The female shaman, the mudang, that Seok had consulted had chosen this particular night of the waxing moon as the most auspicious for grave digging. Using the traditional ceremonial rites the mudang had invoked the ancestral spirits of Seok’s clan and had received their approval of the undertaking. So on this dark night while a few distant stars twinkled dimly in the nocturnal sky Seok and the two shabbily dressed men that she had hired in town walked single file on the pebbled path with dim lanterns to light the way. Under the cover of darkness and carrying a shovel, a pick, and some rope they had slipped quietly into the large cemetery here in Pyongyang, successfully avoiding the night watchman.

The night was icy cold and the fierce wind chilled Seok’s body despite the thick, old, gray padded coat she was wearing. The coat had belonged to her late father and many nights she had seen him tiredly putting it on after dinner to go out and milk the goats in the old wooden shed behind their small farmhouse. It still smelled faintly of his pipe tobacco and it seemed fitting she was wearing his coat tonight as she had come to collect the body of her beloved younger brother Young Jin.

Her witch of a sister-in-law had not even bothered to consult a mudang when she decided to bury her husband’s body next to her parents and their son in this Catholic cemetery. Now Seok’s brother was alone because his profligate wife had flitted off to Peking to join her brothers and his children were scattered, some in China with their mother and the rest being raised by his eldest married daughter in Seoul. There was no one here to honor his grave or his memory, a serious breach of Korean traditions.

Seok was convinced that Young Jin’s gravesite was unlucky and that her little brother was wandering and lost on his long and difficult journey to the other side. He could not enter the after life because the three separated aspects of his spirit were unable to reunite. Her memorial shrine at home where she paid her daily respects housed one part of his spirit, the other lay in his grave here in this cemetery, and the last was a restless drifter who could eventually become a malignant ghost and bring bad luck to his descendants. This belief was a festering wound in Seok’s heart so she had planned and schemed for seven years to bring Young Jin’s body back home to the remote mountain village where they were born and their parents and ancestors were buried.

It was well known in Korea that demons and ghosts and spirits preyed on unlucky people in graveyards or dug up and ate the livers of the newly buried dead. So every sound, every owl hoot, the creaking noise made when the wind rubbed two tree branches together made the men jump and glance around fearfully. The cold wind blew the mist from the nearby river over their path. The mist swirled and covered trees and bushes and grave mounds creating momentarily half recognizable figures that frightened the men. “Is that a Gumiho there next to the path?” whispered one of the men pointing with a shaky finger at a nebulous shape with what appeared to be a foxlike nose. This legendary demon was a 9 tail fox, an animalistic shape changer who often assumed the figure of a beautiful woman to lure men to their doom. The wind blew away the mist and they saw a large gravestone. Then later “Look!” said his companion and pointed to what looked like a group of malignant trolls, the Dokkaebi, but that turned out to be bushes planted around a tree. Only Seok was not afraid. She had lost everyone she had loved years ago and she had nothing left to lose.

She remembered, all those years ago, when she first fell in love with her little brother. She was eight years old and her mother had just died in childbirth after finally bearing her husband the son he had wanted for so long. Seok could see her mother’s lifeless body lying on her straw pallet on the floor. What would she do without her omani? Outside their old farmhouse she could hear her aboji, her father, wailing and sobbing. She too was crying inconsolably when the midwife, an old white-haired woman, had thrust the squalling newborn baby into her arms, his still bloody body swaddled hastily in an old underskirt of her mother’s. The midwife, in an attempt to distract and comfort Seok touched one of the baby’s earlobes with a gnarled finger and said “Ai! Your father has a son! And look he has such big fat earlobes. I’ve never seen any so big on a baby before. That’s good luck. He’ll grow up to be a successful man! He’ll be rich!”

Seok tried to stop crying, sniffling as she looked at the baby, really looked at him for the first time-the small red face, the surprising thatch of black hair, the perfect pink lips open wide as he cried, the tiny fists waving in the air, and yes, those outsized earlobes. She felt a sudden welling of love and a fierce protective feeling for this helpless little brother who had just lost his omani. She felt her beloved mother’s gentle presence in the room and the passing of the responsibility of the baby to her. One day her father’s only male heir would grow up and become the head of their family and Seok, Young Jin’s nuna, his older sister, was duty-bound to ensure his survival and well-being.

Her father, a kind quiet man, was a poor tenant farmer with a small plot of land in a remote mountainous area. They lived in a one room weather beaten old farmhouse and her father labored long hours every day for the local landholder. Seok took the baby to bed with her every night to keep him warm and to comfort him. She fed him by dipping a small cloth into a cup of warm goat’s milk, watching him suck it greedily. She took over her mother’s household duties-the cooking, and the cleaning, and hand washing all of their clothes in the nearby stream. They raised a few goats and had small yearly crops of sweet potatoes, beans, and some greens. When Seok went out to care for the goats or work on their plot of land she would strap Young Jin to her back and later when he was little he would play in the fields laughing when he tripped over the furrows while she worked. All day he would follow her calling “Nuna! Nuna! She and their aboji, who adored his young son, pampered Young Jin and gave him the best tidbits at mealtimes so he would grow up strong.

Seok scrimped and saved and even went to work as a farmhand alongside with her father when she was fifteen so they could pay the school fees for Young Jin. Both she and her father were illiterate but Koreans have a traditional respect for knowledge and they wanted to provide Young Jin the opportunity to go to school. Perhaps he could become a scholar? It was one of the few ways men from their class could rise to a higher social level and gain respect. Young Jin excelled at school, as she knew he would, especially with numbers. By the time he was a teenager he was the official family barterer with their neighbors-he had a knack for buying and selling and not only intuitively understood what his customers wanted but could charm them with his friendly chatter.

When Young Jin was seventeen years old he stunned his aboji when he announced that he did not want to be a scholar or farmer but wanted to become a traveling peddler. This break with tradition was unheard of and considered highly disrespectful to his familial traditions and the sacrifices his father and sister had made for him. But after his aboji recovered from his shock even he had to admit that Seok was a better farmer than Young Jin. His handsome, bright son with the laughing eyes and winning ways deserved a better life than that of a downtrodden poverty-stricken tenant farmer who was so dependent on unreliable weather conditions and the foibles of his landlord. Becoming a successful scholar would take more years of study which they could ill afford. Besides he had never denied his dearly loved son anything and it was hard to do so now. However Young Jin had ambitions but no money.

To provide her brother with funds, Seok sadly and regretfully decided to sacrifice her only claim to beauty-her thick, glossy, waist-long black hair that had never been cut. She knew Koreans believed hair was part of the body and they received their body from their parents and ancestors so to cut it was almost sacrilegious. And because women’s bodies were covered from neck to feet by their traditional billowing hanboks rich, thick hair was one of the few ways their beauty, health and fecundity could be judged. Plus It was her one vanity. She had grown up to become a tall, rawboned, strongly muscular young woman with a broad tanned face and her work worn hands were roughened by years of farm work. She was well aware that she didn’t have the pale moon skin, the large lustrous eyes, and the delicate beauty that was so highly prized then. But every night she brushed her long beautiful hair before she went to bed and every morning she woke and brushed and braided it. As an unmarried woman she was not allowed to wear it up so she was accustomed to the weight of the thick heavy braid hanging down her back.

On the next market day she secretly went to the local hair buyer and sold her beautiful hair. She cried when she saw how ugly she looked with the shockingly short chin length haircut but she was bitterly aware that she wasn’t the first poor woman who had been forced to sell her only asset. Thankfully her sacrifice had not been in vain and she had received enough money for her brother to buy supplies to sell and even a little left over for lodgings. The day Young Jin left home Seok and their aboji stood in front of their farmhouse with tears running down their faces as they watched his departure. Her heart was broken-she knew he would never return and she was right. After several years peddling he had made enough money to open a small business in Pyongyang. He bought hair from poor Korean women and manufactured wigs, hairpieces, and hair extensions that were much in demand. His business grew and grew and he eventually exported hair products as far as China.The midwife was right everything he touched turned to gold. He married a woman from a merchant family and they had 9 children. A dutiful son, he never forgot his nuna and his aboji and sent money home regularly so they could buy farm land and live a more comfortable life.

But when Young Jin was forty-one years old tragedy struck-his oldest son, the smartest of his nine children, his golden child who held all his hopes and his dreams in the palms of his hands was killed in a tragic diving accident. He’d been a brilliant scholar and had been accepted by Tokyo University to study medicine. Young JIn was devastated. Within a year Seok’s handsome, vibrant, hardworking brother was dead. He literally drank himself to death. No modern medicine, no herbal remedies, no priests, no shamans could save his life when he had willed himself to die. Sometimes, deep in her heart, Seok wondered if she and her father had pampered Young Jin too much when he was young, had smoothed too many bumps in his life’s road because they loved him so much. Though he had started life as a poor farm boy everything had come easily to him, maybe too easily, and perhaps that’s why he had lacked the inner strength, the fortitude, the resilience to overcome his grief when his son died.

Seok and the men finally reached Young Jin’s gravesite. The light from the lantern showed her that the traditional earthen mound that covered his grave had been neglected-there were weeds and dead leaves and overgrown grass and her heart grieved. The men set to work shoveling away the grass covered dirt on the grave. Luckily it had rained the previous day and the ground was still soft and damp and smelled richly of fertile earth. Within a couple of hours the men had exposed the wooden coffin. Using their ropes they hauled it up out of the grave and laid it on the ground. Seok brushed the dirt gently off the top of the coffin. Outwardly calm, she was suddenly afraid. How badly had his body decayed? How would he look? Would she have the courage to be able to do this one last thing for him?

In the meantime, the men were becoming extremely spooked and more nervous and anxious. They kept glancing around fearfully though it was hard to see beyond the light of their lanterns. They pried off the lid of the coffin with the pick. Seok raised her lantern and looked upon her brother’s face for the first time in seven years. She was surprised and relieved to see that Young Jin’s body looked remarkably well preserved. Perhaps it was due to all the rice wine he had drunk or the multitude of medications and herbal remedies that were given to him in a hopeless attempt to save his life in the last few months before the end. But the blankness of his pinched, gray face testified that his spirit had fled his body a long time ago. His body was still clothed in the white hemp suii, the traditional Korean clothing for the dead.

One of the men gingerly picked up her brother’s arm. The flesh on his whole arm slid off silently leaving the shocked man holding the bone. The man shrieked as he dropped it. The other man cried out in horror and then they both suddenly bolted, plunging down the hillside as fast as they could in the dark. Seok could hear their pounding feet and the sound of them crashing into bushes and tripping over gravestones. Luckily the wind was blowing so hard and so loudly that she doubted the watchman on the other side of the cemetery heard them.

Finally the sound of the fleeing men faded and there was only the whistling of the wind on this dark misty night. Seok was alone with her brother. She told him softly “Your nuna is here. I’ll take you home so you can finally rest.” She unwrapped the bundle she had carried all evening. She unfolded a large piece of white hemp cloth on the ground and slowly, piece by piece she carefully placed her brothers bones on the cloth in a neat pile. Like his arm, the flesh slid easily off his other bones too. She carefully wrapped the pile of bones into as neat a package as she could manage and stowed it all into a large sturdy burlap sack.

Then Seok sat on the cold ground on her knees and bowed her head and cried silently for a long time. When she had finally finished weeping and had wiped her eyes, she told her brother of the arrangements she had made back home. A mudang had selected a lucky spot for his gravesite near their parent’s and a grave had already been dug and was ready for him. She had hand sewn Young Jin a new Hanji suii, a set of white hemp burial clothes and a shroud to wrap his body for his final journey. And, after they got home, on a propitious day already chosen, he would have the Jangnye, the traditional three day/three night memorial service and the mudang would conduct the shamanistic rituals to unite the three parts of her brother’s spirit and lead him to the afterlife where he would join their ancestors for his eternal rest.

Afterwards she bowed her head and prayed that they would have a safe passage home. She doubted anyone would bother her, a poor old peasant woman from the mountains. She picked up the burlap sack and threw it over her shoulder. Luckily, years of hard farm work had toughened her body and she was used to carrying heavy loads. Seok started walking slowly down the hillside, holding the lantern in one hand, and her head bent as she carried her heavy burden. But the heartache she had borne so long was gone and she felt an overwhelming thankfulness that she had fulfilled her filial duty and that she was finally bringing Young Jin home.