Author Cheryl Pallant recently wrote a book about her travels in South Korea. (Photo courtesy Cheryl Pallant)
Cheryl Pallant, a Richmonder teaching English in Daegu, South Korea, receives a "What’re you doing?" text from a friend, and Pallant replies, "Watching a shaman stab a pig."
Which is the truth.
She describes the scene in her recent memoir, “Ginseng Tango” (Big Table Publishing). “Ancient and modern Korea collide with exquisite invisible circuitry.” In that moment, Pallant witnesses a ritual in which the animal is skewered and divided, “the head mounted last, snout open and stuffed with 10,000 won bills.” The event’s complicated activity rises and falls, and there are a few breaks. “Throughout the ceremony, various people pass through the hall as if what’s taking place is nothing more than folding laundry. At one point, the flutist takes a break to thumb through a store catalog. A woman in the corner files her nails.”
All this is undertaken at the request of another mudang — female shaman — who feels she must reclaim the purpose of her life. This is but one astonishing scene the author witnessed during her sometimes tumultuous tenure in Daegu.
Pallant, who had previously traveled to Hong Kong, Malaysia and Indonesia, didn’t know much about Korea before a marital rupture and the need to maintain her Richmond house sent her to a lucrative overseas position. Her journey, borne somewhat of necessity, became a spiritual pilgrimage, too. And, a practitioner of modern dance and contact movement and improvisation, Pallant, through a need for social activity, became a student of tango. Her narrative weaves, like dancers, in and out of the modern, the ancient, the mystical and boilerplate reality of life in today’s Korea.
She found an ancient culture, steeped in traditions of Confucianism and Buddhism and mysticism, that is also grappling with the issues of contemporary life. Acupuncture is a primary part of medical practice and is used for both a cough and depression. “Yes, there are modern Western methods used, but it’s not an either/or situation,” Pallant says. She learned that Korean doctor’s offices don’t take appointments. “You just show up and wait.” And while Koreans are generally reserved, one thing can prove the one thing too many, and tempers flare.
“They are expressive and passionate,” Pallant says of the Korean people. “I remember being in a subway and seeing two women, maybe 65 years old, going at it, whacking each other with their purses.” Often, outside of the major cities such as Seoul, women don’t have easy access to employment. Their security is dependent upon marriage. There are often affairs that women put up with because, Pallant explains, “their life and family depend on the man.”
There is a dance with the real and unreal, and this is evident when Pallant tours the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). The Korean War ended in 1957 after three gruesome years in a hair-trigger truce. The dividing line is an open wound, or a live exposed nerve, 151 miles long and 2.5 miles wide, where no one is permitted to step, nor are fishing boats allowed in the waters. Occasions have arisen, though, where empty boats are found, and families are told by South Korean government that the occupant “likely fell off the boat after a heart attack,” or “ran away to China with his mistress.” Some 200 people have gone missing — including Japanese citizens and South Korean actors — some returned, most not.
Pallant went on a tour, paid to peer through binoculars at a North Korean Potemkin "Peace Village" that is mostly facades and where the North Koreans claim 200 people live in a kind of paradise. She writes, “High-powered telescopes reveal the interior of the buildings' missing furniture, walls and occupants.” Between 1974 and 1990 the North Koreans dug four tunnels through which an invading force could be sent southward. They claimed these were for mining coal and for "proof" covered the walls with a thin veneer of black paint. Pallant recalls, “There’s a souvenir shop and a place to get a stamped train ticket that indicates [one is] heading North, but we’re warned not to stamp our passport, which would cause great trouble with immigration upon leaving S. Korea. I ask a clerk to stamp a page in my notebook instead.”
Pallant addresses the Buddhist concept of sunyata, the idea that no thing possesses an inherent or enduring quality until mind or culture colors it. “We perceive what we expect, consciously or not, and overlook the rest,” Pallant says.
In “Ginseng Tango,” Pallant takes the reader into a place most of us haven’t seen and would be challenged to describe if we did.
Cheryl Pallant is a co-organizer of the second annual RVA Lit Crawl, and she'll be participating in its series of readings April 20-21 at various venues around town. May 1 is the release of her next book, "Writing and the Body in Motion: Awakening Voice Through Somatic Practice" (McFarland Co.).
