My Grandfather with the Tiger Eyes

 

Last tiger killed in Korea, 1921.
The man in the photo is Lee BokWoo. His older brother Lee WeeWoo was the one who shot the tiger.

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I never met my grandfather, who was born in 1915 in Gangwon province. My mother’s descriptions of him are always short and fleeting, like an old photograph that is taken away too quickly before I can fully study it. She tells me he was strikingly handsome with golden irises and prominent features. She believes his honey-light eyes were the mysterious legacy of intermarriage, which skip generations only to flash inexplicably like a struck match in the general darkness of ancestry. He came from the north, she always says: before his family settled in Gangwon, they originated from a place farther up—a colder, harder place, where Korea presses against much larger neighbors like China and Russia.

My grandfather used to joke to my mother, “Don’t I look like that Russian author?” He was referring to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and received the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature. I found Solzhenitsyn’s photo online, and it does resemble the single sepia photo of my grandfather I once saw more than twenty-five years ago.

My grandfather Kim TaeHee was the second of four brothers. In Korean culture of primogeniture, the eldest son (jangnam) wields a near-absolute power in the family that even his parents cannot readily defy. Accordingly, it was TaeHee’s older brother YongHee who ruled the house. One day, YongHee pulled TaeHee out of school for not doing well on his exams. The older brother said, I can’t waste money on your fees when you’re not even studying. TaeHee was made to work on the family farm instead. He was around ten years old.

Kim YongHee’s authoritarian cruelty against his own brother seems extreme, but it is perhaps understandable considering that he was a soonsa—a colonial police officer. YongHee enjoyed all the lush privileges of the turncoats among the subjugated in every colonial society. When Korea gained independence from Japanese rule in 1945, many such opportunists were imprisoned or killed by neighbors before any semblance of order could be restored. Depending on how cruel this turncoat used to be, eliminating him would have been considered an act of heroism or communal justice. Kim YongHee was spared, however—which may be a sign of his secret compassion during the colonial era or his great wiliness afterwards.

Even YongHee’s prosperity and political dexterity pale next to those of the youngest brother, Kim MyungHee. MyungHee was in the Korea Military Academy class of 8 gi (year 8), graduating six years after Major General Park Chung-hee; he went on to support Park in the coup d’état of 1961. History books mention my great-uncle as one of those who eventually beseeched President Park to return to the military instead of governing as a dictator. For that he was discharged from the army, albeit with a lucrative government post. His house that my mother used to visit had seven or eight playrooms for the children and a ballroom where the political and military elite would gather to dance. My mother still remembers the sting she felt when one of MyungHee’s children said, “Inja probably won’t like this; she’s not used to the taste,” while nibbling on a fruit salad tossed in imported mayonnaise.

The ruthlessness and ambition that characterized his brothers were incorrigibly missing in Kim TaeHee. But he was a Renaissance man: an excellent swimmer, a runner, a tennis player, a singer. Despite his limited formal education, he was a devoted reader of newspapers and books. He knew how to drive, which was certainly a highly advanced skill for that time. He told my mother, “In Shanghai, the lanes on a road are divided by bronze rivets.” The elegance of the metal rivets on a paved road must have made a lasting impression on TaeHee, a natural aesthete. But why was he driving around in Shanghai? This, he wouldn’t answer.

My grandfather’s stories usually involve feats like walking without rest for a whole day and night, crossing from Haeju (now in North Korea) to Incheon—a distance of at least one hundred miles, even if you assume the road is as straight as can be without dipping into the sea. The reason he was in such a hurry to get to Incheon was that he badly wanted to see his three-month-old son. He wouldn’t talk about the reason he was in Haeju in the first place or why he had to walk.

It was only through whispered stories from her sisters that my mother learned about her father’s involvement in the independence movement. With an older brother who was a Japanese accomplice, TaeHee’s part in the movement could not be shared even within the family. Another fact that’s hard for us to grasp in our age of Instagram activism: many people who truly struggled, the real “revolutionaries,” don’t publicly discuss what they did. They don’t have the luxury, the security, or the vanity.

After Independence, TaeHee moved his family to a little island on the West Sea, where my mother was born. From then on, my grandfather would eke out a living as a subsistence farmer or a bricklayer until the end of his life at age sixty-one. My mother was nineteen then—a freshman, the first one in her family to attend college. Even today, my mother rarely talks about her father and only with our immediate family, and the whole truth about his involvement in the movement I can only attempt through imagination.

My grandfather had more than just a pair of close-set eyes and a sweeping forehead in common with Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. The cost of conscience in an unconscionable world is silence. Persecuted for dissension, Solzhenitsyn spent decades in prison camp and exile; his manuscripts were seized and his books banned. As an underground writer faced with harrowing realities, Solzhenitsyn told his stories primarily through fiction. And I felt the same need to turn to the vital, connective grace of the novel in order to gather shards of facts into something truthful and recognizable—into art.

Many of the characters in this novel—the independence activist, the smooth bourgeois men educated at Harvard or at Tokyo University, the ruthless Japanese accomplice, the first capitalists rising along with modern Korea—were inspired by my ancestors on both sides of the family. But I wasn’t interested in replicating their lives on the page, or even simply educating the Western reader about a relatively short time period in a distant peninsula. In his 1972 Nobel lecture, Solzhenitsyn wrote movingly about the role of art and the artist in a dark world: “Through Russian literature we have long ago grown familiar with the concept that a writer can do much among his people—and that he must.”

He continued: “I believe that world literature is fully capable of helping a troubled humanity to recognize its true self in spite of what is advocated by biased individuals and parties. World literature is capable of transmitting the concentrated experience of a particular region to other lands so that we can overcome double vision and kaleidoscopic variety, so that one people can discover, accurately and concisely, the true history of another people […]”

Writing this fictional story in a little land, I was most concerned with “helping a troubled humanity to recognize its true self.” My aim was to write a novel that shows at least as much about ourselves now as about Koreans struggling against oppression in the early twentieth century. Injustice, oppression, violence, greed, and apathy are not issues we’ve long overcome: indeed, they are threats to humanity and the living world at large, now more than ever. Yet the antidotes to these evils—justice, compassion, selflessness, humanitarianism, and love—also transcend time, and it is my belief that there is no better mirror than art to reflect these innate qualities back to us.

As I strove to fulfill this aim, one source of inspiration particularly spoke to me: the countless folktales about tigers I grew up reading. In these stories passed down from generation to generation, tigers are loyal, cunning, noble, frightening, silly, intelligent, stupid, kind, and vengeful. But no matter how they are described, the tales embody a profound veneration, kinship, and love for these animals, which become a synecdoche for nature itself. And while much of this spiritual relationship to nature has been lost today, it is still a defining aspect of Korean culture.

The Korean tiger (also known as Amur or Siberian) is the largest tiger in the world, measuring over nine feet from nose to tail, with a standing jump of over fifteen feet. From the ground it can easily clear twenty feet in a single leap. It is lethal enough to kill a thousand-pound wild boar and strong enough to drag it a hundred yards through the forest before eating it. The overall impression of its physicality is that of overwhelming power, but also searing intelligence, larger-than-life grace, and even nuanced emotion radiating from its golden eyes. This magnetic beast used to rule over the entire Korean peninsula for millennia, a fact made even more puzzling by the tiny landmass and the concomitant existence of so many other large predators such as bears, leopards, and wolves.

How could such a little land support so many large animals that need scores of prey and vast uninterrupted territories? How could they have lived alongside humans for five thousand years? And how could humans have then completely expunged these extraordinary creatures in a few short decades? These questions of nature and human nature laid the foundational chords of Beasts of a Little Land.

Like other imperialist powers, Japan used trophy hunting as a means of material exploitation and—more significantly—spiritual subjugation. According to official records of the colonial government, 141 tigers and 1,092 leopards were killed between 1915 and 1942—which closely overlaps the time in which my novel takes place. The real number is estimated to be over five hundred tigers and over three thousand leopards. The last wild tiger in the Korean peninsula was killed by a Korean hunter in 1921, and its hide was presented to the Japanese imperial family. Today, there are about five hundred fifty Amur tigers and, heartbreakingly, seventy Amur leopards remaining in the Russian Far East. They are the last vestiges of a time when beasts and humans alike roamed freely from Siberia to the southern tip of Korea—an era as distant and as near as my grandfather’s time.

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Read the Prologue to Beasts of a Little Land

 


Juhea Kim is a writer, artist, and advocate based in Portland, Oregon. Her writing appears in Granta, Slice, Zyzzyva, Guernica, Catapult, The Independent, and elsewhere. She is the founder and editor of Peaceful Dumpling, an online magazine at the intersection of sustainable lifestyle and ecological literature. She earned her BA in art and archaeology from Princeton University. Her debut novel, Beasts of a Little Land (Ecco Press, 2021), will be published around the world in 2022.