An Anonymous Island

Illustration by JAIME HERNANDEZ

“Tsk-tsk.”

It’s the end of a long evening, and my husband clicks his tongue at the TV as if he were watching something despicable. On the screen there’s a group of men and women hunched in the corner of a police-station waiting room. The camera catches them from various angles, hiding their faces with their hands or with some article of clothing. I think they might have been arrested for gambling, but it seems they were dragged out in broad daylight from some dimly lit secret basement club where they were dancing. The announcer doesn’t say they were dancing—he uses a more suggestive phrase: “They were rubbing their bodies together.”

“What the hell is the matter with our generation?” my husband complains. “How did it get so easy to be anonymous?”

I’ve heard the same thing from him many times, and I can guess where he’s headed before he has even finished: Get off the bus one stop past your neighborhood in the city and you hardly recognize anyone. Its so easy to hide these days—there must be huge numbers of people living anonymously. Its the moral failing of our generation, a major factor in the corruption of womens sexuality. He pushes on like that and eventually gets around to how much he misses his childhood home, a rural village with only one clan.

“We all knew each other,” he’ll say nostalgically. “It was like looking down into the water at your own reflection. . . . Most of the people were blood relations, so it was practically unthinkable for a woman to be unfaithful. Once in a while someone went off to a nearby village for that sort of thing, but sooner or later it was found out.”

Whenever my husband goes on like this, it makes a repugnant memory resurface in my mind and I feel sorry for him. Maybe I should feel some shame for myself, too, but it’s something that happened ten long years ago.

That spring, I graduated with a degree in education and took my first job at an elementary school in a rural village, which I will leave nameless. It was sixty li from the county seat, up past two high, rugged mountains in a valley where it seemed no one would want to live.

I got off the bus and stood on the slope at the bus stop for a while, feeling desolate and alone. The mountains encircled me like the giant walls of a prison that would confine me for the rest of my life, and the village of about a hundred houses that I saw in the distance looked abandoned—like a ghost town. The school I was looking for must have been hidden behind a ridge. I couldn’t see it anywhere.

The few people who had got off the bus with me had already disappeared, so I went to the store nearby to ask for directions. I had gone only a few steps when I felt something like a sharp beam of light pierce my skin. I stopped to look for the source and saw a young man sitting on the back porch of the store, silently watching me. His pants were so stained and dirty that I couldn’t tell what material they were made of, and the sleeves of his dyed Army jacket hung in tatters.

His face was dark and weathered, with a prominent nose and high cheekbones. I stared at him without realizing it. Just then the light seemed to prick at my skin again. It was hidden behind a veil of madness, but the source was unmistakable—it was coming from the man’s eyes.

It’s as if I were on a forest path. I see a snake through the thick foliage and the fear stays with me until I leave. No simple fear but a kind of primal thrill that dissolves into a hollow regret when I’m safely through and the danger has passed. That’s how it made me feel, the light from his eyes, until the shopkeeper opened the door and came out, breaking the illusion.

“Ggaecheol, you idiot! What are you doing still sitting out there?” Although the man must have been five or six years older than him, the shopkeeper talked down to him, as if he were a child. The man was apparently not some vagrant just passing through—he belonged to the village. He didn’t even pretend to hear the shopkeeper, but just kept looking at me with those vague hooded eyes. His expression wasn’t lewd or disgusting, but for some reason it frightened me.

“You deaf?” the shopkeeper said. “Get up!” He went over and gave Ggaecheol a loud thump on the back, and as I cautiously approached he called out, “Welcome! Are you looking for something?”

It was only then that I was able to shake Ggaecheol’s clinging gaze from my body. I asked coolly, “Where is the elementary school?”

“Ho! So you’re the new lady teacher they said was coming.” The shopkeeper’s face suddenly overflowed with kindness. He turned just as a boy, who looked about six, came out from the back of the store. “Hey, come over here,” he called.

“What is it, Mr. Togok?” the boy said.

“Looks like this is the new teacher. Show her to the school before you go.” He looked toward me with a hint of pity, and muttered, “The school’s the size of a booger, and it’s way out in those hills.”

Obediently, I stepped forward to follow the boy. Ggaecheol’s eyes were on me again, but I had recovered my composure. I shot him a fierce look as I left.

Walking to the school with the boy, I realized how quickly I was being introduced to the peculiar dynamics of the village. The boy nodded in greeting to each man we met, calling him “uncle” or “grandfather.” I had grown up in the city, and my only exposure to relatives was when I visited an uncle’s house once or twice a year; the closeness of this place felt strange to me.

In the classroom, half the students had the same surname and even those with different surnames seemed to be first cousins. Later, I learned that this was because the village was surrounded on all four sides by layer upon layer of high mountains, with a single road threading through from north to south. The village produced nothing special, so there was virtually no influx of people from other family lines.

After my first encounter with Ggaecheol, I forgot about him for a while. Of course, he was constantly lurking about the village doing nothing, and I would see his shabby form and feel that hooded gaze several times a day, but this was my first job and the first time I had been far away from home by myself. I was busy cultivating my new life and I paid him no attention.

But, as I more or less adjusted to my new life and had some time to think, I gradually became curious about my surroundings, and the first thing that came to mind was Ggaecheol.

What initially struck me was the question of his origins. He wasn’t born in the village and he wasn’t related to anyone there either by blood or by marriage. He had drifted in by chance, however many years ago, and had been living there since. He was over forty, and yet he was known by the childish nickname Ggaecheol, to adults and children alike.

The next unusual thing was how he earned his living. At first I assumed he did physical labor or odd jobs, but then I saw that he spent his days doing absolutely nothing. Even so, he was able to get three meals a day and had a place to sleep every night.

This is what he did when he wanted to eat: he would burst into any house as the family was gathered around the table, and announce, “Give me some food.”

Just as no one ever spoke politely to him, he never used the polite form of address, either. It was strange how the men of the house reacted. Not only were they not annoyed by his intrusions; they actually seemed to welcome him. They would say, “Even an idiot like you has to eat to live. Mix up a bowl for him, dear.”

The wife would fill a large ceramic or brass bowl with rice, soup, kimchi, and whatever, stir it all together, and push it to Ggaecheol, who would take the bowl and slurp it all down, sitting on the corner of a straw mat or the edge of the raised wooden floor. As he left, he would announce, “It was good. I’m going now.”

“Don’t you say thank you?”

“What for?” he’d say. “I ate my food and now I’m going.” He’d wander out and there would be neither hide nor hair of him in that house again for a few months. According to my calculations, the number of days he stayed away was approximately equal to the number of households in the village.

It was similar with his sleeping arrangements. Usually, he slept outdoors in a pavilion or in a common room, but when it grew cold—or if it was a day when no wood had been prepared for the heating fire—he was sure to go around the village saying, “Let me sleep in your house.”

“You can sleep here if you take a bath first.”

“You won’t need your blanket,” he’d say. “You’re just gonna go lie down next to your wife, right?”

That was the usual procedure, and it all seemed a bit too comfortable to me.

When I thought about it, there was clearly something strange about Ggaecheol’s relationship with the villagers. The men all treated him like a half-wit or a madman, but it seemed as if they were trying hard to mask their anxiety that perhaps he wasn’t really like that. The women, too, seemed to consider Ggaecheol dim-witted or mad, but beneath their strict maternal façade they hid a protective impulse that went beyond mere sympathy. What I couldn’t understand, no matter how much I thought about it, was why the villagers supported him in this way, like a member of their own community. He did no work, he had no special skills, and he never earned their good will with his wit or humor.

But then something happened that hinted at an answer to my question. One day, after I had been there for six or seven months, I was walking home from work when I witnessed a disturbance in the vacant lot in front of my boarding house. A young man was literally pounding Ggaecheol into the dirt, but it was odd—neither the attacker nor the victim indicated any reason for the fight. The young man, with a staff in one hand and a piece of firewood in the other, was wordlessly thrashing Ggaecheol wherever he could find an opening. Ggaecheol was curled up like a porcupine, periodically spitting out a groan.

As I watched, not knowing what to do, villagers gathered from here and there, and they ended up explaining the brutal violence.

“What the hell are you doing, Hwacheon? We look out for each other in this village! How can you behave like this?”

“Tell us, Hwacheon, what could this idiot possibly do?”

“That’s right, Hwacheon! You’re losing face and bringing shame on your family. Our ancestors have been here for three hundred years, and not once did a woman get thrown out for adultery.”

All the men were trying to make him stop, but to me it sounded as if they weren’t so much trying to convince Hwacheon as reassuring themselves.

“Look, Hwacheon, you’ve got to think about your wife’s dignity. Are there no other men in the world that a woman would do it with an idiot like him?”

“That’s right! She’s got her own perfectly good snake with Hwacheon here, so why would an idiot . . . Don’t go killing him now!”

“You’ve got to behave like a man of your standing. He’s over forty and impotent! Can’t even dream of getting a wife.”

Even the older women helped calm the young man down, and their tone, too, suggested that Ggaecheol’s being an idiot was his saving grace—a sort of magical charm. Strangely, not one of the younger women came forward to help, and their angry looks were directed not at Ggaecheol but at the young man wielding the staff.

The disturbance didn’t last long, but it was through that unexpected event that I was able to get a sense of why the villagers permitted Ggaecheol to live among them. The fact that everyone in the village was related by blood or marriage also meant that they looked out for one another, especially where issues of morality were concerned. I was now certain that Ggaecheol played some peculiar role in the sex life of this closed village.

My suspicions were confirmed one day when I accidentally overheard some village wives whispering by the bank of a stream. It was a hot and humid summer night, and I had gone there so that I could at least cool my feet. The water must have reflected the sound of their voices, as I was able to hear them from quite a distance.

“Don’t you think Yeoung’gok’s baby looks like Ggaecheol?”

“Be quiet! Do you want poor Ggaecheol to get killed this time?”

“What did I say? I was just talking.”

“Even so. Ggaecheol’s just an idiot with no place to go.”

“Right, he’s an idiot. Ggaecheol’s just an idiot.”

They seemed to end their conversation by tacit agreement, and I thought I heard an intimate tone of conspiracy in their voices. I was finally able to guess why I sensed that strange protective quality for Ggaecheol among the women even when they spoke of him contemptuously. Ggaecheol never worked, but he got three meals a day and a place to sleep every night—and the women were half the reason. But the other half? I couldn’t figure out why the men put up with his presence in the village.

I worked in what was nominally a school, but there were only six grades, and sometimes the classes were only half full. Inspections were rare in such a rural mountain village—they were practically never done. So, distracted from the monotony of my daily life by my curiosity, I had plenty of time to keep a close watch over Ggaecheol and the villagers.

But when the second semester began I no longer had that leisure. During summer break at home that year, I went to the seaside with some friends and met my future husband, who was a college senior. What at first seemed a passing fancy between us slowly heated up. Being in the same city helped, but our interests and temperaments were similar, and we grew close more quickly than I would have thought possible.

When I returned to the village for my second semester, my nights were spent just trying to read and answer his flood of letters. My head was filled with thoughts of him, my imagination swirling around the city where he lived. Unless it related to him, nothing at all in the world could get my attention.

The remainder of that year passed, and the spring of the next year came around. Neither of our families objected, so we became engaged when he graduated. But then he immediately had to enlist for his mandatory military service. By that time, I had become a woman with intimate knowledge of a man; we had gone on a three-day trip over winter break, but after we were engaged, during the end-of-year break before he was due to enlist in the Army, we were practically inseparable.

After he enlisted, the torrent of letters began again, and I responded to them even more fervently than before. There were times, once in a while, when Ggaecheol would suddenly pop up and look me over with that gaze, but though he sometimes startled me he was not of interest.

Five or six months after my husband enlisted, his unit was mobilized for the war in Vietnam. I’d thought that all I had to do was wait quietly for his three-year tour of duty to end, so I was stunned when I heard the news. In those days Vietnam was considered a death sentence, and I was gripped by a terrible despair. And beneath my fear was a longing for my husband that burned not only in my mind but also in my body.

I wrote to him without embarrassment. Just once, if only for a moment, I wanted to be in his arms again. I wanted to feel the warmth of his body and the heat of his breath. Whatever he had to do, he had to be with me first. His answer came quickly. Before shipping out to Vietnam he would have a weeklong leave, and he promised to set aside a few days to come and see me.

At five o’clock on the last day that my husband could have come, when the last bus went by without stopping, I was so disappointed that I wanted to collapse right there. I regretted, until my bones ached, that I hadn’t missed work to run to him, but by then it was no longer possible. What I couldn’t understand was why my body didn’t know to cool off when I was so terribly disappointed. I had spent the last week imagining myself in my husband’s arms, and now, when I knew for certain that he wasn’t coming, my body burned even hotter.

I staggered away from the bus stop in a delirious fog until a sudden noise brought me back to my senses. I was standing in the middle of the road. Though it was already early fall, what I’d heard was a cloudburst, and the rain poured down like a monsoon. I noticed a storage shed by the side of the road and ran over to it. At first my plan was to stand under the eaves and wait it out, but then the rain fell harder and the wind picked up, forcing me back against the corrugated-metal door.

“Oh, no—I left all the windows open.”

I waited a long time, but the rain only came harder, so I opened the door and stepped inside. Normally the shed was stacked full of fertilizer, but today it was completely empty and quiet. I remember thinking that someone might be in there, yet it didn’t occur to me to look around. I just stared out at the rain through the half-open door. It wasn’t that my mind had gone blank; it was that I couldn’t rouse myself from the exquisite heat that tingled like tiny insects swarming over my body.

It was a mistake not to look around the storage shed. As soon as I was completely inside, someone rushed from a dark corner, shut the door, and quickly drew the bolt.

“Who’s there? Open the door! I’ll scream!” Filled with a sudden, instinctual fear, I let out a sharp scream.

“It’s no use,” a slightly hoarse voice said. “You see anyone out there walking in the rain?”

A hand clamped onto my wrist. It was Ggaecheol—I had suspected it the moment I saw the blur of his shadow, and, strangely, now that I knew who it was the fear that had gripped me was gone.

“Ggaecheol,” I said. “Let go of my arm!”

I tried to intimidate him the way the other villagers did, but he just pushed me down onto the straw-covered floor and roughly grabbed a handful of my skirt.

“If you don’t want to go back all messy, undress nicely,” he said.

I used all my strength, struggling to get away from him. He lay on top of me, and I felt his hot breath in my ear. “This Ggaecheol may not know much, but I know exactly when you women need me,” he whispered. “Right now your body’s hot and ready.”

When I heard those words my body suddenly relaxed and the strange tingling fever, which I had momentarily forgotten, came back.

Again, he whispered expertly in my ear, caressing my body, “I was watching you the whole afternoon. All the time you were waiting so nervous, at the bus stop.”

He had already become an abstraction of a man to me, an image with no relation to his shabby clothes and ugly face. I did not resist as I fell into a dreamlike state—I just let go of everything. I’m embarrassed even to remember it, but I didn’t feel victimized. I’m not so sure that I didn’t enjoy it, as if he and I were having an illicit love affair. If I could offer up a single defense as another man’s woman at that time, it would be that at the moment of climax it was my husband’s face that I saw.

For a long time afterward, I was worried. I was afraid that Ggaecheol would come bursting into my room, or that the whole village would find out and do irrevocable harm to my life. The fact that I don’t recall feeling a sense of moral shame or of having sinned against my husband makes me feel strange now, though not remorseful.

Contrary to my fears, Ggaecheol did not once come near me—it was remarkable. I had experienced a major catastrophe, but not a single rumor had spread through the village, and in the end I remained unsullied. It was only after a few months of restraint and closed lips on Ggaecheol’s part that I realized his silence was his own protective shield. If he pushed me into the situation I feared, I would deny that anything had happened, and it was obvious that he would end up the loser.

It was the same for his relationships with all the other women of the village.

After the incident, I understood the village women more completely. To put it bluntly, he was the lover or potential lover of every one of them. But I did not yet understand why the village men accepted his behavior.

One cold afternoon before winter break that year, I was sitting by the stove, in the teachers’ lounge, across from one of the male teachers who had grown up in the village. Only the two of us were still there in the empty schoolhouse, so I got him to talk about Ggaecheol—something I should have done earlier.

“He’s an imbecile. And he’s impotent.”

The phrasing was a little different, but his assertion was the same as that of every other man in the village. Seeing him react so defensively annoyed me, and I methodically laid out what I had observed about the village. Of course, I omitted my own story.

He listened quietly until I was done. “You have remarkable observational skills,” he said finally, with a helpless look. “I was born and raised in this village, but I only recently guessed at this. I didn’t realize you were watching the villagers so carefully, Ms. Han.”

I used that opening to ask another question. “But how can the men of the village allow Ggaecheol to behave like that?”

“There are probably lots of reasons, but I think there are two worth mentioning. One is vulnerable pride, and the other is utter pragmatism.”

“Pride and pragmatism?”

“Pride means a man doesn’t want to see himself as the victim. If a man wants to feel superior to Ggaecheol, he can’t consciously know that he lost his wife to someone like that. What’s more, he’s got to believe that the other man is an idiot even if there’s nothing wrong with him. It’s a convenient rationalization. Pragmatism? That’s what makes the men forgive Ggaecheol, because some other husband has suffered the same thing. As you know, this village is made up of just one family clan. Everyone’s related by blood or by marriage. Instead of suffering the shame of incest or having in-laws be discovered belly to belly, isn’t it better to save face by letting Ggaecheol do what he does?”

That kind of logical explanation wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted the pleasure of hearing about the villagers’ fear of some kind of demonic violation; I wanted the vicarious joy of identifying with Ggaecheol, who was so free, shaking off the yoke of their tradition and their morality. But that seemed too much to ask, so instead I asked, “What about the man who beat Ggaecheol up in the middle of the village?”

“This is just my observation, but I think even Ggaecheol has certain rules. For example, avoiding young girls, or not going after the same woman twice. The young husbands tend to throw punches a bit too hastily, and even the older men wouldn’t put up with it if their wives did that sort of thing too often. When Ggaecheol got beaten up that time, it was probably because he didn’t stick to the rules.”

It must have occurred to him that I wasn’t a member of the clan, and that I wasn’t married yet, because he suddenly blushed and started to stutter, bringing our conversation to an end. “W-well, it’s all guesswork on my part. I just made some haphazard comments after your detailed observations, Ms. Han. W-what we just talked about, please be careful not to repeat it to the villagers. It would create problems.”

His words, and even the expression on his face, were like those of the other middle-aged men in the village. When I finally got around to asking about Ggaecheol’s past, he had already lost interest in the topic.

I left the village a little over three years after I began teaching there. When I got a letter from my husband saying that he had been discharged from the Army and that he had found a job, which he still has today, I submitted my resignation to the school so that I could prepare for our wedding. But there were only a limited number of teachers there, and if I had left immediately my classes would have been discontinued until my replacement arrived. So I had to stay on for three more days.

My replacement happened to be an alumna of my college, and on the day I left the village she walked me to the bus stop to see me off. Who knows when he showed up, but there was Ggaecheol, crouching on the back porch of the store, watching the new teacher with the same look he had given me on my first day.

Seeing that, I was going to tell her about Ggaecheol, but in the end I decided against it. In a village full of people who were so closely related, all tied to the same lineage, he was the sole drifting island of anonymity. Perhaps if she was like most of the village women—or like me two years ago, feeling unbearably trapped and sexually frustrated—she might have need of that anonymous island.

Instead of warning her about Ggaecheol, whose eyes clung to her almost hatefully, I shot him a cool look. He met my gaze with the same coolness. I might have been mistaken, but at that moment I thought I saw a faint laughter in his eyes. Just a glimmer. Then he turned his head toward the village and the paddy fields stretching out on the slopes below. There was not a piece of land or a fistful of dirt that he could call his own—or a house or a room where he could lay his head without the owner’s consent—yet he gazed out over that land like a great man, the possessor of everything, an emperor. ♦

(Translated, from the Korean, by Heinz Insu Fenkl.)