The Education of Sumire Min is a previously unpublished novel by S. Jae-Jones.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.
When Soon-Yee realized it was ignorance which had killed her previous selves, she swore she would walk through the world with her eyes open. To be ignorant was to be vulnerable, to be vulnerable was to be defenseless against those who would abuse her innocence, and to be defenseless was to be ashamed. She swore she would never again feel ashamed, would never again let anyone make her feel ashamed: not the Nipponese demon, not the pinch-fingered laborers, not even Grandmother with her punishing switch of a tongue and her sharp criticisms as stinging as a lash. Scale by scale, chain by chain, link by link, word by word, Soon-Yee was beginning to stitch together an armor of knowledge, against which even the pointed stares of the day-wearied workers glanced off harmlessly. Nearly harmlessly. Their eyes still left a bruise.
Her arsenal of armaments were the things she knew the others did not: an alphabet of letters in two different languages, a collection of facts and stories called history, along with a sense of scale and perspective, in which the giants of misery in her old lives were reduced to mere shadows of their former terrifying glory.
“What do you know?” she would ask under her breath. “What do you know?”
What did they know of which she did not know more? Her secret learning had bestowed her with self-importance, but more importantly, it had given her the most effective weapon against shame. It was a question, a single word, a single word with which she could silence her oppressors, those who would take advantage of her. It was why?
She reveled in her power, and gloated into the pillows late at night, wrapped in the illicit joy of being better, of being superior. The world could profane her, but she held her conviction close and sacred. She was above the rest; she was better than. Better than the peasant laborers, better than her poor feeble brother, better than the foreigners who came into her life and stole her glory and honor for themselves because she was small, Choseonese, and a girl.
Pastor Giraffe and his wife claimed her mind was a beautiful organ, an instrument for their Heavenly Lord.
“He hath plucked you from obscurity, Min Soon-Yee, and it must be for a great purpose,” said Pastor Giraffe. “You must be mindful of this, and use your intelligence for the glory of God.”
There was once a time in Soon-Yee’s life when she would have accepted such bathetic platitudes without question, but now, armed with a word, her word, she could deflect them before they could bury themselves in her subconscious mind.
“Why?” she asked, her glib tongue grown facile with the pastor’s Ænglish. She knew now his name was John Allen Green, not Kirin-moksanim, but the moniker had stuck. “And whose god? Yours, or mine?”
The pastor said nothing, but fixed a considering gaze upon her face. Soon-Yee stared boldly back, fighting the urge to avert her eyes, to acquiesce to the decorous, docile creature she had been conditioned to be. There was a nakedness in rudeness, and she felt the edges of embarrassment flutter close to cloak her in shame. But she brushed the feeling away with effort, willing herself to believe in the dignity of being impolite.
“There is but one God,” said Mrs. Giraffe sternly, when her husband did not answer. “And you must give Him thanks for raising you above your station in life.”
Soon-Yee glanced at Mrs. Giraffe with contempt. Here was a woman of learning and modest means, yet she sat shackled to her husband in a strange country with no thoughts in her head that weren’t repeated from someone or someplace else. Did she not want to know, Soon-Yee wondered, to ask, to question, to challenge? Was she content to sit by her husband’s side, to limit her sphere of experience to what she was told? Was she not curious?
“And to what station hath He raised me?” Soon-Yee asked, directing her question to Mrs. Giraffe. She wanted the woman to answer her directly, to form a thought that was wholly her own. “To what use am I supposed turn my intelligence?”
Mrs. Giraffe looked to her husband first. That was answer enough.
“Why, to spread the Good Word,” she told Soon-Yee. “To share your learning with other unfortunate young women such as yourself.”
An old prickle of discomfort ran up her spine. Educated women had no worth in Soon-Yee’s previous lives, their minds and bodies belonging to men who paid for their time. But no one was paying for Soon-Yee’s time, she reminded herself, and the truth was she was losing much-needed income by sitting with the Giraffes and neglecting her laundry rounds. She took a perverse glee in that fact, even as they watered their rice into gruel to stretch out their meagre stores at home.
“To become a teacher?” Soon-Yee asked. “To run a school? A hakgyo?”
“Yes,” nodded Mrs. Giraffe, placated by Soon-Yee’s response. The pastor’s wife, assuming it was the end of the conversation, picked up her sewing but Soon-Yee was not finished.
“Why?”
Surprised by the question, Mrs. Giraffe stabbed herself with her needle. Soon-Yee couldn’t be more pleased if she had pricked the pastor’s wife herself, drawing cruel amusement from the expression of flabbergasted pain on the woman’s face.
“Wh…why?” Mrs. Giraffe asked.
“Yes,” said Soon-Yee simply. “Why should I become a teacher? What would other girls do with their learning?”
“To…to spread the Good Word themselves, to...educate other poor young women…”
“To what end?” Soon-Yee watched as thoughts began to stir behind Mrs. Giraffe’s eyes, confusion breaking across her features. “What use have they for all their learning if it’s only to spread their learning further?” Soon-Yee delighted in provoking the pastor’s wife, prodding at her weak points, causing pain and bewilderment, making her think instead of repeat. “What use has the world for a bunch of teachers?”
Mrs. Giraffe opened and shut her mouth several times, unable to rally a response. Soon-Yee waited for the stir of thoughts to resolve themselves into an opinion, but the pastor’s wife merely frowned and looked at her husband quizzically. Soon-Yee turned her head away in disgust. She had wanted the woman to engage her, to convince her, to do anything other than live down to lowest expectations of herself.
“You said once that teachers were an honored profession.”
Soon-Yee turned to Pastor Giraffe, who had been watching their exchange with grave, contemplative eyes. She wondered what he thought of his dull, unimaginative wife, and wondered if he longed for a companion to challenge him, to be more than his helpmeet, but his equal, not only in intelligence, but in passion and feeling. She thought of her parents, rude and rustic as they were, of how Father’s weariness was met by her Mother’s steadfastness, of how her melancholy was met by his simple confidence. Provincial and rough they might have been, but they were equals in life.
“And so they are,” said Soon-Yee. “Because they kindle wisdom in men who use their knowledge for the betterment of society.”
“And so you would kindle kindness and generosity in young women for the betterment of their situations and others around them.”
Soon-Yee frowned. “But you still haven’t answered why. Scholars may leave university and elect to enter civil service or pass their knowledge on to future generations. But a girl can only become a teacher. Why are we not given a choice?”
A spasm crossed the pastor’s face, but Soon-Yee could not decipher what it meant. Before Pastor Giraffe could reply, Mrs. Giraffe spoke up.
“It is not for young ladies to be working in the government,” she said. “That is the province of men. Women must cleave to the domestic sphere.”
“Why?” Soon-Yee let her question fly like an arrow and strike where she thought the woman was defenseless.
But Mrs. Giraffe had recovered enough to bolster her dull convictions with further platitudes. “So saith the Lord, your God.”
“That is your god,” Soon-Yee retorted. “Not mine.”
At this both Giraffes went still—the missus from outrage, the pastor from sorrow. From the start, Soon-Yee had resisted the notion of an almighty, all-powerful deity who controlled her destiny, and despite the Giraffes’ best efforts, her conversion and rebirth in Christ’s name was not likely. The Giraffes had claimed their god had a name, a powerful name, the most powerful word in the world, a name so powerful that none were privileged to behold it. Soon-Yee had silenced them with a question, a word, for her word was more powerful than theirs, but the victory felt hollow. She could not meet the pastor’s disappointment and chose the coward’s retreat, to hide her face in shame.
But her reading of their faith was imperfect, just as her understanding of destiny was flawed, and her stubborn, simplistic interpretation of these concepts would be her downfall.
Soon-Yee had many regrets, but in her lives to follow, one of her greatest sorrows was that she never again saw Pastor Giraffe, never thanked him, never told him that she was grateful. He and his wife died in the Peasant Revolution in the years to come, brutally murdered at the hands of the very same people whose lives he tried to improve. Soon-Yee was long out of Choseon by then, but old enough to have developed a fine sense of irony, and the fact that the good man died a martyr by peasants who held the same beliefs as he was not lost on her. She never did find out whether his death was by accident or design, but she hoped he had a place of honor at the feet of his God.
In the end, Pastor Giraffe’s absence from her life was not by choice.
Tragedy struck home first.
author’s note ✍🏻
I grew up in a fundamentalist Korean Presbyterian church, but my thoughts on faith are probably best reserved for another essay on another day. Growing up in Los Angeles, all the Korean-Americans or recently-immigrated Koreans I knew were Christians, but it wasn’t until I was older that I realized that the majority of Koreans in Korea aren’t Christian at all. My mother and 할머니 had belonged to a minority religion all their lives, and I don’t think it’s coincidence that they bought into the American Dream narrative.
I hate Christianity for what it did to my mother. My grandmother. To me. It colonized us more thoroughly than any white devil ever could.
—from my journal
For practical reasons, I had Soon-Yee learn English from Christian missionaries. Pastor John Allen Green was inspired by Horace Newton Allen, the first Protestant missionary to Korea, and I gave him the surname “Green” because I could plausibly twist it to sound like girin. A kirin is the Korean/Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese mythical beast Qilin, but for some reason, it also came to mean “giraffe” in Korean.
We don’t immediately think of language as a colonizing tool, but language informs so much of how we think. My values are formed by the words I use, and the concepts with which I communicate. My thoughts are shaped by the contours of connotation and shared understanding, which is why the transmission of language via religion colors our world view. I don’t think it’s any accident that the arrival of Protestantism to the Korean peninsula in the late 19th century coincided with a rise in Korean nationalism and several bloody peasant uprisings.
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!