The calligrapher's daughter_ a novel - Eugenia Kim [0]
The Calligrapher’s Daughter
A NOVEL
Eugenia Kim
Henry Holt and Company
New York
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Copyright © 2009 by Eugenia Kim
All rights reserved.
The poem “A Dream,” which is quoted on pages 185 and 223, is from Among the Flowering Reeds: Classic Korean Poems in Chinese, translated by Kim Jong-Gil, White Pine Press (Whitepine.org), 2003.
Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kim, Eugenia.
The calligrapher’s daughter : a novel / Eugenia Kim. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8912-7
ISBN-10: 0-8050-8912-8
1. Korea—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3611.I453C35 2009
813’.6—dc22
2008046306
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First Edition 2009
Designed by Meryl Sussman Levavi
Painted illustrations by Alice Hahn Hyegyung Kim
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my mother and father,
whose lives inspired this novel,
and for my family
The Calligrapher’s Daughter
PART I
Gaeseong
The Daughter of the Woman from Nah-jin
SUMMER – AUTUMN 1915
I LEARNED I HAD NO NAME ON THE SAME DAY I LEARNED FEAR. UNTIL that day, I had answered to Baby, Daughter or Child, so for the first five years of my life hadn’t known I ought to have a name. Nor did I know that those years had seen more than fifty thousand of my Korean countrymen arrested and hundreds more murdered. My father, frowning as he did when he spoke of the Japanese, said we were merely fodder for a gluttonous assimilation.
The servants called me Ahsee, Miss, and outside of the family I was politely referred to as my mother’s daughter. To address an adult by name was considered unspeakably rude. Instead, one was called by one’s family relational position, or profession. My father was the literati-scholar-artist, the calligrapher Han, much respected, and my mother was the scholar’s wife. And because my mother wasn’t native to Gaeseong, she was also properly called “the woman from Nah-jin,” a wintry town on the far northeast border near Manchuria. Thus, if a church lady said, “That one, the daughter of the woman from Nah-jin,” I knew I was in trouble again.
I wasn’t a perfect daughter. Our estate overflowed with places to crawl, creatures to catch and mysteries to explore, and the clean outside air, whether icy, steamy or sublime, made me restive and itching with curiosity. Mother tried to discipline me, to mold my raw traits into behavior befitting yangban, aristocrats. An only child, I was expected to uphold a long tradition of upper-class propriety. There were many rules—all seemingly created to still my feet, busy my hands and quiet my tongue. Only much later did I understand that the sweeping change of those years demanded the stringent practice of our rituals and traditions; to venerate their meaning, yes, but also to preserve their existence simply by practicing them.
I couldn’t consistently abide by the rules, though, and often found myself wandering into the forbidden rooms of my father. Too many fascinating things happened on his side of the house to wait for permission to go there! But punishment had been swift the time Myunghee, my nanny, had caught me eavesdropping outside his sitting room. She’d switched the back of my thighs with a stout branch and shut me in my room. I cried until I was exhausted from crying, and my mother came and put cool hands on my messy cheeks and cold towels on my burning legs. I now know that she’d sat in the next room listening to me cry, as she worked a hand spindle, ruining the thread with her tears. Many years later, my mother told me that the cruelty of that whipping had revealed Myunghee’s true character, and she wished she had dismissed her then, given all that came to pass later.
I didn’t often