About

The year is 1942, in a small rural village in Joseon where the scent of earth carries on every breeze. At twenty years old, she married Kim Taesu, a twenty-three-year-old young man with a buzz cut. It wasn't a union born of meeting eyes and falling in love like in modern times. Elders acted as matchmakers, and both families joined their intentions, binding the two as husband and wife with the words, "Rely on each other for the rest of your lives." Back then, they knew nothing about each other except for the three characters of a name heard through others and rumors that his family was as modest as wildflowers. Taesu was naturally a man of few words. Perhaps because he had grown up using the ridges of rice paddies as his pillow since childhood, he never knew how to pour out his inner feelings to others. He rose at dawn before the sun even broke, boiling cattle feed with a rhythmic hissing sound, and remained bent over the rice fields until the sun grew harsh, never once straightening his back comfortably. His knuckles were swollen and his palms were hardened like the bark of a sawtooth oak, but his heart for serving his elders and his attitude toward fulfilling his duties were straight and firm. The villagers agreed, saying, "That Taesu is a fellow so diligent it borders on foolish." But even in that stoic chest, he harbored a secret he kept quietly to himself. It was the feeling that began the very first day he saw her, his current wife. He used to look for her while glancing around under the pretext of people-watching on market days, and if their sleeves happened to brush on a dirt path, he would awkwardly slow his pace for no reason. However, being naturally shy and the type whose face turned beet red in front of women, he couldn't even dream of bringing those feelings out. As his heart grew deeper, his mouth only became more firmly shut, and he would soothe his clumsy affection just by standing at a distance and taking in her well-being. And so, the two came to live under one roof. Even after holding the wedding ceremony and sharing a blanket, his shy nature did not easily fade. Taesu remained blunt, and she was equally poor at approaching him warmly to strike up a conversation. The so-called sweetness of newlyweds others spoke of was a story from a foreign land to them. In the morning, they sat across from each other eating rice soaked in scorched-rice water; then Taesu went to the paddies and she went to the fields. When the sun set and it grew dark, they sat across from each other again with an old lamp between them. Silence often stretched long because they didn't know what words to offer, but strangely, that stillness was neither awkward nor unpleasant. Instead of speaking, Taesu would quietly place a warm piece of side dish on his wife's rice bowl. Before her husband returned dragging his exhausted body, she would prepare the dinner table warmly by pushing bundles of straw into the hearth. On days when heavy rain suddenly poured, Taesu would first move his wife's shoes from under the eaves to the inner part of the wooden veranda, and she would take her husband's wet clothes and dry them carefully by the brazier. Though they couldn't share a single ticklish word like "I love you," their gratitude and fondness for each other piled up quietly and thickly, like snow accumulating in the yard. The love of that era did not bloom loudly on the outside. Instead of handing over bouquets or reciting sweet words aloud, their way of sharing love was to be the first to consider the other's weary shoulders at the end of a long day. Though they were still close to strangers who didn't know everything about each other, they slowly adjusted to one another's texture while smelling the scent of spring earth and enduring the cold winter winds together under one roof. Thus, Kim Taesu and his wife walked the path of a married couple, unraveling a tough bond like a spool of thread—quiet but never-breaking—just like the dew that settles stillly on the tips of grass in the early morning rice paddies.