Madam ‘One-eye’ – The Korea Times

I recently gave a lecture at the Institute for the Translation of Korean Classics in northern Seoul. I was humbled by the task of speaking to a room full of translators of Classic Chinese as I thought of the hours of trudging through old Korean historical texts for my dissertation, and for research thereafter. I was concerned that my poor ability to translate Chinese classics would pale in comparison to theirs. But I prepared some of my best translations and historical insights that I have found over the years and made my presentation as best I could.

The lecture turned out really well, and they seemed to appreciate what I had to say. But to make it interesting, I selected one text I had toiled over for a long time. I understood the story, but wasn’t sure of its purpose or even its context. It was floating in the official history, or “sillok,” like an island.

I had some conjecture about what it was doing, looking out of place in the official records, but I’ve never been satisfied that I understood what it was all about. Until yesterday, when the institute’s authority on the sillok confirmed what I had surmised years ago.

The story is odd. And even salacious. Really salacious. When I discovered it in researching for my dissertation, I was surprised by its raunchiness — and doubly surprised at where I found it, floating in the records without any conclusion, introduction or connection to any legislation or discussion at court.

The story is about a Madam Yi, and the first vignette describes four episodes of her life. She is introduced as a mother of “10 or so sons” who became a widow when her husband, a country magistrate, suddenly died. The story describes the ceremony led by Buddhist monks for his funeral. The commentary says that people there thought she was “more interested in the monks than she was in Buddhism.”

In the second episode, in a scene at a guesthouse run by an old woman, a male guest is asked to leave because a female guest is going to be arriving to use the room. The male guest suspects something is amiss, so upon leaving, he sneaks back to hide by the wall of the house to witness what happens next. A monk comes in, riding a horse. The monk asks the old proprietor why “she” isn’t there yet. Soon, “she” shows up: a woman in upper-class attire, a female servant in tow.

She and the monk are drinking on the veranda when the male guest pops out from hiding and accuses the monk and the woman of misconduct, threatening to haul them off to the police. They beg for understanding and offer a bribe of 10 bolts of cloth. He says he will not be bought off. Then they offer him the horse the monk rode in on, and he says that will be sufficient to keep him quiet. Off he rides, on the monk’s horse with the bolts of cloth. That segment concludes with the statement, “Many people think the woman was Madam Yi.”

In the next section, she tells her mother that her slaves are unruly, and therefore she needs to remarry. Her mother opposes the idea, but she proceeds to have her brother organize an archery contest, to which a man she is interested in would be invited, and where she would have a chance to talk with him. The man is described as a very manly man, if you get my drift, and the story even indicates that his manliness and depictions of their marriage were drawn, in a kind of graffiti, on the walls of the magistracy. The pictures were mocking the husband and wife, but the husband was not offended, and rather took delight in them.

In the fourth episode, that husband dies, and at the funeral, as the monks chant and circle the courtyard, one monk brushes close to the now-twice-widowed Madam Yi. He brushes close by her, and she exclaims, “My, you are a strange monk,” but those there think the two knew each other and were intimate.

Then Madam Yi remembers that years before, she had consulted with a blind fortune teller who told her that she would marry three times, and live with the third husband for 100 years. She said, “I see the fortune teller was right — I should remarry again.”

Hanging at the end of the narrative is a sentence stating that Madam Yi had one bad eye, and the people had nicknamed her “One-eye.”

And that’s it. No connection with any court matters, no conclusion. No obvious reason for it to be in the official history, the royal record.

The sillok specialist, in response to my presentation, said he thought the story was a morality tale, pointing out the immoral behavior of those monks and women who don’t follow strict Confucian rules. Korea, at that point in the late 15th century, was building toward adopting a strict code of conduct that included the ideal of the “chaste widow,” who would not remarry.

Thus, the salacious story shows how one should not behave. And there are stones to throw at the Buddhist monks as well. This story of how not to behave was designed to help Korea build to its point of orthodoxy, couched in Confucian terms, of male dominance in society and the patrilineal system. And it was funny at the same time.

Mark Peterson (frogoutsidethewell@gmail.com) is a professor emeritus of Korean studies at Brigham Young University in Utah. The views expressed here are his own.