IIn my childhood homes, I grew up with Korean culture around me. For years we had a woodblock print of a tiger (meant to ward off evil spirits) on top of our bookshelf, a print of the 10 symbols of longevity and a shamanic dance mask of a syphilitic monk who was mounted on our wall, ancient times. Silla-style and celadon pottery on a bookshelf and carved wooden wedding ducks on a side table. All these things were like background noise to me – they were just normal.
When I was a baby, my father would lift me up and sing the Korean phonemes, “Ga, na, da, ra…” to me to ensure that I will be able to pronounce all the sounds of the language. As I grew, he sang me Korean nursery rhymes and rhymes. I still remember all the words to Mountain Rabbit and Forsythia. ”Sythia, sythia, forsythia, pick one, put it in your mouth.” Yet I used to struggle to pronounce the plosive letters, for which there is no equivalent in English, and the difference between the short and long “o ” sounds.
I also learned how to write Hangul. I remember being about three years old, squatting in our driveway, drawing lines and turning them into letters with a stick of chalk. A friend from next door, who was two years older than me, used to draw with my little creatures on the asphalt, but now I use Hangul Writing “Bella”. My friend saw it and asked, “Is it Chinese?” I replied, “It’s Korean.” She seemed offended because she was wrong. “Chinese, Japanese, Korean, it’s all the same thing,” she said.
My face first grew hot with anger that turned to shame when I didn’t say anything. If I were a bit older, I might have had the knowledge and pride to point out that Hangul was an alphabet, that the letters didn’t represent syllables like Chinese characters do, or some such know-it-all thing. But at that age I couldn’t even understand why anyone would make such a blatantly incorrect statement. It was strange to see evidence of how people could somehow discriminate against something they didn’t even really know about in the first place.
A few years later, when i was about five my parents bought me a book about mythology. It felt heavy like an anvil and it was like an arbiter of esoteric knowledge. It was one of my favorite books and I only ever thought of it as “the big red myth book”. I often opened it on the living room floor and fervently consumed stories like those of Thoth and Isis or retellings of the epic of gilgameshlook at the beautiful photos of murals, carvings, paintings and statues. The book had sections on China, India and Japan, but there was none on Korea.
Even though they weren’t in any of my favorite books, over the years I learned about the myths of Korea because they were part of my heritage. My father was born in Korea and grew up in a family of storytellers. His mother was a dream interpreter who told fortunes with flower cards, and her oldest brother, my father’s “Great Uncle”, who narrowly escaped death many times during the Korean War, was a geomancer who read the dragons in the hills have to detect favorable. sites for graves and houses. Great Uncle also exorcised ghosts and the I Chingthe old chinese Book of Changesto predict the future.
My father himself was inspired by storytellers like his uncles to become a folklorist and writer as an adult, so he was always a great source of Korean folktales for me. He would casually mention creatures like goblins or fox devils, or that he lived for years in a house that was said to be haunted. Sometimes he told me stories, like the one about the great search undertaken by Princess Bari, the mother of Korean shamans.
I would ponder those stories—both fact and fiction—about war, long journeys, and spirits, questioning whether I was even Korean enough since I had been told these things and not directly experienced them. With my pale skin, I don’t even look typical Korean. Usually, it’s only the people who are used to seeing mixed-race Koreans who can tell that I’m part Korean. For example, I had older Korean friends who were my tutors. Some of them had come to the US from Korea to study at a local Quaker school, and I eventually realized that teaching me was helping them feel less homesick too. They not only taught me the language, but also the Korean culture. I remember sitting with them on the floor at the small ginkgo wood table my parents bought from a street vendor in Seoul in the 80s. We would study there and eat snacks. Sometimes my mother served our meals with kimchi or made us cucumber pickles, recipes I learned from my Korean paternal great-grandmother, who was a famous cook. I would eat with my father sam (meat wrapped in a leafy vegetable), with my own style lamb and rice wrapped in lettuce.
My feelings about how Korean I am began to change in adulthood. While a student at Vassar College, in upstate New York, I applied for a work-study position in the college’s art museum. During my interview for that position, I had to talk about various objects from different parts of the museum’s collection. One of the objects I chose was in the Asian gallery – a wooden, once gilded statue of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara from a Vietnamese temple. I gave an impromptu lecture on all the different names of this figure, including Gwaneum, the Korean name. I explained that in different countries around the world the same deity is a different gender (a man in Vietnam and a woman in Korea, for example) and that Gwaneum is known for rescuing shipwrecked people. It was then that I realized that all of these facts seemed familiar throughout my life, like common knowledge, that are an essential part of who I am.
But when I finally mentioned to fellow students that I was part Korean, the response I would get would be something like, “That’s so cool, I love K-dramas,” or “What do you think K-pop?” When I studied Korean at Vassar, and the professor asked the class why we were taking the course, almost everyone said they enrolled because they were fans of those genres. I have seen the change in the people in my hometown, from being ignorant of Korea to being very aware of this aspect of its culture. Today, because of the Hallyu phenomenon (also known as the Korean Gulf), young people’s sense of Korea’s culture and its folklore is shaped by these exports, but these media are usually tailored for outside audiences, especially Western ones. Even films produced for Korean audiences often have English titles spelled out phonetically in Korean. These things made me all the more interested in learning about traditional Korean culture.
My first birthday celebration was according to Korean tradition, where the family lays out various objects – yarn, money, rice and a pencil – and sits in front of the baby. Whichever one the child chooses is meant to foretell their future: I chose the pencil (a modern substitute for the calligraphy brush), which meant I would become a writer or scholar.
As a child I was much more attracted to visual art than writing, but now I am just as interested in the latter and I recently wrote a book with my father to bring Korean folk tales and myths to a new audience. In a sense, this project continues the family tradition of storytelling. I brought there my love of mythology and art history, and research methods, while my father, a folklorist, shared his knowledge of local legends and his first-hand accounts of Korea in the modern era. We had a vision of the shape of the book from the start and, each using our favorite fountain pens, wrote together an outline of the sections in a loose-leaf notebook that we passed back and forth. If it were 100 years ago, I imagine we would have ground ink on an inkstone and written with calligraphy quills on mulberry paper.
What my choice of the pencil predicted turned out to be true. I know now that I have a lot to share. And although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I can see now that the myths of Korea were always alive all around me and my time absorbed in them was the best preparation for telling the stories I would have loved most as a child . Sometimes you just have to write the book you needed to read yourself.
The Korean Myths: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes and Legends by Heinz Insu Fenkl and Bella Myŏng-wŏl Dalton-Fenkl is published by Thames & Hudson at £14.99. Buy it for £13.49 guardianbookshop.com
