The Black Sands of Samyang

Jae-yeun’s mother died on the fifth of April, months before the beginning of tourist season. The heart attack sent her face first into a steaming vat of ddeokbokki, the dish of chewy rice sticks in spicy sauce that she’d sold by the side of the coastal road near Samyang for nearly 30 years, and the burns that resulted had left her face unrecognizable, a mealy red mass of boiled flesh that made Jae-yeun vomit when he’d first pulled her up out of the food and shaken her body and wept at the horror of life and the permanence of death.

It is well known that the black sands of Samyang have healing properties, that they channel the energy of the mountain that looms over the island of Jeju-do: Halla-san, the old volcano from whence, according to legend, the island was born, and in the bowels of which all of its many legends live; for example, the tale of Grandmother Seolmundae, the giant matriarch who, in a famous story, was in fact responsible for creating the island, and who appears in many others, one of which (another popular tale, given its prominence in the tourist literature) tells of a day during lean times, when she sent her 500 sons out to scavenge for food and tried in the meantime to prepare some sustenance in the form of a large cauldron of soup, then fell into the soup and had been cooked, unbeknownst to her sons, who came home hungry from their foraging and devoured the delicious-smelling soup right down to the last spoonfuls at the bottom of the pot, and when they reached these dregs, saw that they hid a shamble of bones, which triggered in them the horrible knowledge that they had eaten their own mother, an act of such unbearable blasphemy that they all turned to crags of stone on the side of the mountain, ensconced forever in grief and shame for all who would scale the mountain in future times to see. Jae-yeun had not turned to stone. He had been very much alive when he straddled his mother’s body on the floor of the snack stand, the red and yellow awning flapping in the wind that wailed in a mockery of his own wailing; not petrified at all but in fact as flaccid and pathetic as a beached jellyfish as the ambulance came and the paramedics draped a towel over his mother’s melted features and drove her away to Halla Hospital to be pronounced dead, no longer proprietor of the ddeokbokki stand, no longer a strong matriarch of Jeju, now just another name in the public ledger where these kinds of things are recorded for official posterity. During the following days he’d often wished he had been turned to stone by his own sadness. If such a thing had happened he’d then be able to join the 500 generals on the slope of the Yongshil trail where in spring, azaleas grow in bright purple clusters and then fade to make way for the lush green of summer which in turn gives way to the soft earthtone carpet of feathered eulalia grass that comes with winter, this cycle going on year after year, demonstrating with patience and wisdom the fleeting nature of life and the regeneration of the earth’s many things, which lessons Jae-yeun believed must, after centuries, have given some comfort to the stone sons, and which comfort he craved but was unable to find in the morass of sadness and anger and helplessness and selfishness that now flooded his mind, exhausting him and making him curse this island of stories that held no solace for those who treasured them. The three-day mourning passed but did not seem to, at least not in the sense that something that passes must move. It existed for him mainly as a tableau, him and his bewildered brother and sister standing there in the wood-panelled room at the back of the hospital, wearing their traditional funeral clothes made of coarse yellow hemp, the three of them arrayed in front of his mother’s body as though posed for the very funeral portrait that now seemed to have etched itself permanently in Jae-yeun’s mind. The one exception, of course, was the single moment that would come to dictate Jae-yeun’s future, which may have ultimately taken hold of his imagination and produced such a profound effect later on simply by virtue of its being the only thing he could recall beyond that static and permanent image of mourning. The revelation was prompted by a relative: Aunt Suni, a bent and creased old woman who had farmed garlic in the village of Sagye her whole life. Aunt Suni, who came to Jae-yeun at the funeral and leaned in close to his face and opened her collapsed mouth to tell Jae-yeun to hold out his hand, and then released from her clenched fist a jet of black sand that piled in Je-yeun’s palm like a tiny version of Halla rising from the sea, and said to him: “Put this in with your mother when she is buried, it will keep the ghosts away, your mother was always worried about ghosts,” which Aunt Suni was not implying was a foolish concern; in fact, it was one she shared, and which Jae-yeun, although he was a modern young man who could speak a little English and hoped to work as a public official, had never fully dismissed, largely because he knew well the extent of his mother’s superstition and could never fully disagree with her on anything, even (and, if he were to be honest with himself, especially) her habits concerning the black sands of Samyang. It was only in her later years that his mother had adopted the habit of going out every summer afternoon to Samyang beach, leaving Jae-yeun’s sister at the snack stand to make fresh deokbokki and kimbap to sell to school kids and fishermen. Once at the beach, she would bury herself by the shore, remaining in her clothes but covering every inch of her body save her face, which she would leave tilted toward the ocean to watch the waves roll in from out past the industrial towers and brightly-painted breaker wall to the burning dark sand which she swore by as a tonic for her rheumatism and eczema and general psychic stress. The near religious devotion with which she carried out the ritual had caused rifts with Jae-yeun’s father, who accused her of being selfish and strange for abandoning her duty at the ddeokbokki stand, and who had often, before his own death two years before that of his wife, named the habit as the thing that would be the death of him, which in fact had turned out to be cancer of the stomach. Jae-yeun knew his father would have been mortified by his plan, but Aunt Suni had planted the idea, and he knew also, with the sort of confidence that increased with every second, that it is what his mother would have wanted if she had held on long enough to tell him, or even that she was perhaps trying to tell him as her lips were being cruelly seared shut with deokbokki sauce: bury me at Samyang, she would have said, to heal my face before I make the journey onwards into the world of gods, for I do not wish to be ugly in front of them, lest I offend them and am thus condemned to remain disfigured for all eternity and doomed to become a ghost story told by schoolchildren across the land. Omma, Jae-yeun answered in his head, after the last visitor had left the viewing room and Jae-yeun’s siblings had retired to the dining room upstairs to take their final meal before the mourning period came to an end—because I owe you my life, because hyodo is the foundation of the Korean way, I will do this thing for you. II. Hyodo can be roughly defined in English as “filial piety,” although it implies a dedication and depth that goes beyond what many among us might think of as our duty as daughters and sons—which is to say that once Jae-yeun became convinced that he had to bury his mother at Samyang beach, there was no doubt in his mind that the task must be accomplished, that it was the thing that took precedence over all else: study, work, finding a wife, helping his sister take over operations of the ddeokbokki stand in full (which raised in her the same furor that had caused her father’s stomach to rot away), even sleep. Being a good man and a responsible citizen, Jae-yeun went first to the appropriate authorities in the city government, and made his plea to the minister in charge of beaches, which is to say the minister of tourism, explaining the situation and taking extra time to communicate, with deep respect and deference, the intensity with which his dear mother had sworn by the medicinal benefits of Samyang’s dusky sand. “Minister,” he said, his head bowed, “I beg of you: please let me bury my mother in the black sands of Samyang, so that her soul can rest peacefully and without torment in the afterworld, and so that I can truly be said to have honored my mother’s wishes and given back to her all that she gave to me, in the best tradition of Confucianism.” The minister felt some sympathy for this boy: he had an obvious love for his departed mother, was good-hearted and loyal, and seemed sincere in his request. Alas, even if he would have liked to sanction the idea—which, being himself well-travelled and reasonable and beyond most of the old superstitions that plagued many of the residents of the island’s smaller and more backward villages, he would likely not have done, despite the potential value in tourist literature that such a fervent testimonial to the powers of Samyang’s sands may have brought – the matter was out of his hands. “Your request has been noted,” he told Jae-yeun. “However, this is an issue of zoning, and I cannot overrule the laws as they apply to the appropriate and accepted use of land on and around Samyang beach. As such, I must tell you that what you ask is impossible. Annyonghi kaseyo.” Jae-yeun left the government offices slouched and beset by a feeling of great despair. He could not let his mother down; and yet, what she had asked—or what he knew she wanted—was impossible. With his head cloudy and his thoughts nipped at by the teeth of the ghosts who were waiting for his mother to join them in their devilry, he stopped at the first store he could find, bought a bottle of soju, sat down in a park bench overlooking a field of bright yellow canola that sloped gently down to the blue sea reflecting the pale afternoon sun in the distance, the whole scene a blaze of fervent and discombobulating yellow light, and began drinking. Several hours later, with half a dozen empty green bottles laying at his feet and a high-pitched whine echoing through his head, Jae-yeun got up from the bench, as drunk as he had ever been, and stumbled down the road past the government buildings where his dreams had been crushed like a cigarette butt, down through the corridors of neon and the buzzing alleyways of the city’s bar district where he’d spent countless hours as a university student playing drinking games with his friends, back before his mother had died, back before everything had been cursed; and, stopping occasionally to slump against a lamppost or telephone pole, which he hugged as if hugging his mother’s great solid girth and which he moaned into as though he were whispering into his mother’s ear, “Aigo, aigo, omma!”—“Woe is me, woe is me!”—made his way toward the waterfront at Tapdong, where he intended to throw himself into the surging black waves and be dashed against the breaker wall, all of his problems swallowed by the sea, that great mother that both provided endless bounty for the people of Jeju and at the same time wore away its stones, taking off an inch every aeon as it moved to one day completely devour the island and all of its myths: Grandmother Seolmundae and the three demigods Ko, Yang and Bu and the old woman Samseung who is in charge of pregnancy and birth—all except the old woman Gusamseung, who is in charge of death, and who would remain above the waves to watch the last traces of rock become engulfed by the dark water, just as she now hovered above Jae-yeun, guiding him towards the depths to join the squid and the abalone and the rusting remnants of the fishermen’s tools on the cragged ocean floor. By the main stretch of the boardwalk leading from the row of raw fish restaurants in the east to the great boat-shaped tourist hotel in the west, people of all ages played under the yellow lamplight, riding bicycles around the square or batting shuttlecocks back and forth with racquets or simply sprawling out on the red pavement for a picnic of banch’an and soju, but Jae-yeun paid no attention to any of it, focused as he was on the heaving surf and the hard slapping noise it made as it ploughed into the breaker wall: the sound, he believed, of his own life splitting apart. Strands of thought swam through his head like the schools of shimmering anchovies that darted through the shallows at Samyang, too quick to catch or even to keep track of for more than a few moments, and Jae-yeun knew it was the soju, the potent clear liquor that is Korea’s national drink and which they consequently take proudly and often, it was this elixir that was making him stumble, making it difficult to focus, making his vision vibrate like a spring, making his hands quake; and now, making him angry, angry at the kids hopping about in the dusk, angry at the sea for seducing him with its promise of oblivion, angry at his mother for being dead, and then once again deeply sorrowful and bereft of hope and wanting only darkness, to sink down and harden under the weight of the water into a fossil on which crabs and urchins could dwell. Although he was not aware of it, Jae-yeun had been spitting obscenities aloud for some time, alarming the families who were trying to barbecue by the seaside in peace, and amusing some of the withered old men who stood with their long, telescopic fishing poles draped out over the wall into the dark where their glowing lures beckoned squid toward clustered, burrlike hooks. One old man, sensing that Jae-yeun was experiencing a moment of crisis but impatient with the worries of the young, who knew nothing of the hardship that the island’s elders had faced when growing up, before the tourist hotels and the fancy shops and the department stores had replaced the fields and the meadows and the fishing shacks and the hard tracts of dry earth underlaid by the stony feet of Halla, this man stopped Jae-yeun as he zig-zagged westward towards the coastal highway, and, liquor being the only cure he knew or had to offer, thrust a shot glass into Jae-yeun’s hands and filled it to the brim with more soju. “Mashi-ra!” said the old man, who was dressed in a tuck vest and a crumpled baseball cap: “Drink!” Jae-yeun, by now far beyond the accepted definitions of consciousness and experiencing the whole episode as a kind of dream, even as he continued to blather obscenities, obliged, tipping the little cup back to let the sweet clear liquid slide down his throat.        “Hwaiting!” said the man, removing the cup from Jae-yeun’s hands, which were numb and, in Jae-yeun’s opinion at that moment, possibly nonexistent. “Good luck!, soldier on!, chin up!,” et cetera. Jae-yeun continued down the boardwalk, weaving in a kind of looping figure-eight pattern, until he reached the shadows cast by the great tourist hotel, some distance from the busy, glowing square, and stopped to turn and put his hands on the rail and prepare himself for his descent, his final moments before going on to join his mother with the ghosts, one of which he, too, would become, a drunken ghost without the capacity to instill fear, only a maudlin, pathetic spirit who would be doomed to endless ridicule from the more formidable and fearsome entities that peopled the vague beyond. He raised his eyes to the horizon. A hint of daylight still rimmed the sea’s distant limit, blush pink mellowing into deep indigo, painting the underside of the clouds with a streaky, warm wash of vivid colour. Jae-yeun stared into it, the last trace of his last day, and tensed the muscles in his forearms, ready to jump down, down into the water. Here it is necessary to pause for a moment and tell a little about Jeju-do’s clouds, for, although it is a place that is unquestionably defined by the sea, for whatever reason of weather or magic, its skies are home to the most remarkable formations, making it blessed in being possessed of great beauty both above and below the looming presence of Halla-san. Be they large and puffy, with contours shadowed in varying shades of powder blue and grey, so that they seem as if one could pluck them out of the sky and stuff them into a bag from which they could later be pulled to make comforting sweaters; or feathered and long, spread across the sky like flocked trails of delicate white butter; or endless and undulating, a skyscape of heavenly dunes harbouring as many secrets and stories as the furrowed deserts of the Silk Road – whatever the shape, whatever the season, Jeju’s clouds are things to behold, and even the most sober and rational individual could be forgiven for seeing in them some god or messenger, vision or chimera. And so, given Jae-yeun’s state at the moment at which he gazed out onto the swollen bellies of the evening clouds glowing rose in the dying light of the sun, we must certainly forgive him for suddenly, in the midst of his brooding, perceiving in the billowing pink and blue shapes peopling the sky the figure of Grandmother Seolmundae, reclining across an expanse as large as the isle of Udo, her belly now round and satiated, the bounty of heaven having filled the void that the terrestrial offerings of earth during hard times could not. “Jae-yeun,” she said, her voice in his head somehow both booming and soft, both as commanding as that of an army general and comforting as that of a mother, his mother. “I feel the depths of your despair. I see the old woman Gusamseung, steward of death, hovering behind your shoulders, pushing you towards the water, willing you to complete the task to which she is bound, convincing you that your fate has led you here and there is nothing further for you to do. “I come to tell you: she is bound to this task, committed to death – but you are not. My own death portended the death of my sons, for which I continue to suffer, and will as long as my story is told, as long as this island of rough stone continues to stand its ground against the hammering of the sea. Do not let the same fate befall you. Your mother is gone, but you remain. The time for grief has passed. Do what you know must be done – I give you my permission, as the creator and matriarch of Jeju, which is beyond the word of those that would claim to hold dominion over the ancient laws, those who purport to rule this island made of the bodies of my frozen sons. I am Seolmundae Halmaeng, of such height that even the deepest river on Jeju will reach only to my ankle, and you shall not drown in the seas around my island!” “Seolmundae Halmaeng, chal durossoyo!” Jae-yeun cried, staggering back from the breaker wall – and, in doing so, tripping over a board that had been knocked loose, falling backwards down the short flight of steps that separated the boardwalk from the pebbled road below, and knocking his head against the ground, the impact of which sounded a word in his head with such force and volume that it cut through his veil of drunkenness and rattled his drooping bones and altogether seemed as though a great gong had been struck atop Halla-san to announce to the very reaches of the island, from Seongsan in the east to Hallim in the west, the birth of a bright and limitless new year: “Samyang.” III. The schoolchildren could not tell whether or not the man was dead, but that did not stifle their curiosity. If anything, it made them crane closer to the body lying prone and crumpled on the sand, little black flecks peppering the face, ramps of black sand having begun to accumulate against the sides of the body, built up over hours by the wind, and piles of wetter sand heaped here and there around him, obviously the work of the shovel driven deep into the side of a small dune not far from where he lay. As for the leg that sprouted up from the sand beside his head, drooping like the stalk of a great fleshy reed, such a thing was so unlikely as to be of almost no concern to the schoolchildren at all, who had been warned to avoid strange and irrational situations, perhaps not exactly of this kind; but certainly they could all sense that no good could come of this odd plant and its insensate gardener, this tableau of deviance that stood out so forcefully on the otherwise serene and even lonely windswept shores of Samyang beach, famed among the people of Jeju for the healing properties of its miraculous ebon sands. It was not until an old ajossi showed up – himself still drunk from the night before, but so used to the condition that it no longer hampered his judgment or moral strength, registering instead as the presence of an old friend, perhaps the ghost of one long passed – and saw, through the haze of drink, the leg jutting from the sand and the crumpled form of the boy beside it; not until this besotted grandfather came upon the scene that the authorities were alerted, the old man having spent several minutes shouting at Jae-yeun’s inert body and giving it the occasional soft kick, and furthermore squeezing Jae-yeun’s mostly submerged mother’s leg to determine whether or not it was real or some form of modern trickery or questionable amusement popular among the youth, and consequently having determined that the leg belonged to a dead person and the crumpled body to someone still alive (although clearly not equipped to handle the effects of soju, and therefore, in the eyes of the old ajossi, something of a traitor to his country), having called his wife and told her to alert the police, saying something was amiss at Samyang which was making the schoolchildren abandon their classes and ogle the spectacle in question in the manner of mindless, big-eyed tuna…  as indecent a scene as the old man, who had lived through the tragedy of the war and its purges and was therefore no stranger to atrocity, could recall. The police came swiftly and shooed away the schoolchildren, who wandered off and forgot the incident almost immediately, content in their detachment. In light of the apparent seriousness of the situation, the head detective followed protocol meticulously, first securing the crime scene and then alerting the government, which is to say the minster in charge of beaches (i.e. the minister of tourism) and the minister in charge of public health, who arrived forty-five minutes later in the same black vehicle, both a little tipsy from a long night of drinking soju, to make their pronouncements and attempt to handle the incident without any loss of face or unsavoury scandal. “Aigo!” said the minister of public health, who had often himself enjoyed a healing bath in the black sands of Samyang, and who shuddered on seeing them so befouled, “I can’t believe it. What kind of incompetence has led to this? It is disgraceful, indecent. We must close this story down immediately.” IV. The Minister of Public Health’s claim had been taken to heart, and the incident, although it had managed to leak out onto a few web sites and cause a brief rustle of discontent among the public, had been tidily and efficiently dealt with, mostly before the local media showed up, whom the ministers were not all that afraid of, anyway. However, once behind closed doors, the case had been more explicitly analyzed, and after some thought, it was determined to be not completely devoid of opportunity, especially in the eyes of the minister of tourism, who was in charge of beaches, and who had gradually, despite his assurances to Jae-yeun that nothing could be done, which was of course a lie, come to believe that to waste such a fantastical story as the one that had presented itself on the shores of Samyang beach would be akin to bailing out a wave of shining anchovies that had jumped into your boat of their own volition, martyring themselves so that the people of Jeju could be fed and their tales passed down among the generations. “Ministers,” he said, addressing his fellow ministers, who were lined up sitting cross-legged on either side of a long table embedded with hot charcoal grills, on which strips of deep ruby red pork galbi sizzled and spat and wafted out billows of smoke infused with the odour of sweet, fired meat. “Forgive me for once again bringing up the case of Pak Jae-yeun and his mother who loved the black sands of Samyang, but I believe we must use this to our advantage, if we are to continue to grow Jeju’s tourist industry this year.” “Are you a stone-head?” said the Minister of Transportation, who had a pompadour of black hair greying on the sides, and who always used such vulgar language after a few bottles of soju, of which he had presently consumed four and a half. “You must be crazy. How can we have tourists after such an embarrassing and undignified episode? No one will come, they will all go to China instead. And, by the way, there’s no chance we could use the matter of Pak Jae-yeun to bring more tourists. Give up your wishful thinking, ajossi!” “I understand your thinking,” said the Minister of Tourism. “But please, listen: we can all agree that Jeju-do is an island with great potential, where all people can come and enjoy the beautiful sights of natural beauty and learn about Jeju culture. This is unimpeachable thinking. Gentlemen, we live in the jewel of Korea!” A rousing round of agreements was raised, and toasts were made, the small soju glasses clinking and brimming over with the clear white liquid, which fell onto the burning hot coals, throwing up even more smoke and creating a hazy, meaty cloud that drifted out into the restaurant, causing the waitress to rush over with a long metal bar and remove the grill from the heat so as to replace it with a fresh one, untainted by charred fat and forgotten bits of galbi withered into little black stones, miniature versions of the gnarled black boulders that created a plain of wonderment and grotesquery all along Jeju-do’s coastline, doing all of this while the ministers continued to laugh and bellow in endorsement of Jeju’s treasured status. When the mood finally subsided after two more toasts and the ordering of several more bottles of soju from the timid young waitress, who really wished to be able to live in Seoul and have a fashion career but who was obliged to help her aging parents run their family galbi chib, the Minster of Tourism once again took the spotlight. “Gentlemen, I propose that, if we can manage to get the materials done right, we can use this incident as the catalyst for the launch of a brand new museum and theme park, detailing the story of old Grandmother Samyang, who buried herself in the black sands to heal her disfigured face!” “We need new initiatives,” said the Minister of Finance. “More and more honeymooners are going to China! We must have new attractions with which to sustain the tourist economy.” “And there is a place already in the design stages, which will be built beside the Chocolate Museum in Jungmun,” said the Minister of Tourism, seizing the moment, and making his play at housing such a museum in the island’s premiere tourist area, a sprawling resort on the south coast where the finest and most elaborate tourist hotels were located, and where in the summertime bathers flocked to play in the rough waves cresting towards the black cliffs of Jungmun beach, and the old haenyeo, Jeju’s famous women divers, sold plates of sliced abalone and sea urchin and octopus plucked from the rocks below and displayed in glimmering tanks outside the row of restaurants built into the cliffs along the path that led to the great parking lot above. “Ah, Jungmun, so beautiful!” resounded the Minister of Transportation, nodding his head. “But won’t people become confused: she was buried at Samyang, and her museum will be in Jungmun! Besides, Samyang needs no boost, it is famous for the healing qualities of its black sands and people come from all over Korea to bathe in them in hopes of ridding themselves of their skin conditions and stress-related complaints, and so I say, if this is to be brought to fruition, it should best benefit the whole of the island, and especially its reputation internationally as a world-class tourist destination, because, as you know, we are certainly seeing many more Chinese and Japanese people coming to Jeju these days, not to mention the Americans!” The Minister of Tourism could see his point, and, indeed, drunk as they all were on the many bottles of soju that now littered the table in front of them, they were all in the mood to be supportive, and so they all bellowed and laughed in agreement, proposing toasts to the Minister of Transportation’s tenacity and insight. Thinking for a moment as the Minister of Fisheries refilled his soju glass right to the very top, the Minister of Tourism came upon a solution: “Ministers,” he said. “I can see my colleague’s point. And I’ve been thinking about it. It seems to me that Jeju is famous for many things—for our three abundances, of wind, stone and women; for our bountiful and delicious tangerines, which are of the highest quality in all of Korea; for our pristine water, drawn from the highest peaks of Halla-san, where it flows freely and with the freshest taste; for the succulent meat of our black pigs, which we are at this very moment enjoying; for the dolharubang, the stone grandfathers, who watch over us and guard the gates for which we are also famous, due to their bearing the unique system of three wooden posts that can be used to let people know whether or not one is at home and receiving visitors—for all of these things we have achieved fame, but I would say to you that, above all, we are famous for Halla-san, from whence Jeju was born and in the bowels of which all of its many legends live; indeed, we all know of the famous saying that Jeju-do is Halla-san and Halla-san is Jeju-do, and so I would propose to you that we move the story from the black sands of Samyang to the healing clay of Halla-san, the slopes of which are abundant in wildlife and meadows of rustling dwarf bamboo, and which were forged into mighty black stone from the belly of the once-mighty volcano, or, if you will, heaped into being by the humongous shovel of Grandmother Seolmundaue, who needed only seven shovelfuls to create this most wondrous of mountains and most valuable of local treasures, which surely is the most dignified and appropriate place on which to grow this new legend of Jeju.” “Assah!” cried the Ministers, “Minister, you have really found the perfect solution! Halla-san, ui-haeyo!” Six more bottles of soju were ordered to celebrate the successful resolution of the problem, as well as another round of meat: only the finest Jeju black pig, that held, in the fibers of its brilliant red sinews, the very energy and soul of Jeju-do itself—mountain born of fire, island indebted to the sea, paradise on earth. V. Jae-yeun drove the long metal pole into the ground, striking stone just a few inches down. Beside him, his sister wrestled with the yellow-and-red tarp that would be the awning of the ddeokbokki stand, but was at the moment threatening to engulf her as it flapped and folded in the strong mountain wind. This scene was repeated every ten or fifteen feet down the length of the new road extending from the parking lot at the base of the Yongshil trail, leading to the new museum, which housed various plaques, dioramas and artifacts detailing the story of Grandmother Samyang, whose face had been burned in a brush fire started by Japanese invaders, and who had laid down in the black sands of Samyang to die and have her unsightly burns healed by their medicinal properties so as not to appear disfigured before the gods, but who had, as a result of the sands’ miraculous rejuvenating strength, instead been resurrected, whole and unblemished, to once again walk the shores of Jeju, luring the anchovies with the scents of her delicious cooking (or, in an alternate version, in which she herself was a haenyeo, who are famous for both their endurance and for the sumbosori, a high whistling noise they make upon emerging from the waves due to the process of circular breathing, with the call of her magical siren’s song) for the fishermen to harvest in bunches. The government expected many tourists, especially with the construction of the cable car up Halla-san, and the road would be heavily trafficked with hungry visitors, making it a prime spot for the relocated ddeokbokki stand. “Jae-yeun, work hard! What are you doing? Really!” said his sister, shaking her head at him and looking disapprovingly, as she had taken to doing since Jae-yeun had failed the exam to become a public official, his studying schedule having been thrown wildly off course by his mission to bury his dear mother in the black sands of Samyang, and his morale having been crushed at his failure to do so effectively—for, while it was true that his mother was indeed buried in a glass box filled with thousands of slate-coloured grains collected from the dunes of Samyang, the box was located not on the shores of Samyang Beach, which were lapped by the ocean’s nourishing waves and beside which his mother had worked for 30 years, selling her simple foods so that he could know a better lifestyle as a man—but just up the road from where he stood, in the central hall of the Samyang Museum, the final stop on the guided tour. Jae-yeun, who was tired of being pestered, who felt defeated and impotent, who had tried to get a job in the village of Samyang but had found that there were no jobs to be had, with most residents having given up their local businesses to run tourist-friendly shops and those few businesses that were left faring poorly as more people went to the city to buy their goods from the great hulking Lotte Mart erected at the end of the highway near the airport; Jae-yeun, who these days mainly found that what he wanted was just to sit and drink soju and not be bothered—Jae-yeun turned to his sister and said, with as much confidence as he could muster while continuing to try and pound the metal pole down into the hard black basalt, “Why are we moving this damn stand here? Samyang was fine!” “There will be more tourists here,” she said, plainly, and shook her head. “Besides, the fresh mountain air is good for well-being.” A black car drove past, carrying several of the Ministers, who were to give the building its final inspection before it opened the following day. Jae-yeun watched the car wind its way up through the trees, toward the museum, behind which the sun was beginning to sink, throwing a magenta glow like a field of azaleas across its glassy facade. He turned around, and looked out over the slopes of Halla and the white buildings of the city, where the lights were beginning to shine like scattered bits of shell; and beyond to the ocean, its dark surface rippled with a fading sunset the colour of embers; and to the wide, deepening sky, in which there was now not a single cloud nor story to be found.