Part II: Exordium

The air inside the room smelled delicious. I remember that very clearly. The smell of the Royal Family’s food being prepared. The chaotic calmness in which the suratgan was surrounded with on a daily business was no different that day than any other.

It was the seventeenth spring I’d experienced in my life. Almost summer. It was Seonjo’s 25th year as Joseon’s king. I was a cheonim at the time, a sanobi, to be specific. My status would have resulted in me working far from the kitchen if not for the redeeming qualities my mother had as a talented seamstresses and kind temperament, making up somewhat for my dead father’s status as a traitor. He had been hanged when I was far too young to remember, as the result of attempting to steal and sell some of the Royal Family’s private property stored in the naetango. My father having been originally from Ming China and the obviously foreign name I had been gifted with since birth did nothing to help me become more welcomed and loved by the palace workers after my father’s demise. Because of my mother, however, I was able to find work in the kitchens, cleaning and doing the grunt work, rather than performing tasks of extremely hard labor. Even the grunt work that was my job in the kitchens came to an end during my sixteenth year, when I had taken my first step in becoming an assistant cook.

Now back to that day so long ago, with those sights and smells that I remember so clearly, so vividly, even now in my 62nd year of life.

On this particular day I was following Chief Cook Soo closely as I watched the directions he was giving me closely, working extremely hard to perfect the dish I was instructed to make. Soo was not a man to disappoint. He was harsh with his teachings, perfectly acceptable for the Chief Cook of the Royal Family to be, wanting only the very best from the select few apprentices he took on. I was the only one during this time. The pressure was great but I was eager to prove my worth.

When I had asked him why he had chosen me, he had told me it was because my senses of smell and taste, the most important senses to have in a kitchen, especially the Royal Family’s kitchen, were very good, according to his observations of myself.

Suddenly a hand grabbed mine, the one ever-so-carefully pouring the perilla oil in the stone boil.

“That’s just enough. Too much and it will no longer suit the King’s tastes,” explained Soo’s rough voice calmly.

“Of course, Master Soo. Thank you for correcting my work, Master Soo,” I said to him, ever so polite, with a nod of my head.

“I know you can complete the rest. I will be back shortly to test the dish. Do not be late in finishing the preparation,” was his reply as he turned away to look over the rest of the ongoing activities occurring around us, with the aid of Madam Choi, Chief Madam of the Kitchens.

Between Madam Choi and Chief Cook Soo, the running of the nesojubang, where the King’s daily meals were prepared and were I was centered, the wesojubang, where banquet meals were prepared, and, finally, the bukoedang, where the King’s snacks and drinks were prepared, was split.

During the time that I had trained under Master Soo, life had been very challenging. Perhaps my position was higher up but that doesn’t mean I was given any special treatment. I had spent countless sleepless nights perfecting dishes and correcting any mistakes. I remember knocking the dough for the King’s pastry once. I met the stick five times that night.

I had been putting the final touches on my precious namul bowl when I had felt a light tap on my right shoulder. I knew only one person, my greatest friend, who would do that. He would do it so often any tricks he tried to pull by then failed.

Blindly throwing my arm back behind me, lower to the ground, my hand had come into contact with a head of hair. A yelp of surprise met my ear not a second later.

“Cànlié, I don’t know why you continue to try to pull tricks on me. I’m too smart to fall for them anymore,” I scolded gently. I, as always when he was nearby, was smiling as the young man once crouching down behind me stood and shifted to stand by my side instead. Glancing away from my now-completed dish, I had tried to fake a look of disdain at my friend. It didn’t work. The bright smile Cànlié had on his face, despite just being hit in the head by his dear friend Bai Xian, always had the effect of melting away any negative thoughts I had. It was impossible to be angry or sad around Cànlié when his smiling face that resembled one of those precious mong mong, as Cànlié called them, was directed towards you. It’s a unique kind of power that he had.

Cànlié was not his real name. He was not mixed, like me. He had a Korean mother, a yeoak, a musician for the Royal Family, and a Korean father somewhere in the world. It was my own name for him, and he liked it. Said it made him feel special so he told me to always call him that. Just because of that I won’t tell you, my ancestor, his birth name. If he knew I’d revealed it he would have punched me in the arm playfully, smiled that easy smile of his, and told me his name was Cànlié. I had a different name too, a Korean name Cànlié had specially given to me. That’s only for me to know, though. It’s only for Cànlié to say.

This kid, you wouldn’t have thought he had a sad life, even worse than mine because he remembered everything, with all the positive energy he had enveloping him always. He hadn’t grown up in Gyeongbokgung Palace like I had. He was originally from Changdeokgung Palace, not too far east of Gyeongbokgung. He only came into my life in my 11th year, when some sort of bizarre occurrence I can no longer remember resulted in the death of a yeoak. Who better to take the dead woman’s place than Changdoekgung’s prized yeoak, Cànlié’s mother? The transition could not have come for a better time for Cànlié and his mother.

Just a short time before, there had been a horrific tragedy in his family. His sister, sold to a gisaeng house, had killed herself and the baby she had been forced to bore. Cànlié had recanted to me some time after we had become close the words his sister had told him, newborn baby in her arms, the last time he, just shy of his 11th year at the time, would see her alive. Hours later she and her daughter were dead after the poisonous consumption of monkshood. She was only in her 15th year of life.

“I don’t want her to know what it feels like. To be taken away from her mother, branded as a , forced to pleasure men who care nothing for her except the momentary pleasure she could provide for them,” Cànlié recalled her saying. “This is torture. I am nothing. I refuse to let her be nothing too.”

Before he could say anything she had vanished into the shadows from which she had appeared, leaving the blind-spot of the Royal Guards that they had been using in secret all the years after her separation from her family for the last time.

Cànlié had been crying at the end of his sad tale. I remember the way his tears, creating tracks down his tan skin, glistened from the moonlight that had reached through the branches of the tree we had been hiding in. I remember thinking that I never wanted to see them again. Crying didn’t suit Cànlié. Smiling did though.

You also wouldn’t know that his mother’s health had been dangerously deteriorating the past year.

Perhaps, ancestor, you do not think Cànlié is important. I will tell you now, though, that his story is just as important as mine. For now, however, we will go back to the past I’m focusing on, the story I’m focusing on.

Cànlié had been opening his mouth to speak when he had yet again been hit, this time with a wooden stick to his behind. Master Soo glared at the back of Cànlié’s head until the tall young man, now rubbing his hands comically over his behind, turned to see the instigator of violence. Then Master Soo glared at him in the eyes. Even though he was shorter than Cànlié, his intimidating presence made Cànlié wilt in apology.

“Shouldn’t you be preparing the meat for the King’s meal tonight? If I see you talking instead of working you’ll meet the stick!” barked out Master Soo.

Cànlié took off with another yelp, almost knocking over a returning serving girl and her tray of dishes in his hurry to return to his rightful place.

I knew I was no better off than Cànlié. I had been caught talking as well. Before Master Soo had the chance I had already sunk to the ground in a formal bow, apologizing for having acted inappropriately and that Cànlié was a hardworking idiot and to please have mercy on him and I would work even harder as I was an idiot as well all in one breathe. All Master Soo had done after my apology was tell me that my namul needed more soybeans in it before ordering me to follow Assistant Chief Cook Kim for the rest of the afternoon and do whatever he demanded of him.

The rest of that dreadful afternoon with Assistant Chief Cook Kim was unimportant. I was thrown insults at my face and forced to do the grunt work I originally came to do in the kitchen in my younger days, as expected. The important part is what happened that evening, after the King and the rest of the Family had been served their meal.

The court ladies and serving girls brought information that spread like wildfire throughout the palace. The ilbon were coming, to invade and destroy Gyeongbokgung and possibly the entirety of Hanseong. The Royal Family were leaving the palace in the coming days for their own safety. They were heading to Deoksugung Palace. Nothing had been said during the King’s dinner about what would happen to the lower palace servants, like myself. It was obvious at that time that the eunuchs and court ladies would be leaving with the Family to aid and serve them. But us? We were all fearful, and none more so than Cànlié.

He had a mother so sick she could hardly stand, receiving only the very basics of herbal treatments. And if they were left at the mercy of the Japanese once they arrived? His mother would surely be left for dead while Cànlié would be taken, or killed if he resisted, which I knew he would if someone tried to separate them.

Being men, we’d been physically separated from our mothers when we were ten so we could start real palace work, as well as getting taught the very basics of education. Any chance Cànlié could get he spent what little time he had with his mother, listening to her play the gayaguem.

Later that night we had met in the same tree as we always did, the same tree where he had cried for his lost sister. He told me his plan to leave, to obtain some of the plentiful supply of medicinal herbs he knew were located in one of the kitchen rooms and flee before the Japanese came, on the very night the Royal Family left.

“Will you come? Please? You know that we will not be the only ones leaving, the others will leave to, before the Japanese come. I can’t leave knowing you could get hurt. Please,” Cànlié had pleaded. I remember his concerned face, visible in the moonlight, and the way his eyes begged.

His pleading was unnecessary. Though my mother and I were not close like Cànlié, I could never let my mother stay here. I could only imagine those jjokbari forcing themselves on her. Both of us were far more concerned about the other people in our lives than our own selves.

Before I had met with Cànlié I had taken the opportunity to visit the quarters where she slept, the little space she could call her own, to speak with her of the news. My mother did have the opportunity to leave, being a valued seamstress of the Royal Family. She, being as she is though, gave the opportunity to leave to another seamstress. The seamstress was younger than her, with a small child not yet old enough to talk more than a few garbled sounds closely resembling eomma and appa, and a husband. Luckily for that family, he was leaving as well. He was one of the animal caretakers.

“Of course Cànlié, but the medicine… You know what could happen if you’re caught. Let’s just get some after we leave the Palace, okay? Please don’t try and take it. You know the palace guards won’t let you off just because the Royal Family is leaving,” it was my turn to plead to him. He knew why I was fearful.

All he did was smile sadly and grab my hands in his rough but warm ones, squeezing gently. “Bai Xian… look at us. We’re cheonim. We have no money. How in the world would we get them if not here? I have to.”

I knew he was right. When we left all we would have would be our blankets tied to our backs, holding the few meager possessions we could call our own inside. “Okay. If you’re gonna do it, I’ll do it. I’ll keep watch. Don’t argue with me. We’re in it together.”

Reluctance was clear in his expression. Loyal as ever, Cànlié wouldn’t want someone to risk punishment at the result of his own actions and decisions. He has seen my face though. He knew I wouldn’t take no for an answer. His head sagged before he collected himself, giving me a firm nod and a hearty “Okay!”

It was done. The decision was made. In two days’ time, after the Royal Family departed, we would get the herbs that night and leave behind the only kind of life we’d known.

The next two days were busy with a flurry of activity as the Palace prepared the supplies needed for the Family’s departure. The gamas that would carry the King, his Queen, and the Crown Prince were prepared, as well as the wagons that would carry their supplies and most important possessions. Food that would keep during their journey was prepared in abundance. Vegetation was packed for future use, a few animals from the Palace’s private farm were brought to idle outside the Palace until the departure, clothes, blankets, and other fabrics were packed away as well. To summarize, it was a ton of work to make sure a family that did nothing to save us save themselves.

By the time the Royal Family embarked on their journey we, the servants and palace workers left behind, knew our job. We had been told to care for the Palace as we always had until we were able to leave after a fortnight, once the rest of the supplies was packed away, when we would also depart for Deoksugung Palace.

They hadn’t thought the Japanese would come as soon as they did. They had thought that the continued running of the Palace might, at least until we left, trick the Japanese into thinking the Family still occupied it, that the Family had not fled for their lives and that they were not afraid. Later down the road of time I would learn that the Japanese had already been in Hanseong, hidden in plain sight as Joseon’s citizens, had seen the Royal Family’s departure, and had immediately reported back to the Japanese military of the departure.

Even with the new information that we were not, in fact, being abandoned to fend for ourselves, not entirely and forever anyway, the opportunity to leave this kind of life behind was too great to pass up on. Besides that, there was the fear that the Japanese might come before we were able to leave.

They did.

All I had known though, two nights before they came, was that Cànlié and I were to obtain enough medicine to last his mother until we could earn money for more.

We hadn’t made a move for the herbs until the moon was in a position similar to the position of the lunch sun. I took on the job of watching for guards possibly passing through the kitchens, a bidulgi call that I was able to imitate as Cànlié’s warning if any showed up. I watched the grounds intensely from where I was hidden in the shadows of the room opposite of Cànlié and the herbs, the one I had hidden in full of culinary instruments- stone bowls, pans, pots, and the like.

It was my fault for what had happened. I had been watching for guards not long after Cànlié entered the herb storage room when one had arrived around the wall to my right, on my side of the rooms. If I hadn’t stuck my head out the entryway I wouldn’t have seen him walking past, wouldn’t have jerked my head back, as well as my body. I wouldn’t have stepped back far enough to knock into a stone bowl sitting innocently on a stand. I remember the dull thud of it hitting the ground behind me and the shuffle of boots on the earth as the guard picked up his pace, drawn toward the sound that shouldn’t have been heard.

Before he reached my hiding place, there was an even louder clanging to be heard elsewhere. It was clanging of several containers of herbs hitting the ground. Cànlié. That foolish boy. That young man so kind and caring and loving he would give up himself before his accomplice could be caught. That foolish boy. Silence had filled my ears when I had watched the guard run toward Cànlié, who had appeared in the entryway opposite of him, and had barely gotten three feet before the guard met him in a tackle. I had been so shocked by the view before me, my friend caught for stealing, that I didn’t hear his words in his yells until all the sounds- the yelling of both Cànlié and the guard, the grunts they made as they struggled against each other, the distant calls of other guards coming to catch the thief- came back to me in an almost physical wave washing over me.

“Run!”

And I ran. I ran because if I stayed Cànlié would have hated me for it. I ran because I was afraid. I ran and escaped before the other guards had arrived. I ran until I found our tree and I cried. What would happen to Cànlié next would death- or just short of it- and it had been all my fault.

At some point later I had made it back to my quarters and collapsed, the short trip a blur in my memory even then. I had woken up the next morning with what felt like a hard stone in my stomach. Fear and dread. I exited my quarters and made my way to the servant quarters’ tiny courtyard, a place I always had to pass by on my way to the suratgan. What I saw when I arrived made my heart stop and my blood run cold.

Cànlié, bruised and bleeding, dirty, his minsangtu gone as his brown hair, now completely free fell in front of his hanging head, too weak to hold it up, was tied with his back to the trunk of the sole tree that grew in the courtyard. More than standing up right, he was tied so tightly, so securely, that he was positioned upright.

“Cànlié,” was all I could say, shocked at the appearance of my friend. Not because what had happened after being caught was a surprise, but the completely new appearance of my friend, suffering so horribly, did not seem real. Cànlié, who always had sunny disposition despite his past and the hard life we were subjected to, looked defeated.

I remember his face when he had lifted it ever so slightly. More than the blood, the cuts, and the bruises I remember his eyes and the small smile he gave before he dropped his head again.

They told him “I’m okay. You’re safe. I’m okay.” Cànlié, in the state that he was in, had been comforting me.

My internal suffering had been put to a stop when the guard that had been standing off the side spoke sternly to me and the crowd around me that also saw the horror in the courtyard. “This is what happens to those who think that stealing just because the Royal Family has left is acceptable. It is not acceptable. Everything in this Palace belongs to the King. Nothing is up for the taking. Do you understand? Spread the word. I know he had an accomplice. I want to make sure that person hears it.”

His proclamation was met with gasps and whisperings. I remember some of the whisperings. Some had been sorry for the young boy, beaten and tied to the tree as a warning to others. Some were not at all sympathetic, saying it was only to be expected for the crime.

The guard left the courtyard after seeing that the display and his words had gotten the point across but not before adding on the warning “If I or any other guards catch anyone aiding this criminal in any way, you will face the same fate.”

I hadn’t cared. I had run and fallen to my knees in front of Cànlié. It had been all my fault. Here I was though, unharmed, while he “stood” tied to the tree. I spoke nothing. I only held onto his legs and cried. I stopped when I heard his voice, worn soft and rough from exhaustion and pain, tell me “Don’t tell my mother this happened. It would kill her… I’m happy you are safe.”

Before I could remark to him there was a firm grip on my shoulder, pulling me away. Anger flooded me as I stood and whirled around. It was a servant girl. Soon Deok. I had known her almost as long as I had known Cànlié.

“A guard is coming. If he catches you… Come on,” she had spoken then, her voice soft but firm, while tugging hard at my arm. “You can’t help Cànlié later on if you’re in the same state as he.”

I remember seeing Cànlié shoot her a look of gratitude from the corner of my eye.

I had reluctantly followed her, leaving my friend at the tree, out of the servants’ quarters and all the way to the suratgan, her hand still holding my arm behind her as she walked, though not in the tight grip she had earlier.

Soon Deok was by herself here. Her parents did not work in the Palace. Soon Deok wouldn’t have either, except that her parents had refused to pay taxes to the King. The guards had taken their daughter instead of their money that day. Being poor and barely able to feed your family didn’t matter during that time, or now really, as long as you showed your loyalty to Joseon and its King through taxes.

And so my day had gone as it had the day before, outside the kitchen helping pack up the Royal Family’s belongings. Like Cànlié hadn’t been beaten to an inch of his life. Like my heart hadn’t broken in two after causing tremendous pain to the one person in the palace who I knew had my back all the way- and had paid the price for it.

That night I had gone to my mother and then to Cànlié’s, explaining that the next night we would escape. I didn’t tell them about Cànlié’s condition. They’d see it the next night anyway, after I’d freed him. The blind spot where Cànlié and his sister had met in secret was an area heavily protected by trees and shrubbery, the Palace wall covered in vines that hid the whole at the bottom of the wall. It was just big enough for a tall but thin man, like Cànlié, to crawl through, also hidden on the opposite side of the wall by bushes. Once outside the wall we would walk the short distance to Inwangsan Mountain, bypassing some of the Family’s land that laid within that distance. After that, the plan was to head north and to the east, towards Ming China. Somehow, someway, we’d make a new life for ourselves, for our families. A free life.

The plan would have been successful, I think, if those Japanese jjokbari hadn’t come the night of our planned escape.

The evening had come and so had the Japanese, setting Gyeongbokgung on fire and terrorizes anyone in the vicinity. The guards tried to defend the Palace, as well as anyone else feeling extremely loyal to the King. Their defense failed as the rest of us fled. At that point using the secret entrance was pointless as servants fled right through Gyeongbokgung’s four gates except that I had hidden our supplies that before returning to my quarters the night before after the visits I had made. It had only been a thread of a thought at that time but I had noticed, though we were all fleeing together, all of us were fending for ourselves and the precious few we cared about. Us slaves and servants, we were always a community that did not unite.

As the Japanese flooded Gyeongbokgung I tried to aid my friend, pushing past the fleeing crowds and trying to ignore the chaos around me. When I arrived at the courtyard Cànlié looked as he had the day before, though even more worn out from lack of nutrition and his untreated injuries. Hurriedly I tried to undo the multitude of rope knots holding my friend hostage. I knew the panic that was quickly creeping up on me was making my hands tremble and shake so bad that the knots stayed as they were, perhaps slightly loosened.

I remember feeling hot tears slide down my cheeks in frustration- at my hands, the knots, his mother’s illness, the Japanese, at the world- my anger making me pull at the ropes like they would simply fall away from the pain and anger I was feeling.

Cànlié knew how I was feeling. As always. Calling me to face him directly rather than his back, his eyes and his voice were steady despite his condition.

“Go to my mother Bai Xian. Go to your mother. Get them. Get them and get out. Go to Inwangsan. I will meet you there, okay? You loosened the ropes earlier, I can get out on my own after I work at it. I’ll meet you at Inwangsan by daybreak, if not, leave anyway. Do you understand?”

Though steady, his voice was weak after the exertion of speaking.

I knew he was lying about the ropes. It didn’t matter if they were loose, they were inescapable. I also knew how serious Cànlié was. Yet again, he was throwing his safety away so that someone else would be okay.

“Bian Bai Xian! Do you understand? I want you to take my lucky silk, okay? It’s still here, in my shirt. It hadn’t fallen out when they caught me. Take it and keep it safe for me, okay?”

I had felt a cold numb wash over me as I mechanical dug my hand underneath the fold of his thin, white, blood-stained undergarment shirt and pushing hard past the rope that restricted his chest. I felt my fingertips touch fabric much softer than the ruined shirt. I had grabbed it, the fabric and pulled. I remember feelings so relieved when the simple loop made to keep the scrap of blue silk securely in the shirt gave way with ease. At least I wouldn’t be letting Cànlié down by not being able to get his precious silk.

Cànlié always carried it with him. It was “lucky” he has told me. With everything that had happened in his life, I didn’t think it was. I had told him so when he had first shown it to me. He had just laughed and pointed out that he had met me, hadn’t he, so how could it not be lucky? I had let it alone after that, silently judging him for believing in such a simple thing like a scrap of figure his mother had torn from the sash of a dead Royal Guard before he’d been taken away. She had given it to him when he was a baby, hoping the soft texture would quiet his cries. It did. Cànlié carried it with him not just because he had thought it was lucky though but also because it was a way of having his mother with him throughout the day.

It meant a lot to him. In that moment, as I held it in my hand, it meant a lot to me too. This fabric was a piece of Cànlié’s mother but to me it was a piece of Cànlié himself. And now it would be all I had to remember him by.

The exchange between us had seemed like hours but in reality it was a mere couple of minutes before I nodded sadly at my friend, taking a moment to remember those warm brown eyes and the last smile he’d ever give me, before turning and running to save the lives of the most important people who mattered to us, besides each other.

I was leaving him behind again. This time I was saving his mother’s life by doing so, as well as my own and my mother’s. Leaving him behind was no doubt something he had been thankful for in his last moments.

By a of luck that may have been because of the blue silk now tied securely within my jeogori, my mother was in Cànlié’s mother’s room. She came to me after standing up from where she was crouched next to the sick woman on the floor.

Holding my face in her gentle hands she had asked me “My son, are you alright? Are we going now? We must hurry. Where is Cànlié?”

I told her yes, we were going, and I lied that Cànlié would be meetings us at Inwangsan Mountain later, something was holding him back.

Cànlié’s mother’s face held a troubled expression but she climbed onto my back when I had offered it to her anyway, knowing there was no time to lose. The Japanese were already here. Who knew what they would do to stragglers taking their sweet time in leaving the Palace they were overtaking? Slavery worse than this? Never.

Thankful that that women’s quarters’ location meant I did not have to pass through the courtyard, we made our way to the secret passage and, once my mother had grabbed the hidden supplies in a bush, and out into the land outside of the Palace.

The short journey was quick, if not a bit slow going because of Cànlié’s mother on my back. Once we had arrived at Inwangsan Mountain we found ourselves shelter amongst a thick patch of trees. I told them what Cànlié had told me, to leave if he was not there by daybreak. Cànlié’s mother, sick as she was, fainted at the sudden prospect of never seeing her son again.

While we waited for daybreak my mother slept, as did Cànlié’s mother, and I kept watch. Here and there I spotted from my perch in a tree other servants heading this way or elsewhere. It was not until the sky was starting to lighten, on the verge of daybreak but not quite there yet, that I had heard rustling coming from some nearby shrubbery and out stumbled a figure, falling clumsily to the ground. I scrambled to the ground and had almost pounced at the figure when a familiar voice had cried out “Stop! It’s me! Soon Deok!”

When the figure stood and came into the moonlight, Soon Deok was clearly visible, leaves in her hair and dirt on the chima of her hanbok. By this time my mother had woken up and watched the scene before her, speaking before I did.

“Soon Deok? You escaped? Are you hurt?”

“No,” Soon Deok had said, “I am fine, do not worry about me.”

Nodding her head in relief, my mother let out a breathy “Thank goodness.”

We fell into silence as we settled back down to watch as day finally broke, the sky full of red and orange and yellow and green and blue and night’s purple. The sky was beautiful, even after the horrible night that had occurred. Cànlié’s mother woke up during the sunrise, tears silently running down her face. The sun rising quickly and her son was not there.

We left soon after the sun’s full shape became visible, knowing the distance between us and Gyeongbokgung Palace needed to grow, and quickly, before the Japanese now occupying Hanseong ended up traversing through the mountains.

We came upon a village after a couple days’ worth of traveling, exhausted and low on supplies. My mother and Cànlié’s revealed to us the little money they collected from the work they did that they had kept in the hidden pockets under their chimas. It bought us some vegetables to last us a couple more days and a night in one of the villager’s home’s empty rooms with some left over for another time.

Cànlié’s mother died during the night in her sleep. I wasn’t surprised. Her son and daughter were now both dead. She’d escaped into freedom with nothing. She had been listless during the entire traverse across Joseon’s mountains. She hadn’t eaten any food either. Her illness was as worse as ever.

I wish I could have buried her with her son. Instead she was buried outside of the village, a tree as her grave marker. I carved her name in the tree just so anyone who passed by and noticed the markings I scratched into the bark using a sharp rock would know she was there. Cànlié would no doubt end up in an unmarked grave. I couldn’t let his mother go through the same kind of treatment.

After that we had continued north, knowing we had finally gotten to China after almost two months of traveling when we came upon the settlement of Tonghua. We settled down there, finding what you could call a shack to live in, rented out cheap to us by an old man. I eventually found work building a home along with some other men, learning Chinese from them as I did so. Once my skills had improved I was able to find more jobs around the community, eventually able to move Soon Deok, my mother, and myself into a nicer small home that an employer of mine had empty once his son had moved somewhere in southern China.

We were there for twelve years, until my mother had died during her 52nd (or so) year. Her death had been unexpected but I believe she had been at peace. Happy. She’d simply not woken up one morning.

During that time Soon Deok and I had been united in marriage, with a little girl of eight and a little boy of five. All of us knew Chinese and Korean, I had made sure to teach them what I knew of both languages. It would be very helpful for them in the future.

It was after her death that we decided to return to the city we had abandoned so long ago. We were not afraid of being recognized, thirteen years had passes and we had been a mere servant and a slave anyway. Forgettable. Our journey back was much quicker and far more pleasant than the first. We had horses to carry our supplies and possessions, as well as ourselves. There were no starving stomachs and aching, injured feet when Hanseong came into view.

We found an empty home far from the Palace. We never wanted to go back there, to that place full of memories and hardships. Sadness. When we had arrived we had taken up a new family name, to protect our ancestry. Byun. I took up two jobs then. Soon Deok ran a vegetable stand, the vegetables growing in a patch behind our house, protected from view by the fence I had built from thieves, while I worked for a couple that owned a shop serving food. I was there cook. That was my first job. My second job involved me helping slaves escape from their servitude, sending them north to Xiwang, a friend of mine in Tonghua who had readily agreed to help me in my mission.

I helped many people for the 33 years that I did that. Now as I’m writing this, I have grown too old to make the journey to the edges of the mountains before I let the freed slaves go, heading towards a new life. I am now the owner of the hanshikjeom, the couple owning it before growing too old to manage it and no children that wanted to inherit it. My son and his wife are starting to take the reins from me, having worked with me for many years already. Soon Deok is having a hard to carrying things as of late, her figure growing weaker. I am determined to spend the rest of my life in peace with my family, until the earth reclaims my body.

I have left my legacy behind, as well as the legacy of my soft-hearted Cànlié, and can now rest knowing our lives will not be forgotten, even after those who knew us personally after we’ve passed on have passed on themselves as well.

Remember me, ancestor. Remember our story, our lives. Always work towards a better future. Do not overlook this story. I was able to pave a new path for my family, but others had not been so fortunate. Remember me, Bian Bai Xian. Remember Piao Cànlié. Remember the ones left behind at the mercy of the Japanese. Remember the ones who were beaten to death for stealing medicine for their sick mother. Do not overlook this story.