Kim Seung-jong's Literary Miscellany (174) 'The Light of Our Home Shines Bright Inside the Beans'

Yes, indeed. We are all blood relatives born from our mothers, rooted in their bodies. That is why children who have lost their mothers reminisce about them and yearn to return, and why those spending time in their hometowns or care facilities continue to miss their mothers with a bittersweet longing—the circumstances are manifold. In the following poem, the speaker recalls the figure of his mother sorting beans in the inner room during childhood. For those who grew up in cities, such scenes may be unfamiliar, but since no one can be without a moment shared with their mother, readers of this poem will soon come to understand.

Mother sorted beans on a small table

I played with shadows on the wind-exposed wall

In the beans were the ox herders passing through tapping tobacco fields

and the beggars who lived in the village

From Yangyang to Yeoryangj the three-hundred-ri path to my mother's home

As the day grew dark, I raised the wick of the evening lamp

Speaking sometimes in words I did not know,

Mother's sorting of beans

Was the work of sorting through your sorrow and your worries,

but today I sort the beans alone

Who now lives in the village we left behind—

The light of our home shines bright inside the beans

- "Sorting Beans" / Lee Sang-guk

In the first stanza, recounting the speaker's childhood scene, we can see that although the mother and speaker existed in the same time and space, they were absorbed in different tasks, creating a certain distance between them. Though one could not say that distance was great. The mother was meticulously sorting out beans with defects or those hiding insects one by one, while the speaker himself was engrossed in shadow play using the wind-exposed wall.

Then the speaker says 'In the beans were the ox herders passing through tapping tobacco fields' and 'the beggars who lived in the village.' As can be understood from 'were,' this matter 'inside the beans' is the speaker's perspective continuing from that boyhood to the present, and it also provides a reason why the mother was sorting beans. Both the 'beggars' and the 'ox herders' here are marked as improper subjects that damage beans. The speaker recalls how the 'ox herders' wounded the beans—which the mother had cultivated with sweat in the summer sun while weeding—like tearing tobacco from the 'tobacco fields,' and thus implicitly points to the hardships of the mother's farming above all to himself. The 'beggars who lived in the village' are not limited to insects that devour grain but seem to also allude to 'beggar-like' people in the village who troubled the mother or caused her hardship.

In stanzas 1 and 2, the present-day elderly speaker does not reproach his younger self for not understanding the mother's feelings, which are described later, calling himself ignorant; however, underlying the distance between mother and speaker suggested by the statement in the first stanza is a regret that serves as the foundation for a later emotion of deep sympathy toward the mother. If the speaker had directly stated some hardship the mother endured due to the village people, rather than mentioning 'beggars who lived in the village,' not only would this aspect be overly emphasized, but it would also lead readers to almost definitively fix the meanings of 'sorrow' and 'worries' in stanza 5, thereby limiting the taste of reader inference, which is also a virtue of this poem.

Stanza 3, where a shift in poetic context occurs. In the first line, 'From Yangyang to Yeoryangj the three-hundred-ri path to my mother's home as the day grows dark,' we can sense a parallel meaning: just as the mother's journey grew increasingly distant from her birth home, the 'three-hundred-ri' of married life from Yeoryangj to Yangyang also gradually has the day 'grow dark.' Thus the second line, 'I raised the wick of the evening lamp,' is a statement where the speaker recalls that evening in childhood when as day grew dark, he helped his mother sort beans; simultaneously, it can be read as a preparatory statement for a shift that illuminates the fact and awakening that was later to be revealed in stanzas 4 and 5—meanings embedded in the mother's bean-sorting work that the speaker did not then understand.

That is, it is a statement preparing for the disclosure of another meaning embedded in the mother's bean-sorting. The poet's prompting of this inference is concluded immediately afterward in stanza 4, line 1, with 'Speaking sometimes in words I did not know,'—marking the speaker's present recollective tone. This subtle interweaving of time and meaning through linguistic economy is a virtue of this poem. In other words, stanza 4, line 2, and stanza 5—'Mother's sorting of beans // Was the work of sorting through your sorrow and your worries, / but today I sort the beans alone'—are the voice of the speaker in his present state, yet they also represent an awakening that came only later, something not understood at that time.

From 'sorting through your sorrow and your worries,' we can infer from stanza 2 what 'sorrow' and 'worries' mean; at this point, quite suddenly, we come to belatedly suspect that the speaker's mother may have been a widow separated from her husband. Related to this circumstance, 'sorrow' and 'worries' too—things that the young speaker could never possibly have known.

Yet immediately after that, stanza 5, line 2—'but today I sort the beans alone'—simultaneously raises a new question, and our tension and concern are amplified. The speaker confesses, to the mother perhaps, to himself perhaps, that he now sorts beans as his mother did then. Of course he is not actually sorting beans, but rather his own 'sorrow' and 'worries.' He also confesses that while the mother had at least her son beside her, he now is alone.

This lonely and desolate solitude troubles us briefly with melancholy, but in the following final stanza 6, the state shifts once again. We do not know who now lives in the 'village we left behind' where we lived with mother, yet 'the light of our home shines bright inside the beans.' This 'inside the beans' is of course different from 'inside the beans' in stanza 2. The 'beans' in stanza 2 are beans to be discarded, but the 'beans' in stanza 6 are the beans the mother preserved for her son through the sublimation of all her 'sorrow' and 'worries' and matters related to 'words I did not know.' Having come to know this fact later, the speaker has continued until today to gaze upon it with such tender admiration.

Though already suggested, we would do well to add a bit more in closing our reading of this poem rather than stopping here. The speaker says 'today I sort the beans alone,' but this soliloquy is not the final sentiment of the recollection the speaker has undergone. The speaker increasingly yearns for his mother and, with that bright and warm light, that 'lamp,' raising the wick 'as before' to extend it into the present, neutralizes and overcomes certain 'sorrow' and 'worries' of recent times, thereby gaining strength.