Joseon Korea, the fourth month of 1882.
The ship can’t reach Chemulpo. Nothing can. The tide runs out a mile
and leaves the harbor standing on mud, so you come ashore in a flat
boat at somebody else’s convenience, watching a country decide when…
or if… it will let you in. Last summer, this country’s soldiers rose up and hunted its foreigners through the streets, and the treaty that permits you to be here is younger than the shoes you’re standing in.
Hanseong is a day inland. You arrive in the hungry weeks, when last
year’s rice is gone and the barley isn’t in yet, carrying a medical
degree no hospital at home would honor and a commission from a mission
board that measures a year’s work in converts. What you get is an empty
room. The fish seller doubles her price at the sight of you. The
grandmother who sells dried persimmons won’t meet your eye. Then the
wells go bad, and the sick come to whoever is left standing, and by the
second week, you’ve run out of everything Philadelphia trained you for.
The questions that keep you up are rarely the medical ones.
You were raised in an abolitionist house where Garrison was read
aloud at the supper table. You’re given a woman to assist you. Given.
She isn’t free to leave, and the reason is written in law as the
consequence of something she didn’t do. Refuse her, and she’s sent
somewhere worse.
A boy from the slums starts talking about the civil examinations.
Nobody has told him what that yard does to boys whose fathers didn’t
buy them brushes. Can you be the one who does?
King Anjong summons you once, which is an anomaly, and again, which is
unprecedented. After that, you’re a woman who appears at the palace,
who’s asked what she thinks and answers. The eunuchs pretend not to
see, the court ladies whisper behind fans, and you learn to walk the
gates like someone who belongs there while understanding perfectly
that you don’t. One misstep, and you go home on a ship. If you’re
fortunate.
Meanwhile, an official’s body you’re asked to examine doesn’t read
like a natural death. The slums burn, and you don’t think it was an
accident. On a wooded path, the first arrow arrives before the sound
does, and you have half a second to decide which direction to run.
You’re a physician. You’ve learned to read this city the way you read
a pulse. It’s been running fast since you arrived, and it’s only
getting faster.
And amidst all of it, four men make it their business to argue with you.
A radical reformer who wants your country’s modernization and nothing
to do with your God. A shaman healer out of the mountains who tells
you God is welcome on the road with all the others and can’t
understand why that offends you. A British diplomat certain that
most of this city is already lost. And a Confucian king who asks
better questions than your seminary ever did, and isn’t allowed to
accept the answers.
By the time you understand what you’re being used for, you have too
much here to leave. Not everyone you love will end up on the same side
of what’s coming.
You came to Joseon certain of what you believed.
Joseon is going to take its time with that.
그녀는 답을 품고 왔다. 조선은 더 깊은 질문을 던졌다.
