It was 1968 when I first saw Oedolgae, so it’s already been 50 years.
It was when Seoulites started buying tangerine orchards and my mother and father also bought a farm in Namwon-eup that I started going to Jeju Island.
I came to Jeju for the first time in a long time.
When Jeju started falling out of favor with many people, the Olle trail was made. Many people walk along Olle trail and the Chinese are coming to Jeju a lot these days, so people joke that Jeju Island will become a part of China.
Oedolgae in Seogwipo is tall and lofty as always.
It’s one of the reasons that route 7 of Olle trail has become famous.
Oedolgae is 20 meters high and 10 meters wide. The grey, dense rock stands tall in Jeju with its many black, vesicular basalts. The sea rocks in the surrounding area form a glorious view with sea cliffs and caves.
I don’t remember standing here with my mother,
Professor Inhee Lee, who was a dean of the Department of Family Studies at Dongduk Women's University and became a friend of my mother as she understood my mother’s poetry, stood in front of Oedolgae with my mother and said “I love this Oedolgae. It’s the best in Jeju,” and my mother, who was deeply moved by this replied, “Me too!” They hugged each other and spun like they were dancing. . I heard this from Professor Lee after my mother was gone – and for a while I looked at Oedolgae with affectionate eyes.
My mother was particularly fond of Jeju due to the memories of the farm that she tended there with my father for several years. She also wrote many poems on Jeju, with Hallasan and tangerine orchards and the like as a theme.
I wondered why the only poetry monument of Hoyun Son, a Korean poet who wrote poems all her life in Korea, was standing in Japan. The thought that my mother dearly loved Jeju also came across my mind. So when I met two congressmen of Jeju, I tried to persuade them that engraving a line of my mother's 'Oedolgae' in Korean, Japanese, English and Chinese (as is becoming popular nowadays) would add new meaning to this view and people would be moved by the poetic spirit of Son's love for Jeju and Jeju will stand out as 'Cultural Jeju.' They didn't understand me at all, saying "Jeju is yet to embrace that kind of culture."
I have been hearing that for decades.
And a path to the right leads to a place where the famous TV series Jewel in the Palace was filmed. There is a big picture of actors and actresses of Jewel in the Palace, and replicas of them with a hole in the space of a face. People stick their faces in that hole and take pictures.
A country which parades statutes or signboards of famous actors or politicians is not an advanced country.
China built a statue of Fan Zhongyan, a prominent poet of the Song dynasty, with a line of one of his poems in the middle of a station square recently built in Suzhou to spread their humanistic spirit.
People passing by that station would knowingly or unknowingly keep its spirit in their mind.
And beyond that, Beomsom Island, which is flat like a low wooden bench, can be seen in the distance. I move my eyes back to Oedolgae on the right, soaring over the sea. I have to go back to the taxi waiting for me, but I cannot seem to move.
I look back again and again, at the thought of the pitiful figure of a grandmother waiting silently for her husband who went fishing, eventually transformed into Oedolgae Rock, and of my mother who would have ardently wished that the old woman's husband would come back, and who would have danced hereabout with a wish that if the old woman's husband came back then her own husband that had left her suddenly would came back.
An old woman became a rock after waiting for her husband who went fishing but there is no news of a fishing boat coming back.
Tanka by Hoyun Son
