a Korean folktale

I took the hagwon's head teacher, Charles, out to dinner last Friday to thank him for giving me Korean lessons. We went to Chaban, a so-called "Korean fusion restaurant" which combines elements of Eastern and Western dining. You sit on the floor (an ondol, or heated floor, after the Korean style) at a low table, and are brought banchan, or sidedishes, which you snack on while you cook your meat at the grill in the center of the table. These side dishes include things like pickled cabbage, moistened seaweed, oysters, octopus tentacles and vegetables in a spicy red sauce, some form of devilled eggs, and two species of the ubiquitous and inherently Korean kimchi, which is fermented cabbage. At all the good restaurants you get two varieties: regular kimchi, which is liberally doused in pepper sauce, and white kimchi, which is simply steeped in water. Both have distinct and excellent flavors. The most popular variety of meat is samgyupsal, which is sliced pork belly.

The variety we tried that night was hangjeongsal, which was less fatty, but also less flavorful. With the meal, we drank soju, Korean firewater, a colorless liquor usually distilled from rice, although anything up to tapioca can be used. This drink is mild, only 20 percent alcohol, and is usually compared to sweet vodka in terms of taste. I don't much care for it, myself.

However, over drinks, I begged Charles to share with me some Korean folklore, a subject I am desperately behind in, as I am with most things Korean. Sometimes during our sessions in the library we'd take a break and Charles would share with me a Korean proverb or tell me a folktale. I am entranced by mythology of any kind, no less so by that from a country I knew next to nothing about before arriving. Charles agreed heartily, and with his usual mastery of English and his deft mental translation, related to me the following story.

Once upon a time, a long time ago when Korea was still wild and people slept in walled-in houses, there was once a married couple whose young child would not go to sleep. It lay awake, crying and crying ceaselessly. The parents were trying all sorts of persuasion, but the child would not relent. Outside the wall, in the dark woods, a tiger was walking by. He heard the crying and licked his lips.

"Mmm," he said to himself, "sounds like a delicious, tender young child! I think I'll have it for dinner."

He put his ear to the wall and listened, waiting for the right opportunity.

"If you don't go to sleep," he heard the parents threaten the child, "a nasty, horrid tiger will come and eat you up!"

This threat did no good. The child continued to wail. The parents tried a new tactic.

"If you go to sleep," they said sweetly, "we'll give you all the dried persimmons you can eat in the morning."

The child immediately clammed up, and presently dropped off to sleep. This bothered the tiger immensely.

"Why," he said to himself, "the child refused to stop crying when threatened with horrible death in my jaws, but when offered dried persimmons, he quieted right down! This is awful! Persimmons are scarier than I am!"

The tiger began to feel very afraid of persimmons. Unknown to all of them, on the roof of the house at that moment, there was a cattle rustler. He'd come to steal the family's livestock, and he heard the tiger moving about down below at the base of the wall.

"Ah-hah," he said to himself, "it's a nice big fat cow!"

He leaped off of the roof and landed full on the tiger's back. The foolish tiger automatically assumed the dried persimmons had his number and were attacking him. In a blind panic he raced into the woods as fast as he could go, the thief clinging to his neck.

"HELP!" the tiger screamed. "THE PERSIMMONS HAVE ME!"

"Hmmm," the thief mused, "this is a fast cow."

And so they went off into the night, the family went to sleep and everything turned out hunky-dory.

The moral of this story is that dried persimmons are stronger than tigers. Kindness is better than force. That sounds familiar...