The Education of Sumire Min is a previously unpublished novel by S. Jae-Jones. Chapters will be emailed every Friday at 5PM EST. If you do not wish to receive the next chapter, but want to remain subscribed for other updates, you may unsubscribe from the book here.
NOTE: Apologies if some of y’all received this twice. Things should be smoother going forward.
Min Soon-Yee was nine years old the day the iron ships of the West appeared with the morning sun, nine years old the day her first life died. The ships glinted atop the waves of the Yellow Sea like dolphins breaching before the storm, bringing with them the metallic tang of trepidation and confusion. The villagers gathered along the shore to watch their swift, stately passage into the bay, pointing and muttering amongst themselves, the rising murmur of fear and superstition thick as paste at the back of Soon-Yee’s throat.
Dragons, they said. See the steam rise from its nostrils!
But they seemed less like dragons and more like inelegant dolphins to Soon-Yee, the steam that rose from their backs more like the flume of a whale than the breath of a beast. After a few more moments, they were even less intimidating than that, as it was clear that it was not a spirit which animated these mountainous creatures, but men.
The magic was lost, the iron whales turned mundane and dull. They were only ships after all, she thought with disappointment. Only men. What were men to mountains?
A great deal more, she would later find out. The pattern was begun, but the child Soon-Yee wouldn’t yet be able to discern just how much more powerful men would be in her life, far more than mountains, than the sea, than the sky, or even blood. She would not, could not know yet just how she would spend the rest of her life fighting the destiny they forced upon her. Instead, still ignorant, she turned her face from the shore as the iron ships settled into the docks, and blithely set one foot before the other towards home. Mother was waiting and there was much to be done before the evening.
Father was a fisherman and Mother ran a shik-dang, cooking meals for the laborers of their village in exchange for a portion of their day’s wages. Soon-Yee spent her days washing dishes and serving men their food in her family’s humble two-room house while Grandmother tended to Tae-Hyun, the youngest and the boy, who was growing too old for his milk teeth but was yet too young for a life on the sea. If their lives were hard, Soon-Yee didn’t know it; if they were unhappy, she didn’t comprehend it. The boundaries of Soon-Yee’s first life began at her home and ended by the shore, the passage marked by fish soup in the morning and fish stew in the evening.
The morning meal was a swift, casual affair but the evening meal required more extensive preparation. In addition to going to market and preparing the banchan side dishes to go with dinner, the low wooden tables must be cleaned, polished, and set out on the landing before the first laborer stumped through the gate. Distracted by the arrival of the iron ships, Soon-Yee had started to market late, and now must hurry before the vendors sold their best produce and cuts of meat. One foot before the other, faster and faster, until the dust flew from her heels as she ran down the dirt path to the village. The stalls would be closing soon.
Mother said nothing when Soon-Yee returned from the market flushed and out of breath, her eyes sweeping from the top of Soon-Yee’s disheveled hair to the tips of her muddy shoes. Mother was a woman of few words, her taciturn nature as consistent and opaque as stone. She had a face which beauty was defined by stillness in chaos, like the majesty of cliffs standing immobile and immemorial beside the changeable waves. Her features were craggy, her jaw heavyset and square, the lower half jutting forward ever-so-slightly, giving one the impression of fortitude, steadiness, and infinite patience.
“One of the tables is broken,” Mother simply said. She gathered the fish and vegetables from Soon-Yee’s hands and walked toward the kitchen. There was no fuss to be made, only work to be done. Soon-Yee tied back her sleeves and began preparing the evening meal.
She had just finished setting up the shik-dang and was sweeping the steps when the demon arrived.
Soon-Yee wasn’t much for stories or tales. Once the last grain of rice had been eaten and the dust from the heels of the last laborer swept away, she would unroll the futon and lay beside her brother, listening to the rise and fall of his breath as Father, Mother, and Grandmother tended to the fishing nets in weary silence. Time enough for fanciful tales another day, when there were no more nets to mend, no more dishes to wash, no more meals to cook, no more laborers to serve with their pinching fingers and their prying eyes. But ghost stories seeped through the cracks of her pragmatic mind and into her subconscious through Grandmother’s cautionary tales of troublesome or disobedient children stolen away by gwishin.
And surely it must be a ghost or ghoul walking up the road toward her, come to punish her for loitering by the shore that morning. For what other creature could it be with its pale skin, faded hair, and strange dress? As the gwishin drew nearer, she saw that its face was furred like that of a beast, and that its eyes were a strange colorless hue, like the white-grey of a sky before snow or the cloudy-blue of blindness. The ghost was tall, taller than any man she had known, and those unnerving eyes were fixed on her with intent and purpose. As it strode closer and closer, she could hear it speaking in an awkward, squawking tongue.
“Hey there, little girl.”
Startled, Soon-Yee dropped her broom when a man materialized beside the ghost. So fixated was she on the ghost’s frightening appearance that she hadn’t noticed the man walking with him. He too was dressed strangely in the manner of the ghost: sombre, fitted silk jackets with funny tails that fluttered behind them like the feathers of a swallow. Wispy strands of hair trembled about the man’s mouth as he spoke, and it was a long moment before Soon-Yee realized he was speaking to her.
“Little girl,” said the man impatiently, “can you tell me where Official Yamamoto lives?”
The man addressed her in Nipponese, a tongue she understood but had never spoken. The wealthy Nipponese sea traders and merchants settled further away from shore, further from the reek of unsold fish and rotting brine. Father spoke a little of their language, necessary for daily interaction, but for the most part, these outsiders kept to themselves.
“Of course,” the man muttered. “These Choseon dogs can’t speak, only bark.” He thrust his face toward hers, but she shrank from him. “Where…is…Official…Yamamoto?” he asked, loudly and slowly, gesturing wildly and broadly.
With a trembling hand, she pointed to the base of the mountains. The Nipponese officials in their town lived in grand mansions on the hills above their fishing village, ousting the previous nobles, who had long since sold their claim on the village to foreign, but wealthier prospects. The villagers, the laborers, the fishermen, and even the cheonmin peasants bristled at the presence of these foreigners on their land, itching to buck them off like a horse with a gadfly. But the Nipponese gadflies were aggravatingly persistent, and had multiplied like maggots in spoiled meat.
The man followed the path of her finger and left without another word. But his gwishin companion lingered at the gate. Soon-Yee trembled, afraid to meet its gaze lest it curse her. She focused her eyes on its feet, clad in what seemed to be polished leather. She was surprised to see scuff marks and mud tracks on its feet, for gwishin were usually legless and ethereal, floating above the ground instead of trodding upon it.
“Fureisa-san!”
Soon-Yee glanced down the road to see the man beckoning to the demon. He must be a powerful sorcerer, she decided, to bind the gwishin’s spirit so.
“Wait,” said the demon. She could feel its gaze upon her head and saw its hand rise to cup her chin. She flinched, but the demon forced her head to look at him, to meet the power of its colorless stare. The gwishin smelled of sweat and sea air, undercut with a smoky earthiness, more like a man than spirit. Soon-Yee trembled in its hold. It bared its teeth at her from behind its furred jaw, and Soon-Yee closed her eyes, praying to meet her death swiftly.
“Pretty,” it said. It spoke Nipponese. Perhaps this was a Nipponese ghost, and not a gwishin at all. The thought made her even more afraid. She knew how to exorcise her own demons, but the demons of another land were another thing altogether.
“Look at her, Kaneshiro-san,” said the Nipponese ghost. “A flower face for your garden, ne?”
Its awkward squawks resolved themselves into intelligible, if heavily accented words, but it would be a long time before Soon-Yee would truly understand what the gwishin had meant.
author’s note ✍🏻
Honestly, there’s no real reason to have set this book in an alternate universe except for the fact that the middle grade had alternate spellings of country names for what I assume was vibes. There is an enormous divergence from actual history later in this novel that does set up the events of the middle grade, but truthfully, there really is no reason to have this be alternate history at all, especially considering the amount of actual research I did while writing.
I probably wouldn’t even have to have changed much. Back then, Korea was called Joseon (Choseon was the Japanese pronunciation)—both by its own people and by its neighbors—as it was name of the ruling dynasty. Nippon (or Nihon) is the Japanese pronunciation of 日本, the name of the country written in kanji.
The end of the 19th century was a turbulent time in East Asia. Commodore Matthew Perry had “opened Japan up to the West” in 1853, which led to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Tokugawa Shogunate and the United States. “Opening up Japan to the West” is such a gross phrase found in history books, especially when the US essentially just parked itself in Japanese waters with warships until the shogunate was forced to acknowledge them. One might even be able to draw a line from this coerced soft colonization with Japan’s imperial ambitions during the Meiji era.
Anyway, I finally get to share some of the research I did! FINALLY! *papers rustle furiously*
The first nine chapters will be available for free, after which the content will go behind a paywall. I am currently running a birthday promotion on yearly subscriptions, so grab it while you can!