Wed to a Bird With No Wings

Wed to a bird without wings

Whenever he talked about his childhood, there was one story that always came first. He had expected to die and had come out alive, so he called it “the first miracle God saved me by.”

It happened when he was six or seven. His older brother and some other older local boys said they were off to the hills to cut wood, so he followed them. They climbed far up into the hills and collected enough wood for each to have a full load, then they started back down. Little Ch’ŏn Sang-pyŏng was valiantly following his elders when he lost his footing and rolled right over the edge of a cliff. He only had time to think: “I’ve had it,” before he found himself dangling from a branch, alive.

Even when he had passed sixty, he used to say it had been such a hair-raising experience that it still gave him goose pimples. Since he had escaped without a scratch, he saw it as the first miracle resulting from God’s decision to save him.

What he called his second miracle came when he had passed forty. Every one had concluded that he was dead, and he came back alive from the brink of the pit.

The memorial volume of his poems Sae had been published and was just beginning to become known when we heard the report: “Ch’ŏn Sang-pyŏng is alive.” Doctor Kim Chong-hae of the municipal psychiatric hospital, who had been caring for him, had read a newspaper report on the book and made the news known.

I first heard about it in a letter from his brother in Pusan. I had written to announce the publication of the volume, and in his reply he told me that amazing news had come from some doctor. Bewildered and overjoyed, I went hurrying to Park Chae-sam’s office; he too had just been in touch with Doctor Kim and was about to go and visit the hospital.

“We were contacted by the hospital yesterday. Song Ch’un-bok and Min Yong, Song Yong-t’aek and I are going to visit him there now; perhaps you could go tomorrow?”

“Alright. Off you go now.”

As I made my way home, I felt at the same time relieved and confused. The fact that he was alive made me want to cry for joy, but at the same time, the fact that he was in a psychiatric hospital wrung my heart. What state could he be in, to have spent almost six months cut off from the world? I felt deeply anxious.

The next day, I heard the report of the friends who had gone to see him the previous day and gathered the overall state of things; then I bought some supplies and headed for the hospital. To my surprise, I found that the doctor in charge of his case, doctor Kim, was an old acquaintance of mine. Until then I had only heard that news had come from “a certain doctor” without ever hearing his name.

“Why, doctor Kim, do you work here?”

“Yes indeed; for a long time now. Won’t you sit down?”

He is dead now, but at Pusan High School Doctor Kim had been a pupil of Park Chong-woo, whom my brother considered as an older brother. Moreover, in high school he had been a classmate of Ha In-Du, an artist who was very close to Ch’ŏn Sang-pyŏng and my brother, so we were all on familiar terms. He was no man of letters, but he did write one book, and was deeply interested in literature, so that he had long known of the existence of the poet Ch’ŏn Sang-pyŏng.

He diagnosed Chŏn Sang-pyŏng’s sickness as a nervous breakdown. It was caused by malnutrition, just as a machine stops working if it is not given oil. In a nervous breakdown, the system has ways of requesting help and concern; therefore he was not controlling his bowels but simply discharging everything. That was why he was wearing diapers.

The basic cause was the intemperate life he had lived, pouring alcohol instead of food into a body traumatized by torture, so that after too violent a shock there had been no way of avoiding the psychological consequences. Once his body was debilitated, the nervous system had followed suit.

Later, he expressed what he felt at that time:

“I was in such despair that I could feel no hope for myself or desire in life.”

The day beyond

the day I die

lonely in death after lonely living

birds will sing as new day dawns and petals unfold

on my soul’s empty ground.
I’ll be one bird

alighting on ditches and branches

when the song of loving

and living

and beauty

is at its height.

Season full of emotion

week of sorrow and joy

in the gaps between knowing not knowing forgetting

bird

pour out that antiquated song.
One bird sings of how

there are good things

in life

and bad things too.

(“Bird”)
It was as if he had wanted to live like that bird. It seemed almost that he had been eager to give up this life and be born again into another one. But although he had nearly given up on life, he was gradually preparing to return, not as some bird but as his true self.

A little later, Doctor Kim brought Ch’ŏn Sang-pyŏng down to see me. With his wildly dishevelled hair, his swarthy face that had recovered a certain pallor, thin as ever, with badly fitting hospital pajamas, he looked dreadfully shabby; the moment he sat down he greeted me in almost a shout:

“Oh! How have you been? How’s your brother?”

“We’re fine. How long have you been here in hospital?”

“Goodness knows... Doctor, give me a cigarette... Miss Mok, did you bring anything with you?”

“I’ve brought some canned goods.”

“Let’s have something.”

After he had consumed a can of food, we talked about this and that. There was nothing obviously odd about him, but the overall atmosphere was very different from before. It was as if he was being submissive, there was a feeling of the obedient child about him. When I made to go, he quickly asked:

“Miss Mok, when will you be coming again?”

“Today is Wednesday, I’ll come again on Saturday. Is there anything you would like to eat?”

“I feel like some red-bean cakes.”

He also asked me to get him a book of Chinese poetry.

As I left the hospital, I thought how lucky he was. He had happened to encounter someone like Doctor Kim, who had recognized him; otherwise he might have lived on as someone without a past, never knowing who he had been.

When he was my husband later, he used to recollect how, while he was being carried off to the hospital in the police squad car, he kept shouting: “Do I have to go back to prison?” but that was the only thing he could remember.

As we had thought, that day he had collapsed in the street and nearly died. He never carried an identification card or anything indicating who he was, which meant that if he had died, he would have been disposed of as a vagrant, an ignominious end that he narrowly escaped.

Fortunately a police car discovered him and took him to hospital but he was far from being in his right mind. Asked his name, he replied “Ch’ŏn Sang-pyŏng” and “poet” but when he was asked what poems he had written, he could not recall the title of a single one. Since he was completely incontinent, at first they felt that there was nothing they could do for such a wreck and it seems they were even reluctant to take him in charge.

A month later he was transferred to Doctor Kim’s service. On discovering the poet he knew in such a grim place, doctor Kim saw that he was in a bad way but had no idea that we were anxious about him and never once thought to contact any one.

Doctor Kim was staying in a boarding house, and would bring a lunch box to work with him; every lunchtime he used to divide up the rice and side dishes and share them with Ch’ŏn Sang-pyŏng. I only learned belatedly that there could be such love, after he had taken in this patient that others had been prepared to give up, and brought him back to life.

I have always been full of gratitude: if it were not for doctor Kim’s devotion, caring for him with such endless patience and affection, he could never have enjoyed his new life together with me as husband and wife.

When Saturday came, I returned to the hospital, bearing as promised the red-bean cakes and the book of Chinese poems I had bought. He had always been a hearty eater, heaping each spoonful high and eating with relish, and the way he ate those bean cakes was no different. He did not simply eat them with relish, he positively wolfed them down in an amazing manner. Of the ten cakes I had brought, he gulped down eight at a single go, leaving just two. Whereupon he opened the jacket of his pajamas, and stowed those two cakes inside, not in any pocket but against his bare flesh, which looked none too clean, beneath his clothes.

“I must take these up to my companion who washes the clothes,” he explained to me as I looked on doubtfully, and went up to the ward.

Once at home, I began to worry in case he had indigestion from eating all those cakes, but he never so much as burped.

I started to visit him at least twice each week. In theory people were supposed to come just once a week but I found the door was always open for me. I felt it was my task to care for him in this way, especially since he had no one from his family staying there with him, as was normal. It certainly did not start from any kind of feelings of romantic love. It was simply that on seeing this person who was close to me lying there in such a state, I felt that I had to help as I could.

Yet as time passed, warm feelings of affection that I could not explain began to arise. It was rather as though I was happy to be the only person looking after him. Perhaps after all it was the maternal instinct that we women are supposed to have, stretching out to embrace this man. I felt happy caring for him, and he felt peaceful being looked after. It was impossible, yet I gradually felt his gaze becoming warmer as he looked at me.

Sometimes I would go to visit him with another friend, and though we were sitting side by side, he would keep gazing fixedly at me.

“Ch’ŏn Sŏnsaeng-nim, why aren’t you looking at me? You only look at Miss Mok. Don’t you want me to come any more?” My insistent friend would sometimes ask him, and he would burst out laughing.

Now that he had found rest and peace, his health began to improve visibly. When I first saw him in January, he had weighed less than forty kilograms, but by the end of April he was up to fifty-eight. As his physical condition improved, he grew eager to go out. It seemed good to give him some practice at walking, so with Doctor Kim’s permission one day we made an outing. He was incapable of walking unaided, I supported him as he made his way out to the front of the hospital and suddenly he was insisting: “I’m not going back.”

“I won’t go back. What need is there to go back?”

“Where will you go then?”

“I can go and stay with friends... It’ll be alright: kwench’ant’a, kwench’ant’a!”

“Alright. Let’s go and have a cup of coffee.”

“Sure, sure.”

There was no choice, I told a lie. From the cafe I phoned doctor Kim and prepared a rough plan of action.

“Doctor Kim says you can sleep out if you like, but you must collect your medicine before you go.”

“Really? Sure, sure.”

Ch’ŏn Sŏnsaeng-nim unfailingly did as I told him. He rose without a shadow of suspicion, and climbed back up to the hospital.

“Ch’ŏn Sŏnsaeng-nim. Wait just a minute.”

While the medicine was being prepared, I quickly left and went home, where my heart ached all night long. I felt sure that he must be feeling terribly resentful and upset, and was ashamed of what I had done. Doctor Kim duly soothed his ruffled feelings, however, and when I met Ch’ŏn Sang-pyŏng again three days later, it was he who was the more apologetic. He had been so overwhelmed by Doctor Kim’s admonitions, that he had no thought of scolding me: “If you didn’t return to the hospital, do you realize just how hard I would have scolded Miss Mok, since she was looking after you?”

Suddenly it was time to think of discharging him from hospital. It was all thanks to the care lavished by Doctor Kim and his team, but he seemed determined to shift part of the responsibility on to me: “Because of you, he found a sense of peace, and that made his recovery go much more quickly.” At the same time he kept trying to discover my inner feelings.

“He needs no more treatment. There is nothing to stop him leaving this hospital. But can’t you go on looking after him?”

“Sŏnsaeng-nim, you know I have no money, nothing, so how can I possibly look after him?”

“No, that’s not the problem. You see, one woman is worth dozens of men. There is no one but you who can help him. It all depends on you now, whether he lives or dies; it’s for you to decide.”

He had never been adapted to life in this world, even before he was hurt. He was quite incapable of walking through reality on his own. That was why he had led such a wandering life, at home nowhere, drinking endlessly. He had written that once he died, he would be reborn as a bird; now I was obliged to ask myself whether I felt that I could be his partner in the real world that was sure to treat him badly again.
According to Doctor Kim, Ch’ŏn Sang-pyŏng was confident that things would work out: “I have my royalties, and the land I bought.” He had boasted, completely forgetting that he had given the land to his young friend.

At last, seeing how like a child he had become, I made up my mind.

“Very well,” I said, “I’ll do what I can to help.”

I did not stop to consider what difficulties and hardships might come in the future. As things were at that moment, it was obvious that we had to be together. There was no thought of it being a sacrifice for one of us, and it was not something motivated by mere sentiment, either. It was a highly practical question, involving as it did the rest of our lives, and I chose the path after much agonizing.

For Ch’ŏn Sang-pyŏng, as for myself, the only way for us to live at peace was for me to be beside him. Just as he would lose his peace without me beside him, so I could never live quietly if I abandoned him.

“I must live for Ch’ŏn Sŏnsaeng-nim, there’s no one else.” The thought was firmly fixed deep in my heart. For the rest of my life after that, when I was weary or sad, I always found new courage as I recalled the promise I swore to myself then.

In late April 1972 he came out of hospital. As he put on the new clothes and shoes we had bought, he was quiet and docile. I had already rented a room in a small house up near Mount Surak, and we went home there together.

“Sure, no cobwebs grow over living lips. He’s a good enough fellow, but he’ll never make it alone.”

With those words, my brother expressed his consent to my decision. From his brother in Pusan came the response that if it was simply a matter of my looking after him, he would be too sorry for my sake ever to allow it; he would only be able to entrust him to me with a quiet heart if we were married.
On May the 14th, the two of us stood side by side before the novelist Kim Dong-ni and informed the world at large that we were henceforth husband and wife. The whole assembly was laughing, and the two of us were beaming brightly too, amidst the applause wishing this forty-two year-old bachelor and this thirty-five year-old maid a hundred years of happiness.

There I was, side by side with the man who in his poems “Wings” had prayed: “I want wings. I want wings that will carry me wherever I want... God, give me wings, please.”

I had become the partner of this wingless bird, resolved to look after him until the day when he would at last earn his wings and take flight.