You are guilty of abandoning your starving kinsmen. Even if you spend the rest of your life offering food and reciting sutras to the spirits of these dead, you will never wash away your sin!
The ten kings called out their judgment in unison:
Seven by seven is forty-nine. If you can endure forty-nine days of penance, you will be permitted to return.
As soon as their judgment came down, the envoy grabbed me by the nape of the neck, dragged me to the edge of a cliff and tossed me over. At the bottom of the cliff was a blazing inferno. I screamed long and loud as my body tumbled like a piece of straw down toward the flames, which wriggled like the jaws of a creature intent on swallowing me whole. Just then I remembered the flowers my grandmother had given me. I took one peony from my pocket and tossed it down. With a loud pop! the fire vanished, and something like a warm blanket or a cloud wrapped around me. I drifted slowly down through the air.
When I alighted onto the ground, the air filled with a faint blue light and grey smoke billowed all around. A clump of smoke wafted over to me and moaned as it brushed past.
Feed me. Just one bite. Please.
Another clump of smoke coiled around me.
Just one little gaetteok. Or even some porridge or thin gruel will do.
The smoke began to fill the large hollow; each clump bore the face it had worn in life. I saw the woman and two children I’d met in the village near Gomusan, as well as the old woman I’d come across at the train station. Countless other faces I’d never seen, and did not know crowded around me. There were three or four little urchins who’d slept under stairwells in a night market in Yanji, and even babies joined the throng as tiny puffs cleaving to mother clouds. Their eyes were dark, their cheeks sunken and their throats strangely long and thin. Their mumbling sounded like magic spells: Hungry, hungry, hungry. Feed me, feed me, feed me.
I couldn’t breathe, my chest was heavy and my eardrums felt like they were going to burst. I covered my ears with my hands and squatted down on my heels. Then, without thinking about it, I pulled out another peony and tossed it upward. The air filled with wooden bowls packed with steaming hot rice, freshly cooked rice cakes piled high with mashed sweet red beans, every kind of fish and meat, fritters and savoury pancakes, wild greens, stews and soups of every flavour and colour and variety, plates and dishes and platters and saucers galore. All around me I heard the sound of lips smacking and teeth chomping.
Words — half-song, half-incantation — burst out of me, and even in the midst of singing, I recognized them as Hwangcheon muga, the shaman song to console the spirits of the dead. It was from the story my grandmother used to tell me about Princess Bari:
Aah, aah, deceased spirits!
At this open door between our worlds,
I pray, I pray.
To the mountains, to the rivers
you prayed, you prayed.
Hungry ghosts, starved spirits,
what became of the bodies you wore only yesterday?
Return! Return!
Go to Paradise, come back to life.
You are without sin;
lay down your burdens.
When the song ended, the smoke retreated, low to the ground, and vanished. Suddenly the floor of the hollow tree split in two to reveal a fog-covered pond. A breeze lifted the fog and the glassy, mirror-like surface of the water appeared. The water was the blue-green of moss, and under it a shadow was moving. Against this solid blue screen, images slowly began to take shape:
A stormy sea. A single boat tosses like a leaf amid mountainous waves, barely making it from crest to crest. It is a fishing boat with a squat cabin like a tiny house sticking out of the top. The belly of the ship is stuffed with the day’s catch. In that cramped space, where the ceiling is so low that a person can’t even sit straight up, water sloshes and rises. Then I notice the people squirming inside. Men, women, children. Ten, twenty, maybe thirty or more. Waves surge over the side of the boat, sweep over the deck and pour down into the hold. Women and children struggle and try to crawl out. The crewmen kick and shove them back in. They close the hatch and padlock it. The wind and waves subside, and the sea is sunny. A distant mountain peak in a foreign land appears on the horizon. The crew remove the dead bodies from the hold and toss them into the sea. Bodies sink below the surface, bob back up, are swept along by the waves.
The coast of a foreign country. A boat, half-sunk and listing. Vegetable crates floating in the water. A large ship approaches. Uniformed people board the boat. They open the crates. Amid the tomatoes and cabbage are drowned bodies.
People suffering and struggling to breathe inside a dark container. The face of a woman clawing at the walls looms large. People crowd the door. They search for any crack in the walls before collapsing in the spaces between the cargo.
People called to the crewmen’s tiny quarters. When they are told to hand over more cash, they shake their heads and say they have none. The crewmen begin beating them. They punch their faces, kick their stomachs, gang up on them. Eyes fill with rage. Moneyless men slump to the ground, their faces bloodied. Women’s clothes are torn off. The men take turns. The women shake their heads from side to side, cry, struggle.
A narrow alley. Women alight from cars. Heavily made-up faces stare down from every window and every corner. The owner counts heads. Gives money to the men who brought them. Men lick their fingers and count their cash. The women are herded into a curtained room. The owner strips and inspects them.
A woman crouches and covers her mouth to keep from crying, crumpled skirt and top clutched to her naked body. Her face blurs and begins to shake with laughter. She’s lost her mind.
She stumbles down a road as if drunk. A young man chases her and smacks her face mercilessly. She’s dragged away by the hair and disappears down a filthy alley.
A dark basement. A single fluorescent bulb hangs from a low ceiling. Women sit at sewing machines and stitch together mountains of fabric. Men walk up and down the rows, their hands idle behind their backs.
A storage room at the back of a restaurant piled high with vegetables and shellfish. Water sloshing underfoot. Men trimming cabbage and cleaning fish.
Another stormy sea. Men who have been gathering clams stand on a tiny sandbank, naked beneath their raingear. They bring their hands to their mouths to shout. The tide rises. The sandbank slowly vanishes and the water rises from stomach to chest. The floundering bodies disappear beneath the black water, and the waves cut furrows into the surface of sea before filling them again.
The surface of the pond that revealed these scenes to me vanished, and was once again cloaked in darkness. Someone grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and dragged me away. I floated in the darkness like smoke.
Down below I saw the murky bottom of the container ship. I saw Xiang, and myself slumped beside her, and the middle-aged woman who no longer had the strength to stand. Then I saw each man in turn. I also saw other people stuffed in the spaces between the other rows of containers. Several people pulled food from a cloth bundle and ate it. One of the men violently shoved someone who was trying to steal a peek. Three men fumbled their way toward one woman. She tried to push them away and then fell to the floor. Her trousers and knickers were pulled down at the same time, and I saw the men take turns on top of her.