Ten Thousand Sorrows

My first introduction to the seven sins of Korean women was when I read Elizabeth Kim's Ten Thousand Sorrows at the end of 2001.

I remember December 2001 clearly. A month earlier, I seemed to have fallen in love. A few days before Christmas I set off in the freezing winter from Beijing to Shanxi (山西) with Mary and Ay Shin. The three of us spent Christmas in Taiyuan (太原), Shanxi's provincial capital. Mary was so cold that she stepped on a tiny piece of cardboard in the bus hoping that the flimsy piece of object would provide her foot with extra warmth. That had since become a joke among the three of us. And I had the book Ten Thousand Sorrows with me to while away the time when it was too depressingly cold to walk, and when we were not jokingly pointing accusatory fingers at each other asking "whose idea was it to come to Shanxi in winter?"

Anyway, I digress. The chilgo chiak, or seven evils are:

Disobeying her in-laws
Bearing no son
Sexual looseness
Being jealous
Carrying a hereditary disease
Talking too much
Stealing

Set in the aftermath of the Korean War, the book is about an orphan - known derogatorily as honhyol (or non-person, mixed race, animal) - who was shunned by society, and later adopted by American parents.

As Kim pointed out: "If you were a childless couple and you didn't mind having an Asian son or daughter, Korea was fertile ground at that time. There were so many forgotten children, the product of brief liaisons between soldiers on their way through, and women on their way to hell."

Incidentally, Korea is still "fertile ground" for "forgotten children", even till this day. The only difference is that children put up for adoption in the past few decades are more likely to be those born out of wedlock than honhyols.

But overall, the book is uplifting. As Kim noted in her concluding chapter:

"We all struggle along through the ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows of our lives. But because we are ultimately alone, and because life is so hard, every moment of beauty, every belly laugh, and every kiss are powerful and precious. I'm intensely grateful for every fragile instant of contentment."

Me too.

And in her concluding paragraph:

"Maybe this life is like that. Maybe this pain is like that. Fears and hopes and dreams and sorrows all will dissolve like the fog that they are, and what will be left is the light and warmth of my deepest self or soul or whatever it might be. I want true love in this life, and true contentment and peace. But maybe the only way I can find those things is to let go of the belief that this life is my reality."