The Education of Sumire Min is a previously unpublished novel by S. Jae-Jones.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.
🚨 content warning: sexualization of a child by gross adults
She wouldn’t recognize the death of her first life until the demise of her second. Perhaps the Nipponese ghost had truly laid a curse on her, for the instant it touched its hand to her face, Soon-Yee felt something within her wither and fade. Perhaps it was innocence, or perhaps it was ignorance, but her small life in the village, bounded by the sea on one side and the market on the other, would never again feel whole or complete or fulfilling.
“Stop dawdling,” snapped Grandmother. “Laziness is a weed in the soul, which returns again and again unless it is beaten back with a strong hand. Oh Heavenly Lord, what did I do,” she muttered to herself, “to be burdened with a useless granddaughter and a feeble grandson?”
Soon-Yee adjusted the basket of laundry on her head, but it was heavy and awkward, the muscles in her neck and back unaccustomed to the unwieldy weight they bore. Grandmother strode on ahead towards the stream where the village women did their washing, her mutters and mumblings a familiar litany of supplications to deities and forebears. In her previous life, Soon-Yee would have found the mutters meaningless, even comforting, but now they itched, irritated, and confined, like a scratchy jeogori jacket grown too small.
But she had not yet realized her first life was dead, and could not put a name to the deep feelings of restlessness and impatience that plagued her. Her younger brother Tae-Hyun was now of an age to be sent to school, but fees to enter the seodang were expensive, and in addition to working the shik-dang, Soon-Yee and Grandmother had begun to take the washing of the only wealthy patrons left in their village: the Nipponese.
Grandmother muttered and complained about how the constant washing and beating of clothes was destroying her hands, leaving her unable to tend to the fishing nets at night, but Soon-Yee didn’t mind. It was true the ice-cold river water left her hands mottled purple and white, her fingers cramped and stiff, but she couldn’t resist running them through the Nipponese silk kimonos as she worked. The fabric was delicate and soft, and felt more like water than water itself. The word luxury had not yet entered her conscious lexicon, but the idea of being draped in such beauty, of silk sliding against her bare skin, seemed like the moment after a monsoon summer shower, pure and clean and good.
“Ya, you little chit,” Grandmother called. “Come help me and stop wasting time. Idleness becomes a habit, and no man wants an idle wife.”
Soon-Yee set her basket of laundry down by the river and began washing alongside her grandmother, who grumbled and griped about finishing in time to set up the evening meal at the shik-dang. Soon-Yee had no doubt they would be back before the first laborer stumbled up the path from the sea, but for her part, she secretly hoped they would be late. Lately the men would poke and prod and pinch her as she brought the dishes from the kitchen, remarking on her appearance, appraising her, testing her as they would a taut fishing line hooked with bait.
“Look at this one,” they would say to each other, “A pretty girl, nok bin hong an. Don’t see girls like that around here.”
“You don’t see girls like that around here,” another would reply, “because they’re spending their beauty elsewhere.”
“In the arms of richer men?” they would laugh, loud and raucous and rude.
“Oi, madam!” they would shout at Mother, “sell this one to the kisaeng house, eh? Then we could all enjoy her charms! Pretty kisaeng girl,” they would call, pinching her in places she blushed to feel, “sing us a song! Give us a dance!”
She would endure their cajoling with humiliation, feeling shame settle over her like a robe. Sometimes she couldn’t rub the stink of it out of her skin. Later, when she crawled into the futon before sleep, she would take a rough washcloth and scrub and scrub and scrub until her skin was raw, but still the stench would linger.
“Black hair, beautiful face,” Tae-Hyun whispered, hunched over his textbooks with a fluttering lamp on the desk while Father, Mother, and Grandmother toiled away on the nets in the dark.
Soon-Yee looked at him.
“Nok bin hong an,” he said. With a trembling hand, he drew the characters on the page for his sister. “Jet black hair, and a beautiful, white face. Like a flower.”
A flower face. The Nipponese demon had cursed her, cursed her with beauty that drew eyes like moths to a flame, cursed her to feel ashamed and small and powerless in the face of such attention. Such beauty was not a gift, but a burden.
It wouldn’t be until her fifth life that Soon-Yee would learn that her beauty was not a burden, but a weapon.
“Ah, it is the girl with the flower face.”
Soon-Yee jumped with alarm when the Nipponese demon materialized with a breeze in the courtyard of Official Yamamoto’s house, as though summoned by the breath of wind. Although by now she knew that such pale-skinned men were no gwishin, but foreigners from even further away than Q’in and Hindustan, this particular man unnerved and unsettled her. It was he who cursed her with the burden of beauty, a weight heavier than the basket of laundry beside her. She could sense the threads of the curse that bound her to him, how their fates were entangled and entwined because of what he had done, and she chafed and panicked at their bond. It was he who had first named her a beauty, he who had first opened her eyes to her seductive allure, he who had first taught her the meaning of hatred. She hated him because she feared him, but she hated him more for the fact that he had made her world feel small.
She bowed before the demon, hoping he would accept her courtesy and let her pass, but he stood tall and fearsome in the gate threshold, his teeth bared in what she came to realize was a smile. That his expressions, previously inscrutable, unfathomable, unknowable, were beginning to make themselves clear dismayed her. She resented how his strangeness was no longer foreign to her, that he and his ilk were becoming as commonplace as mosquitos in the summer in her little village. They were becoming familiar.
“Where are you going, pretty child?” he asked, reaching for her face. She turned her head away, his meaty fingers just grazing her cheek. “Why do you hurry?” Soon-Yee attempted to slip past the demon at the gate, but he grabbed her arm, upsetting the washing that was to be her day’s work.
“No,” she whispered.
“Let us have a look,” the demon said. “A look at that face, just the face. Come on, child, show us and lift my spirits, ne?” He drew her closer and she struggled to free herself from his grasp. The beautiful Nipponese silks lay scattered in the dust, but she no longer cared, desperate to flee, to fly, to escape a certain dread she did not comprehend.
“No,” she said again, her voice cracking. “No, no, no.”
But the demon did not listen, or perhaps he did not understand.
“Iie,” she pleaded, the Nipponese word thick on her tongue. “No, no, no. Yamete. Please.”
Suddenly, a harsh voice rang out, and the demon paused. They both turned to find another foreigner standing in the street outside, his hand outstretched. He was not dressed like the others with their slim trousers and funny swallow-tailed jackets, but in a simple, austere long black tunic which swept the dust-choked streets like a regal robe. For such a small man, he carried himself with all the strength and bearing of another several times his size. Words flowed from his mouth, each as stinging as a slap and Soon-Yee’s assailant flinched beneath them. The demon said something in turn, but his protests were overridden by forceful exclamations from the other, who pointed toward the heavens with an emphatic jab. The demon released her with a sullen push, kicking the washing into the street behind her with a mutter.
Soon-Yee waited in the street on her hands and knees, palms scraped raw from her stumble. She bowed her head and prayed this black-clad foreigner would leave her be, to collect the remains of the washing with whatever remained of her dignity. But he did not walk away, and she could feel the weight of his regard on the back of her neck, as palpable as the sun’s rays in midsummer.
Presently, the man knelt beside her and began to gather up the fallen laundry littered about in the dirt.
“No,” said Soon-Yee quickly, darting forward to pull the clothes from his hands.
“It’s all right,” he said. Soon-Yee froze. “I only wish to help you.”
The man was speaking—clumsily, awkwardly—in her own tongue. Not with the mellifluous syllables of the Nipponese language, not in the strange and clipped consonants of the waeguk-in, the outsiders, but in her dear and familiar words. She felt unsettled, unbalanced, as though the earth had shifted in small, imperceptible ways, but most perturbing of all, she felt gratified.
“Are you all right, my child?” he asked. He leaned forward, but she cringed, unsure of his intentions, unable to anticipate what he wanted of her. All she wanted was to gather her work and disappear, but the man’s colorless eyes kept her corporeal, grounded to the dirt with fear and apprehension. She could not understand his face, so inscrutable, so different.
“Ah,” he said. He withdrew from her, his movements slow and careful, as though she were a skittish stray. “I am not going to harm you.”
Soon-Yee eyed him warily. Despite his squawking, twisted way of speaking, the man’s voice was soft and gentle, and she wondered whether he meant to be kind. Fluidly, unobtrusively, he began to gather up the scattered clothes again and gently placed them in the basket beside her.
“My name is Jon-Ah Ren-Girin” he said. “People call me Pastor Kirin, Pastor Giraffe. So unless you have been a naughty child, you have nothing to fear from me.”
He smiled at her as though he expected her to laugh, but she didn’t understand what it was he found so amusing. The kirin were legendary creatures of beneficence and peace, said to appear in provinces ruled by a kind and wise leader. There hadn’t been a sighting in Soon-Yee’s village for a very long time. Even Grandmother had never seen one, though she claimed they had two horns, a long, graceful neck, scales instead of fur, and could walk on grass yet not trample the blades.
“You have nothing to fear from the kirin,” Grandmother had said, “but if you are a wicked girl, it will char your bones to ash with the fire from its lungs.”
This kind stranger looked nothing like a giraffe. Neither tall nor graceful nor elegant, he was stout and stocky and not much taller than Soon-Yee herself. He had the rough-hewn face of a man weathered by hard work, and the angles of his jawline and cheeks had a sharp, unfinished quality to them, as though the stonecutter carving his face had simply left in the middle and never returned. His skin and hair were of a similar reddish hue, and the effect was striking if unnerving. She had never met anyone whose skin was the raw shade of a slap, but upon closer inspection, she realized his face and arms were not uniformly the same color, the ruddy impression coming from the mottled red and white and brown spots spattered across his skin. She wondered if he was ill, or if all men in his land had such spotted hides.
“Here, my child,” he said, lifting the heavy laundry basket easily with his thick arms. “Let me help you.”
“No, no,” Soon-Yee rushed forward and tried to reclaim her day’s work. “No, sir, it’s all right, I can do it myself.” At the back of her mind she could hear Grandmother’s voice, scolding her for indolence and laziness, reminding her that only those without pride would accept help when they themselves were perfectly capable. An idle man was the bane of society, but an idle girl was even worse.
"Our Heavenly Lord bade us help our fellow man, and I'm sure that includes little girls with burdens too heavy for their shoulders to bear."
She flinched as Pastor Giraffe reached for her, and she thought the heavy basket of washing was a burden she would gladly suffer, if it meant she would be relieved of the beauty that drew such cursed attention. But the man just patted her shoulder gently and began walking down the path toward the river and she tentatively followed behind, a cautious lamb led by its shepherd.
"And your name is?" asked Pastor Giraffe.
"Min Soon-Yee, sir," she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
"And whose daughter are you, Min Soon-Yee?"
She was surprised by his asking, although it was less his curiosity than the question itself which took her aback. Her parents were Mother and Father, of course, but she was startled to realize she did not know their names, their ancestry, their place of birth, or indeed, anything about them.
"I am the older sister of Min Tae-Hyun," she said instead.
"I don't know of that name," said the pastor. "Is he as pretty as you, Min Soon-Yee?"
Again she felt the entangling threads of the curse close about her face, and a wave of hot shame overcame her.
"I don't know, honored sir."
"Oh no, I am just a humble pastor, my child," he said. "Just a modest teacher."
Soon-Yee frowned. "But a teacher is an honored being, honored sir."
"Ah," Pastor Giraffe smiled again. She was beginning to feel eased and comforted by that smile. "Where I come from, teachers are merely servants to a higher calling, which is to educate the common man."
She frowned again. Education was the privilege of the elite, whose superior intelligence was necessary in order to pass the scholarly examinations, so that they may better understand how to govern their people. If everyone were to become educated, how then could society function?
She voiced none of these concerns to the pastor, for such thoughts were barely half-formed in her own mind. She had never been taught that such was the way of the world, and yet, it was what she believed. But these half-formed thoughts were beginning to grow into something more substantial, a ghost becoming corporeal, solidifying in a single question: why?
“Would you like to attend school, Min Soon-Yee?”
If he had asked her a few moments before, she would have laughed. The notion was so foreign, so bizarre to the Choseonese mind that it would have been as though he asked if she had ever seen a dog walk on its hind legs. It was ridiculous; girls did not attend school. Education was the province of men, and of women who lacked the honor of wives and daughters—the kisaeng courtesans, born or sold into shame.
“Min Soon-Yee?”
She thought of her brother Tae-Hyun, burning expensive oil in the lamps late into the night as he pored over the Thousand Character Classic. She saw the tiny nub of an inkstone in his hand, ground to a pebble in his fingers as he mixed his water to make ink. She saw the cheap boar bristle brushes, the clumsy calligraphy, her steadier hand secretly guiding his in the dark to form words she did not know, but could write beautifully. She saw how the light of understanding was slow to kindle in her brother’s eyes, and longed for a spark to ignite her own wisdom. She was quicker than her brother; she always had been. She had always been more capable, but she could not, should not want what he had. But she did. But she shouldn’t.
The words that fell unbidden from her lips were, “I cannot afford it, honored sir.”
“Kirin-moksanim,” he corrected gently. “Pastor Giraffe.”
“Pastor Giraffe,” she whispered.
He smiled again, and it softened the blunt angles of his face into an expression of benevolent kindness. Perhaps his ill-suited soubriquet was not so ill-suited after all, she thought.
“There are no fees. The school is mine. I call it a hakgyo, a place of learning. But you did not answer me, Min Soon-Yee. Would you like to attend school?”
She could not avoid his question any more. She lifted her head from her decorous stance to stare the man straight in the face. His strange, colorless eyes were fixed on hers, twin spots of piercing brightness amidst all that red. She felt his gaze go through her, and she wondered if she wasn’t mistaken, that this man was also a demon in disguise, some dokkaebi hobgoblin come to plague and torment her with its mischief. She felt as though a thief had stolen into her house while she slept, opening the drawers of her mind and rearranging the contents as they saw fit. Everything was still there, but was now in disarray.
“Yes, yes I do.”
The kirin were said to walk through forests without a sound, to walk on grass without trampling a single blade, to walk on water without drowning in a single wave. If Pastor Giraffe could do all this, she thought, then he could breathe the fire of wisdom into her soul with a blast of his furnace lungs. Oh, she was wicked, Soon-Yee knew, but could no more prevent herself from wanting than she could stop her heart from beating.
They had made it to the river. Pastor Giraffe set down the basket. “Come by my school if you can,” he said. “I live behind the inn in town. Every Sunday I hold prayer services in its main hall. You would be welcomed.”
“By your god?” she asked.
A solemn expression fell over Pastor Giraffe, the lines and planes of his craggy face inscrutable once more in their immobility.
“No,” he said. “By our God, our Heavenly Lord.”
With that, he turned and left her there, but Soon-Yee was reluctant to begin the washing. She felt something in her heart sputter and die, and understood at last that this life had passed, that this offer had killed the girl who cleaned the robes of her Nipponese superiors without a second thought, just as those same Nipponese superiors had killed with a curse the little fishing girl who lived by the sea.
author’s note ✍🏻
So much of this book was predicated on me needing to find ways to maneuver my villain-to-be into place while simultaneously make her a sort of bizarre wish fulfillment character. I needed Soon-Yee to be Korean because the middle grade heroine was half-Korean, but because Korea was still considered “the hermit kingdom” at that time, she also had to be Japanese for logistical reasons. There were a lot of Koreans during this time who were in bed with their Japanese colonizers—my own family included. So it could make sense that my villain-to-be could be ethnically Korean while Japanese by nationality.1
But English…how on earth would my character learn English before meeting my middle grade character’s father?
Enter Christianity.
Yeah.
Anyway, that’s all for this week! I would promise it gets more lighthearted or interesting next week, but it doesn’t. Sorry about that. It WILL get more lighthearted and romantic soon, I promise. Just…not for a few chapters.
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!
Ethnic Koreans in Japan today are largely descendants from this group. They are called Zainichi.