To Kill a Tiger

Lee Jid

Description

Against the backdrop of modern Korea's violent and tumultuous history, To Kill A Tiger is a searing portrait of a woman and a society in the midst of violent change. Drawing on Korean legend and myth, as well as an Asian woman's unique perspective on the United States, Lee weaves her compelling personal narrative with a collective and accessible history of modern Korea, from Japanese colonialism to war-era comfort women, from the genocide of the Korean War to the government persecution and silence of Cold War-era pogroms. The ritual of storytelling, which she shares with the women of her family, serves as a window into a five-generation family saga, and it is through storytelling that Lee comes to appreciate the sacrifices of her ancestors and her own now American place in her family and society. In To Kill A Tiger Lee provides a revelatory look at war and modernization in her native country, a story of personal growth, and a tribute to the culture that formed her.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 07 janvier 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781468302844
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2010 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
Copyright 2010 by Jeong Hwa (Jid) Lee
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-284-4
To my father
(1920-1989)
C ONTENTS

Copyright
A Note on Authenticity
A Woman Who Wished to Be Eaten Alive by a Tiger
The Stolen Grapes
My Little Dog
Love Thy Enemy, They Say
Peppers
Exiled in His Own Country
Stealing a Dream
The Good Vampires
Summer Perils
Under the Gun
Dead Man Speaks
Shakespeare on a Grass Roof
Love in a Dust Storm
To Seoul
A Woman Who Flew Down from the Moon
My Mother s Daughter
Aunt Minsoon, the Comfort Woman
Women Whose Marriages to the Gods Were Successful
Battle Fatigue
They Were Nice Fellows
No Gun Ri
Conjure the Devil
Lucid Dreaming
Homeward Bound
Love Made Me Grow Tall
My Father s Daughter
An Amaryllis in a Stone Field
Hope for Reunion
No-Name State
Acknowledgments
Index
Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness-for then
The spirits of the dead who stood
In life before thee are again
In death around thee-and their will
Shall overshadow thee: be still.
-E DGAR A LLAN P OE,
Spirits of the Dead
A N OTE ON A UTHENTICITY

W HILE I TRIED TO BE AS ACCURATE AS POSSIBLE IN MY RECOUNTING OF historical events, I added some fiction to the personal lives of the people affected by these events. The names of the characters, too, except those of well-known historical figures, were changed, and some of the facts, including the contents and dates of the incidents in their lives, were altered to accommodate the narrative integrity and consistency. That history is fiction is a clich , and trying to explain why I attempted to fill in the blanks in modern Korean history with the information I gathered on my own would be a waste of time. The truth was intentionally cast out of the official version to be replaced by lies and propaganda, so the only way to arrive at the truth again is an exercise of disciplined imagination, and this I tried to do. I must acknowledge the random power of memory to select what remains in a nation s or an individual s psyche, but it is with certainty that I can say that I did my best to take into account the unreliable nature of what I remember.
Since the history of my country has to be thoroughly interpolated into the re-telling of my personal childhood, what I know now must remain entirely mixed with what I remember as my distant past. I must give an adult s sharp language to a child s inarticulate thoughts. Since it is equally true, however, that the retrospective reassessments that I gained as a grownup gave me newly born layers of interpretation, it was necessary as well to make them distinct from the narratives regarding my past.
I have now lived in the United States for twenty-eight years, for several years longer than I did in Korea, and I can finally look at the little Korean girl I used to be with a sense of humor. Still, however, unable to abdicate the Korean custom of not calling one s older siblings and parents by their names, I use birth orders and generic nouns to refer to them. Perhaps, I wrote this memoir to let this custom go with laughter.

My family in 1956. I am the baby, and that is my mother holding me. Right of her is Father, and in front of him, holding hands, are my two brothers.
A Woman Who Wished to Be Eaten Alive by a Tiger

M Y NIGHTMARE-AND MY DREAM-STARTED WHEN I WAS SIX years old, a child sick in bed.
Your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother-she was quite a woman, Grandmother said. She volunteered to be eaten alive by a tiger for her descendants.
I couldn t afford to be bored by the only story Grandmother had to tell me. I had been ill for half a year from renal paralysis, and there was nobody else who could stay by my bedside except the old woman. Mother was busy with housework, Father was at his job, and my brothers and sisters were in school, so Grandmother was stuck with me, and I was stuck with her same old story. With my silence, I invited Grandmother to start from the beginning.
That great-grandmother of yours was always ready to do anything-anything-for her posterity. She prayed, so that her descendents would prosper forever under the auspices of the gods. And one day suddenly her long-awaited chance came. Grandmother sighed with pride and sadness. Her delivery was always a mix of glee and melancholy, what she actually felt creeping through how she thought she was supposed to feel. When she had just turned twenty, with two sons and one daughter, she had a visitor, a Buddhist monk from a temple in a distant city. He came to tell her that there was a way she could place her children, their children, and these children s children under the gods eternal good will.
What did he say she should do? I inquired, already knowing the rest of the story.
If she chose to be eaten alive by a tiger, he said, her offspring would be promised good health, high offices, long lives, riches, talents, good looks, and many loyal friends and servants.
Did she decide to be a tiger s meal, then?
Yes, Grandmother said. The Buddhist monk didn t tell her exactly when the tiger would strike the house and take her away, but he said it would be in the night, about when the eighth half moon of the year started to wane into a crescent shape. She, her husband, and her parents-in-law figured it would be around the beginning of August, the time of the year when bamboo forests grow the tallest and willow trees wear the longest leaves. Such a young, pretty lady waiting to be carried away by a tiger s teeth, prepared to leave a suckling girl behind her!
What happened to her? I pretended not to remember. Did a tiger come for her?
On the third day of lunar August, she was washing her hair in the backyard. Since the Buddhist monk had told her that the tiger would come in the night, she thought she would be safe during the day, so she boiled a big basin of water to wash herself clean for the gods. I think the tiger came sooner than the gods had planned because she smelled so good. Grandmother dropped her head, dabbing her teary eyes on her skirt. So young, so pretty, with a baby in her arms!
The tiger come in broad daylight? I made my voice sound shocked.
Yes. She blew her nose in her skirt. He sank his teeth into the nape of her snow-white neck. He snatched her away, her beautiful hair dragging down behind her like a long, black painting brush, wet and lustrous in the sunlight.
I touched the nape of my neck with the palm of my hand, feeling my blood congeal. The vision of the lady being carried away between a tiger s teeth choked me. In my imagination, she became me. I was screaming, but as if in a dream, my tongue was dead. My body, separated from my face by the tiger s mouth, was limp like a rag doll.
You said they later found parts of her body in the mountain.
Yes, they searched the mountain for days and found one of her breasts, half-eaten, under a tall oak tree, and a hand with three fingers on the grass near the trail. Grandmother had regained her composure. Your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather and his parents buried the remains in the clan cemetery and performed a ritual of gratitude every year for a century on the lunar day of her death.
Did her descendants prosper?
Yes, they did, for two hundred years, until your Grandfather ruined it all.
I know what Grandfather did, I interrupted to prevent her from slipping into her usual bitterness. Tell me about his ancestors.
Matter-of-factly, she began to list family accomplishments. The brave woman s son, your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, became a minister of education at the age of twenty-five, and his son at twenty-one achieved the honor of being the youngest to serve as the finance secretary for the king. To follow them, this son s son rose to be the governor of one of the largest provinces at only twenty-six, and this man s son in turn responded to their ancestors call by becoming a nationally celebrated calligrapher and writer. Lastly, your great-grandfather, as you might have heard, was a renowned scholar. Although he couldn t hold a title in the government as his forefathers had, he was just as talented. If the exams for Confucian bureaucrats had not been abolished in his adolescence, he probably would have earned the highest scores.
In my clan, such a brilliant record was routine, not an extraordinary achievement. You will get it all back-whatever your grandfather ruined, Grandmother concluded. You, my grandchildren, my flesh and blood. You will make something of your lives and make it up to the young lady who was gladly eaten alive by a tiger. I thought I saw tears in Grandmother s eyes. Women in your clan have all been so brave and firm. They never hesitated to do anything for the good of the family, just like the tiger woman. They were warriors. You, my dear, are going to be a fighter, following them. You will bring honor to your family. You will make your husband and children proud.
I will have to be eaten alive by a tiger, then, I squeaked. But inside, I was thinking, If a tiger comes for me, I will cut the beast in half with a sword.
I remembered a story Mother had told me about her mother s father, who had scared a tiger off with a pair of flint stones on a pitch-black summer night. His village was a basin surrounded with thickly forested mountains, and tigers often ro