Wed to a Bird With No Wings

Poverty’s no sin

After our marriage, I felt less that he was my husband, than that he was a little child I was taking care of. True, he had left the hospital, but we always had to be careful his health did not suffer and above all we had to find some way of earning a living.

At the start of our married life, early each morning we would walk up to the middle slopes of Mount Surak, and once every other day we would go on an outing downtown. On the days when we did not go out, he would go back up the hill after breakfast, return home in time for lunch, and then write poems or take a nap.

During the wedding ceremony, Kim Dong-ni had pointed at the watch I had given my husband, saying jokingly: “Your wife has bought you this watch as a way of telling you always to be on time.” As if in obedience to those words, my husband’s habit of insisting on being given his meals at precisely the right moment dates from this time.

On Sundays we used to go for lunch to the house of Doctor Kim Jong-hae; at the stroke of twelve, my husband would bellow: “Mrs Kim, it’s twelve o’clock. Let’s have our lunch quickly now!” It was always the same, whatever house we were visiting. His meal just had to be served at exactly twelve o’clock.

On the Sundays when we did not visit Doctor Kim, we would eat lunch at home with friends who had come to visit, then go for a stroll in the hills. Since we were always near Mount Surak, it is only natural that it figures so prominently in the poems written at this time. By his poems, he gave Mount Surak some good publicity, and celebrated our very simple home with its thatched roof, too. He wrote poems that expressed the peaceful ways in which he passed his days surrounded by the peace of the hill.

He was certainly becoming calmer, surely because of the relief brought by the fact that he had found a haven and that twenty years of rootlessness had come to an end. Yet it was still true that unless he could maintain this state, his health might easily deteriorate again. Keeping him away from drink would certainly be a problem, but regular meals were the fundamental condition for a settled life. I was responsible for him, and I always had to be on the alert about that.

At the start of our marriage I had to take care of him, for he was still very poorly, and I earned a living by doing embroidery at home. I had been embroidering since before our marriage, so there was no great difficulty about it, but now I had to look after him as well, and I found that there was not enough time in a day. It took a full month to do the work for a single folding screen. Only what with taking him down town, drinking tea, running errands, there was not enough time for me to sit down and work.

One’s skill at a job improves by doing it, but since there was too little time, I found I could not work as well and of course our income began to dwindle in consequence. In addition, the work had to be framed or mounted by someone else, and that took more of the total price than it should have, so that earning a living was no easy matter.

When a little money came in, the purchase of embroidery materials came first; then we would buy a sack of rice, ten or twenty coal-briquettes, and there would be nothing left so we would go on for a while, making do with that until something more came in. That was how we lived. Once the rent was paid, the two of us had almost nothing to live on.

Finally, in 1977, a friend and I opened a store selling antique furniture in the Ch’onggye-ch’ong area of Seoul. It was our first experience of business, in a small space we rented inside Hwanghak-dong flea-market. The money had been put up by my friend’s elder sister, while a collector who knew us well helped by letting us have a million Won’s worth of folk paintings and other objects on credit, telling us to pay it back gradually.

The store was so small that once the wooden objects and pieces of furniture were inside, there was no room left for us, and we used to sit on the cash box. Yet it was the neatest of all the stores, and we had some good ideas, too. We were the first to think of adapting wooden mortars from Cheju-do for use as tables; afterwards it became quite the fashion in interior design to use a wooden mortar covered with a round piece of thick glass as a table.

One year later I set up on my own, but since I had no capital to start with, I borrowed money at high interest from a money-lender and in the end, after a hard fight, I was forced to close down. That was the hardest moment in my life.
During those years there were moments when we had no money for so much as a single cupful of rice. Yet still I felt that the debts had to be repaid; I believed that starvation was better than being despised and insulted. That meant that there was no one I could tell about my problems. I never uttered a word to my mother, or brother, or friends. I reckoned that if there was no money for rice, we could very well make do with half a pack of dried noodles each. I could not stand the thought of talking about money with anyone.

Money is very odd stuff; one mistake and it ruins a relationship. Suppose I told someone of our difficulties, and they could not help? The only result would be that we would both feel embarrassed. Fully conscious of this danger, I never uttered a word about my difficulties. If I had skipped a meal, I never said I had gone without, never said I was hungry.

In those days, my brother had stopped work at the publishers’ and was working at home, engaged in making translations from Japanese. They already had three children, it was already beyond his ability to feed and clothe the five of them properly. I had to fend for myself, no matter how.

At that moment someone who had happened to learn of my situation proposed that I take charge of a corner of his store. It involved keeping an eye on the store in general, while displaying and selling pottery and wooden objects. The arrangement meant that if I sold something, I would receive ten percent of the total price for myself. With that, assuming that I made about a hundred thousand Won a month, fifteen thousand would go on rent, a certain sum on repaying my debts, and then I would buy rice and coal briquettes with what remained.

That went on for about a year, then I was able to set up a corner selling wooden objects in a traditional tea-room named “Tyrol” in Insa-dong. The income was smaller, only about seventy thousand a month. With that amount, once the rent, the rice and the coal were paid for, there was almost nothing left for any bus fare.

After I had been more than a year in the “Tyrol” I happened to meet Kang T’ae-yŏl there. He had been manager of a publishing company and in those days he had his eye on the room now occupied by “Kwich’ŏn” with the idea of making it into a shop.

At first I thought he meant one doing the same line of business as I had in the “Tyrol” but finally the situation became clearer, for he invited me to start up a business in the room he had chosen and kindly lent me three million Won: “Think of it as makkŏlli money for old Ch’ŏn” he said, telling me to take my time repaying it.

That was the origin of “Kwich’ŏn”; thanks to the kindness of that one person, I was able to be my own boss, incomparably better off than before.

Yet in the twenty and more years we spent together, my husband never showed the slightest interest in how his wife managed or what she did to buy the rice. Even when pains and sorrow were in full flood, he remained utterly serene as if there was nothing at all the matter. So long as he had a bottle of makkŏlli and a packet of cigarettes, he envied no one, and so long as he had a wife, he reckoned that all happiness lay in my hands.

I feel fairly happy this morning,

with a cup of coffee, enough fags in the pack,

breakfast eaten and still the bus fare left over.

I feel fairly gloomy this morning,

though I’m not short of small change,

because I have to worry about tomorrow.
Poverty’s my full-time job

but if I can hold up my head in this sunshine

it’s because the sunshine has no bank account either.
My past and future

my dear sons and daughters,

sometimes come to my grass-grown grave and say,

here sleeps a life that took pain in its stride,

let the fresh breeze blow. . . .
(“My Poverty”)
He lived exactly as this poem describes. And because he was like that, I became stronger. His eyes expressed happiness as he looked at me, and that was enough to make me forget all my fatigue.