Phantom of Greatness

Sun Rhee Chi

Description

The Phantom of Greatness is part of a four part series which encompasses the history of Korea from the 1940 invasion by Japan to the present. In the first volume, Mija, a Korean girl and Ichiro, a Japanese college student, accidentally fall in love. Although parents of both offspring order the two to avoid meeting, they disobey their parents and marry. Through this marriage, a variety of obstacles are created and we learn the intimate details of Korean culture, history, and manners. The conflict between Japan and Korea, symbolized in part by this unusual marriage, threatens to tear the fabric of such a union. Through the eyes of Ichiro, we learn much about South Korea, its strong work ethic, its ability to move onward against impossible odds.

Sujets

• Historical romance
• Historical fiction

Informations

• Publié par: First Edition Design Publishing
• Date de parution: 24 mai 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781622870141
• Langue: English

Extrait

T HE P HANTOM
OF G REATNESS

C HI S UN R HEE
ISBN 978-1-622870-14-1
Published by First Edition Design eBook Publishing
May 2012
www.firsteditiondesignpublishing.com



Copyright © 2011 Chi Sun Rhee
All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except in the case of reviews, without the express written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

ISBN Number 978-1-57087-781-0 (PRINT)
Library of Congress Control Number 2011930105

Professional Press
Chapel Hill, NC 27515-4371
Dedication
This book is dedicated to my mother’s soul.
BOOK 1 - PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
During the summer of 1942, the Axis and Allied Forces in full gallop turned the world into a vast shambles, devastating the whole earth and humanity. In the same year, the latter part of August, shortly after noon, a student came out of Asahi Girls’ School in Kwangju City of the South Cholla Province in Korea.
Following the school volleyball practice at the school playground, being drenched by sweats, she went straight to the girl’s locker room and removed her sweatbands (white headband and wristbands) and the protective kneepads and adhesive bandage from every finger joint. Then she took a quick shower and changed into clean sportswears of the white half-sleeved top shirt and white long pants with two long black strips running parallel along the either outside of the pants. She slung a bulky blue athletic bag over her left shoulder and headed for home.
At this time of the year, all schools (primary, secondary, professional, and collegiate) were in recess for the summer vacation. The Asahi volleyball team players, however, maintained their daily heated practice to meet the coming autumnal volleyball game between Asahi 1 and Yamato 2 Girls’ School. A decade ago, both schools had established a traditional annual volleyball game on Saturday afternoon during third week of September. It was played alternately on each of their school playground. With time, it had become a tradition for both schools. As interest in the game had grown, it had not only become a stirring sport event with great expectation to the schools but also to the entire city.
The main reason for such growing—almost frenzied interest—was that the players of both schools were simply the best; each school players were fighting for the glory of their school. Moreover, there was an implicit understanding that they were also fighting for their own racial excellence.
The student player in Asahi was in her junior year, tall and well-built and well-developed, her highly trained body responding nimbly to flying balls, enabling her to vault up high, spiking the balls for winning shots, allowing her to jump unusually high to deliver a commanding serve. She was a capital member of the team, keeping the center post of the front line. While drilling, the sun’s heat had tanned her fair complexion to brown, yet her dark sable eyes sparkling with intelligence were balanced by her well-carved nose and lips in her oval frame. She was, as many who watched her play realized, a rare combination of intellect, strength, and discipline. Now she was walking directly toward the Juo Elementary School. 3 Two leaves of the school gate composed of black wrought iron were closed. Serene and empty was the whole grand school buildings and playground.
Suddenly a flock of white-blue-gray pigeons from the school building appeared overhead, fluttering their wings in black, glinting their bodies in silver like glittering lights in the high space. Paused for a moment, she gazed at them without shading her brow from the sun’s heat because the gray overcast obscured the scalding daylight. The birds, noisily flapping their wings, flew into the limitless sky as if they were exhibiting her inmost thoughts filled with free spirit to venture her wishes like those soaring birds. Thus, with lighthearted humor, she resumed her walk briskly, plunging into her reveries amid a teeming crowd.
Since she was a little girl, she had had a lofty dream that even she could not believe would ever come true. Nonetheless, she could not help dreaming. Her dream has developed from reading on the various children’s books: fairytales, fables, comic heroes, and the biographies of great men. Creating her own wings and expanding them to the unknown places beyond her reach was her real yet imaginary world. All the books she had read were written in Japanese because once Japan colonized Korea, she had forced Koreans to use the Japanese language. If any student spoke Korean, teachers punished them severely. Moreover, the Japanese translated the world’s great books of various fields in the West or the East countries into the Japanese language. Consequently, through her eyes of imagination, she was enabled to see the outside worlds besides all boundaries of Korea: their diverse looks, different skin colors, bizarre culture, mystic customs, and splendid costumes. In addition, many a great minds, ideas, literary works, and authors existed in the outside Korea provided that she had not read these available books, she could never have been stirred by her unimaginable dreams. She was sociable, having a sensible mind and sound body. That’s why her classmates elected her as their Class President. However, if circumstances had permitted her, she would rather stay alone in her own world.
Through the square blocks of city streets as a maze, she turned to the left and to the right toward her house located near the heart of main city. It was here where most important activities of the city life were thriving. The heart of the city consisted of the Provincial Building complex, District Court, Martial Art Hall, East Theater, Honam Bank, Chungjang Street, City Hall, hospitals, hotels, and Chinese and Korean restaurants.
In the early afternoon, it was getting stuffier and sultrier, brewing a summer shower. The city was breathless under such high humid pressure. Its streets were lined with cherry and maple trees, each sleeping languidly, being unaware of the crowded streets. While busy citizens strolled to their desired destination, the ladies’ parasols enhanced the color of the crowd. Boys waded their way through the bustling crowd, shouldering heavy boxes and shouting aloud for selling ice cream, “Ice cake, ice cake!” The screeches of raucous cicadas clinging high on the street trees competed with the ice cream boys. Occasional bicyclers plowed through the crowd. With their menacing face and wary eyes, the Japanese police in black uniforms bore their long Japanese swords and pistols and patrolled around streets. Furthermore, a group of Japanese police cavalry clattered along the thoroughfare.
Thirty minutes later, she crossed over a threshold of her house gate. A waft of savory soybean soup whetted her hungry appetite. As soon as two dogs recognized she was coming home, they ran forward out of a cool place beneath the front wooden porch, lolling their long pinkish tongues exposed over their vicious canine teeth, frisking and panting around her, wagging their furry tails to welcome her. After caressing them on their heads and backs, she took off her shoes on the rectangular stony stand and stepped up to the wide shiny wooden porch.
In the female quarters, her mother’s room door was open, but a fine bamboo blind was halfway open. She could hear a running sound of Singer sewing machine.
“ Mom, I’m home,” she said and slightly raised the blind up.
“ Mija ya, ” her mother sitting on a round stool called her name after halting her sewing machine’s foot petal and her working hands. She was in white cool ramie jyugori 4 and long wavy chima, 5 looking at her daughter over her golden-rimmed glasses saddled on the lower part of her nose.
“ Mija ya ,” her mother said, “your father wanted to see you as soon as you come home.”
“ Did he say why?”
“ No, he did say nothing more than those words,” Mrs. Rhee answered.
“ All right, Mom,” Mija said. She went to the house well in the backyard to wash her face and sweaty body that had become so sweaty again from the humid air in the city. She walked back to her room, dropped her bag, and put on a clean muslin white housedress with motifs of blooming pink peonies. Suddenly the dress reminded her of an important envelope that she crammed it into a pocket of her other housedress. At that time, she intended to put it later into her drawer, yet she just missed a chance. Now she was looking for that other dress. After her careful search, she realized that dress was gone. She knew her mother used to collect her laundry from her room. Mija frantically searched the envelope from her desk and drawers, yet it was nowhere to be found. Now being in a panic, she hurried back to her mother’s room.
“ Mom, by any chance, did you see an envelope in my dress pocket before washing it?”
“ No,” she said, “is there any thing I should concern about?”
“ No, nothing, Mom,” Mija replied and went back to her room. She began puzzling wildly, thinking aloud as she always did as frightened, “Perhaps, Father discovered the letter somehow by himself. But how? He never—by his own square mind and civilized nature—ever intruded into my room to fiddle with my private stuff. Never! I couldn’t even think of such thing!” Thus, she muttered against herself—“Now, it was too late!” Intuitively, she sensed that white envelope might have brought her calamity that would be ominous, dreadful, and deathly.
In the mid morning, Rhee Changyul, Mija’s father, came out of his room from the male quarters and walked down the front yard taking his dogs with him for a walk along Meiji Street toward Kwangju Bridge. Unexpectedly, he spotted a white envelope dropping from a bundle of laundry in his wife’s arms to the front wooden porch of the female quarters. Intending to hand it