"Jeff! People die! Ground! You go! Not fear." That is the direction I was given by one of the teachers of Inha Elite taekwondo academy during saturday night's campout. But that wasn't til ten to midnight.
Let me backtrack.
I arrived at six p.m. in time for games and fun. The older students and staff were basically being counselors for the younger kids' games. They played everything from dodgeball to soccer to simon says to more carnival-style games, and we helped out and gave them opponents. This was incredibly helpful for my Korean, and by the end of the night, for the first time, I was putting together sentences with a subject, an adjective, and a verb. Now, I was obviously butchering the tenses and verb forms so thoroughly that I made the opening quote of this update look like Billy Shakespeare himself, but nevertheless, I was communicating.
I also met a university student who was the number one student at Inha (kyobumnim, is the title for top student, I think.) and learned that at his university, he was majoring in Tae Kwon Do. Whoah.
Traveller's Tip: Remember the traveller's tip about not picking fights with Koreans? Some of them literally have a degree in kicking your butt.
So after a few more games and watching videos of the K Tigers demonstration team (who I would encourage you all to look up on youtube) and having one of the ten year olds here point himself out in their championship video (again...whoah...) we all had dinner and settled in to watch How to Train your Dragon (Dragon Taming, in Korean). As the younger students dropped off to sleep and midnight approached, the older students put on our jackets and crept out to the van. I knew very little about what we would actually do when we got there. But the students whisperings about getting sick last time they tried, and the master's stories about the Kui-shin, a ghost or a vampire (I couldnt make out which) who had blood running from her eyes and her mouth certainly set the mood.
On the way, we grooved to the sugary K-Pop sounds of shiNEE and 2NE1 as we climbed the mountians.
We arrived at the tombs, shut off the van, and the world got quiet.
The weather had finally begun to cool, and the heavy mist that was settling on the mountains soaked through the students' jackets until they were huddling and shivering along the rocky trail. One of the younger ones pushed his way closer to me, until he could whisper up to my ear,
"Go there. Arrive. Nightmares."
The trail snaked over a foothill, and a valley opened up before us. A nearly-full moon stretched it's way through the gauze stretched between the ground and the sky, and in the half-light we could see something strange about the valley.
The ground didn't roll and flow in the unpredictable way that nature decorates, with mis-matched streams and trees and hills. Instead if was flat, and patterned like a quilt, with the stitches at even intervals spread across the open grass and up onto the hills beyond. Graves, I learned. Family tombs. Thousands of years worth of them. The Master looked at me.
"Jeff." he pointed to himself. "Grandmother. Sleeping. Here."
The younger students tittered nervously at his poetic choice of word approximation. They were scared, and wanted to make the walk ahead in groups of two or three.
"No." The master said definitively, "Solo go." He pointed to his heart. "Heart strength. give."
We came to a point where the wide trail stopped, and the tombs closed in around it until only one narrow path went ahead. The assistant teacher went first, to wait at the end of the path to ensure that everyone walked the entire length. I learned from the students that I was to go last. The students didn't envy the assistant teacher who would wait there alone. They didn't envy me, either.
As the students disappeared one by one down the path, I had time to look all around. I saw a light move through the graves far away. A car, one of the students whispered to me. Kui-shin car, the teacher whispered in his ear to make him jump. I never did hear an engine.
Some of the graves were newer, machine carved, their Hangul (Korean characters) names still shiny on the marble. Then I noticed the graves further up the mountain. Their brick tombs were crumbling. The names were certainly not laser-carved. And most striking of all, the characters were Chinese. I asked the Master if this was a Chinese area of the cemetary. He explained that many years ago, before they had their alphabet, the Korean people wrote in Chinese characters.
I did the research today. The Korean alphabet was devised in the fifteenth century. These graves could be six hundred years old. And the further I looked up the mountainsides into the fog, the more ruined the graves looked.
Hundreds of years.
Thousands of years.
This is a place that has seen the coming and going of writing systems. This is a history that extends not just through Administrations, but Dynasties.
Finally my turn came.
I set off down the path. a hill rose on my right, and a bank on my left as the path dropped into a ravine. The rocks underfoot gave way to a powdery sand that silenced my footsteps until all I could hear in the fog was my own breathing, and all I could see were the solitary row of tombs on my right that got older as I went further down. The air got colder and quieter as I marveled at how many generations must have visited this place to mourn their ancestors, and then been mourned by their decendents in their own turn. I traced family names up the hillsides until I could no longer see the grave markers. When the assistant teacher finally stepped out to tell me I'd made it, I jumped.
I spun to face him, guard up to protect myself.
"oh, no no, boxing no". He laughed as he marked one of my raised fists, proof of my completion and instructed me to hurry back.
As we left the graves, I hung back for a moment and noticed the Master gesturing backward. When I asked, he smiled and asked me to join him in waving to his grandmother who slept here.
An-nyeong-hi ke-se-yo.
Stay in peace.
Jeff-Teacher
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