[KS] legend of mangbusok

[Ann Choi]

Thanks to everyone who responded to my query with generosity: each one of
you have been helpful to me in looking at the story from various dimensions
(this topic alone--tracing the various origins of mangbusok--could make a
book!)  In Sowol's "Ch'ohon" the speaker declares that it is the power of
her own verbalization of grief which would petrify her; this kind of
materialization of 'han' does not dissolve (in So Chongju's "Sinbu"--the
unmoving aesthecization of desire dissolves into ashes at the husband's
return, and, in particular, at his touch).  In these stories of women (and
bear!) who wait without fulfillment, their bodies become unchanging physical
monuments linked to collective memory which, in Korea's case, is likely to
reach across the Sino-Korean border (thank you Gari Ledyard--I'm interested
in the notion of Sowol as a local poet tied to the northern region, the
flipside to his universally 'Korean' stature).

Which leads me to the Samguk yusa and the story of the wife of Pak Chesang,
the faithful Silla official who was burned alive by the Japanese and
couldn't return to his faithful wife:

Pak Che-sang's wife, overwhelmed with grief, prostrated
herself on the beach south of Mandok temple gate and cried long and
bitterly.  People still call the place Changsa, meaning long sand.  The good
lady could not long endure the yearning of her heart for her husband, who
would return no more.  She took her three daughters with her to
Ch'isul-lyong (Kite Pass) in the mountains.  There she looked away in the
direction of Japan and wailed for sorrow till she died.  She became the
tutelary spirit of Kite Pass, and the people of Silla erected a shrine to
her there. (p. 65, tr. by Ha Tae-Hung and Grafton K. Mintz)

As Young-Jun Lee notes in a previous email, the above story by Illyon leaves
out any notion of the body solidifying:  the wailing for sorrow reminds one
of "Ch'ohon" but nothing physical remains until a shrine is built to honor
the woman (why didn't she become sand dune at the beach?).  If, in fact,
there occurred a suppression of native stories by Buddhist and Confucian
contingencies, as has been suggested, could they have been reinvigorated
through Chinese examples as introduced by someone like Hong Taeyong who is
writing during a time when a thorough Confucianization of Korean culture has
taken place?  Thus, I think it may be difficult to cut a clean line between
unofficial folktales and monuments of official ideology.

Thank you for the dialogue,
Ann
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gari Keith Ledyard" <gkl1 at columbia.edu>
To: "Korean Studies Discussion List" <Koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws>
Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2004 1:38 PM
Subject: Re: [KS] legend of mangbusok


> The various responses to Ann Choi's query make it clear that "mangbuso^k"
> stories are ubiquitous in Korean folklore and around the world.  A well
> known Chinese variation on this theme was noted by Korean travelers during
> the 18th and 19th centuries.  Here is an account by Hong Taeyong
> (1731-1783) of the Temple of the Faithful Woman (Chennyumiao, Korean form
> Ch^ongny^omyo) and its legend of the Mangbus^ok:
>
>   "The Temple of the Faithful Woman is ten li (5.5km) out from
> Shanhaiguan (the eastern terminus of the Great Wall). A small hill rises
> abruptly out of the plain, its soil blending with blueish, shiny rocks,
> all ringed with pines.  A brick path is set into the hill, with perhaps
> twenty or thirty steps lined on both sides by stone railings very
> skillfully carved in relief. At the top is the "Watching-for-her-Husband-
> Rock (Mangbus^ok), which is about a chang (2m) high and seven or eight po
> (9m) wide. On the left side of the rock is a faint cavity. Tradition says
> that this is the footprint of the Faithful Woman. In the temple itself
> there is a statue of this woman, her face powdered in the manner of a
> country wife, simply and plainly. A boy is at her left, and a man carrying
> an umbrella is at her right. It depicts the story of how she looked for
> her husband as she led her child by the hand. On the pillar, a pair of
> lines in the calligraphy of the Song minister Wen Tianxiang (1236-1282)
> tells the tale:
>    "'Where are you, oh Emperor of Qin! In your Great Wall of a myriad
> li, righteous rage is pounded firm. You are not dead, Woman Jiang! In this
> stone slab a thousand years old, constancy and faith still endure.'
>   "Iwent up to the front of the statues and let out a sigh, then
> came out. Wang Wenju (Hong's carriage driver) went in and left a small
> coin on the table, then made repeated bows. This was to seek good fortune
> for the trip."
>
>   The woman, Meng Jiang (K. Maeng Kang), had an earlier history as a
> model for wifely faithfulness going back several centuries before Qin's
> building of the Great Wall.  Her mythic connection with the Wall seems to
> have started in the Tang period, from which time it took on a life of its
> own, in which her given name became a surname.  See Arthur Waldron's <The
> Great Wall of China, from History to Myth>, pp. 197-203.
>   The account above is translated from Hong's narrative in Chinese
> of his trip to Beijing in 1766.  But the version in his diary, which was
> written in Korean, is much longer, with an extended rumination on Woman
> Jiang, who evidently made a very strong impression on him.  When he
> returned from his journey, he expanded and elaborated his travel diary for
> the express purpose of sharing his travels with his mother and his wife.
> See the Korean diary, <^Ulby^ong Y^onhaengnok>, Seoul, 1997, pp. 126-128,
> or, for a rendering into modernized Korean, Kim T'aejun's abridged rewrite
> of the diary under the title <Sanhaegwan chamgin mun^ul han son^uro
> milch'idoda> (Tolbaegae Publishers, 2001), pp. 59-62.
>   Hong Taeyong really put this particular mangbus^ok story on the
> map with his very widely read hanmun memoir; Korean travelers after him
> invariably went out of their way to see the shrine.  In tracking
> mangbus^ok stories, it is good not to discount Korea's rich travel
> literature and hanmun culture, and in Hong Taeyong's case, the much less
> common phenomenon of a traveler's own lively version in Korean.  Ann
> Choi's observation that Kim Sow^ol's poetry suggests a general popularity
> of mangbus^ok stories in the north is significant here, because the
> hundreds of soldiers, servants, and merchants who accompanied the annual
> "solsticial" diplomatic missions every winter were overwhelmingly from the
> P'y^ongbuk area.
>
> Gari Ledyard
>
> On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 aychoi at rci.rutgers.edu wrote:
>
> > Dear Korean studies list members,
> >
> > Can anyone help me find sources to the manbusok (husband-waiting-rock)
> > story that tells of the faithful wife who waited so long for her husband
> > to return from the sea that she turned into a rock?   There's a
mangbusok
> > rock formation in Haeundae in Pusan, the only site I am aware of that
> > carries a physical remnant of this folktale/legend.  Something tells me
> > that this was also a story that circulated in Northern Korea in early
> > twentieth century, as Kim Sowol alludes to it in one of his poems.
> >
> > Much obliged,
> > Ann Choi
> >
> > ----
> >
> > Ann Y. Choi
> > Asian Languages and Cultures
> > Rutgers University
> > New Brunswick, NJ  08901
> >
> >
>
>