The Calligrapher's Daughter (15 page)

He thought that at age fourteen Najin was woman enough. She’d graduate from the girls’ school when the term ended in three months, and what better time than soon after that? A providential harvest moon wedding! And since such a decision was beyond his wife’s role, it mattered little that she would be opposed. The Kabo Reforms said women couldn’t be married until sixteen, men until twenty, but this unenforceable law was generally ignored.

Han considered it his personal responsibility to challenge Japan’s attempts to suppress Korea’s mores and ethics. Hadn’t he refused to name his own daughter for that very reason? After the death of so many infants in his attempts for an heir, it was difficult to deny the irony that the first to survive was female, and one with health that was as stubbornly strong as her obstreperous personality. Now there was Ilsun. Japan’s laws were meant to eradicate the ancient moral right of male ascendancy, and he refused to support the implication that a female child could come into this world with the same rights as men. He believed that the highest standard of resistance was existential. He would campaign against colonialism with the example of his own life choices. At first he had little desire to find a name for a girl-child whose birth a few weeks after the Treaty of Annexation foreshadowed Korea’s decline. And then as she grew, the Japanese occupation also grew entrenched. The more his traditions fell by the wayside of modernization, which he blamed entirely on the Japanese, the more he saw that his daughter thrived in the change, and she came to represent to him Korea’s failures. He would resist the failure that surrounded him by refusing to name it—by refusing to name her.

Han wrote his letter and thought little of this resolve that had evolved over time—time that was its own kind of god, one that allowed procrastination, justification, forgetfulness—means to excuse one’s own failings. He dipped his brush in ink, his thoughts centered on his moral obligation to his ancestry. As his father and his father’s father would have wished, it was also his desire that his daughter be attached to an appropriately scholarly family. But damage had been done. He’d need a family liberal enough to accept a missionary-educated girl, yet traditional enough to subdue his daughter’s
ambitions for more. His prediction that the imperial educational initiatives were thinly veiled plans to educate Korean youth into becoming Japanese sympathizers had come true.
They can build a thousand public schools
, Han thought,
they can ban our native tongue, our flag, the teaching of our long independent history, but they cannot abrogate our traditions.

To prevent his wife’s involvement in the engagement, he’d eschew the services of a matchmaker to spy on the boy’s family. Besides, he knew them well enough. Han remembered the boy’s father from their days studying together at the Confucian Academy, preparing for the civil examinations, until the reforms had eliminated the exams, which were the only opportunity he’d had to gain a ministerial post and follow his ancestors’ tradition of officialdom. Instead, he was left to wait for royal recognition through occasional commissions for artwork or calligraphy. Yes, he had gained renown, but the method had been slow and undignified.

The prospective groom’s father, Chae, slightly younger than Han, was a lesser scholar from Yuncheon, one hundred li east in the mountains, a day-and-a-half journey. They were both painters in the Chusa tradition, and Han remembered that Chae was as much of a stickler for form and propriety as he was. Plus, he’d heard that Chae, a leader in his village, had been jailed and tortured for his participation in the March First movement. Upon learning this, Han had renewed the acquaintance and regularly corresponded with Chae as part of his resistance activities. In yesterday’s letter, Chae had casually mentioned that his eldest son had turned twelve, and he would be honored if Han might consider a union between the two families.

So be it. His daughter’s graduation come July would satisfy his wife’s wish that the girl was schooled. If his wife needed help with domestic duties in lieu of his daughter’s hands, she could find a decent girl who’d be grateful to work. In fact, since they were squeezing more taxes from everyone, there were plenty of girls from good families who’d embrace such an opportunity.
Aiu!
How irritating to think of women’s concerns! But among those concerns was Ilsun’s development. His son was exhibiting many of the rambunctious traits of his daughter—the prime reason to have her married off. It annoyed him that he was forced to pay attention to the children at all, but somehow he kept being drawn into their affairs. He
was torn between his Confucian duty to ignore his young son lest he spoil him, and the fact that Ilsun was, after all, quite a plucky boy!

Although Ilsun’s tutor, Khang, was quite old and not at all famed, he was a
chinsa
, a certified poet-scholar in the old tradition, and a vestige of the crumbling Confucian University in southern Gaeseong. Han had enjoyed a few evenings discussing poetry, history and philosophy with him, confirming that Khang was sufficiently versed to take on Ilsun’s classical education.

Every now and then, during his habitual morning walk through his estate and to town, Han stopped in his son’s study to listen to Ilsun’s lessons. He appreciated the detailed attention Khang Chinsa gave to the T’ang Dynasty classics, and the chinsa’s firm reproaches for Ilsun’s mistakes. Hearing his son’s five-year-old timbre reciting passages with exquisite clarity brought pride that wet Han’s eyes. But his hardest struggle against pride was when he regarded Ilsun’s calligraphy. For one so young, the boy showed remarkable communion with the brush. He had a natural instinct for pressure and stroke, as if his little boy’s arm possessed an ancient sage’s wisdom of the correct life force needed to express harmony between letterform and its meaning.

Yes, Han expected greatness from Ilsun. He refused to lament that Korea might never again be the kind of genteel nation that recognized classical scholarship and artistry. In one mere decade he’d witnessed a dependable and flourishing way of life, which had remained unchanged for centuries, fray like the tail of a kite caught in the razor winds of imperial breath. Winds of such violence could just as easily blow the other way.

Using a sophisticated code of metaphor and nuance that had developed among the yangban resistance, Han ended his sincere response to Chae’s marriage proposal with a poem that reported on the growing presence of Japanese spies and the workings of key individuals in Gaeseong’s independence movement:

With this, Han conveyed that the number of Japanese police had multiplied, and revolutionaries with the code names Crane and Mule had traveled west to Shanghai with five hundred won for Rhee’s provisional government. By “songs” and “seeds,” Han alerted Chae to watch for articles published by the men in the national Christian weekly. He felt confident that the unrefined Japanese censors would see nothing hidden in a dreadful sijo about farming! He considered the large sum he’d given to “Crane” for Shanghai. He would have to reduce such contributions, though they never ceased asking for more. Taxes took anything extra from the farm, and it had been months since his last painting commission, a simple calligraphic scroll. Once he saw that a known collaborator in the palace had stamped the commission, he never fulfilled the order. With no income from calligraphy or painting, every donation he made to Shanghai now came directly from the family savings. This was the other reason Chae’s proposal for his daughter’s hand was timely; Han could no longer afford private secondary school for her or, God forbid, fees for Ewha Women’s College.

He called for Joong, who hurried across the courtyard, shoes flapping. His servant crouched in the doorway to receive instructions. Joong, narrow-framed with a chest like a spoon, was yet unmarried at thirty-one. High cheekbones accented the crescents of his eyes and a boned ridge along his brow. His family had been serfs and slaves to generations of Hans. Slavery was abolished by the reforms, but Joong’s mother, uncles, brothers and their wives still tended Han farmlands in a village sixty li north. As part of his household position, Joong received Han’s worn clothing, except for the garments that distinguished the scholar’s status, and had garnered a bonus of beautiful clothes when Han’s younger brother had married and moved to Manchuria. As head of his family, his father having died years ago, Joong had responsibly taken the spare clothing to his uncle and brothers on his annual visit home.

Han folded and sealed the letter and gave Joong coins for the post, cursing as he silently admitted that for the price of a few jeon, he could rely on the letter arriving in Chae’s hands within days, rather than having to send his servant to Yuncheon. The postal service had escalated in reach and efficiency after the Japanese crisscrossed the country with train tracks. The image had once inspired him to create an unusually stark
painting: a resplendent phoenix struggling to fly in iron chains. It was urgent that Ilsun receive classical training. The last time Han had visited Deacon Hwang, there were men of all ages sitting together, not just chronological peers. What would be next? Women and babies joining in men’s talk?

Han sighed. His consent in the mail, he would soon tell his wife. For now, he perused his winnowed shelves and settled on a slim volume of poems on the renewal of spring. When his wife appeared with Cook to ask if he wished to eat in his study, Han felt refreshed from his reading.

“In my sitting room,” he said, choosing that formal setting as preferable for her to receive his decision. His wife took the tray from Cook and followed him, and after he sat, she arranged it so comfortably and with such pleasing grace that he was loath to ruin the simple moment of domestic harmony with upset. He said nothing, and she left.

He ate slowly, selecting morsels of rice, spring greens, winter radish gimchi, mashed soybean flavored with pork belly, and egg pancakes with wild leeks as carefully as he’d choose the words to tell her. Perfectly balanced in the ancient fivefold way, the food, washed down with sips of bone broth, sank warmly to his stomach. He quietly gave thanks for his wife’s cooking skill, which with every meal provided variety and nutrition, and kept his sensitive digestion in balance.

After he’d eaten and Cook removed the dishes, he reached for his tobacco box and called for his wife. She sat before him, poured wine and folded her hands together on her lap. Her skin shone with the kitchen’s heat, and though he surmised her mind was always busy with household planning or the children’s concerns, she appeared calm and untroubled, the moon curves of her face still as smooth and pale as when he first saw her on their wedding day. He had been twenty; she, seventeen. Except for her well-defined nose, she had classic beauty, her eyes like two clean strokes of ink, her brow smooth and rounded.

The serene lines of his sparsely furnished room gleamed in slants of afternoon light. Birds chattered happily outside. He could hear their wings beating against budding tender leaves. He sucked dryly on his pipe. “Yuhbo, your daughter will soon receive a chest of fabric for her trousseau.” The groom’s family typically sent these early gifts—the first exchange toward the coming bond. Ignoring his wife’s sudden sharp
intake of breath and her surprised eyes directly on his, Han tapped and filled his pipe, and as she lit it, he noted that her fingers trembled. “From the yangban son of Chae Julpyang in Yuncheon. We studied together and I know his is an honorable family.”

“But she has school until—”

“After her graduation. A harvest moon wedding. It’s settled.”

Her cheeks flamed. “Without once consulting your wife?”

His eyes narrowed and his mouth tensed in dismay. Never before had she raised her voice to him. “It is my right.”

She straightened and glared openly. “Our only daughter. She’s far too young!”

“The boy is twelve. It’s a respectable gap. They’ll have enough years before children.”

“And you would refuse me the courtesy to decide for myself if this boy-husband is appropriate for her?”

“The decision is made! The letter of agreement was sent this very morning.”

“This morning? She’s still a child and not yours alone!”

Why would his wife persist in creating such outright discomfort between them? Having never seen it before, he hadn’t expected her anger. “Your own mother married at this age.”

“Yes,” she said, her mouth bitter. “And lost three babies because of her youth.”

“The girl is strong—”

“And intelligent and educated and deserving of better consideration than this!”

He smelled bile on his breath. “How dare you talk to me thus! You’ve roused the entire house with your anger!”

“Your action provoked it, your old-fashioned ideas! Are they even Christians?”

He tapped his pipe so hard it broke. He threw it across the room and it narrowly missed striking her cheek before shattering against the wall.

She paid no attention to the tobacco embers smoldering by her knee. Her voice was low and tight. “No one marries at this age anymore. And for good reason! What of a Christian marriage? What of your own Christian vows? I can’t allow her to go, too young, still so much to learn, my
hopes, her education—” She faltered as tears captured her breath, but she did not lower her eyes.

“She’s had education enough. And see what it’s done! She’s less worthy as a bride. Her mind is full of the outside and her actions are as bold as a peasant’s. Before she becomes completely useless she must marry! What does it matter if they’re Christian or not? We owe everything to the generational traditions of my family. What is more venerable—a Christian visitation of a mere few centuries or thousands of peaceful years of orthodox living?” His nose flared; his breath flew hot in his lungs. “Woman—you make me argue with you—I won’t have it!”