Princess Bari by Sok-yong Hwang

– but she also has to wash other people’s clothes and weed their fields and do all sorts of lowly tasks. She repels ghosts and travels to Hell. She saves the sinners who are trapped there, and when she reaches the western sky there is a guardian totem pole there, a jangseung , waiting for her. Bari loses a bet with the totem pole and has to marry him and have his children and work for him for nine long years before he will give her the life-giving water. She endures all manner of hardship there at the ends of the Earth, and on her journey back she sees the boats that travel to the other world. And on the decks of those boats are souls burdened with their karma.”
    â€œGrandma, you left out the part about how she gets the life-giving water!”
    â€œYes, yes, you’re right. Granny forgot. Bari asks the jangseung for the water, and that rat tells her: ‘You’ve had it all along. It’s the same water we use every day to cook rice and do laundry.’ ”
    â€œSo Princess Bari did all that work for nothing?”
    â€œNo, no. She gained the ability to recognize which water gives you eternal life.”
    â€œWhat does that mean?”
    â€œYou’ll understand when you’re older. When she returns and sprays the life-giving water on her parents, they recover and the whole world gets better again. Ever since then, Old Grandmother Bari has lived inside of us. She’s inside me and inside you, too.”
    I heard the story of Princess Bari many times while lying next to my grandmother in the dark. Back then I used to dream all kinds of dreams and, as I mentioned before, other than the one in which my mother and two sisters stare at me silently, none of them left much of an impression on me – except a dream I had about the Great Princess Bari. But I don’t remember for certain whether I had that dream when I was living in the dugout hut with Grandmother, or after she passed away.
    *
    There are times when I am in the middle of a dream and I think to myself, I’m dreaming right now , even as I keep following the course of the dream. When the Great Princess Bari appeared in my dream, I was strolling along a wide, empty beach. At the other end of the beach, on the white sand devoid of any tree and under the blue sky devoid of any cloud, stood a single house. It had a huge tiled roof and latticed windows and doors. The next thing I knew, I was inside. Pillars with a circumference as wide as my arms could reach around stood in a row. Sunlight slanted down into a broad corridor that looked like a palace or temple that I would later come to visit after I’d left the North for good, but stone walls blocked the light from reaching any further. It was so dark that I didn’t move from where I stood, but then the room began to brighten, as if someone had turned on a small lamp, and the faint, glimmering light spread up the walls all the way to the ridgepole at the top of the high ceiling. I took a step forward, and then another step. Someone appeared in the light. It wasn’t a golden light, rather a bright glare like the sun on a summer day, and in it hovered the white silhouette of a person. I wasn’t sure if it was her hair colour or just the light, but her hair was all white and held in an old-fashioned chignon with a long hairpin, and she wore white mourning clothes. The countless pleats in her long, loose skirt swayed as if stirred by a stray breeze. Her face was white too; I could not tell whether she was old or young, but I could sense that she was smiling gently. The figure, which floated there impassively, vanished when I took a step back and reappeared when I took a step forward. But when I stepped into the room again later, she was gone. I committed the vision to memory. I never saw her again, but that was because Chilsung and my grandmother would sometimes appear in my dreams instead to help me, even after I’d travelled to a faraway