Gumiho

Oct 4, 2020 | By Jason Lee TD ‘22.5

The only book I’ve ever stolen is a book of Korean myths. At the time, I’d only ever heard the versions my mother told me when I was younger. She’s a wonderful storyteller and invested much time and attention into ensuring I dreamt about the same characters she did. Dokkae-bis, dragon kings, tigers, a miserable fool of a frog— I loved folklore, and though they had to share space with Pokemon and Iron Giant, these characters became a consuming fixation. 

I won’t disclose any specific details of when or from where I acquired the book, but I will say that it was long after my last bedtime story. Revisiting these stories was both a great joy and a deeply unsettling experience. Some were just as I had remembered them. The image of a woman rolling into the maw of a pudding-obsessed tiger kicked up the same laughs it had almost two decades ago. Other stories bitterly disagreed with my memory. The magic was too subtle, the spirits too petty, and the settings too mundane or too absurd to reproduce the grandeur that lingered in my childhood recollection.

In one, a man pees on the side of the road. Looking down, he notices he’s peed on a white bone. So he asks the bone, “Is it cold?” The bone, to his surprise, responds, “Yes, it is cold.” The man chats with the bone for a bit before realizing the absurdity of the situation and fleeing into a wine shop. The bone pursues him into the wine shop, at which point the man tells the bone to wait—he will buy it some wine. Then, the man sneaks out the back door. Years later, he happens to pass by the wine shop again where he notices a beautiful young woman at the counter, and in true masculine fashion brags to her about how he once outwit a bone. Listening, the woman yells, “I was that bone!” and, transforming into a nine-tailed fox, devours the man. 

Myths about the nine-tailed fox exist throughout East Asia. In China, it’s called the huli-jing, in Japan, the kyuubi no kitsune, and in Korea, the gumiho. The gumiho, as my mother had described it, was a shapeshifter, yes, but it was also equipped with powerful illusions, reserved nobility, and unapproachable cunning. It didn’t get pissed on. 

I think the most disconcerting part of the story was its last line: “And the moral is that one should not make water on white bones.” Most folklore conveys certain truths about the culture that breathes them. The other myths in the book fulfilled this role. Tigers and hunters acted out ancestral regard. Dragon-horses and questionable wood-cutters embodied respect for the divide between heaven and earth. That pathetic frog I mentioned mournfully sings filial piety into Korean children even today. This one about the gumiho is so out of place as to feel cheeky. As if it’s centuries-dead author was even now grinning at its lack of a moral.   

It confused me. I thought I had understood these figures and characters, and their lessons about a culture that was simultaneously my own and satellite. Here, however, it seemed they were talking past me. Here, they had lives separate from the ones that had been shared with me, and now walked through my memories hazy, ephemeral, with flickering silhouettes.

The question, then, was whether I still enjoyed these stories, whether I still loved them. Can I love what I don’t understand? The stakes are low with myths and memories, but much higher with other people. 

God, we are told, understands us perfectly, beyond what we know and can convey by our words. Psalms 139 says, “You know my sitting down and my rising up; You understand my thought afar off. You discern my going out and my lying down; You are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue You know it completely.” What is not clear to me is the link between being known or seen, and being loved. Many biblical sources attest to the fact that God both knows us completely and loves us unconditionally, and that this combination is what makes his love for us so transcendent and unlike any earthly analog. 

Lovers, friends, even a stranger’s unexpected but piercing insight can all pursue a sort of asymptotic convergence towards this ideal. Yet given what knotted, silly, and sequestered beings we are, it feels safe to say that we will never be completely known by another person. Still, Christ tells us in John 13:34, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” Even if we acknowledge we can only ever approximate this task, how do we go about that approximation? Where do we round? How do we start?

What gave me some insight was Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving the Wreck”, in which she relates the experience of a person confronting their wounded past to a diver encountering a sunken ship. Here is one part:

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done

and the treasures that prevail.

I stroke the beam of my lamp

slowly along the flank

of something more permanent

than fish or weed

the thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth

the drowned face always staring

toward the sun

the evidence of damage

worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty

the ribs of the disaster

curving their assertion

among the tentative haunters.

The diver here makes no move to catalogue, or compare, or critique. There is no parsing of origin, or cause, or motive. What they do is bear witness to the wreck. By treating it as a testimony to itself, the diver respects the inherent value, dignity, and wonder of the wreck. With the diver and the wreck being one and the same, what the poem does is affirm an individual’s scarred and pitted present, with no attention paid to the circumstances of their ascension, whether they have gleaned anything from their trials, what they intended, or where they are headed. Whatever is beautiful, whatever is peaceful, or whatever is treasured in a person is made so not by the person’s history, but by their simple being. It is not just what is understood, or packageable, but the whole wreck that is precious.

The wreck and not the story of the wreck: we have a tendency to write each other into narratives. We view who we are and what we do as the present conclusion to where we were and what we did. It is difficult to love such stories, like that of the gumiho, without understanding them. 

But God, when He sees us, knows where we have been and where we will go. Our motion, our stories to Him are one part of an already completed work of art that we can’t see. As we approximate God’s love then, it makes sense to treat each other as parts of this work of art, to see each other as parts of this work of art, rather than attempting to comprehend an individual component removed from its context.

I don’t understand this tale of the gumiho. I know, however, that it has some place in the art of my and my parents’ culture. In some ways, the task of witnessing lessens the burden of understanding. When the worth of an individual is not in their every slivered detail, we can move more easily into mutual care. When the task is to bear witness, then even in mutual incomprehension, even without clear goals or intents, we can love each other as axiomatically, unjustifiably, a priori, in and of ourselves, beautiful and gutted and stellar and stunning and bitter and precious.