The Demon of the Well

[By Soon-I Park as told to JRB in 1997]

In the courtyard behind Song Doh Elementary School, in South Korea where I went to school as a little girl in the late 1950s, was a heavy-duty well of ancient design, with two huge square wooden buckets and a forbidding mechanism that made one of those buckets rise while the other descended. It had to be heavy duty because from it we got all the water for every purpose for a school with a thousand students. One of the heftier Grade 6 boys might show off by turning its wheel on his own, but usually it took two of them. How deep was it? Deep enough, but maybe not more than fifteen or twenty feet. Possibly it tapped into an underground stream. The water from the well was first rate, probably originating high in the mountains and then filtered through miles of sand and fine clay, before going on to the ocean, which was actually only half a mile away. 

            A peculiarity of this well, however, was the moan than would occasionally emanate from it, usually early in the morning or at twilight. It seemed to keep low to the ground, this moan did, and creep through the crawl space beneath the school. It did sound menacing, and my fellow students were sure it came from a demon who lived just out of sight in a niche at the water line. The moan said he was hungry. Please lean over, silly child, and be my dinner.  On days when the moan was heard, my Grade 3 classmates would whisper stories about the demon, excitedly, seriously, even reverently. There was always someone who swore their older brother or sister knew someone else who had honestly and truly been lured to their death that way.

            Even in Grade 3, I scoffed at such nonsense. Unlike all but a few of them, I was Christian, even Presbyterian. My mother's family had been one of the first converted by Canadian missionaries in 1885. We believed in no demons whatsoever, not at the bottom of wells, or anywhere else.

            So one day I said to my friends, "I will prove how silly you are. Meet me at the well after school and lower me down. If there is a demon there, he will have a good meal. If not, I shall laugh at you."

            They were terrified. "Oh no, no, no, Soon-I," they said.

            It was Friday. School ended at 7:00 PM. Normally there'd be school on Saturday too, but this week for some reason Saturday would be a completely free day. The teachers had gathered up their things and dashed home as soon as their last student was dismissed. By 7:15 there was nobody to be seen anywhere in the school grounds—except me and half a dozen other Grade 3 kids, dawdling casually next to the well.

            "We still don't think this is a good idea," they said.

            I stepped into the bucket that was waiting for me. Plenty of room for a small girl to be comfortable. "Lower me down," I commanded.

            They managed that somehow, perhaps because my extra weight in the usually empty bucket meant gravity was on their side. Soon I was at the water line. The bucket itself filled with water now, but that was okay. There was a sturdy wooden bar across the top of the bucket, reinforcing it, and this was dry. I stood on it and held onto the rope.

            "Okay," I called upwards. "No demon here. Pull me up."

            Well, there was a bit of movement to the rope, then a slackening, and a lot of confused voices at the top. No doubt it was not so easy for them to raise a bucket full of water and an eight-year-old girl. Gravity was not their friend anymore. Then—nothing. No movement, no sound. My friends had run away. I knew they were not running for help either. They'd be in for a hiding if they told any adult what they had been up to.

            I considered my situation. If worst came to worst, I would be there until Monday morning when someone came to use the well—say two and a half days. That wouldn't be fun, and I was already getting chilly. That was cold water even if I did not have to sit in it. I could sit on the cross bar and wrap my feet around the rope. I knew you could last several days without food and, of course, there was lots to drink.

            It was boring though. I tried shimming up the rope using one side of the well for my feet. I got a few feet up that way, but I wasn't strong enough and let myself slide back. Then I thought, the courtyard opened onto the park, which was a popular place. There would be adults and older kids coming out for air after their dinners, not so far away. If I screamed, maybe someone would hear me. It was certainly worth a try. So I began to holler. I hollered until I was exhausted, rested up a little, and started hollering some more.

            Now, I don't really know what was happening on the surface, but later I imagined the scene. The school had only the one paid caretaker. We students did all the cleaning; he was responsible for fixing things mainly, but also for checking on things. His job at the end of the day was to see the windows were closed and the fires were out in the stoves of all eighteen classrooms. That took a little time naturally. So the teachers had all gone home, but the caretaker was still there. He had just finished his rounds and was ready to go home himself when he heard this strange sound coming from the great well. "Huh, what's this?" he asked himself, approaching gingerly. Now he was no Christian—I never saw him at church—I don't think he was a Buddhist either. He could have been the sort who believed in random demons.

            However that might have been, with the last light of the day behind it, his head appeared far above me. He called down: "Are you the demon of the well, or are you little Soon-I Park?"

            "I am Soon-I Park," I said. "There is no demon of the well."

            "Hang on then," said the caretaker. "I'll reel you up."

            When I got to the surface, I wanted to say a quick "thanks" and rush off, but the caretaker wasn't going to let me off so easily. He kept me close while he sent a boy off on a bicycle for my mother. Other adults started to gather around, coming over from the park. By the time Mother arrived, there seemed to be a hundred of them all asking me the same question and me repeating the same implausible story about how I had somehow managed to lower myself into the well. I wasn't going to rat on my friends.

            As my mother dragged me home, I kept my eyes on my shoes, as shame dictated was proper, while she said, "How could you?" and "You must never never..." Yet in my heart I was sure Mother would have approved if only she knew all the circumstances. Had not I borne witness for our faith?

            Could the caretaker recognize every student—there were a thousand of us in that school— even in twilight at the bottom of a well? I don't know. He knew me. I was always like that, always a little more audacious than other girls, something of a tomboy. Everyone knew me and my exploits. The old men would say to one another, "If you don't know Soon-I Park, you must be a spy from the North." That was a common joke back then. They never tired of it, the old men didn't. "If you don't know Soon-I Park, you must be a spy from the North."

Song Doh Elementary School, South Korea, 1958

Song Doh Elementary School, South Korea, 1958

[Soon-I Park as told to JRB, 1997]

            Song Doh Elementary School was a truly lovely wooden building. In the pagoda style, with tiered roofs, it had been built by the Japanese during the Occupation, possibly during the 1930s. It was on stilts because of periodic flooding at the bottom of the mountain; you could walk beneath it. Two graceful curved stairways at the front swept you to the first level, where they met at the same landing. It was gorgeous, that structure. I still get a good feeling seeing it in my mind's eye. I haven't been back. It would just be in the middle of the metropolis now. All the farmland of my childhood has been developed for residences and shipyards as an extension of Busan.

            You know, I have good Korean friends who would be disturbed hearing me say anything positive about the Japanese. Not everyone in the West knows how Japan occupied Korea for thirty-four years before the end of the Second World War, but of course Koreans remember. I do not think the Japanese met with much resistance when they first came in 1911. We had protectorate status. I guess that meant Japan was protecting us from Russia, England and America. We were in fact pretty vulnerable. China had been our patron for centuries—we had paid tribute—but now she was too weak to do anything for us. There were some at the time who thought Japan would be a progressive force, bring us into the twentieth century. 

            They certainly expanded education; we had public education for the first time. Before them, there were classes on the estates of Great Men for their children and the children of their managers. That was meritocratic too in its way. A bright boy might be sent to Seoul to take civil service examinations, even become Prime Minister based on his results, or so they said—the same system they had in China for a thousand years. If the boy was only second best, they'd make him head of the Army! That's the way the story was told, anyway. I guess people liked to dream of how once upon a time the army was kept in its place!

            Well, meritocratic but not democratic was that system. The son of a farmer, much less of a farm labourer would never get any education, and as for their daughters, forget it! Yet there was a girls school started by Presbyterians from Canada in the late nineteenth century. Did you know? Tra la la. Yea Canada! Really. That's why I emigrated here finally. Later during the Occupation, the Japanese closed our universities but let that girls school continue. After the Second War, it became a university—Ewha. My employer had me take professional classes at it, some from an old old Canadian woman who may have been there all through the years of occupation. She taught Social Policy—I worked for a directorate that was investigating total care institutions: orphanages, mental hospitals, old folks homes, prisons—and she was wonderful, this woman. She was my favourite teacher. I loved her and felt her love for me.

            Ah, well.

            So the Japanese may have advanced primary and secondary education. In the 1930s, however, things darkened, for Japan herself, not just for Korea. The generals took over and attacked the part of China that is just North and West of us. It was around that time they decided to annex Korea too. Henceforth we were to be a full province of Japan, speak only Japanese, bow in the Japanese way, have Shinto shrines in our temples and churches, (the religions could continue with their other faiths too), and so on and so forth. My mother had to speak Japanese all day in school, even on the playground, or be punished. She was the baby of her family. Her older brothers were grown and teaching school already. Of course they had to teach in Japanese, but they never talked to me about that. You can imagine how a people proud of being "The Hermit Kingdom" for a thousand years felt about that, we who in our own minds felt superior to both the Great Powers that hemmed us in—the other was China. So here's a secret: Koreans of my mother's generation are all fluent in Japanese though they are too bitter and ashamed to admit it.

            Which doesn't stop Song Doh Elementary School from being the loveliest of structures, nor its surrounding playing fields and parks from being, at that time, anything less than a taste of heaven on earth. Before cars were common, and when even bicycles were rare, the whole community loved to stroll along the paths around Song Doh Elementary School in the evening and on weekends.

            During the Korean War at the beginning of the 1950s, however, Song Doh was flooded with refugees from the North, thousands of orphans among others. So they extended the original building with two wings made of concrete bricks, functional but ugly, like the schools my children in Canada go to today.

            Back then Song Doh was a farming community a couple of kilometres from the street cars that took you to Busan proper. We were on that little neck of land at the very bottom of South Korea. You can see it on most maps. Now it's a thicker neck, built up with land reclaimed from the sea and developed for residences and commerce. Busan is one of the world's great ports, a great beneficiary of the "economic miracle" of the 70s and 80s. But I'm writing about a time before that time. You can tell is the unimproved farm village Song Doh that has first place in my heart.

            You'll be surprised if I call it my little village school because those eighteen rooms had over a thousand students crammed into them. I guess I think it "little" compared to the big city junior and senior high schools I was sent to in later years; they were truly scholar factories.

            No running water or indoor plumbing, but the school was modern in one respect. By 1958 there were amazingly powerful loudspeakers on its roof. As a country we were poor as church mice, but we had a state of the art public address system.

             The school day started at seven in the morning but, half an hour before that time, recorded marches started booming out from those loudspeakers, never anything but marches, and always loud. You could hear them from a kilometre away. "Got to hurry," you'd say to yourself when they came in earshot. They did get me marching, and I won't say I didn't like that.  I remember some of the tunes today. Good for doing housework. If the music stopped before you reached school, you'd get a sinking feeling, because that would mean you were late, and would be punished with extra chores and the shame of being singled our in class later.

            We did not enter the school directly however. Instead we lined up beside our teachers on the parade ground in front of the great steps I mentioned, all thousand of us. On the landing at the top where the two staircases met stood the principal, in a fenced podium, glowering down at us while our teachers called the roll. The lowest grades stood at the front, and Grade 6 at the back. There were lines of boys and lines of girls. Elementary school was co-educational while junior high and high schools usually still were not, although even then things were changing. My parents could have chosen to send me to a good co-educational Junior High, but they decided otherwise; after Grade 6, I attended only all-girl schools.

            We were already more or less in order, but then all whispering would cease and we would stand absolutely at attention, with our eyes turned to the top of the stairs. The principal was about to speak. His voice boomed out over the great loudspeakers, which would carry his voice to the countryside. He would talk the kind of talk that principals talk everywhere. Try harder, take pride, stand straight, think straight, the eyes of your parents and the nation are upon you, and so forth. Naturally we wouldn't listen, yet he would sometimes talk on and on, well, sometimes only for five minutes but at other times as long as an hour, as if he had just forgotten to stop. Of course that meant less time at our studies, but his speech was boring, and it was arduous too, standing at attention like that was. When would he stop? When he was tired of talking I guess.

            Sometimes in the morning, though more often at similar assemblies in the afternoon when the sun was high in the sky, a weaker student might just collapse in place and lie unconscious at the feet of their classmates. The rule in such cases was that we would just let them lie there. It was forbidden to stoop to their assistance, not just for students, but for teachers too. The principal would keep on talking. Weakness was not to be indulged! We knew that was wrong of him and our teachers must have known it was wrong, but he was the principal, and he could do what he liked.

            I'm talking about the late fifties. In a few years things would change a little.  You might be surprised how we followed developments in the West. When the sixties happened, we knew about it. We gave up singing "Good things in the valley," the Ho Ho Ho Green Giant Song, and instead sang, "the times they are a-changing." I suspect you didn't know what was happening in South Korea, how an uprising of students brought down a government, for example, when it went too far in disciplining a trade  union, but we knew what was going on in America.

            I read where a couple of years ago university students at the National University in Seoul, our number one institution, stopped responding to un yung, which is an abbreviated form of address you use with children and servants. Formerly a professor had said un yung to start a class and the students had replied in unison un yung a sayo, un yung a shim n ka, which means "greetings, wise and revered elder." But now when the professor said un yung at the beginning of a lecture, the rebellious students kept silent, whole classes of them. Dead silent. You know, the professors almost called in the police, they refused to teach, they assigned those students failing grades. It was a big deal and went through the courts. The students won. Now professors must begin a class with at least un yung a sayo, which shows respect, if not necessarily reverence.

            Anyway, I  never fainted at assembly because I was always a strong girl though I was as light as a feather—like everybody else. We who were born at the end of the Korean War were all skinny, all light as feathers. For lunch we ate noodles we brought from home in thick aluminium containers. In summer we ate them cold but in the winter we would heat them up. First thing in the morning we would pile these on the great coal stove that was at the centre of every classroom, pile them one on top of the other: sixty students, sixty cast aluminium containers, but just one stove, and they slow cooked and were ready by noon, more or less ready, depending on how close your container was to the surface of the stove itself. The noodles were made from flour included in CARE packages from Canada and States, or sometimes from Australia or New Zealand. Mixed with a hint of fish, that would have to sustain us for the ten hours of the school day. My family was well to do. Our tenant farmers gave us milk and eggs and pork, under the table no doubt; maybe those supplements kept me strong. The flour bags of the CARE packages were recycled into dresses and other clothes. Not me, but other kids, wore shoes fashioned from discarded jeep tires. I wanted a pair too, but Mother said we were above that. The "economic miracle" had not happened yet.