The 111-Year Prophecy 1-1: The Child of Donghak’s Founding Day

Section 1 — The Child of Donghak’s Founding Day

On the fifth of the fourth month by the lunar calendar, in the year Gyeongsin — 1860 by the Western count — dawn came to Cheongsugol, a hamlet deep in the mountains of the Gongju country, in Chungcheong Province.

It had been called Cheongsugol since old times, because the mountains held the village in their lap. From the town of Gongju it was half a day by mountain path, over two passes, before one came down into the valley. Clear water ran through the hollow, and the paddies it fed climbed the mountainside in tiers, like stone steps going up to the sky. People called that water *cheongsu*, clear water, and from one generation to the next they passed down the saying that where the water is clear, the people are clear too. At the innermost end of the valley, its back to the mountain and its face to the south, stood the head house of the Yeon family. The name Yeon means to stretch out and to join on, and the old men of the village used to say it was no accident that a house which carried its line from generation to generation had put down roots in a valley of water that flowed on without rest.

Dawn in Cheongsugol always began with the sound of water. The dew that came down from the mountain through the night gathered along the hollow and made a stream, and the stream wet the terraced paddies as it flowed down and down. Even at night, while people slept, the water did not rest. So the people of Cheongsugol fell asleep to the sound of water and woke to the sound of water. The sound was so clear, it was said, that a traveler new to the valley would lose sleep over it the first night, and after a few days could not sleep without it. Water was the heart of this valley, and the temper of its people. Clear, unresting, flowing toward the low places, held by nothing. That dawn too, the water of Cheongsugol ran as clear as ever. Only on that one dawn, something else lay over the sound of the water, some other stirring.

That dawn, in the inner quarters of the head house, a labor had gone on all night.

Lamplight leaked through the paper of the doors and barely pushed back the dark of the yard. At the end of the wooden floor of the men’s quarters a man sat. He was the eldest-line heir of the Yeon head house, and about to become the father of the child being born. He had not left his place all night. The pipe in his hand he had never lit; he only looked up at the old persimmon tree that stood in the middle of the yard. Between its branches the dawn stars went out one by one. Each time a moan from the birthing room crossed the yard, the man’s shoulders flinched and he brought his two hands together.

It was before the cocks beat their wings.

The eastern ridge was still black, but above that black line a faint glow began to gather. It was not like the first light of other dawns. Neither red nor white, a thin milky radiance, an auspicious light, came flowing down the ridge and spread itself thinly over the thatched roofs. The man in the yard saw it. At first he took it for tired eyes; eyes that have been up all night see lights that are not there. But the light did not go away. If anything it seemed to be gathering quietly over the roof of the head house. Without knowing it, the man had risen to his feet.

The light did not fade after the sun came up. The man stood under it through the morning. The moaning from the birthing room did not slacken with daylight, and he did not know that he had missed a meal. Then, when the sun had climbed high over the ridge into the hour of the snake, the child’s first cry broke from the inner quarters.

The man leapt down from the floor. Without time to find his shoes, barefoot, he crossed the yard. At the door of the birthing room the midwife came out. Her fingertips were still trembling, and on her face was a look that an old midwife who has delivered children all her life seldom shows — astonishment.

“A son, it is.”

That was all the midwife said; then she lowered her voice.

“But… this one’s a strange child, and no mistake.”

Before the man could ask what she meant, the midwife went on as if talking to herself. At the moment the child came into the world, she said, every lamp in the room had brightened at once. There was not a breath of wind in the room, yet the flames stood straight up as if drawing themselves to their full height, and the room went so bright it dazzled the eyes, and then settled back. And the child—

“He cried, he did, but once, just the once, and then he stopped. His eyes are open. A newborn thing with its eyes open, and not looking at the ceiling either, but still, as if he was listening to something…”

The man went past the midwife into the room.

The mother lay with her eyes closed, spent, but her breathing was coming back even. Beside her lay the child, wrapped in a cotton swaddling cloth. The man knelt and looked into it. It was true. The newborn’s two eyes were open. A newborn’s eyes are mostly swollen, neither open nor shut, but this child’s eyes were clear. Black and deep. Slowly they moved and came to rest on the father’s face. The man stopped breathing. The child did not cry. It did not fuss. It only looked back at the father looking down at it. In those eyes — the man would recall that day many times in later years, and never managed to put into a single word what he had seen in the child’s eyes then — there was something like the stillness of one who has come already knowing.

“What name will you give him?”

The midwife asked from behind him. The man could not answer. He had no name ready. The family had followed its generation names for ages, but at that moment the generation character and the clan register alike receded far from his mind. He looked at the child’s face again. And suddenly he thought of the milky light that had overflowed the yard. That quiet light coming over the ridge to gather on the roof. So-mun — the writing that comes back to life, the word that rises again. Characters with that meaning came up from somewhere to his lips. Where the two syllables had come from he himself could not guess. But when he spoke them aloud, the certainty that this was the child’s name pressed first against the pit of his stomach.

“So-mun. Yeon So-mun.”

The midwife repeated the name softly. So-mun. The word that comes back to life. The old midwife knew no letters, but she said the sound was good. Rolled in the mouth, she said, it made a sound as clear as water. At that the man smiled faintly. For the first time, a smile spread over a face that had been up all night.

When word spread through the hollow that a child had been born, people began to gather at the head house. In Cheongsugol the great and small occasions of the Yeon head house were the occasions of the village. The heir’s first son, they said, so even those on their way to the paddies set down their hoes and went first to the head house. The old men who came in through the gate stood in the yard, brought their hands together toward the inner quarters, and bowed. It was not the custom to enter a birthing room before the first twenty-one days had passed, so people only waited in the yard. And while they waited, each told what he had seen at dawn.

An old woman who had been weeding a field beyond the front hill said she had seen from far off a pale light, neither mist nor cloud, pooled in the valley of Cheongsugol that dawn. A young farmer who lived across the stream said that his shaggy dog had sat facing the head house the whole dawn through, not barking, only wagging its tail. A boy who went to the village school put in, small-voiced among the grown-ups, that the water of Cheongsugol had sounded unusually clear today. People laughed and patted the boy’s head, but at the end of their laughter something was left over that no one could easily put into words.

The oldest of the old men stood in the middle of the yard and looked up at the persimmon tree. It was said to have been planted the year the Yeon family settled in Cheongsugol. Over the generations its trunk had grown so thick that a grown man’s arms could not meet around it, and every autumn it bore so much fruit that the roof of the head house turned red. The old man looked up at the tree a long while, then said quietly to those beside him:

“That tree was late to blossom this year, and look — it’s chosen this very dawn to come out all at once.”

People lifted their heads. Sure enough, every branch of the persimmon tree was thick with small persimmon blossoms. For persimmon flowers to open so fully in the first days of the fourth month was rare. The yellowish-white blossoms held the morning dew, and now and then, though there was no wind, one or two dropped into the yard. Children picked up the fallen flowers and threaded them on string. Watching, people said to one another that it was a good sign, that good fortune had come to the head house twice over.

But the old man alone was silent for a long time. In his youth he had lived through great famines and great upheavals more than once. He knew in his body that whenever the world was about to turn over, the sky showed strange signs first. Stars rose by day, wells dried, birds never heard before called, flowers bloomed that should not have bloomed. In such years many people, without fail, came to harm. He gazed a long while at the riot of persimmon blossom, then said to himself, so that no one could hear:

“Too prettily. It has bloomed too prettily…”

Then he pressed the ill-omened thought down and wiped it out himself. Today was a day of celebration; a son had been born to the head house. It was no business of an old man’s idle worries to cast a shadow on another’s celebration. Like the others in the yard he bowed toward the inner quarters and prayed that the child’s life be long and his fortune thick.

From beyond the threshold of the inner quarters, the father watched the mother wake and give the child its first milk. Her face was worn by the labor, but her eyes were clear. The mother looked into the tiny face of the child at her breast and said over to herself, softly, again and again, the name her husband had given. “So-mun. So-mun…” Then she lifted her head and looked at her husband and said, half to herself: “I never learned letters deeply, but even I can tell this name is no ordinary one. The word that comes back to life… what has died, that it should come back to life?” The father only shook his head in place of an answer. The mother kissed the child’s forehead again and prayed in a low voice: “Only be mild and ordinary. Plow the fields and raise children and grow old like everyone else.” That wish was a humble one, no different then from now from any mother’s. But Heaven had already prepared for this child a road that lay far from anything humble.

In later years the people of the village told the story of that dawn for a long time. The story grew a little as the years went by. At first only the milky light on the roof, the lamp flames standing straight, and the early persimmon blossom were handed down; but as the story passed from hand to hand, some said that at dawn that day a white bird had shot up into the sky from the bamboo grove behind the head house, and some went so far as to say the water of the valley had run backward for half a day. Whether such stories were true or not, no one troubled to ask. The people of Cheongsugol believed with one heart only this: that the child called So-mun of the Yeon head house was no ordinary child. That belief took the shape of a blessing, and like most blessings it passed back and forth without cost. How far words that pass without cost can carry a man, Cheongsugol had not yet had occasion to learn.

On the child’s hundredth day the whole village gathered in the yard of the head house. The mother had sewn a newborn’s first jacket of fine white cotton and put it on him, and the father sent round white steamed rice cake and red-bean millet cake to every house, in the belief that a child who eats cake passed through a hundred hands lives to a hundred. People held the child in turn and each prayed for his fortune. Yet even as he was handed from one pair of arms to the next, the child hardly cried. Strange faces peered down at him one after another and he did not shrink from them. Only now and then, when his eyes met someone’s, he looked quietly back with those black, deep eyes. Everyone who received that look seemed to feel a coolness inside, as if a newborn had looked into them instead — something cool and yet tender. One old shaman held the child and soon handed him back, and said quietly to the father: this child was a great vessel, and not to be handled carelessly. Only, a great vessel is made to hold great things, and whether what it held would be a blessing or a calamity, Heaven alone knew. The father laughed it off, but lying down to sleep that night, the words circled in his ears for a long time.

The Yeon family had never been a house of high renown.

Their clan seat was Goksan, in Hwanghae Province, far to the north. At some point one branch of the Goksan Yeon had come south and settled here and there in the Chungcheong country, and of those, one branch again had turned its back on office several generations before and come into this deep valley to put down roots: that was the Yeon head house of Cheongsugol. Open the clan register and there were, here and there in the upper generations, men who had held office, but to the people of Cheongsugol that was a distant story. What the family had long passed down was only this: that the ancestor who first came into the valley had carried, down a thousand *li* of road, nothing but a *jige*, the A-frame carrier that farmers strap to their backs, and a single clan register. It was a house that had chosen to live as clear as water rather than chase worldly success. The name Yeon means to stretch out and to join on, and the teaching of the elders was that to lengthen the line and carry the purpose on unbroken was the life fitting to that name. So the Yeon head house was for generations neither greatly rich nor greatly distinguished, but among the people of the valley its standing was solid. In famine years it opened its granary and fed its neighbors; when someone was wronged it stood up first against the magistrate. People looked up to the Yeon head house not for its land or its offices, but for that clear and upright temper.

So-mun’s father was a man who had inherited that tradition. He hoped his newborn son would inherit it too — the clear, upright temper of water, and the meaning of the name, to join on without a break. A few days after the birth he carried the infant into the ancestral shrine behind the head house, where the tablets of the forebears had been kept for generations. Standing before the tablets with the child in his arms, he announced the new life to the ancestors. And in a low voice, as if making a vow, he told them: he would raise this child as clear and straight as water. However muddy the world grew, this child alone he would not let be stained by that mud.

Leaving the shrine, the father looked once more into the child’s face. The child still looked back at him with those black, deep eyes. In them, the father seemed for a moment to see the faces of the ancestors enshrined behind him. As though within this child all the forebears of the house — and all the descendants not yet come — dwelt together. A chill ran down his back and he shivered a moment. Then he shook it off as an idle thought. A father holding a newborn, he supposed, lets his heart run over for no reason.

On the same day, at the same hour — at the Yongdam pavilion in the Gyeongju country of Gyeongsang Province, a man was said to have heard the voice of Heaven. In that time when the Way of the world was spent and men’s hearts had turned wild and the whole country lay sick, that man, after long discipline, found his body trembling and his mind gone cold, and heard a voice without form; and from it, he said, he founded a new Way. It was the Way that says man is Heaven. Since Heaven is served within each person, the teaching went, serve each person as Heaven. That this Way would one day shake the three southern provinces and in the end swallow even the fate of the Yeon head house of Cheongsugol, no one knew on that day.

Only this: on the day Heaven opened the new Way, at that very hour, in a head house in Cheongsugol a child too came into the world with his eyes open. In two places hundreds of li apart, one man received the Way and another received a son. It would take many years before people understood that the two were strung on a single thread.

The child’s father could not fathom such great designs. He only held the child carefully, like a man with something too precious in his hands. The child weighed no more than a feather, yet somehow that lightness was heavy, as if the whole house, the whole village, all the years not yet come were laid upon it.

On the day the child was born, when he came out of the birthing room and stood in the yard, the sun was climbing toward the middle of the sky. The milky light was gone, and in its place the clear light of full day filled the valley of Cheongsugol. The terraced paddies brimmed with water and held the sky, and over that water the morning mist slowly lifted. The man stood with the child in his arms and looked at it a long time. The child still did not cry. In his father’s arms he kept his eyes open and looked back at the light that filled the valley. As if the world were greeting him, and he were greeting the world in return.

At the hour when the sun was climbing toward the center of the sky, the child came.

A child born at the hour when the light climbs high. A child who drew his first breath not in darkness but in the very middle of light. The fact stayed long in the father’s mind. People are mostly born at night, or at dawn. But this child had come into the world in broad day, with the sun climbing toward its height. As if he had come to push back the dark and call in the light. The father did not take that accident lightly. He held his son born in the heart of the light and prayed, without a sound, that the light would shine on the road ahead of him.

That this child would grow up to be a prophet, that his prophecy would cross five generations and run for a hundred and eleven years — and that the first letter of those hundred and eleven years would be this very child’s name, So-mun — neither the father holding the child, nor the mother asleep from exhaustion, nor the midwife standing at the edge of the yard, nor anyone at all knew.

Only the water of Cheongsugol ran clear that day too, and the sky was looking at its own face in that clear water.

Water reflects everything that passes over it and holds on to nothing. It reflects the sky and the mountains and the shadow of a passing bird, then lets them all flow away and is clear again. So was the water of Cheongsugol, and so would be the fate of the child born in this valley. A clearness that takes all the things of the world into itself, reflected, and in the end is muddied by none of them. The water did not hurry. Not hurrying was the water’s strength. Reflecting and releasing, clouding and clearing again, over and over for as long as the valley lasted. That day, Cheongsugol only flowed on, without a word.