself. At lunchtime the following day, Father showed up. Aunt handed over and Father took me home on the bus.

"Now even my kid's acting like his mother. My damn luck."

In the seat next to us, a young woman was nursing her new-born, her luscious bosom visible between the open flaps of her jeogeori blouse. Father kept stealing glances at it. He uttered dry sighs. We got off at the bus terminal in town and Father entered an alley in the marketplace where hostesses serve men drinks. Although it was mid-day, the alleyway was cast in shadows by big zinc-slate awnings jutting out from the shops. Needless to say, the alley was dirty and it stank. Father stopped at a place with a sign standing out front painted with the name 'Mun-hui' in big brush-style letters, and he knocked on the door with his fist. After a few moments a woman opened the sliding door and peered out at us. She was wearing a night gown with its seams fraying, even torn here and there. It was late in the afternoon, but she still had crusts of sleep in her eyes.

"What are you doing here in broad daylight?"

It seemed that she already knew Father.

"What do you think I'm doing here? You go to pubs to drink!"

The Mun-hui woman grumbled in a voice saturated with fatigue.

"I don't open till much later. Come back tonight."

"Where am I supposed to go and what am I supposed to do until then?"

"I haven't even washed yet."

"I can wait until you powder your face and get dressed. Don't you know yesterday was payday at the land union?"

Mun-hui turned and gave me a wary look.

"Who's the kid? You don't expect me to pour him drinks too?"

"I'm going to keep him standing out here . I have my reasons."

"Why, that's the craziest‌" Father left me standing by the shop sign, followed Mun-hui inside, and slammed the door hard. He wouldn't stick his nose outside again until it had gotten dark. My legs ached, of course, and after two or three pees, I started to feel hungry and my body shivered. I should have had the sense to go home on my own, but for some reason I

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waited, just holding to the spot. At about 7 o'clock, the door opened with a rattle and Mun-hui, outfitted in traditional hanbok, appeared with a dish of leftover snack foods from the bar.

"So you're still out there? Here, you must be starved."

She handed me the dish with a few sweet rice cakes, sorghum fritters and sliced pork on skewers. She started to turn to go back inside, then stopped, turned back towards me and came nearer, her face worn like a weary traveler's.

"Aren't you cold? " "I'm doing all right."

I caught the dizzying scent of perfumed powder rising off her body.

"Why, you're barely out of diapers. What put it in your head to run away? What kind of troubles could you possibly have?"

Already busy eating with my fingers, I replied curtly.

"You'd better get back inside and finish pouring drinks."

Mun-hui's face flushed red. Doling me a noogie, she scolded.

"Fine way to talk. No wonder you had to run away at such a young age."

"You have no idea what you're talking about, auntie."

"Aunt!‌ Do I look like somebody's aunt to you?"

"What should I call you then? Big Sister?"

Mun-hui let out a loud laugh, then grabbed me by both ears and planted a kiss on my cheek. I inhaled another whiff of her perfumed powder. She pressed me to her bosom as though I were her own child, then quickly darted back inside. I could hear a man calling for her. It was around 9 that night when Father finally stumbled out the door, happily drunk. Mun-hui, a dark look on her face, stood beside him. Father seemed surprised to discover that I had been standing out there in the alley the whole time.

"How come you're still here instead of going home?"

"You told me to wait."

"So you've been standing there like a scarecrow?"

Mun-hui stood in the murky shadow, watching me with a strange smile. She seemed exhausted. On the last bus home I was treated to an endless litany of laments from Father.

"Some day you will see for yourself what a lonely event life is!"

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I pretended to nod off.

"But today was a good one….yes, a fine ripe peach, that woman."

When we got home, Mother already had water boiling in the large iron cauldron in the kitchen. Father went straight to the main room and lay down while Mother stripped my clothes off one piece at a time and gave me a sponge bath. The water was scalding hot, but I braved it. Mother also kept silent.

That night mother put me down to sleep in her room. By then each of us had been sleeping in our own room for a long time. After the lights went off, I lay staring up into the blackness of the ceiling. I stayed like that for a long while. Mother turned towards me and placed her hand on my forehead.

"Why bother leaving home if you're going to come back just after one day?"

I kept my mouth shut tight, pretending to sleep.

"Where did my son think he was going?"

Mother pinched my cheeks and demanded an answer.

"All I thought was that I should leave home."

"Yes, I guess that's why you left." " …."

"Then were you planning to stay away for good?"

I racked my brains for an answer and soon found myself saying these words.

"I was going to come back in the spring."

But I did not say, along with the swallow that I raised and sent south of the river. I heard Mother sigh. She changed the subject and asked me about the lipstick marks she'd scrubbed off my face.

"Was the lady pretty?"

I was thinking about Father sleeping in the main room.

"Was she pretty?"

"Yes." :Yes….. I see.."

Mother clasped my hand in hers and brought it to her breast. The feeling of her steady breathing transmitted to my body. But the sensation left me cold.

"Women are all pretty."

She went on.

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"But women are like migratory birds that fly back and forth between here and the land of eternity. Don't you forget it."

After all she'd said that night Mother turned silent again. She would stay this way until spring arrived. To me, her silence meant she was gone. I could see her, of course, but she was already busy passing the winter in a faraway country that no one else could reach. Then, as had become her habit, at dawn on the day of the first snowfall, Mother left home and came back twenty days later from wherever it was that she had been.

3 It was in the middle of winter 1986 that I met Mun-hui, early February to be exact. I received my discharge orders and left the sentry point at Mt. Baegam, reported to the regiment headquarters in Hwacheon and walked out past the guard house, finally ending my 27- month military service. Still clad in my reserve uniform, the first place I headed was a public bathhouse. After scrubbing my body clean at the bath, I stopped at a small restaurant nearby and ate a bowl of beef soup with rice before boarding a bus non-stop to Chuncheon. In those days, there was no non-stop bus service all the way to Seoul from Hwacheon.

The world on the other side of the bus window appeared so calm and silent that it felt unfamiliar, almost unreal. The snow that had been falling all winter blanketed the mountains in thick layers. I didn't think I could manage to survive out there in the real world. Maybe it was an early hunch about the fate fast approaching me. The realization hit me that I'd been safer in the army. In fact, one of my buddies had gone to the administration section a week before his scheduled discharge to fingerprint his application for long-term enlistment. It occurred to me that perhaps he had made the wiser decision.

On this non-stop bus from Chuncheon, I fell into a conversation with a woman whom I guessed to be a college student. She initiated the conversation by asking me where I was traveling from. When I answered that I was coming from Hwacheon, she explained how she had taken the bus down to Yanggu after an unsuccessful attempt to visit her boyfriend. He was in boot camp, only three weeks into training. Hadn't she known that you're not allowed visitors during boot camp? Anyway, the two of them had a long wait

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ahead until his discharge, with no way of knowing what might happen to the other in the mean time. The daily longing was like a kind of despair, she'd said, and the last three weeks had felt like three months. And there would be 26 more weeks until his discharge orders came through.

We rode together all the way to Majangdong Bus Terminal in Seoul then went into a caf? for a beer. At first she declined, only accepting after I'd insisted she join me. I learned that she studied Home Economics at a university in Sinchon, and would begin her senior year in the spring. Her home was in Bucheon, Peach Blossom Village. After some initial hesitation, she'd even told me her name. When she did, it hit me like a lightning bolt. The name that came streaming from her lips was one I'd forgotten a long time ago. Mun-hui. Her name was Seo Mun-hui. I stared at her with widening eyes, vividly recalling the details of that day and night in the pub alley Father had taken me to as a kid. Mun-hui in her Korean dress bringing me food to eat, the scent of powder on her skin, the sensation of her lips on my cheeks. A sea of feverish longing flowed into my heart. My eyes began to well hot tears. Mun-hui gave me a perplexed look and spoke in a husky voice.

"What's wrong? You're giving me the collywobbles."

What was happening? And why? A grave, life-changing turn of events was taking place inside my heart. A painful premonition loomed before me, like the sight of the customer under an umbrella arriving at the door, that I might fall in love with this woman. She undoubtedly assumed I was still emotional about being discharged from the army.

Looking at me sitting there in my reserve uniform, she remarked how much she envied me. Imagine her envying me, the guy who had boarded a bus that afternoon without the slightest idea where to go or what to do next.

Her home in Bucheon was a long distance from Majangdong Bus Terminal and it was already past 9 o'clock at night. Mun-hui looked back at me and spoke with a tremble as we came out of the caf?.

"How do I get home from here?"

The ice-cold night rains of February were falling.

"Let's take a taxi to Jongno first."

She followed me into the backseat of a taxi without protest, probably because she felt she had no other choice. The taxi inched its way past Dongdaemun Stadium and

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approached the subway station at Jongno Boulevard's third intersection. Sensing the traffic was about to get worse, the driver turned around to address us.

"Where on Jongno do you folks want to get out?"

I deferred to Mun-hui sitting beside me. She suggested we get out there and walk for a while, perhaps she had something specific in mind. Mun-hui and I bought a couple of blue vinyl umbrellas at the subway entrance and walked down the street towards Tapgol Park.

"Why do I have this feeling we've met before, a long time ago?"

She murmured as though she were dreaming.

"Strange, isn't it?"

Of course I was also overcome by the same feeling and I said, "Will we ever see each other again? I'd like that very much."

Under her umbrella, Mun-hui tried to stifle a laugh. A crowd of pigeons perched atop the Tapgol Park gate were getting thoroughly soaked.

"You know we can't."

"We will, though."

Mun-hui halted her steps to look at me. Then as she began walking again, she said firmly, "I'm going to wait for him."

"That won't matter."

When she opened her mouth again, it was a calm reply.

"Let's have another drink somewhere around here. Then we'll part ways, and that will be it."

"We,' she had said, almost by accident, as if we were already a couple. Surely it was in the cards. The feeling I had was close to a conviction . I took her to a pub named Tapgol next to Nagweon Arcade, which I used to frequent before enlisting in the army. A group of what seemed to be newspaper reporters and writers were there having drinks.

Someone was hunched over the piano in the corner, plunking at the keys and singing in hushed tones as though reciting from a book of poems.

In this pub I began telling Mun-hui the story of my life one event at a time as though peeling off layers of an onion. My nose occasionally stung from emotion. I told her about Mother whose wits left her for half of every year, about Father's tormented loneliness,

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and about myself, burdened from boyhood with this same loneliness as though it had been passed down to me in the family genes. And then I told her about the hostess aunt who once lived in our small corner room, about raising the baby swallow and sending it on its way south of the river, and about packing my book-bag that day and running away from home. The story of my life ended at the hostess pub in town that I had visited with Father, and the fact that the name of the place was 'Mun-hui.'

As soon as the name Mun-hui jumped from my lips, her two eyes widened dramatically, and then after a moment or two, slowly closed, like a clam shell. She kept them closed for a while as though tired. Had I said things I shouldn't have said? A wave of regret swept over me, but it was already too late. Mun-hui appeared to be dozing.

Gazing at her pale face, I thought of the words my mother whispered in my ear under the covers when I was still a boy. Women are like migratory birds that fly back and forth between here and the land of eternity. Don't you forget it.

The middle-aged man who seemed to fancy himself a poet was still sitting intently at the piano, singing on and on tirelessly. Then I heard a song, oh so familiar to my ears. I had sung the words in my head so many times in the army while standing guard duty at night. "La Golondrina," made famous by the Italian singer Caterina Valente. Jo Yeongnam adapted it in Korean as "The Swallow" and the words went like this: Your sweet words filled my heart like the starry night above, their silvery light so lonely.

You went away because you loved me I still see you in my dreams.

Storm clouds may weep, the white frost may fall, but on the day the swallows fly back with the wind I will think of your beautiful eyes And hold your love in my heart Oh, how I long for you Never can I forget you Where am I wandering now?

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My tears fall through the darkness And lie asleep in waiting The day the swallows fly back with the wind I will hold your love in my heart.

Sometime before the song was over, Mun-hui had gotten up and walked out the door, all without making a sound. It was clear she had left. But where was she going on this cold night?

4 The year I finished middle school, my family left Ganghwa and moved to Seoul. It was all so I could enroll in a high school in the city, I was told, but the real reason lay elsewhere.

Father had grown sick of his job at the farmer's land union, and following his logic, if he didn't make a change, he'd sink like a rat fallen into a liquor barrel. He announced his decision in grave tones, like a hoary old general brandishing his rusty sword. That year, the swallows didn't make the annual return to Seoul, nor the next year, nor even the year after that. They didn't return until I was 45 years old.

In Seoul, Father found work at a fish cake factory, while Mother contributed to the household by helping out her youngest sister at the tailor shop in Noryangjin. From Father's perspective, the move was an immediate success. First of all, Mother took an interest in tailoring, and her face showed renewed vigor. She didn't start behaving like a mute when the bone-chilling autumn turned to winter. Nevertheless, with the

coming

of the first snow, Mother got all dressed up and left home just as she always had in Ganghwa. Father no longer questioned or beat her when she returned. He seemed to have given up on the situation, and probably believed this improvement was better than nothing at all. Although we could only afford a rental, Father seemed to be gradually stirring from his mud-like loneliness as our lives gradually brightened. He must have been hiding his managerial skills all this time, because in just three years, he had risen to the level of supervisor of the fish cake factory and two years later he took over the factory.

Every morning at daybreak Father drove the truck, drove to Noryangjin

Seafoof Market and brought back a full load of fish parts and scraps that he picked up at a bargain. The factory was so busy it couldn't fill all the orders even operating two eight-

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hour shifts per day. But even so, dad didn't expand operations. It wasn't a pile of money he wanted, just to be settled in a comfortable life as soon as possible.

With Mother's help my aunt's tailor shop business improved day by day, and then in the 1970s they made a bold move into the Dongdaemun Market. The market for custommade dresses was on the wane at that time, and ready-to-wear was starting to come into demand. It was hard that first year establishing their place in the market, but later Aunt grew to be a top-dog in charge of several Dongdaemun shops. In 1988, the year of the Seoul Olympics, Mother announced that the shop had become too much for her and she and she retreated to our new apartment in Mokdong, instead, making trips to Dongdaemun just once at the end of every month to collect money. Unbeknownst to Father, Mother was proceeding with detailed plans to buy back the old house in Ganghwa in order to live out her twilight years back home.

It was mid-April, around the time when the swallows would be coming back, and two months since Mun-hui and I parted ways at Tapgol Park, when I went looking for her.

I had returned to college and was in my senior year. I walked through the front gate of the university Mun-hui attended and asked around for directions to her department's main office. I obtained Mun-hui's class schedule from a professor's assistant and waited outside the classroom for her to appear.

Mun-hui came up the stairs at the end of the hallway moments before class time. Our eyes met at about ten meters. Her surprise was apparent. At first she made a move as if to turn and go back down the stairs, but then she quickly marched in my direction only to keep walking past me straight into the classroom. Then the professor went in and the door closed. Still I decided to wait. If I waited just two hours, I'd be able to see her again.

But less than an hour had passed when Mun-hui emerged from the classroom and met me in the hallway. It was spring, and she was even prettier than in February. Her hair had grown below her shoulders. "Let's go outside,' she'd said, and made her way down the stairs ahead of me. Towering white clouds floated in a deep-blue sky. The sky appeared vast and empty, like a huge, gaping cauldron. As we walked shoulder to shoulder through the front gate, Mun-hui spoke to me in a hushed tone.

"Why are you doing this?"

"I told you we'd meet again."

"You did for a fact. Mr. Army Reserve."

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"Well, at least that's better than civilian defense."

"And that hair of yours. Would it have killed you to bring along a hat?"

I hadn't made any plans for our date, but a sudden thought rushed into my head. I'd take Mun-hui to Ganghwa Island, and have a drink with my sweetheart at the hostess pub in town. Ganghwa Bus Terminal, after all, was practically at our feet, just down the street behind Sinchon Market. I strode beside her with a vague sense of direction.

"I missed you so much over the past two months."

She fired back a look that seemed to say she couldn't care less.

"Is that supposed to impress me? It doesn't."

"I wasn't trying to impress you. I wanted to convey my feelings."

"Such lines. Why don't you try using them for an audition at a theatre on Daehangno?"

"Do they take reservists?"

At that, Mun-hui called for a truce and asked how my mother was doing.

"She's up to her neck with work now. Word has it, though, that she took off for three weeks again last winter."

"Amazing."

"What?"

"Your mother. She's amazing."

I was eyeballing the Sinchon Market entrance right across the street.

"The weather's nice today. How about a trip to Ganghwa Island? If we catch a bus over there, we'll be there in an hour and ten minutes."

Mun-hui turned and looked at me as though I had said something rude, then gave a laugh.

"Catch a bus where?"

"There's a bus station behind Sinchon Market."

"And once we got there?"

"We'll drink maggeolli. It's prime season for fresh herring, too" "Drink where? At Mun-hui's?"

"Well, we might as well drop by!"

As though her curiosity had been piqued, Mun-hui asked on.

"Is the pub still in business?"

"We'll find out when we get there."

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"Even if she's still there, she must be an old lady by now."

Not quite an old lady, but in her forties, probably. In a moment, Mun-hui and I were at the Gangwha Bus Terminal. I went into the waiting room, paid for two tickets and returned to where Mun-hui was standing. She seemed to be in a mild panic, as though she'd just been pickpocketed. She hawk-eyed the open door of the bus in front of her and spoke as though she needed reassurance.

"You'll guarantee my safety? A hundred percent? I have to be home by 9 o'clock."

I assured Mun-hui that there was a bus from the town of Ganghwa to Incheon, and a subway line would take her from there home to Bucheon. The bus left Sinchon, crossed the Han River, got on Highway 48, passed Gimpo, and stopped briefly at the checkpoint

by Ganghwa Bridge. The door opened and an armed soldier boarded the bus to check each passenger's citizen card one by one. Under the bridge, a swift salt-water current was coursing through the narrow channel, racing past twice each day, drawn as if magnetically by the pull of the distant sea. Mun-hui looked down fearfully at the steep mudflats suddenly exposed by the receding waters. It was her first trip to Ganghwa. Not long after crossing the bridge, we arrived at the terminal in town. It was about 4 in the afternoon. Getting off the bus, Mun-hui looked around at her surroundings like a child abandoned on a strange street corner.

The two of us passed a cluster of ginseng shops and entered the market. I was surprised that nothing had changed in ten years. The same signs still hung on the pottery store and noodle shop. We turned to the right at the empty lot behind the market and found the alley of hostess bars, hidden like a deep well. The ground of the area was sunken and the roofs of its buildings hung down low to the street. Thick-spread humid air hung over the alleyway, even in mid-day. Greenish moss coated the lower walls, and first-time visitors could not help but hold their breath. The pub doors were all shut tight, which made the darkness and dampness all the worse. I had come alone to the alley one last time the year our family moved from Ganghwa. It was just a few days before my middle school graduation ceremony. But I couldn't bring myself to open the door and step inside. Instead, I paced back and forth restlessly, shivering in the cold, and returned home late that night with nothing to show for my trip. Only after moving to Seoul did I realize that I had gone back to the alley to see Mun-hui again, a fact which made me blush with shame. I was a pimply-faced kid waging an uphill battle through a rough

17

patch of puberty.

Mun-hui brought her lips close to my ear from behind and whispered, as if we were standing alone in the dark.

"Isn't that it, there?"

Indeed it was. 'Mun-hui' still stood in the same spot. I was so grateful, I thought I was going to cry. At the same time, the longing that lodged in my heart suddenly leapt to my throat. I clutched Mun-hui's hand and we approached the door. Warmth from her body flowed from her hand through my body like the sea surging in the channel. But the door was locked from inside. I tried knocking. I knocked twice, then a third time, then I heard a harsh shout from Mun-hui.

"Don't knock any more!"

I stopped and looked back. Mun-hui was shuddering like a woman standing facing the gates of old age, seized with fear that the door would swing open and old age would pounce on her the instant she stepped through it. This time it was Mun-hui's hand that yanked me away, and we quickly turned away and fled the alley. So I lost the chance, perhaps forever, to sit with Mun-hui and share a drink after so many years. We left the run-down alley behind us and found a small shop where we split a soda. Mun-hui spoke in soft, apologetic tones, as though she had broken a promise.

"Why are there so many 'cushion' houses around here?"

She used the local slang term for "hostess bar." Anyone who has been to Ganghwa could answer her question. The "cushion houses" developed in the wake of the island's ginseng and flower-mat markets. Times had changed, but in the days when the markets prospered, the hostess bars would have been overflowing with merchants from dusk to sunrise. Ganghwa held a virtual monopoly on the ginseng market until the mid-1970s, and Ganghwa set the price of ginseng for the entire country. Minor civil servants like my Father would have been merely occasional customers quite out of the league of the preferred clientele. Having fled the alley, the two of us were left without a destination, so we ended up getting some noodles at a market stall, taking turns checking our watches.

Mun-hui put down her chopsticks after just a few bites.

"Hyeong-u, what part of the island are you originally from?"

"Giljeong Village. It's over in Yangdo."

Of course those names meant nothing to her. Father was also born in Giljeong, and the

18

old house still stood where Mother had come from her village 40 miles away as a 20year old bride. With the plains of Ganeungpo stretching off into the distance, and a great view of Mt. Mani at the far edge of the fields, Giljeong was a beautiful village.

Mun-hui was all ears. Then she made an unexpected suggestion.

'How about going out there? It's still only five o'clock."

What would be the use, going all the way there, I thought, but I agreed so I could be with Mun-hui. We left the noodle place and practically winged our way to the bus terminal. Ten minutes later, we were en route to my hometown.

Mun-hui gazed out the bus window in silence for a time, then started asking questions as though she were a curious child.

"So many slate roofs on the houses here. Why?" "Because it rains so often. They're slanted so the rain and snow will slide right off. All the yards are tiny, too, so during the heavy snows everyone gets around by walking under the eaves."

"And I don't see front gates on the houses."

"Ganghwa County people once reaped the highest incomes in the entire country, so there were no beggars or thieves to keep out. See the decorative tiles and stones? People with lots of money added ornate designs to the exterior walls around their property.

Three sections of ornamental wall meant you were well-to-do."

"The only thing I ever learned about Ganghwa Island was the 19th century French and U.S. warship expeditions. That, and Cheoljong, the boy king from Ganghwa."

"Yes, of course, but this is also where all of the woodprint blocks for the Tripitaka Koreana were made, then transferred to Haein Temple."

"Ha! I didn't expect I'd learn so much about Ganghwa today."

The bus kept an onward course through the island's central region and let the two of us out at Giljeong before speeding off in the direction of Hamheodongcheon Valley. My hometown had changed in the ten years since I last saw it. The dirt road leading to the village was now paved, a new church had been built near the reservoir, and a grape arbor now stood where cabbage and radishes used to grow. But to my relief, the same view remained of the plains and Mt. Mani from the front gate of our old house. The fields were flooded with water, however, as the rice-planting season was then underway.

The house was now occupied by a friendly couple in their early 30s who had relocated

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there from Seoul. Sitting at the veranda of the house and chatting with the man and his wife, we learned that as college students they had been labor activists at the industrial park in Guro. While her husband was in prison, the wife had licked envelopes or strung necklaces for extra money to send him provisions. Four years ago, when the husband was released, they had moved to the island for his health. Others with similarly difficult histories moved here, and a community had formed. As always, Ganghwa Island bore the pain of exile. The couple had a three-year-old son, whom I could tell at a glance was being reared like a little prince, like a jade leaf on a golden bough, as they say. We couldn't refuse their kind supper invitation, so Mun-hui and I left with our bellies full with heaping bowls of steamed rice, radish kimchi, pickled sardines and crusty-rice soup. When we finished, the couple told us that the bus into town would be coming by soon. While we had sat there talking, a hazy, mellow light had settled on the fields.

While standing by the bus stop sign waiting for the bus to arrive, Mun-hui had turned away from me and was looking out onto the fields. Old memories began to sweep over me as I looked back at our old house standing there beyond the grape arbor. The wife was still standing in the front yard, the little prince in her arms, eyeing the bus stop, probably checking to see whether or not the bus arrived on schedule. The sound of Munhui's voice reached my ears as though beckoning me in a faraway dream.

"Swallows. Look over there."

I did not give much thought to what Mun-hui was saying and waved at the wife and the child. The wife waved back at me in turn. Then I heard Mun-hui exclaim in a voice that seemed to be faltering.

"I've never seen so many!"

I turned to face her. I watched as the fields gradually took on a crimson cast from the light of the setting sun. And just then, I witnessed flock after flock of hundreds, no, thousands of swallows descending on the plain. Some of the flocks floated low in the air, chirruping and trilling noisily as they maneuvered in flight, while another flock careened off and away in the direction of Mt. Mani, and yet another massive cluster seemed to be navigating straight toward us at the bus stop. Not only Mun-hui: it was also the first time for me to witness such a skein of swallows all at once.

The bus arrived after sunset. Once in our seats, Mun-hui rested her head on my shoulder. Her eyes were closed but she didn't seem to be sleeping. Only as we were

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drawing near to the town did she speak.

"That swallow you raised as a boy then set free‌ did it return the following spring?"

"Four came back, but I don't think mine did."

"How could you know?"

"None of them sat in the date tree."

"So they don't always return."

"A guy I met in the army, a reliable source, told me only about five percent actually return to their home regions. Out of those, only one percent ever return to where they were born."

"So what happens to the rest of them?"

"Some die, some fly to other places."

She repeated it back to me.

"Some die. Some fly to other places."

"Yes." Mun-hui smiled, faint and obscure as the night, then hid her face,.

5 I made the trip to Thailand twice, once with Mun-hui and the second time by myself.

Before that, during our remaining years in university, Mun-hui and I continued to meet on the weekends. We would eat dinner, see a movie, have drinks at a bar and then go home on our separate ways, like a typical couple. At the end of each date I would see Mun-hui as far as Sindorim Station, the junction between subway lines No.1 and No.2, and then head for home. We never had a date that took us out of Seoul again, but looking back, we had fun. Yet it was also a painful time for each of us. Even though Mun-hui was busy studying to get her teacher's certificate, I noticed that she always had time for trips to Yanggu, and when confronted, she made no attempt to deny it. My heart gradually putrefied, like a potato browning with rot. And the more wretched I became, the more I fixated on her, and though I struggled with my own confused feelings, I could not bear to let her go. I feared I was losing my mind. Each morning I awoke to find a stranger in the mirror. My final semester was spent caught in a to and fro between heaven and hell.

Soon after graduation I took a job at the public relations office of a confectionary

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company. In the fall of that year, Mun-hui was assigned to a teaching job in Seoul at a girls' middle school in Anguk-dong. It was two weeks before I was scheduled to start my new job that we flew to Thailand together. A phone call came from Mun-hui one Sunday afternoon during an icy rainstorm, and we arranged to meet downtown for the first time in over a month. Our meeting place was a run-down, 1960s-style kimchi stew restaurant called Gwanghwamun, located in an alley next to the Sejong Cultural Center and named after the entrance gate to the Joseon kingdom palace grounds. When I got inside the restaurant, I saw Mun-hui, her eyes cast down at the stew boiling on the burner as though she were reading an old magazine. On the armrest of her chair hung a traveler's shoulder bag stuffed full like a protruding gut. I could tell she had just returned from Yanggu. Then and there I decided I would have to give her up. Her face appeared haggard. She motioned me to eat, placing spoon and chopsticks in front of me, as if to say today would be our last meeting. And so we ate, neither of us bothering to make conversation during the whole meal. Finally, Mun-hui unwound some paper towel from the roll on the table, daubed at her mouth, and looked me boldly in the eye.

"Why don't we find some place where we can be together for the night. I already phoned home and told them not to wait up."

Those were her words to me, right there in that restaurant so cramped you could barely avoid breathing on the people next to you. A waitress holding a tray and two fiftyish men sharing an evening bottle of soju turned around to look at us. Her eyes made it clear that she wasn't propositioning me because she wanted me. She was caught in a trap and crying out for help. I took steps to redirect her thoughts, determined that I could rescue her then.

"I'm thinking of going to Thailand in a few days."

Mun-hui looked over at the door as though her attention had been momentarily drawn by the sound of the wind.

"Thailand? Why?" "I've always wanted to see what it's like. I'm going to go and forget you, Mun-hui, and then on the 5% chance that I make it there and back, I'm gonna don my suit and start my new job. The time has come for death and a new resurrection."

Mun-hui didn't flinch or even hesitate.

"Everybody does that. It's something everybody experiences periodically."

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"Then I want to live my life like everybody else then, do it the way they do."

"Haven't we already come too far for that?"

"What do you mean?"

"So we should have never met at all. We shouldn't have gotten on the same bus to Chuncheon last year. And we shouldn't have gotten a drink that night and we shouldn't have gone to Ganghwa Island. You still don't see what I mean?"

"I think it's time we call the relationship off."

Laughing with a discouraged air, Mun-hui gave a deep sigh.

"If only we could. Do you think things will go as we plan? Will our plans bring back the heart and soul that's already left home?"

Mun-hui's eyes misted over as she told me that last spring she had lost possession of herself at Ganghwa Island, the moment she saw the flock of swallows on the fields of Ganeungpo. She became aware of this loss on the bus back to Seoul, and had feared it would bring her to despair. She said that ever since then, she had been roaming the skies like a bewildered migratory bird. She said, with tears in her eyes, that all this time she had been flitting back and forth between two men, she had been nothing but lonely. I found my resolve slipping, yet again. She spoke again after wiping at her eyes with her paper towel.

"Why don't we go to Thailand together! You can't just run off by yourself and leave me here alone. There's no way I can let you go alone. Who knows what one of us might do?"

I caved in, yet again. We left the restaurant and went straight to Korea Travel Agency next to the Sejong Cultural Center, where we reserved two tickets for a Thai Airways flight departing from Gimpo Airport that Friday afternoon. The flight would in a mere five days take us to Thailand-south of the river. During those five days of waiting, my nerves were on tenterhooks, anticipating the moment I would board the plane with Mun-hui. Only when the airplane left the ground was I able to relax.

As soon as we found our seats on the plane, I dropped off to sleep, and didn't open my eyes again until Mun-hui nudged me awake as we landed at Phuket International Airport. Even after we got off the plane, everything I saw seemed shaky and blurry, as if the spirits of slumber were still holding me captive. We checked into a hotel near Patong, a town thronging with hippy-types, and went up to our room, where I plopped onto the

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bed like a sheaf of straw. No wonder I was exhausted: I hadn't had a single good night's sleep since the first day I met Mun-hui.

I was awakened in the morning by the unbearable heat. A terrifying sunlight was streaming in through the open window. The glare was so intense I had to turn my eyes from it. Mun-hui was lounging on the sofa, casually leafing through a tourist information pamphlet. She had gotten up early, taken a shower, and even gone for a walk on the beach. The breakfast buffet was nearing closing time, so I got dressed and we went downstairs. The restaurant was overrun with tourists. Most of them were newlyweds; and to them, we probably looked the same. I asked myself what we were doing there.

But Mun-hui was the one who first suggested Phuket. I hadn't had a bite to eat since the previous night, and I hungrily wolfed down toast, eggs and fruit, and after topping it off with two cups of coffee, lit up a cigarette. Mun-hui was watching me intently, like a cat, from across the table.

At about 11, we left the hotel and caught a tuk-tuk, a taxi converted from a mini threewheeler, and headed for the port, where we boarded a passenger ferry for the island of Phi-Phi. Like the restaurant we had just left, the boat was jam-packed with Chinese, Japanese and European newlyweds. There were some Western men paired up with young Thai women, too, but no one seemed to be phased by them. As the ferry crossed to the island, as I gazed at the puffy white clouds floating in the mirror-like water, a dizzying illusion that the ferry was somehow being sucked in between the sky and the earth swept over me. Mun-hui had fallen asleep with her head on my shoulder, for only the second time since I'd known her. During lunch at one of Phi-phi's beachfront restaurants, she downed two bottles of beer, then slept again the entire way back to the port.

After returning to the hotel and having a light dinner, we changed into comfortable clothes and walked along the beach down to Patong. With its back-to-back shops and caf?s, the night streets of Patong had the hum of a red-light district, each of its alleyways concealing a secret glitter. Inside the caf?s, Thai women in bright, flower-patterned mini-skirts and bare feet, their faces so heavily made up you might never recognize the woman beneath it, sat drinking and mixing with Western men under the dim lights. We did not see many newlywed couples. Whenever an occasional tired laugh reached our ears, we would turn, drinks in hand, to see what it was about. As time passed, Mun-hui

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and I became caught up in the hazy atmosphere of the caf?, fooling ourselves that this must be our hour for sweet relaxation, the kind of moment that comes by only rarely in life. Occasionally, some of the Western men in the bar would send laughs in Mun-hui's direction, and when the men caught her eye, her face broke into a quiet smile. I thought of the bar hostess Mun-hui at home in that back alley of Gangwha. She would be approaching the gateway of old age by now. Mun-hui lit up a cigarette, her distraction showing clearly on her face.

"I think I could make a living working here at night as a hostess, then go back home when I get old. That's one possibility."

I gazed deep into Mun-hui's bloodshot eyes.

"It's something every woman in the world fantasizes about."

"Is that so?"

Mun-hui gave a half-hearted laugh. It was as though pain was welling up in her heart again. I ordered two more bottles of beer.

"Just now you were thinking of Mun-hui on Ganghwa Island, weren't you? I recognize the look on your face."

I didn't confirm her suspicion.

"See, I might be a good bar hostess."

Pain welled up within me, too. What in the world were we to do? I told Mun-hui we should stop roving, and asked her to marry me. But Mun-hui didn't take my question seriously. Maybe it wasn't the right time and place for a marriage proposal.

"The little prince of Ganghwa and Mun-hui the barmaid. Could be a good match."

"If we can't marry, I'm going to leave you."

With a fruitless reply, I brought the beer bottle to my lips.

"You love me because of Mun-hui the bar hostess, Hyeong-u! It's crazy, I know, but that day I started to feel jealous of her. So who's in love with whom here?"

It was true, and I admitted the fact. All this time I'd been longing for my Ganghwa Island Mun-hui, but I explained to her that it was all an adolescent stage I'd grown out of now, that the only one I loved was her. Mun-hui said it's one and the same thing, then turned away and would not look me in the eye.

Too tired to walk, Mun-hui and I caught a tuk-tuk back to the hotel, and like two people trying to fill a vast emptiness, hurriedly began making love. As though finding

25

our way through a dark forest, as though scooping up water from the sea, as though making a long journey on foot with an extra pair of straw sandals, we shared a long night of love until the light of daybreak shimmered at the edges of the curtains. Then we fell into a long slumber. I got out of bed in the afternoon and looking in the mirror. I couldn't see myself. A new, unfamiliar emptiness now swelled up in my body and soul like a balloon. We spent the entire day inside the hotel. A light drizzle scurried down on the other side of the window.

On the morning of our fourth day in Thailand, Mun-hui and I paid a visit to Wat Chalong, burned incense, kneeled side by side before the Buddha and each prayed our own prayer. I prayed Mun-hui would marry me. As we exited the temple, I looked up at its roof gilded with gold leaf, and saw a crowd of swallows gathered. That evening at Phuket Airport, Mun-hui and I boarded a plane bound for Seoul. We returned home to find the capital in the throes of a blizzard. That was followed by yet another burst of snow in early March, then suddenly spring arrived. But just as in previous years, the swallows did not return to Seoul with the advent of spring.

6 The days after our trip to Thailand were unbelievably peaceful. A few days into my new job I was assigned to a team in charge of producing corporate promotional videos. I gradually became aware that the heavy shadow of loneliness bearing down on me was slowly lifting in the course of being driven here and there like a madman by a swirl of night shifts and business trips. I constantly made my best effort to hold on to that feeling, to not let it go.

While waiting for her teaching post, Mun-hui worked part-time on the weekdays at a restaurant in Bucheon. Because she only worked Monday through Friday, she continued to meet me in Seoul on the weekends. It was the afternoon of the last Saturday in May and I was waiting for her by the entrance to the City Hall subway station, as usual. A shower began pouring down about 10 minutes before our meeting time, but for some reason, the umbrella-seller I'd always seen around the station was nowhere in sight that day. When Mun-hui arrived on schedule, the rain was coming down in buckets. Of course, she hadn't brought an umbrella, either. We watched the rain pour down on the stone wall of Deoksu Palace for a time, and then Mun-hui made an unexpected suggestion.

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"Let's go visit your mother at Dongdaemun."

I was so floored by her words, I couldn't speak.

"I've wondered what she's like."

All sorts of ideas went willy-nilly through my head. The time had finally arrived, I thought. Time to walk down the aisle with Mun-hui. We went down the subway steps and got on the train bound for Dongdaemun. I wanted to call Mother in advance to tell her we were coming, but Mun-hui wouldn't let me. Let's just pretend we were in the neighborhood and dropped by, she'd said. By the time we were leaving Dongdaemun station, the rain had stopped and the sun was shining.

On that day it so happened Mother was sitting in the shop nicely primped in traditional hanbok. She greeted Mun-hui warmly as though welcoming an old friend, perhaps because she thought she was meeting a prospective future daughter-in-law.

Mun-hui was also friendly towards Mother. Mother asked Mun-hui to come up and sit by her on the narrow stretch of laminated floor, then took Mun-hui's hands in her own.

"I'm so glad you came. Something told me this morning I might have a special guest."

Mother called up a tea house to have coffee delivered, then ordered her employee to go buy some boiled eggs and sandwiches. There was no space for me to sit with them, so I decided to leave the two women alone while they talked. I went outside and passed the time looking around the neighboring shops. Thirty minutes later, I came back without the foggiest notion of what the two had been talking about in my absence. When I walked through the door, Mother was speaking.

"That's why when you came into the shop I was so surprised, it was like seeing myself at your age."

I was seized by an ominous feeling in my gut. Mother. No. "It felt like you'd been away all this time and finally returned to me. Like the swallows coming home in the spring, on the third day of the third lunar month."

I reflexively inspected Mun-hui's face. Her face bore a hardened expression, but her smile had not disappeared. Something was wrong. Cradling her coffee cup in both hands, Mun-hui turned to look at me with a smile that seemed deliberately aloof.

"They say that a son grows up and finds a girl like his mother. That's certainly the case with my son."

Mother had never understood a single thing about me, her very own boy. I'd surely

27

never wanted to find a girl like her, nor had I ever missed Mother when I was away from her. And now she'd brought up the topic of marriage much too hastily. I couldn't get a word in edgewise.

"It'll take some time for you to get your teaching post and begin your teaching career.

How about setting the wedding date for next spring?"

Mun-hui cautiously backed off from the topic.

"My family still doesn't know that I'm dating Hyeong-u. And, as you said, I haven't been assigned to a school district yet. But I'll bring it up with my family next time I have a chance."

"Yes, why don't you do that."

Dismissing Mother's insistent suggestion that we wait around so she could take Munhui and I to dinner, we left Dongdaemun Market and took a taxi to Dongsung-dong. We got off at Marronnier Park and, although it was still early evening, went to a murkily-lit caf? and ordered beers. Light streamed in through the long, rectangular windows above us, and came to rest on the caf?'s door. There was something shaky and insecure in the air again.

"You seemed pretty confused back there."

Mun-hui replied in a steady voice.

"Yes, well, a little."

"I hope you won't give too much thought to what Mother said."

Of course Mun-hui knew what I was referring to.

"But I had the same feeling as she did. There really is something similar about us."

No, I wouldn't hear that sort of talk. I hadn't spent all my life suffering and drifting from place to place just to marry a girl like my mother. Mun-hui looked up and stared into the glare entering through the broad expanse of the window. For a split-second I couldn't see Mun-hui's face. As though it had been erased.

"The swallows are all gathering on the roof."

Mun-hui was drawing me into her reverie. But she seemed to be seeing the flocks of swallows descending on the plains of Ganghwa, while I was seeing the swallows on the temple roof at Wat Chalong.

"Your mother said that when the swallows cry, it means you're going to end up lonely or in some faraway place alone, and that's why she leaves home at the first snowfall."

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"People may leave, but they come back. Just like we flew to Thailand and made it back alive."

Mun-hui wasn't listening to me.

"She said I would leave you, too, Hyeong-u. And then come back again."

I learned later that during the course of my conversation with Mun-hui in Dongsung-dong, Mother had walked out of the shop in Dongdaemun and didn't return home until two days later. This time she confessed to Father where she had gone. She said she'd been to the old house in Ganghwa. I searched the phone directory for the number of the couple Mun-hui and I had shared a meal with on Ganghwa Island. The wife confirmed Mother's story. Mother had stayed with them at the old house those two days.

It was around this time that I learned from Father that I have an older sister, or rather, I would have if she had lived. She had contracted the measles and not long after, at a clinic in town, passed from the world after a final, thin cry on the night of her second birthday.

Father told me that she would have turned three the year I was born. But even that still didn't explain Mother's puzzling absences from home every winter.

7 As Mother predicted, Mun-hui left me in the fall. There was a reason. Her boyfriend in the army had lost his father and received an early discharge due to family hardship. His father had suffered from symptoms of high blood pressure and had suddenly collapsed a month ago while visiting a neighboring public bathhouse. He expired in the ambulance on the way to the hospital without a stitch of clothing on. The boyfriend was the only son and the eldest grandson, to boot.

As soon as the boyfriend had filed his discharge papers, he'd headed straight to the school where Mun-hui had started her teaching job. As all her colleagues looked on, he'd begged her to come back to him. He'd behaved violently, like a soldier gone AWOL. Then the following day, having somehow discovered where I worked, he came barging into my office, getting down on his knees and begging me to give Mun-hui back, refusing to budge from the spot for a full hour. When I continued to refuse, he shot up off the floor like a rocket and said he would go back to Mun-hui's school and settle the matter once and for all.

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Financially speaking, Mun-hui was in no position to forfeit her teaching job over such an embarrassing incident. She had already gone to the principal's office with a letter explaining the situation. Like her army boyfriend, she got down on her knees and pleaded. But the solution offered by the principal really took the cake. The only way to quiet the rumors and remain an educator, he said, was to wed the disruptive intruder from the previous day. Moreover, the principal offered to take it upon himself to be master of ceremonies since she was, after all, like a daughter to him.

That evening, I called Mun-hui and suggested that we meet near Gwanghwamun. I implored her to put in for a transfer and marry me before the end of autumn. Mun-hui, her head hung low the entire time, suddenly shed tears and begged me to please let her go back to the other man. She said he had been her first love, and that was the last word she spoke before we parted ways. Many years later, Mun-hui's first love was appointed a professor at a provincial university, but in the early years throughout his marriage to Mun-hui, he struggled as a part-time lecturer, and on top of that, rumors abounded that he was a sadistic pervert, an alcoholic, and a perpetual womanizer. These rumors reached me eventually.

When the phone call came five years later, Mun-hui had already been divorced for a few months. She said her ex-husband hadn't wasted any time shacking up with another woman. Mun-hui had requested a leave from teaching and was living alone in a small village named Seongsan in Gangwon Province, though how she had ended up there she didn't explain. I met Mun-hui one evening at Gyeongpodae Beach on the last Saturday in October. She had changed tremendously. She was only thirty but had put on a lot of weight and no longer kept up her appearance, which made her the spitting image of an over-the-hill hostess of a small town tavern. Mun-hui and I reminisced about the old days as we sat side by side on the sand, hugging our knees and gazing at the autumn sea.

"Did you really have to take a leave from teaching? At times like this, work can help keep your mind off your troubles."

"Keeping my mind isn't something I worry about anymore."

My gaze trailed a seagull flying low over the deep blue water.

"It's good we didn't have kids. Neither one of us wanted any." "……………."

"Living with him totally ruined me as a woman. So why should I care about keeping

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my mind? From our first day as newlyweds, he started digging into everything from my past. Bearing it was like a slow form of torture. I asked for a divorce when we got back from the honeymoon but he wouldn't hear of it. And he wouldn't stop pestering me for a single minute. Not until the day three months ago when our divorce went through. He simply came home one day and announced that he had a girlfriend. He handed me the divorce papers, got my signature, and a few days later summoned me to court. I don't know why, but I couldn't cry a tear. I figured I was getting what I deserved for having lived so self-destructively."

Darkness fell on the water and the wind grew colder. I suggested that we go and find a restaurant where we could talk.

"In that case let's go to Seongsan and eat there. It's famous for braised haddock heads.

Lots of haddock are caught in the East Sea during the winter months. They use the meat to make fish flakes and bring the leftover heads to Seongsan where people cook them."

I hadn't come all this way to eat haddock heads, but I didn't want to argue. I helped Mun-hui into the passenger seat of my car and drove to Seongsan, a village at the foot of Daegwallyeong Pass. The fog on the water seemed to pursue us from behind like a tidal wave. When we got to Seongsan, the town was enveloped by darkness that reminded me of squid ink. Only a few fluorescent lights glowed like ghosts in the pitch-dark. I parked the car in front of a restaurant and we went inside. Mun-hui ordered braised haddock cheek and asked for a pitcher of beer while we waited.

After one glass, she looked drunk.

"Did you ever marry?"

A few men, probably locals, were conversing noisily on the other side of the room. From the moment we entered the restaurant, I felt a nagging uneasiness that they were watching us. I told Mun-hui the truth that I hadn't married, but was dating someone.

"She's two years younger that me. We work at the same company."

"Who asked whom out on the first date?"

I maintained a blank expression as I looked at Mun-hui's face.

"I did. I liked her from my first day on the job, and still do."

"The man makes the woman, you know. So be good to her."

"Judging from my father, I wouldn't say that's entirely true. A relationship is something a man and a woman build together, little by little, like a house."

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Mun-hui's extended her parched-looking hands and refilled my glass.

"I'm relieved to hear that you've met someone you like. Truth is, there are no words more selfish and irresponsible than 'I love you.' In the end, you're going to take everything the other person has to give. But you should never take everything."

"That's why if you love somebody you end up hating them. Just like my father hated my mother his whole life."

"Did you hate me?"

"I did."

"Can I ask you if you still do?" "‌‌..I've no right to talk about that."

"Why is that?"

"As you said yourself, Mun-hui, we should never have taken the same bus back to Seoul, I should never have gone looking for you at your school, and I shouldn't have taken you to Ganghwa Island. Having done what we did, we should have had the sense to keep some distance between us and gotten to know one another gradually and grown closer that way, but from the beginning I pounced on you and wanted to take all of you, all at once. Irresponsible and selfish. So now at this point, how could I possibly say I hate you?"

"And isn't it exactly the same for me? After we returned from Thailand I should have made myself stop going back and forth."

Just then, I overheard one of the men drinking across the room grumble loudly as though he were intent on us hearing him.

"She's really got her claws into that guy. Somebody grab the bitch and take her out of here. Sitting there drinking day in and day out . . . gives a bad impression of this town."

Mun-hui didn't bat an eye. I had planned to drive back to Seoul that night, but it didn't seem right to just go off and leave her there. I tried pleaded with her.

"You should wrap up matters here, and come back to Seoul."

"Why go back there? It's not like anyone's waiting for me."

"If you go back to teaching, there'll be people around to give you a hand. All you have to do is not push them away."

Mun-hui responded, but her reply didn't make any sense.

"The day I stop hearing the sound of the rocks rolling, I'll go back. But not until then."

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We left the restaurant around ten o'clock and I followed Mun-hui to her place: an old Japanese colonial-style house, the only one of its kind still standing in the village, with a yard overspread thickly with gravel. The door was varnished black with coal tar. When we stepped through the doorway, we were met by darkness and gloom. When Mun-hui switched on the light, the darkness retreated, but another darkness seemed to be lurking up the wooden staircase on the second floor. I asked her how she'd ended up in such a place.

It had all happened three months ago. She was spending some time in Gangneung alone to get a fresh lease on life, and was on her way back to Seoul. A rainstorm hit suddenly and they had to close the pass at Daegwallyeong, leaving the bus driver no choice but to head back to downtown Gangneung. In the midst of all the commotion, Mun-hui had spotted the dark Japanese house through the fogged up bus window. Asking the bus driver to stop, she got off and ran to a nearby restaurant to get out of the downpour. The restaurant owner explained to Mun-hui that the house was owned by an old gentleman from Seoul who occupied the house for only a few days in the summer. This gentleman was in his seventies and had a transport business in Seoul. The old man, it so happened, was at the house that night. Mun-hui went to the house and asked the owner if he might have space to put her up until morning. Without a moment's hesitation, the old man invited her in and offered her coffee. He asked her how she had ended up at his door on such a stormy night. Mun-hui spoke frankly, telling him about all the problems that had recently befallen her. She had just acted on her feelings, she'd said. After listening to Mun-hui's story, he graciously offered her the use of his house for a few days until she was ready to go back home. Or even a few months, if she wanted.

The terrible storm raged on all night long, raining down buckets on Seongsan. Munhui had nightmares through it all, nightmares about rocks thundering down a hill. In the morning she took her umbrella and went outside, crossing the road to see the stream on the other side. Muddy currents that had swept in from the Daegwallyeong Valley were coursing furiously on their way down to the sea. And with it, came the roar of rocks, deep rolling, booming sounds, as they were being washed downstream by the rapids. It was the same sound she'd heard in her sleep. As the sound of the rocks rolling down with the flood waters came to her ears, Mun-hui began to wail. It was like the sound of her soul crumbling around her.

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Mun-hui took a few bottles of beer out of the refrigerator and set them on the table.

We slowly drank and listened to the pattering of raindrops at the windows. All I could do was keep repeating myself like a croaking frog, telling Mun-hui again and again that she should come back to Seoul. A despair welled up within me as I realized those were the only words I could offer her.

A clock on the wall struck midnight.

"I was planning on inviting you to stay tonight, but now I think I should have you go.

Go home. I'm going upstairs to get some sleep. As I said, I'll leave here when the rocks stop rolling. Then I'll go back to Seoul. I promise."

In March 1994, Mun-hui returned as promised and took up teaching again. In September, I married the company colleague I'd dated for two years. A month before the wedding, I took leave from work and went to Thailand alone without telling anyone where I was going. Some months after that, my wife became pregnant with our child. I decided on a name before my son was born-"Gang-nam," which means 'south of the river.' As the child grew, I was amazed to see a tuft of hair appear at the nape of his neck, which people call a 'swallow's tail.' I'm told that as a young boy I had one, too. That's how blood passes from one generation to the next.

8 Mother returned to Ganghwa Island in the spring of 2000. She had turned 64. I was six years into my marriage, and our child was now a big five year-old. Father had chosen to stay behind in Seoul. He managed his fish cake factory, returning home every night to an empty room until two years ago, when a fifty-something widow moved in with him. As he described in his own words, he was spending his twilight years comfortably and enjoying life.

Living on her own in Ganghwa, Mother began getting ready for death early. She picked out the traditional ramie outfit she was to be buried in, and took a bath every night before bedtime, just in case. Her diet consisted of only thin gruel with a little soy sauce for breakfast, and bean-paste soup for supper. And she spent each and every day cleaning and sweeping the house. The only variation in her schedule was the short trip she made into town every three weeks for a visit to the market. According to the neighbors, she made occasional visits to Hamheodongcheon Valley and Dongmak Beach

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as well.

I caught on to the fact that Mother was planning for death only after she started planting flowers around the outhouse, a project begun the year she returned to the island. She'd planted rose moss, zinnias, dahlias, hollyhock, four o'clocks, even cosmos and chrysanthemums, tending to that corner of the yard as if it were her flower bed.

Mother said she did not wish to cast off her earthly body in the cold winter. Though she knew it wasn't something she could control, she often said she wanted to leave the world as if she were dropping off to sleep, and at a time when the flowers are in bloom.

Or at least, she said, before frost set in.

With his new family, Father never returned to Ganghwa. Legally, Mother was still his wife, but to him, she was as good as gone. Perhaps the long lonely years made him callous. During Chuseok and the Lunar New Year holidays, I took my wife and child to visit Mother. But she would allow no visitors on her birthday on the grounds that it was her one day to be alone. The only thing she did the whole day, I was certain, was sit out on the veranda, gazing up at the eaves waiting for the swallows to come.

When I went to visit Mother during Chuseok last year, I asked her a question I'd been keeping bottled up inside.

"Where did you go every year when you left home at the first snowfall?"

Mother looked at me with a curious smile and made her confession.

"I'd get on a bus or a train headed anywhere, it didn't matter where, and at night I'd get off somewhere along the line. I'd wander around. Somehow I'd always end up with food to eat and a place to sleep. Then I might help out at a restaurant or a pub for a few days and one thing would lead to another, and I might follow some widower home, cook for him and spend time together, or something like that. That's how things always turned out." "‌‌."

"What! You don't believe your mother?"

Dumbfounded at what she'd said, an unintended reply came darting out of my mouth.

"Well, good for you."

Mother did not stop there.

"But I regret nothing. Though it probably hurt your father a little."

"Not just Father. Do you have any idea how many people you hurt?"

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She responded, but with clear reluctance.

"Did I?" In my experience, people who shut loved ones out of their life or otherwise cause suffering do so without realizing what they're doing. My wife and child were asleep in the next room, or perhaps they were listening to our conversation. But I no longer cared if my wife heard every word. Mother and I had been talking for quite some time when she asked me a question. It was as if she had only just gotten around to remembering.

"That girl who stopped by the shop at Dongdaemun, things have been going good for her?"

"Yes, but lately we've been out of touch."

Mun-hui got married again in the spring of 1995, to her psychiatrist. But sadly, this second marriage fared no better than the first. They split up after just one year. Three years later she met a furniture manufacturer-40 and still single-and the two were wed in a ceremony in the Mt. Namsan area. Mun-hui was thirty-five at the time. I went to see her in the bridal reception room and in the few brief moments of our conversation Munhui joked, "This time we should honeymoon in Phuket, don't you think?" The newlyweds did leave for Phuket the next day, and a short two months later she phoned me to say that she had seen an obstetrician the day before and found out she was pregnant.

After that, Mun-hui quit teaching for good and I didn't hear from her again until her child turned seven. Then, just this year, on the afternoon of April 25th, she phoned to tell me that during a visit to the newly-restored Cheonggyecheon stream downtown, she'd seen a flock of swallows. She said that she'd seen as many swallows flocked in the skies there as she had over the fields that evening long ago on Ganghwa. Mun-hui's voice soon grew quiet, like the sound of a river that's reached the end of its course. The sound of the roaring river rocks had ceased.

As I hung up the phone that day, a thought of Mother flashed into my mind, but I knew that a call to her was unnecessary. If what Mun-hui said was true, it would mean that the swallows had returned to Ganghwa Island as well. I sat staring out the window for a moment, then changed clothes and descended to the underground parking garage. Then I got in the car and drove to Ganghwa Island. I passed Gimpo and reached the Ganghwa Bridge, where I realized that the checkpoint was no more. Actually, the checkpoint itself

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was still intact, but there were no armed soldiers around checking identification cards.

I parked my car at the entrance to the town market and headed straight for the alley of hostess bars hoping to see Mun-hui after 35 years. Over 20 years had flown by since Mun-hui and I had come there by bus from Sinchon Market.

9 The alley was still there-where would it have gone, one would think-hidden away out of the sunlight in the same old spot. Only a few pubs were still standing, but those that remained looked much as they had before. The old rooftops of coupled slate and zinc, the slanting eaves, signs that threatened to come crashing down at a touch of the hand‌.Fork in the Road, The Crane, Gyodong Bar, Myeog-suk, The Pier, Spring Rain, Bomun Bar, Seogeomdo, Sondolmok and Mun-hui.

I lit myself a cigarette and for quite a while I just smoked, pacing back and forth by the sign on the door where as a boy of ten I'd waited for my father. The little boy was now a man in his mid-forties, newly arrived after ending his long, protracted spell of youthful wandering; standing here, face to face with that bygone time. It felt as though at any moment someone might open the door and hand over a plate of leftover bar food. She would look down at him in her shabby hanbok, her eyes weary from the nostalgia of a life spent in transit, and yet wearing a flushed smile that reminded him of certain oldstyle masks worn by characters acting the part of a bride, her expression full of sadness and lament, sad even for the scent of powder from her body.

I knocked on the door of the ruins. While my mind leapt back and forth between anticipation and fear, I sensed the desolation of passing time. Before long I heard the noise of slippers dragging across the floor. By the sound, I guessed it was a woman of thirty. Then with a rolling sound of pulleys the door opened and a woman in a dress the color of red chili paste peered out through the doorway. Looking me up and down as I stood there in my suit and tie, she spoke in a wary voice.

"What is it?"

Her eyes were faintly bloodshot and her breath reeked of alcohol. I'm looking for the owner, I said. Her response was more like a sneeze, as though she hadn't quite understood my words.

"Owner?"

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"The owner of this pub, granny Mun-hui."

I could not control the pounding of my heart. But she was wearing me out with the same old question.

"What do you want?"

"Please tell her that there's somebody here that absolutely must see her. Say I've come back after 35 years."

Perhaps grasping the unusual nature of my visit, she went back inside leaving the door wide open. I was on my second cigarette when the woman appeared again and told me to come in. Unlike the image I'd carried in my mind, the interior of the pub was small and about as hard up as you could imagine. There was only space for four tables in the main hall, with just one other room off to the side of the kitchen. On the walls were a few promotional calendars from beer companies, and hanging from a nail, a print of the Gim Gi-chang ink painting "Fool's Landscape" encased in a frame host to piles of fly dung. An old woman looked out at me from the room by the kitchen. She was tilting her head as though puzzled. I pulled a chair over closer to her and sat down by the door.

"I've come from Seoul to have a drink with you."

The old woman gave me a suspicious look.

"Well, at first I thought 'Who's this handsome guy?' But I see now you're just a crazy man!"

The woman from the front door stood, arms crossed, giggling.

"Granny Mun-hui-am I right?"

"That's right, my boy!"

"I grew up on this island. Yangdo Village."

The old woman rolled her eyes and then examined my face slowly and carefully.

"So what?"

"It's been such a long time you probably don't remember, but I came here with my father once when I was ten. Back when Park Chung-hee was President. I waited in the alley while Father was in here drinking. You brought me some snack food, remember?

And you were wearing a blue jeogori on top and a yellow skirt." "‌‌.So?" "On the other side of that door you gave me a hug and kissed me."

"I don't recall that. I don't remember. You'd better get out of here!"

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But she did not sound as though she really meant to chase me out. The old woman felt around in her skirt pocket, took out a cigarette and lit it.

"Are you sure you don't remember? I called you 'auntie' that day and you just laughed and laughed. When I got home Mother really chewed me out! Because my face was covered with lipstick stains!"

The hand that held the old woman's cigarette was shaking slightly. Heaving a dry cough amid the smoke, she wriggled her body closer to the threshold between us and slipped on a pair of shoes that had been sitting overturned on the floor. Then in a low voice she spoke to the woman still standing behind me.

"Yeon-suk, my throat's a bit parched, so bring out some rice wine. Then go into the kitchen and cut up some flounder and make a herring salad."

While the woman was busy in the kitchen, the old woman walked over and sat down in the chair across from me with her body turned sideways. Her cigarette had burned down to its butt and she stubbed it out in the nickel-plated ashtray. She inspected my face again. Remembering me wouldn't be an easy matter. We had only exchanged a few words by the light of the shop sign in the alley, and by then night had already fallen. And all of this was 35 years ago. But even so, I could discern in the old woman's wrinkled visage the way Mun-hui had looked that night. Plump cheeks, a mouth skewed slightly to the left, a purplish mole beneath her ear, the fold of her eyelids (a Western-like feature rarely seen in the days before cosmetic surgery), her thin eyebrows, her smooth forehead pale and round as a gourd.

The old woman seemed to be aware that I was recollecting her facial features. But she still couldn't recognize me.

"Sorry, but I can't seem to remember."

She lifted the kettle and filled her bowl to the brim with milky rice wine. I took a sip from the bowl she offered to me. As she placed the bowl back down on the table, the old woman peered into my face again with narrowed eyes .

"Aren't you the son of the farmer's land union family?"

Before I could get the words out, my hands had already reached out and clutched the old woman's.

"That's right! You do remember!"

She screwed up her lips and chuckled.

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"Yes, I can still see your father's face. For two years he came here every chance he got, then one day he upped and left and never showed his face again. Is he still alive?"

"He's been running a fish cake factory in Noryangjin for nearly 30 years now."

I told the old woman everything I knew of Father's life since the year he left Ganghwa. She listened attentively, clicking her tongue and murmuring.

"He used to babble on about how he was going to take me away one of these days, and now he's settled with a young widow. Your poor mother‌ husband abandoning her at her age. No surprise though, seeing as how he played around in his younger days. Tut, tut!" "‌.She came back to Ganghwa a few years ago and lives in the old house alone now, growing flowers out by the outhouse."

"Well, she must be getting ready to die."

"She's still going strong."

A drunken expression settled on her face, and then a flickering of grayish shadows. She seemed to be thinking back, long ago, to her younger days.

"So now, why come here looking for me? Have out with it."

I began to tell the story that I had kept in my heart for so long.

"Don't get angry at me for saying this. I've missed you so much all these years. I came back to see you once before, 20 years ago, but the door was locked so I had to turn back."

Her wrinkled face broke into a faint smile then she spoke as though she was suddenly holding something against me.

"You have a glib tongue, just like your father."

"You're right. That's why I came again to see you."

"So where were you all this time? What have you been doing?"

At that point, I found myself unable to speak. It felt as if my heart would burst at every word she uttered.

"Kid, when you get old even the slightest thing can make you get all misty-eyed. Where do you get the nerve sitting there talking like that to me?"

"I'm so happy to have this chance to see you again."

"Stop talking baloney and drink up! Here, let me pour you another."

"I never dreamed I'd be able to see you again."

By that time, the old woman gave vague signs of knowing what I had in mind.

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"All right, I'm not going to kick you out tonight so talk and drink as much as you want before you go. But leave my old heart alone. I've spent my whole life selling drinks to men, but I've yet to cry in front of one."

Then there appeared, from somewhere, a streaming light. A large, purple shadow flickered behind the old woman like a lotus leaf. That light gradually took on a human form and became a silhouette that seemed to be embracing the old woman from behind.

To me, it seemed an avatar of eternity had come and was gently spinning a protective cocoon around the old woman's body. Then, as though from a dream, these words met my ears.

'I've got an aching back and pain in all of my muscles and joints. I should rest. My life hasn't been an easy one. But even such a life as mine only goes around once, so I can bear it. I still don't know which way to go. I just look out my door each night and wonder."

Hearing these words so familiar to my ears and my heart, I muttered to myself as though in reply, 'Someone said there's an eternal land. And we're all like birds from that land, here for a short while before we fly off again. When you get there, I pray you will rest there forever. Without worry that you'll have to come back for another life."

Fully immersed in my drunken soliloquy, I found myself craning my neck like a snapping turtle, delivering questions at the old woman in a slurring tone, caught up in the swirl of alcohol.

"One more thing! Is your name really Mun-hui?"

I had a hunch that at some point before I left Mun-hui's pub, the dam waters of my heart would break free. And the moment was not long in coming.

"I ask you, is it really Mun-hui?"

"You little.., what do you think it is then, Bong-hui?"

"Well, there's Yeong-hui, there's Seon-hui and there's Myeong-hui!"

"Just listen to this kid talk! Mun-hui's my name all right. Yi Mun-hui! Satisfied?"

At that, the tears I had been holding back began to flow. Then for the crowning blow, I ended up falling into Mun-hui's arms and wailing like a child. Old Mun-hui stared down at me, her eyes wide open in surprise, then she folded me in her arms, patting my back and stroking my head. And then she spat out, as if she were wailing with me.

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"Aigo, my child! Something must have given way in your heart. That's what happened.

My poor child, what are we to do?"

At some point, while listening to old Mun-hui's mutterings, I fell like a child into a slumber, exhausted.

When my wife's call came through on my cell phone, I was lying in old Mun-hui's room. Somehow, there in the dark room, I was all alone.

Copyright 2008 Literature Translation Institute of Korea

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