Every human being lives a life along two trajectories: a personal and a historical one. We go about our time on Earth mostly thinking about how to live the happiest life we can for ourselves, concerned for our own immediate problems, but at the same time, our little lives are intersecting with millions of other individual lives in the great event called human history. With each story, the writer makes a choice about where to situate the lives of the characters within these two trajectories. At one extreme, a writer can ignore history and focus microscopically on the lives of the characters, including their interior and psychological lives. At the other end, a writer can let individuals be drowned by the macroscopic flow of history so they seem to make few choices for themselves. Or you can be somewhere in between.
When we meet Tongsu, his personal history is a drop in the great flood of Korean national history right after the end of the Korean War. He joins other South Korean refugees who lived in the conflict zone during the war as they return from the far south of the country back to their homes within a day's walk of the DMZ separating South and North Korea. They're all on the back of a truck together, recollecting recent history, which was about the same for most of them. There is no individual history here; it's all collective.
The moment Tongsu gets off the truck, though, we immediately swing to the other extreme. He goes home to the mountain farm house that looks down at the Valley of the Moon, the home where his family was living before the war. Tongsu is the only one fool enough to move back there, and he lives in extreme isolation. While the country is rebuilding, creating the great Korean miracle, Tongsu is mostly unaware of contemporary history.
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| The 40 Steps in Busan have been renovated now, but this (in the background) is more what they looked like at the time of the story. |
Private and public life mirror each other
Despite Tongsu's isolation, he isn't completely free from the influence of history going on around him. Rather, his personal struggles mirror those of the society outside his field of vision.
Both Tongsu and society show a desire to move on, and they express it in the same way--by burying bones. Tongsu buries the bones of the goats and other animals from his farm when he returns home before he can even enter the house. Outside the farm, the rapidly developing country has also thrown bones into bombed-out holes as part of a gruesome and cobbled-together modernization. The stranger who comes to the home tells Tongsu:
"I’m sure you know this, but they used to bury animals and the unclaimed dead in them and then, if the holes still weren’t full enough, they would use whatever else they could—sacks of stones, steel drums, wood—so that vehicles could cross. Transport vehicles all over the country, carrying supplies, tires, concrete, animals. A pig passing over the bones of another one. Isn’t that something? That was reconstruction back then."
On the back of the truck, the returning refugees hoped, with a bit of gallows humor, to find what was lost in the war: "Some of them showed him the toes or the fingers they were missing from frostbite during winter. Tongsu did the same—he was missing a toe—and then they made a joke about how maybe what they had lost would turn up now that the war was over." Seeking for what was lost is exactly what Tongsu is doing at home, too. Although Tongsu has no illusions that his family survived the war, he nonetheless often visits stones "that were not from the war but from long before." He wants somehow to return to a pre-war condition. It's sitting on top of these stones that he first thinks of his parents and sister, bringing them back, at least in memory. His family doesn't "turn up," but his memory of them does.
The Moon
The moon is often connected with madness in Western symbolism. In East Asian tradition, the moon is often more of a symbol of the harmony and union between light and dark. It is tempting to think the moon is linked with insanity here, because when Tongsu goes down into the Valley of the Moon, he meets the crazed stranger, which leads to the surreal killing and burial.
However, when the moon first makes its appearance, it isn't threatening, nor is it linked to insanity. The moonlight is helpful the first time it appears, guiding Tongsu through the house. By moonlight, he finds a cup full of "dirt and rainfall," the two most basic elements needed for traditional farm life. The moonlight has shown him a way back to life that predates the war by thousands of years. A cup will show up three more times, each time linked to a death. Tongsu will drink from a cup after killing the man who shows up looking for his family. The second time will be when the man comes looking for the dead stranger and Tongsu gives him water in a cup. The last time, Tongsu's semi-adopted daughter Eunhae finds cold tea by Tongsu's dead body. For all its appearances close to death, though, the cup isn't quite a symbol of death. Rather, it is a symbol of life carrying on after death.
This is also what the moon is. The moon is a symbol that provides its own explication in the story, an explication that comes from a local saying known to people around the Valley of the Moon. "The moon rises and falls and shatters, and then builds itself back up again."
With its constant, roughly 29 and a half day cycle from full to nearly gone to full again, the moon is a perfect symbol of both individual and communal history. Societies long for greatness, grow and prosper, then are wracked by war or famine or disaster, and then they collect themselves and attempt to grow great again. So do people, who continue to aspire to fulfill dreams no matter how many times they fail to fully realize their dreams.
The story sort of falls into the same thematic territory as Of Mice and Men, which gets its title from these words of a Robert Burns poem: The best laid schemes of mice and men/Gang aft agley (often go wrong). Except here, the plans of men (and goats) don't simply go wrong; they go wrong, and then people overcome and rebuild, and then they go wrong again, ad infinitum.
It's both reassuring and incredibly depressing. For those in crisis, they can know that the shattered moon will build itself back up again, which is hopeful. But for those who are riding a high of good times, they can also know that the moon will eventually shatter again. To some extent, the trauma of the previous shattering will help contribute to the following undoing.
The stranger who combines public and individual history
The man Tongsu kills is incredibly similar to Tongsu. Tongsu's family is dead, while the stranger's is separated. But separation like that--they are now in North Korea, where retrieving them is nearly impossible--is almost as good as death. The stranger's family members are as much ghosts to him as Tongsu's family are to him. The stranger, who desperately wants Tongsu to take him into North Korea to find his family, cries that he can't even remember what their faces look like--the same thought that had occurred to Tongsu before going down into the Valley of the Moon with its ancient stones.
When Tongsu sees the stranger, at first he mistakes him for a ghost avoiding the moonlight. Avoiding the moonlight is akin to trying to avoid the cycle of life and death and life again. The ghost/stranger wants to "get across," which of course means make it into North Korea, but in Tongsu's confused state, could also mean cross over from life into death in order to be reunited with lost ones.
All of the themes of the story are collapsing in the stranger. He has private pain of losing his family, but his private pain is one and the same as the political crisis. His separation is tied up with the political separation of two countries. He is a ghost looking for ghosts.
After killing him and burying his body, Tongsu considers the stranger his friend. He wants the stranger to go and find his family in the afterlife. For Tongsu, the stranger he has accidentally killed and helped to "get across" is tied to the regathering of the moon, not its fracturing.
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| "The Tinker" by Kim Joon-geun |
Folding and unfolding
The tinker's memory goes back before the war. He is older than Tongsu, and can remember Tongsu from when he was a child, although Tongsu does not remember him. The tinker has not only a store of treasures, but a store of memories that are equally valuable. One of those memories is the trick of folding paper into an origami boat. He teaches the trick to Unsik, Eunhae's "brother" whom Tongsu adopted, along with Eunhae, when they came from the church orphanage to work at his house.
The origami crane is something of a mirror of Eunhae's feelings, and really, the feelings of every Korean trying to put their lives back together after the war. When the makeshift, unofficial family breaks up after Tongsu unleashes his pent-up trauma on Unsik, her fist instinct is to find her brother. But she has another desire, too, "at some point the desire to find Unsik folding together with a new desire to keep moving."
Eunhae's desire to keep on moving is the same desire most of society is finding itself folded up in. As Eunhae discovers when she leaves the time capsule of Tongsu's farm house, Korea has changed and is changing still more at an ever-increasing rate. A military dictatorship in many ways barely more liberal than the one in the North is forcing the country into modernization, come hell or high water. Rather than fight against the political power, Eunhae adapts to it. She finds what furtive pleasure she can in jazz dancing "clubs" on the fringes of society, just out of view of the authorities. Others, like the gay couple she comes across, are making the same choice to take their small happiness where they can without openly opposing the forces that would prevent them from enjoying them more fully. Eunhae and her entire generation are "folding up" their desires. There are things they want, but those things are too painful to pursue, so they continue to fold those desires up into deeper and deeper places of their minds while they move on in their daily lives.
The problem with this continual folding, this unending repression of feelings and memories, is that it leads to the very cycle of breaking apart that caused the trauma in the first place. Eunhae is at last able to overcome the cycle when she allows herself to give in to her curiosity and check in on Tongsu.
Eunhae is the emblem of a Korea moving on from the war, the ones rumbling over the bones as they rocket toward making Korea a first-world nation. Tongsu is the emblem of a Korea looking to the past and intentionally keeping itself apart from change. Both individuals and societies will suffer psychologically when they cannot allow for both desires, when they cannot both look for ghosts and long for a future.
Eunhae is at last able to unite these two desires when she finds Tongsu dead:
From her pocket, Eunhae took out the origami boat that her brother had left for her all those years ago. For the first time, she unfolded it, knowing there wasn’t anything written on it but hoping anyway the way she used to, wanting every night on that rooftop overlooking the river when she couldn’t sleep, listening to someone’s rock and roll, to take the origami boat apart but being unable to. Now she flattened the blank paper on the tea table and left it there, thinking of what Tongsu had said to them both a long time ago.
What Tongsu had said to them both a long time ago was the line about the moon rising, falling, shattering, and building itself back up. This is the only way to live balanced, neither denying life by staying stubbornly in the past looking for ghosts nor hurling carelessly toward the future, wanting only greater wealth and growth no matter how much it crushes large parts of the country.
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