Emily Ding
Land of the Morning Calm
I find the inherent romanticism of mankind charming, how we attach
poetry to even the names of countries. Do you know what "Korea" means?
Land of the morning calm. And if you have ever been here, you will find
it to be the truth. There is something pure and unsullied about this
place, especially now in winter where everything is a vast, tranquil
white that stretches on for miles and miles, stretches on until the
whiteness vanishes into the glare of the sun and blinds you, so that it
is impossible to tell where heaven and earth meet.
In the evening, however, it is a slightly different story. The sun
seems
frozen, buried beneath a surface of ice, not unlike the water in the
small lake we have just come across, its glare diffused; but still,
that
sense of calmness permeates the air. It is almost eerie, this
stillness,
as if time has come to a standstill. The street is very quiet, flanked
with little mountains of snow and shrubs bowing bashfully to the weight
of the frost leftover from this morning’s snowfall. The occasional car
rumbles past us, arcs a spray of snow across the ground. The fog and
the
gloom bring with them a translucent pearly grey blanket, so that
everything around us has no shadow. Strangely, I find this flatness to
the world appealing.
A myriad of images scud along the crust of snow in front of me,
pockmarked now with the imprints of our ski boots, which all seem
identical. It is impossible to tell them apart, whether adult’s or
child’s. Brian and Nessa walk before me, their feet dragging on the
ground, weighed down by their clumsy ski boots, skis and ski poles
propped over one shoulder -- like unwieldy pregnant women -- unable to
see
past their ballooning parkas. We have been skiing for the past seven
hours and everyone is pink from exertion. I hunch my shoulders against
the stinging wind reaching its icy fingers into my neck, hold on to my
grandmother’s elbow, tell her where to step, so that she will not slip
on the devious ice. She waves a hand at me impatiently, and with the
indignation of old people when they are told they are no longer capable
of doing something on their own, tells me she can walk perfectly
without
my help. But I hold on to her. Mother would never forgive me if she
slips and falls.
We come to a square of hard ice on the ground, and I steer Grandma over
to the outer edge of the road. Cheryl, the quiet one with what we say
is
the Cindy Crawford mole in the right hand corner of her mouth, is
oblivious as always to everything around her. She gives you this
sensation of being left behind by a train as it slowly chugs away just
as you get close enough to touch the doors, searching desperately in
every face that soon passes you by in a blur for the one that you had
seen on the street, the one that was familiar and whom you thought was
dear to you. There is something untouchable, impenetrable about her.
Now
she stands steadily on the mirror of ice and peers down into it,
searching for her reflection.
Nessa, a firebrand always looking for trouble, puts down her skis and
purposefully marches onto the ice, pretends to be a figure skater and
trips most inelegantly, skis and poles flying in all directions. She
lays sprawled out on her chest, her glasses perched precariously on her
nose; a baby bird that suddenly realizes it must first learn how to
fly.
Brian laughs hard at her, and Nessa shoots him a dirty look, but Brian
is too well mannered to match Nessa in a fight. His face closes -- seems
literally to fold in upon itself -- and he slides his gloved hands into
his pockets, turns abruptly quiet. He looks up at me as if to say,
“What
is her problem?” and continues trudging along in the snow. I hide a
smile, and Grandma laughs soundlessly, tears squeezing out from the
corner of her crinkly eyes; little rivulets of water on a map.
Fragments rush in, fill me. A high white forehead. Words I do not
understand. Skis entangling. Legs buckling. A sudden boneless
sensation.
There is a Korean photographer on tour with us called Ricky who says
“Yes”, “Hello”, and “I love you” to everything English you say to him,
who loves to correct us when we say “Seoul” wrong, who always goes
around in the same navy blue parka, a Nikon camera too big for him
hanging from his neck. There is something awkward, almost clumsy about
the way he looks; a bird whose wings have been clipped. It is easy not
to notice him at first; he does not command space like some men do,
like
my father does. I have only slivers of memories of him: from yesterday,
when we were renting our ski gear -- I see him crouched over our feet,
asking if the ski boots fit, not in any coherent sentences but more
with
gestures and nonsensical chatter, the way you communicate with someone
who does not know your language; and today, he running around the foot
of the ski slopes, chasing the gaggle of kids like he is one of them,
with jerky exaggerated movements you would only expect of Jim Carrey.
I pick my way cautiously through the first flight of steps we come to,
snow frozen over the thick wooden slats. We are staying at the Yong
Pyong All Seasons Resort, a cluster of chalets and condominium-like
buildings surrounding the ski slopes. We live on the lesser side, where
the white paint of the buildings has peeled a little, shedding skin,
revealing the greyish facade beneath. The steps leading to the top
floor
-- there are four -- are slippery and frost-laden. To make it easier for
the old folks, I occupy one of the two rooms on the uppermost level.
It is at first pleasantly warm in the room after the biting chill
outside, but as the minutes tick by, I feel as if I am walking on hot
coals. The heat rises from the floor, presses down on me like a
blanket,
heavy as water. Even the sounds -- the distant whistle of the kettle
boiling, the toilet door swinging open then shutting, the Korean drama
playing out on the television set -- are muffled, and make everything
seem not entirely real, vicarious somehow, my ear pressed to a floating
bubble, listening to everything going on inside.
I venture out onto the balcony -- covered as it is by a thick bed of
snow
-- and the burdensome weight evaporates. Nessa, in her little attempt at
being imaginative, tries to build a snowman using matchsticks for the
eyes and the nose. The only problem is, the tips of the matches are
white, not black or brown, so the poor snowman is faceless, just two
blobs of snow rolled onto each other. She begs me to take a picture of
it. It is a waste of good film, I am thinking, but I oblige anyway.
I peer through the lens of my camera, point it tentatively at Nessa, my
naked fingers, deprived of the warmth of my mittens, stiff from the
cold. But suddenly, as if a curtain has been lifted, it is not Nessa I
am staring at; it is not the ridiculous looking snowman. It is,
instead,
the infinite expanse of dark blue sky above their heads, the lone
stranger standing on the cap of the highest ski slope, delineated by
the
churning orange pool of the setting sun. The blanket of sky, devoid of
stars, makes the world seem boundless, unending, larger than life
itself.
So this is how small we truly are.
©2004 by Emily Ding
