How
beautiful the world can be!
This article was published in the
magazine Arirang early in 2001
Almost
everyone in Seoul knows Insa-dong, the narrow street and web of narrow alleys
that runs from Tapkol (Pagoda) Park on Chong-no to Anguk-dong Rotary. The
street is sometimes called "Mary's Alley" but I don't know why.
Visitors from abroad go there to buy souvenirs: Korean handicrafts, mulberry
paper, brushes, pottery, to say nothing of a lot of imitation antiques imported
from China! Other people go to visit the art galleries and antique shops. Many
go to drink Korean tea in one of the many tea shops, or eat traditional Korean
food in a traditional Korean house to the sound of traditional Korean music.
For years now, Korean artists, writers and journalists have been going there to
drink together until late at night. It's a very lively neighborhood, but with
none of the rowdiness of Taehang-no with its masses of teenagers.
I want to
tell you about a secret cafe in Insa-dong, called "Kwichon." It's
secret because it's hidden up a very narrow passage and also because so far the
sign hanging outside simply has the two Chinese characters pronounced
"Kwichon" on it, nothing in Hangul, even, or in English. But I hope
that by the time you read this, it will have changed, so that you can find it
and go there too! Otherwise, just stand in the middle of Insa-dong and say
"Kwichon" quite loudly twice;
you will certainly find someone who knows where it is, eager to direct
you. It's very well-known.
I had
better warn you at once: this is no luxurious coffee shop with big, soft sofas,
muted conversations, perfumed toilets. It does not serve twenty blends of
coffee, or exotic cocktails, or lots of delicate Korean delicacies. It has been
called the smallest cafe in the world, although it can hold 20 people if none
of them takes up too much room. It has just four tables and the seats are
rather hard. The toilet is as simple as could be, or more so. The carpet on the
floor looks like a beaten-earth floor, thanks to the messy road-works that have
made Insa-dong a chaos throughout the summer, although that too should have
changed by the time you read this.
"Kwichon"
is famous. Why? Because of Ch'on Sang-pyong. Ch'on died in 1993, he was a poet
whose whole life was spent in extreme poverty. Today he is one of the
best-selling and best-loved poets in Korea. His poem entitled, in Korean,
"Kwichon" is in high-school textbooks. During twenty years of intense
poverty and mostly very poor health, he was looked after by his wife Mok
Sun-ok, the younger sister of one of his university companions. Mok Sun-ok
opened the cafe "Kwichon" in 1985, thanks to help from friends, and
since then it has never been closed for a single day. Her own life-story is
worth telling too, and she has told it, in a book that is also a best-seller.
The tale of their life together has been dramatized for stage and television,
she is often interviewed, and she is recognized wherever she goes in Korea.
Ch'on
Sang-pyong was born in 1930 and spent his early years in Japan, where his
father had gone in search of work. After the Liberation of Korea in 1945, his
family returned to their home-town of Masan, in the south-east and Ch'on began
to attend school there. He was no ordinary schoolboy, it seems, his poetic
sensitivities were already coming alive. One day, standing in the school
playground looking out to the sea, he heard people weeping in front of a tomb
on the hill just below him. That inspired him to write his first poem,
"River Waters" that his teacher arranged to have published in a
literary review.
The reason why the river flows
toward the sea
is not only because I've been
weeping
all day long
up on the hill.
Not only because I've been
blooming
like a sunflower in longing
all night long
up on the hill.
The reason I've been weeping like
a beast in sorrow
up on the hill
is not only because
the river flows toward the sea.
Ch'on
Sang-pyong was a recognized poet while still only in high school! He loved
reading, but his family had little money. He used to spend hours sitting on the
floor of a little bookstore, reading the books, until the owner took pity on
him and allowed him to use his shop as a library, taking the books home to
read. When he was ready to go on to university, he did not choose to study
literature, because he was already an established writer! Instead he chose
business, a good preparation for someone who never had more than 10,000 Won in
his pocket till the day he died!
When war
broke out, Seoul National University was relocated to Pusan and Ch'on began his
studies there before moving up to Seoul. In the 1950s and 60s, the main center
for students, artists, bohemians, writers, and young intellectuals was
Myong-dong, a very different place from today's glitzy fashion-shop inferno. It
was full of tiny cafes, restaurants, bars, paduk-rooms, billiard parlors. Its
gangsters and thugs were well-known. Everyone was always nearly broke; the
cafes served as writers' offices, since they often had no room of their own,
sleeping wherever they could and eating when they or a friend had earned a bit
by publishing something.
Needless
to say, the evenings were spent drinking, often some cheap makkolli with a bowl
of kimchi or some ramyon (noodles) that might well be their only supper. That
would usually have to be chalked up to be paid for later. Ch'on Sang-pyong
became a familiar figure in Myong-dong. He was totally innocent, with a loud
voice and a raucous screeching laugh. He enjoyed company, and everyone was fond
of him but he was completely unable to live a normal life or hold a steady job.
He lived by publishing poems and literary essays or book reviews here and
there. Otherwise, when he needed money, he would demand some "taxes"
from a richer friend. He was intensely sensitive and his poems often expressed
a strong melancholy:
Under the bright moonlight
a reed and I
stood side by side in silence.
Anxiously we gazed at one other
calming our distress
in the gusting wind.
In the bright moonlight
the reed and I
were both drenched with tears.
Many of
his university friends were working as journalists of various kinds and one of
them invited his teenaged sister up from countryside one summer to see the
sights. That was how Mok Sun-ok first met Ch'on Sang-pyong, who was some 8
years older. She and her brother had grown up in a suburb of Hiroshima,
returning to Korea with their mother after the explosion of the atom bomb that
killed their father. After finishing high school, she came up to Seoul to be
with her brother and began to work for a review. She was very small, and very
pretty, but she recalls that all the men used to consider her as their
"kid sister." She
sometimes used to go to the movies or to listen to classical music with Ch'on
Sang-pyong, who loved music and would always weep on hearing anything by
Brahms.
In 1968,
after a group of young Korean intellectuals had visited the North Korean
embassy in East Berlin, Ch'on was picked up on suspicion of spying, since one
of them was a friend of his. The ensuing torture left him deeply traumatized,
his health deteriorated, and in 1970 he thought he would perhaps soon be dead.
He wrote a poem with that idea in mind, a kind of farewell message that has
become his most famous work, "Kwichon" (Back to Heaven):
I'll go back to heaven again.
Hand in hand with the dew
that melts at a touch of the
dawning day,
I'll go back to heaven again.
With the dusk, together, just we
two,
at a sign from a cloud after
playing on the slopes
I'll go back to heaven again.
At the end of my outing to this
beautiful world
I'll go back and say: It was
beautiful. . . .
The next
year, he suddenly disappeared. At first, his friends supposed he had gone to
stay with his brother in Pusan but then they realized he was nowhere to be
found. Months passed, and finally they concluded he had died somewhere along
the roadside. Since he never carried any papers, there would have been no way
of knowing who he was. Sadly, they decided that his poems, that had been
published one by one in reviews, should be collected in a memorial volume. The
book had scarcely been published when they heard the good news that Ch'on was
alive after all!
He had
been found semi-conscious and raving, and had been taken to the Seoul City
Asylum. There, all he had been able to say was his name and his occupation:
"poet". A doctor recognized him, and made sure that he was looked
after, but it was only after reading about the memorial volume in a newspaper
that he realized none of Ch'on's friends knew where he was! Among the happy
visitors came "Miss Mok" and although he was still deeply disturbed,
Ch'on was clearly specially glad to see her, so she began to visit regularly.
He slowly recovered but when he was ready to be discharged, the doctor pointed
out to Ch'on's friends that he could never live alone; he was like a child.
Someone would have to be with him all the time, making sure he ate properly. He
needed a home and only Mok Sun-ok could provide him with that kind of loving
care, if she was prepared to sacrifice her life to that extent.
So in
1972, Ch'on Sang-pyong and Mok Sun-ok were married; he was over 40 and she in
her mid-30s, the sight of the two made everyone laugh. But life was not so
funny. Where were they to live? Other husbands went out to a house-agent; Ch'on
wrote a poem and waited for a miracle that never came:
Won't somebody give me a house? I roar to the heavens. Hear me,
someone, to the ends of the earth. . . I got married just a few weeks ago, so
how can I help but shout like this? God in his heaven will hear with a smile.
The French poet Arthur Rimbaud put an ad in a London newspaper. "Won't
someone take me to a southern country?" A ship's captain saw it, gladly
took him on board and shipped him to a southern country. So I'm shouting like a
giant. A house is a treasure. The whole world may crumble and fall, my house
will remain...
Years
passed and the two moved to ever smaller rented rooms in the north-eastern
suburbs. Ch'on could earn almost nothing and his new wife's efforts to stop him
smoking and drinking were doomed to failure. In the end she realized that all
she could do was ration the intake
and try to help him live happily. He had very few needs, despite the
dream expressed in one poem:
I want wings.
I want wings
that will carry me wherever I
want.
I can't understand why God
didn't give humans wings.
Being a pauper
the only trip I've ever had was
our honeymoon
but I want to go any and
everywhere.
Once I have wings I'll be
satisfied.
God
give me wings, please. . .
While
Ch'on could pray for wings, he could never earn much money and had no idea of
the price of things. His wife sometimes had nothing with which to pay the rent,
and at times they had no money for a bus fare. In 1980, Mok Sun-ok's brother suddenly died and they went to
live with her mother, in a very simple house on the outskirts of Uijongbu. In
1985, after unsuccessfully trying various other ways of earning a living, Mok
Sun-ok was able to open the cafe Kwichon in Insadong. At last, they had a
regular source of income, however modest. Ch'on was duly grateful:
I'm the happiest man
in the world.
Since my wife runs a café
I've no need to worry about making
ends meet
and I went to university
so there's nothing lacking in my
education
and because I'm a poet
my desire for fame is satisfied
I have a pretty wife too
so I don't think about women
and we have no children
no need to worry about the future
we have a house as well
I'm really very comfortable.
I'm fond of makkolli
my wife always buys it for me
so what have I got to complain of?
Besides
I firmly believe in God
and since the mightiest person
in the whole wide world
is looking after my interests
how can anyone say misfortune's
coming?
1988
brought new shadows. Ch'on's belly began to swell alarmingly, his liver was
failing. For several years he had refused to eat solid food, drinking only a
few bowls of makkolli and powdered milk, and this was the result! With nothing
but debts waiting to be repaid, there could be no question of taking him for
treatment in a big hospital. A doctor told Mok Sun-ok that she should prepare
for the worst; it could only be a matter of days. Desperate, she phoned a
doctor friend who had a clinic in Ch'unch'on, two hours north-east of Seoul.
"Sure, bring him in." So they bundled the vast-bellied invalid into a
car and gently drove him along the twisting road.
Mok Sun-ok
had to come and go between the cafe in Seoul and the clinic in Ch'unch'on,
riding the bus to and fro. She used to pray, as the bus trundled along:
"God, not yet, please. Give him another 5 years!" Miraculously, the
poet survived, recovered, and returned home. For another 5 years. On April 28,
1993, while he was eating his morning meal, the poet simply keeled over and
died. Mok Sun-ok had already gone down to open the cafe, it was her mother who
witnessed the end.
Ch'on
Sang-pyong is buried in the Municipal Cemetery on a hillside outside of
Uijongbu. Every year a large group of friends and admirers go up to pay tribute
on the anniversary of his death, enjoying a simple lunch on the grass in the
spring sunshine and admiring the blossom in the pear orchards below. A few may
recall Ch'on's last poem, which was in the pocket of his coat when he died,
ready to be mailed to a newspaper to welcome the month of May:
May's the month for greenery.
Green light
covering the world, Maytime's
literally the month for greenery.
Green light's very good for the
eyes.
And not just for the eyes;
it whispers of hope.
So the month of May
seems much too brief.
Green Maytime!
All the world's Maytime!
A few
months after he died, Mok Sun-ok published a book about their life together.
That inspired a dramatist to write a play about them, which has been produced
several times. A television production followed, and still now the books of
Ch'on Sang-pyong are to be found among the "steady best sellers" in
all the big bookstores. In fact, he is more popular and better-known now than
in his lifetime.
That's
why, when you enter "Kwichon" cafe, it's not like going to any other
tea room. It's more like becoming part of Ch'on Sang-pyong's family. Mok Sun-ok
serves fruit teas made by a group of neighborhood women under the direction of
her mother; the most popular are "mokwa-cha" (quince tea) and
"yuja-cha" (citron tea). Helping her are her brother's two daughters.
On the wall above the seat he always occupied when he came down to Seoul are
pictures of Ch'on Sang-pyong, Mok Sun-ok's mother, and their beloved dogs. The
paintings on the walls are all by friends. Ch'on's books are on sale, as is Mok
Sun-ok's story of their life.
When she
first opened her cafe, lots of bohemians turned up, demanding makkolli because
that was her husband's favorite drink. They were quite puzzled when she offered
them tea instead! Nowadays, most of the customers are young couples. Sometimes
a crowd of school children arrive, sent by their teacher to learn about the
famous poet. Friends arriving from Japan or the United States head straight
there from the airport. Admirers from the provinces ask for an autograph. Quite
often there is a tall, rather fat English-looking Korean sitting there. He is
the author of this article and he is only one of countless people for whom this
tiny, rather shabby space is the most beautiful room in Korea. Because it is
full of tales of love.