In my childhood homes, I grew up with Korean culture all around me. For years we had a woodblock print of a tiger (intended to ward off evil spirits) on top of our bookcase, a print of the 10 symbols of longevity and a shamanic dance mask of a syphilitic monk mounted on our wall, ancient Silla-style and celadon pottery on a bookshelf and carved wooden wedding ducks on a side table. All of these things were like background noise to me – they were just normal.
When I was an infant, my father would lift me up and chant the Korean phonemes, “Ga, na, da, ra…” to me to ensure I would be able to pronounce all the sounds of the language. As I grew, he would sing me Korean children’s songs and say rhymes. I still remember all the words to Mountain Rabbit and Forsythia. ‘‘Sythia, sythia, forsythia, pluck one, put it in your mouth.” Still, I used to have trouble pronouncing the plosive letters, of which there are no equivalent in English, and telling the difference between the short and long “o” sounds.
I also learned how to write Hangul. I remember being about three years old, crouched down in our driveway, making lines and turning them into letters using a stick of chalk. A friend from next door, who was two years older than me, had been drawing little creatures on the asphalt with me before that, but now I was using Hangul to write “Bella”. My friend saw it and asked, “Is that Chinese?” I replied, “It’s Korean.” She seemed offended to have been wrong. “Chinese, Japanese, Korean, it’s all the same thing,” she said.
My face first grew hot with anger that became shame as I said nothing. Had I been a bit older, I might have had the knowledge and pride to point out that Hangul was an alphabet, that the letters don’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 a blatantly incorrect statement like that. It was strange to see proof of how people could somehow discriminate against something they did not even really know about in the first place.
A couple of years later, when I was about five, my parents bought me a book about mythology. It felt heavy as an anvil and it was like an arbiter of esoteric knowledge. It was one of my favourite books and I only ever thought of it as “the big red myth book”. I’d often open it up on the floor of the living room and voraciously consume stories like those of Thoth and Isis or retellings of the epic of Gilgamesh, looking 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.
Though they were not to be found in any of my favourite books, I did learn about the myths of Korea over the years, 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 eldest brother, my father’s “Big Uncle”, who had narrowly escaped death many times during the Korean war, was a geomancer who read the dragons in the hills to locate auspicious sites for graves and houses. Big Uncle also exorcised ghosts and consulted the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, to foretell 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 resource of Korean folk tales for me. He would casually mention creatures like goblins or fox demons, or that he had lived for years in a house that was said to be haunted. Sometimes, he would tell me stories, like the one about the great quest undertaken by Princess Bari, the mother of Korean shamans.
I would reflect on those stories – both fact and fiction – about war, long journeys and spirits, questioning if I was even Korean enough, given I was being told these things and not experiencing them directly. With my pale skin, I don’t even look typically 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 realised that tutoring me was also helping them feel less homesick. They not only taught me the language but Korean culture, too. I remember sitting with them on the floor at the small, ginkgo-wood table my parents had bought from a street vendor in Seoul in the 80s. We would study and eat snacks there. Sometimes my mother would serve us meals with kimchi or make us cucumber pickles, recipes learned from my Korean paternal great-aunt, who had been a famous cook. With my father, I would eat ssam (meat wrapped in a leafy vegetable), with my own-style lamb and rice wrapped in lettuce.
My feelings about how Korean I am started to change in adulthood. While I was a student at Vassar College, in New York state, I applied for a work study job in the college’s art museum. During my interview for that position, I had to talk about several objects from different parts of the museum’s collection. One of the objects I chose was in the Asian gallery – a wooden, once-gilt statuette of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara from a Vietnamese temple. I gave an impromptu lecture about all the different names of this figure, including Gwaneum, the Korean name. I explained that in different countries throughout the world this same deity is a different gender (a man in Vietnam and a woman in Korea, for example) and that Gwaneum is known for rescuing people who have been shipwrecked. It was then I realised that throughout my life, all of these facts had seemed familiar, like common knowledge, forming an essential part of who I am.
Yet whenever I ended up mentioning I was part-Korean to fellow students, the response I’d get would be something like, “That’s so cool, I love K-dramas,” or “What do you think of K-pop?” When I studied Korean at Vassar, and the professor asked the class why we were taking the course, nearly everyone said they had signed up because they were fans of those genres. I’d 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, due to the Hallyu phenomenon (also known as the Korean Wave), young people’s sense of Korea’s culture and its folklore is shaped by these exports, but this media is usually tailored to outside audiences, especially western ones. Even films produced for Korean audiences often have English titles phonetically spelled out 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 sets out various objects – thread, money, rice and a pencil – and puts them before the baby. Whichever one the child chooses is meant to predict 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 far more drawn to visual art than writing, but now I’m equally interested in the latter and I’ve recently co-authored a book with my father in order to introduce Korean folk tales and myths to a new audience. In a sense, this project continues the family tradition of storytelling. I brought my love of mythology and art history, and research methods to it, 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 outset and, each using our favourite fountain pens, co-wrote in longhand an outline of the sections in a loose leaf notebook that we passed back and forth. If it had been 100 years ago, I imagine we would have been grinding ink on an inkstone and writing with calligraphy brushes on mulberry paper.
What my picking of the pencil foretold turned out to be true. I now know that I have a lot to share. And while I had no awareness of this back then, now I can see the myths of Korea were always alive all around me and my time absorbed in them was the best preparation to tell 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 at guardianbookshop.com
