Writings

Planaria

by Jeon Sang-guk, translated by C. La Shure

“Hey, Mr. Planaria!” Sa said. “These days there’s been a lot of talk about human cloning.”

Actually, I had asked him to come over. Perhaps I wanted him to help me discover the source of the bird song I had heard in the house.

“You cutting up the bodies of planaria is ultimately cloning living things, isn’t it?”

“Of course. But that’s different from cloning by dividing a fertilized egg in half and making a different organism from it. With planaria, organism A is merely taking a part of itself and making another organism A—it is not a mother-child relationship cloning.”

“The dominant opinion on human cloning is still negative, isn’t it?” he said. I think he might have mentioned once that he was writing a children’s story about human cloning.

“Yes, they say that it violates God’s creative principle. That is, new life must be created by a union of male and female, but cloning makes procreation possible without sex.”

“Fish procreate by external fertilization, don’t they?”

“That’s just another way for the male and female to have sex.”

I once asked her what she thought about human cloning. “I think we have to wait and see,” she said. “Just being opposed to human cloning won’t stop it from happening. Science is the bridesmaid of evolution, you know. It will go as far as it can. I’ve learned a thing or two by watching you study. About the evolution from asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction, I mean. As time goes by, creatures compete for food and new environments are created and destroyed, so a new method of procreation is developed that allows creatures to adapt. That new method would be sexual reproduction. It’s a method that allows the offspring of the mother to adapt to a slightly different environment. But if the offspring cannot survive in that environment because of the mother’s bad genes, those genes must be weeded out.”

I laughed. “So I guess that’s why there’s been talk of Dolly, the cloned sheep.”

“I don’t know much about genetics, but it’s probably the same principle.”

“Mr. Planaria,” said Sa, “Since you’ve already started, why don’t you try cloning a human as well? The first thing we must do is return the vanished fairy to life.”

“That’s something for writers like you to do.”

“True. Shall I write you a story where the fairy comes back?”

“She’s come back.”

“What do you mean?” Sa looked around the house in surprise. “Is that what you called me about before?”

It was true. The girl who had vanished had reappeared. When I got out of bed that morning I heard that sound. Twitter twitter, twitter scree.... It was clearly the song of the crowned willow warbler that had come from her mouth. I searched every corner of the living room and veranda, but there was no bird to be seen. But already for several days I could hear the sound at certain times of the day, when the other sounds died down. It was a melody more clear than that which had come from her mouth. Twitter twitter, twitter scree.... While searching the house for the source of the sound I discovered what was clearly one of her pubic hairs, thick and shiny, beneath the bed. She used to wear nothing at all when she went to bed. Even when she got up to go to the bathroom, it was without shame in the nude. While I sat there holding the single pubic hair, I could no longer hear the warbler’s song.

“Is it true that the fairy raised those flowers?”

“Heh, yeah.” Fiddling with the flowerpots on the veranda was her only hobby. She would save branches or roots pruned from flowering trees or garden plants and plant them in the flowerpots. They were merely cuttings, but strangely enough just about everything she planted in the earth took root. Branches of lantana and fig trees took root, and a French balsam grew quickly.

After she vanished, the most astonishing thing that happened in the house was that the wildflower that had died completely came back to life. It was an orchid that she had discovered in a valley near the highway three years ago on the way back from a trip to the Peace Dam. She had dug it up with her fingers from between the rocks of a small waterfall. “I thought I might even find wild ginseng. Last night a naked child appeared to me in a dream and led me into the mountains.” This is what she said as she planted the orchid in a hole in a decorative stone. The next summer that orchid bloomed with light purple flowers. But that was it. Last year there were no new shoots, and upon digging it up we discovered that the thick roots had completely rotted. She planted a perennial shrub on top of this, but even that dried up and died. A few days ago, though, I saw a new orchid shoot in that spot.

“Wow, that’s really amazing. Even if you were imagining the bird’s song, how can a plant come to life again in that stone? This might even be a sign of shamanic powers.”

“What are you talking about, shamanic powers?”

“I’m talking about the powers of a mudang.”

“A mudang?”

“That’s right. You’d know better than I, but that woman was a shaman, a mudang. The reason the bird’s song came from her mouth is that she was possessed by the spirit of a dead child. They call that sort of woman a taeju. If it is a girl child, they call her a myeongdo, and In North Korea, a person possessed with the spirit of a dead child is called a saetani—literally, ‘a person filled with a bird’s song.’”

“Since when did you become an expert on shamanism?”

“I’m right, I’m telling you. Even if she wasn’t a mudang, it’s clear that she was suffering from a shamanic illness that would have required her to hold a spirit-invocation rite.”

“You’re writing a fairy tale.”

“This is just my feeling, but maybe she.... Did she have any symptoms of epilepsy?”

“Really, how can you talk like that about someone who isn’t here?”

“Think about it—saying she won’t get married, and further that she will never have children, what’s that? She’s obviously rejecting her heredity. That time when she poisoned herself can be seen in the same way. Am I wrong?”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear you say that.”

“I suppose you would—after all, it’s such a tragedy to fall headlong from the heavens down to earth.”

At that moment I felt something suddenly rush through my whole body and I grew dizzy. “Hey, what’s wrong with you?” Sa was holding my arm. “I was just trying to get you to forget about her. You get too attached to things. As long as your memory of that woman is still alive you’re going to be unhappy. I’ve never seen a smiling mudang. It must not be easy having to live with another person’s soul inside you.”

I moved the out-of-season orchid shoot into the shade and sprayed it with some water.

“That must die as well.” Sa had come out onto the veranda from the kitchen with a glass of liquor in his hand. “You must drive that woman’s spirit from your body. Just like you killed that woman, you must kill everything related to her.”

“What do you mean I killed her?”

“You were afraid that she would leave. That attachment is what killed her.”

“You don’t know when to stop, do you?”

“Of course you don’t want to remember. You might have even already completely forgotten that you killed her. There are many people who can’t remember what crimes they have committed.”

I didn’t think I had had all that much to drink, but I was very drunk. Sa left, also weaving drunkenly. As he left, he aroused my ire with a malicious remark. “And here I thought that you were making confession for having killed her.”

I killed her? I killed her, and I kill her and kill her, like cutting a planaria this way and that I cut her body with a sharp knife, I cleanly divide her head and body and limbs, twitter twitter scree... take all the unclean blood from my body and fill me again with clean blood, take all the wicked shamanic energy from the genes in my brain, kill the spirit energy of my mother who dances on the ladder of blades, kill the evil spirit of the hanged man I see whether my eyes are open or closed, twitter twitter scree... the ghost of the drowned, the ghost of the child fallen into the manure pail, the ghost of the man dead of consumption, the ghost of the woman who gave her body to the Americans and then killed herself, the ghost of the maiden who died scooping out the child of a rape, the ghost of the epileptic who died foaming at the mouth, kill them all, kill them all, throw them with a splash into the well, the aborted fetus with a splash, the man with a splash, the woman with a splash, I eat you, the planaria eat me, the pieces of the planaria come to life, the planaria form a mob and crawl out of the tank and eat the geraniums and the cyclamens and the orchid and the cycads and her sandals and her shoes and her hair and my suit and my brain and my liver, “You killed me and you ate me,” thousands and thousands of planaria crawl over my body.