These legends, the only venerable export of this frozen North, spread their wings across all of Dong Soo’s town, charging down from its hills and across the great Nakdong river, being swept around the great, impractical mountain on which Dong Soo himself resides, to where the land flattened and became cramped with life. It welcomed all kinds out to this sinful edge, and all kinds devoured these tales, in this place where Dong Soo’s innocent imagination has concocted a world of cheats and mystics and drunks; a place where the foreigners, the travelers and dispossessed were drawn; the western walls neighbors more scurrilous even than those inside. Here were narrow, cobbled alleys that wound around high, skinny homes whose windows were too often cracked or boarded. Here humanity was packed tightly, a dense throng unable to breathe freely, each soul lusting after fortunes at card tables, at lotteries, or at knifepoint, each weighed down by its past, and by its future. In dirty markets everything from magic to minors was sold, strange foreign objects mingled with cheap plastic and snake oil, while capricious sanitation makes adventurers of them all. Here fat woman lounge around, smoking and eating fat cakes while their children delight in the squalid streets, daring the others to venture into the darkest places, the asylum, the gutter bars and brothels about which they only half-understand, while their drunk fathers scheme and fight and fuck.
This a place no one can leave still wholly pure, and so it is with the legends, that once were innocent and fair but are now mangled, twisted wreckages of themselves, devastatingly altered, darker, stronger, no longer the elaborate country tales but now inflicted with barbarism and cruelty, growing Greecian perhaps, before they sweep south, skirting Dong Soo’s home as if strong magnets repelled them, sucking them down the long, winding roads that venture from these decrepit pits to gradually, and then swifly, coerce fine country estates to their sides as they approach the affluent south, where kind, noble people act kindly and nobly to their kin while paupering the rest. The south, here the gateway to the world, where rich traders and money-lenders speak in high tones about civility and decorum, about respect and filial devotion, and in tones just as high when they set the crippling prices that pay for their civility. Here is where the wholesalers live, the businessmen who thrust the west its poverty and the farmers their insecurity. Southern roads are wide and paved, its gate the finest in the city, its luxury mall the first port of call for the respectable holiday makers here, its pristine lake home to sail boats and swans, its grass retaining that spring that Dong Soo first enjoyed, when his town was yet to be molded. They receive the twisted tales and tidy them, freshen them for the export to other nice towns, sterilizing them, crystallizing them to dull, bland and obvious things, freeing them of all color both beautiful and grotesque.
Inevitably both up from the south, and down from the north, the tales float, as is the only way to be there, to the calm, green east, where perfect, flat fields are unaware of the gauche vogues springing elsewhere. Here are the most recipient ears, and so let us follow one such tale there all the way to the far eastern edge, four hours by horse, less by voice, from its northern conception.
To the East lies Dong Soo’s penance, perhaps his sop to those he has left behind. To the real world. He will not visit the East, except when called to, and he takes no pleasure or envy in the deadened luxury that he has bestowed upon it. It is farming land, fertile land, soft and healthy, on which no crop may not flourish. Money spurts from the ground in great, rapid gulps, as radishes, cabbages, tomatoes, fennel, you name we have got it sir, grow without hindrance from nature’s pestilent armies. This is the breadbasket of the town, and its owners are nothing if not respectful of that title. The farmers here use every speck of land, every inhospitable dark corner sprouts hardy root vegetables, a mentality that forbids pleasure or rest, that has its roots in the harshest of times. Now, despite these wondrous conditions, no one will martyr themselves for change. Here wealth is solely material; and this wealth they must surely amass goes, goes where? Only they know. Not to their pokey homes, which are mainly roofed with corrugated iron, and in whose stone walls holes find themselves patched with wood, or more cheap metal. Not to their dinner plates either; they will eat the simple food of their fathers, and they will enjoy it, that their fathers were war children (Dong Soo made their fathers war children, in a fit of cruel nostalgia), is an irrelevance.
And so to one house, so like the others, where a mean old lady sits rocking her grandson upon her knee. Her knee, all dried skin and bone and made hard and brutalist by her miserly ways, the state of her whole, of her people’s whole. Her version of the legends are quite different again, her alterations the most deliberate, the most deceitful. Changes that connive and trick, a quite terrible bombardment she delivers to her young: the most ingrained, the most scowling, conservativism, tales of not stepping off the path, of doing thy duty, and always moralistic to a fault. Tales of fantasy, but not fantastic; meek and frail and imploring, begging, wrenching their young to protect them.
