by Kathleen McCarthy

(15-2, p. 6)

In traditional Korean society, the lives of well-born women were circumscribed by the walls that limned their households; they were expected to stay behind them. Only female entertainers, called kisaeng (a Chinese compound that can be loosely translated as "students of the arts performed by females") participated in the full panoply of social events that comprised the cultural lives of Korea's governing elite. In the capital, as members of the Court Entertainment Bureau, kisaeng presented elaborately choreographed music and dance pieces on festival days and occasions of state, twirling long crimson sashes and carrying a dazzling array of banners emblazoned with pairs of phoenixes and peacocks; when court officials required "willow waists" and mouth organs to foster a party mood at private banquets they were summoned out as well. At government offices throughout the provinces rosters of kisaeng were kept so that "glistening eyebrows" and "crimson skirts" would be on hand to greet visiting dignitaries and newly appointed administrators. At the end of along night of banqueting, they might also be called upon to "provide a pillow" and ease the loneliness of the hours remaining until dawn.

Kisaeng were lowborn women, and their occupation was hereditary. Their origins are obscure; a casual reference in the History of Koryo describes them as the descendants of the members of a migrant group, the Willow and Water People (Yangsuch'ok), whom the first ruler of the Koryo dynasty (918- 1392) had difficulty controlling and consequently designated as male and female slaves, sending them to various government offices established throughout the provinces. The Court Entertainment Bureau, one of the principal institutions with which kisaeng were associated, is mentioned in historical records as early as the beginning of the eleventh century. There are specific references to court dances imported from Sung China and performed by them during the reign of King Munjong (r.1046-1083) - including one in which fifty dancers formed an intricate pattern of lines to spell out (in Chinese characters!) the message, "May our Ruler Live Ten Thousand Years, and the World Enjoy Lasting Peace."

Extensive Training

Although in the Koryo period there is no evidence of an established procedure for procuring those who were to be trained for the Court Entertainment Bureau, during the Choson Dynasty certain provincial officials were required to select the brightest among the young and attractive female slaves under their jurisdiction and send them to the Court Entertainment Bureau in the capital at regular intervals. While all of these young women were trained as entertainers, they also received instruction in a variety of skills: some learned sewing and were assigned to the Palace Wardrobe Department, while others were taught the rudiments of medicine, including acupuncture and moxa treatment. The most promising students among them were sent to the Palace Infirmary.

In Korean society kisaeng seem to have been treated in large measure to a mixture of public condemnation and private approbation. There were always those who viewed their presence as a threat to Confucian propriety, and court records attest to many attempts, none successful for long, to ban them from the palace and to discontinue their affiliation with local government offices in the provinces. But the argument that headed off one of the most concerted efforts to ban kisaeng, during the reign of King Sejong, was hardly a ringing defense. A court official named Ho Chok (1369-1439) opined that "the bond between men and women is a strong human instinct that cannot be controlled. The kisaeng in the villages and towns are all public property, and if anyone lays hands on them, it does not matter. If you strictly ban kisaeng, then young officers of the court sent out on government business (15-2, p .7) will all behave immorally and lay hands on the daughters of private citizens, and our gallant young men will sink into crime," convincing Sejong that it would be unwise to make a change in policy.1 Despite the ostensible demarcation between "public property" and well-born propriety, kisaeng were often brought into the homes of the aristocracy as concubines.

Perhaps because of the ambivalence with which kisaeng were regarded, they have left only the faintest impression in written records of the Choson Dynasty. So little, in fact, remains as palpable evidence of their lives, that the discovery in Kyongju in 1990 of a grave and headstone bearing the inscription "The grave of Hongdo, a celebrated kisaeng of the Eastern Capital (Kyongju)" was heralded as an extremely important one.2 The 388 characters carved on the back of the headstone memorialize the life of Ch'oe Kyu-ok, born to a civil official of the second grade named Ch'oe Myong-dong, and his kisaeng concubine, in 1778. Kyu-ok was sent to Seoul and entered the Palace Wardrobe Department at the age of twenty, and because of her remarkable beauty and talent at singing and dancing enjoyed the favor of King Sunjo (r.1800-1834), who bestowed upon her the name Hongdo ("Radiant Peach"). Through the benefaction of one State Councilor Pak she was taken into the household of the king's father-in-law as a concubine, where she remained for more than twenty years. But when asked one day by the councilor why she was looking so downcast and so frail of late, she replied with this poem, in which she speaks of herself as though she were a parrot (a time-honored emblem for kisaeng, because of the similarities of their "costumes"): (15-2, p. 8)

In its collar of green and skirt of red,
it looks up day after day at cloudy skies and cries.
Locked away forever behind a gilded cage,
how will it ever know what freedom is?

Upon hearing her words, Councilor Pak decided to allow her to return home to Kyongju, where she remained "the toast of the gentlemen there who could indulge their tastes for poetry and wine," until she died at the age of 45.

Celebrated Poets

While all kisaeng were required to be skilled in singing, dancing and the playing of a musical instrument such as the mouth organ or the six-stringed zither, not all were accomplished poets. But since the ability to respond to an occasion with a graceful song or poem was one so highly valued by the aristocratic company they kept, it was inevitable that those who had such a talent were celebrated for it. But even in the case of Hwang Chini, a sixteenth century kisaeng recognized as a preeminent master of the Korean sijo verse form, precious little was actually written about her by her contemporaries. The following passage from a miscellany called A Record of Remarkable Things in Kaesong (Songdo kii), written by Yi Tokhyong (1566-1645) while he was serving as magistrate in Kaesong, delineates her extraordinary gifts.

In beauty and talent she was unrivaled in her day, and she was also the most gifted singer. People called her a goddess. When the Kaesong governor Song first took up his post, it happened to be a festival day. The local officials held a banquet for him, with a little wine, in the government headquarters, and Chini made an appearance. Her manner was poised and reserved, and her behavior stately and refined. Governor Song was a man who sought and enjoyed life's finer things, and had passed his life in perfumed halls of pleasure. At one glance he knew that here was no ordinary woman. He said to his attendants, "Her reputation is not undeserved," and delightedly made her acquaintance ....

When Governor Song held a banquet in his mother's honor all the most accomplished kisaeng and singing girls in the capital were summoned and came. Officials in neighboring towns and the gentry all sat lined up one after another, and dazzling powdered faces filled the hall, with clusters of yellow silk skirts everywhere.

Chini had not applied powder or rouge, and came dressed in a pale robe. With her natural beauty, there was no one in the whole country more beautiful. She projected a dazzling aura that moved everyone around her ....

When the wine had had its effect the governor ordered a serving girl to fill up a cup of it for Chini to drink, and he then ordered her to sing an impromptu song, by herself. Chini made up a song on the spot and sang in a voice so pure and vibrant it was absolutely beyond compare. It rose straight up into the cloudy avenues of heaven, the high and low notes clear and graceful, completely unlike an ordinary song. Governor Song clapped his hands and praised her copiously. "A genius!" he said.3

But only six of Hwang Chini's sijo are extant, and other verses attributed to kisaeng scattered through sijo anthologies bear only the wispiest identifications of their authors: "Maehwa (Plum Blossom), P'yongyang kisaeng," or Myongok (Bright jade), Suwon kisaeng."

It is no wonder, then, that when we look back even further in time to the "five hundred years" of the Koryo Dynasty, we find that kisaeng have left an even fainter imprint in the written record. Two extant collections of poetry, however, bear witness, even if obliquely, to their active participation in Koryo cultural life, and provide the barest hints of their literary achievements: (15-9, p. 9) a collection of "conversations about poems" (sihwa) written by Yi Il-lo (1152-1220), which he entitled Collection of Poems to Dispel Boredom (P'ahanjip); and a "sequel" to this work by a younger contemporary, Ch'oe Cha (1187-1260), called A Supplement to the Collection of Poems to Dispel Boredom (Pohanjip).

Hallmarks of Cultivation

These two informal "conversations about poems" contain descriptions of the circumstances under which a variety of poems were written and judgments about their particular merits. From these descriptions it is possible to elicit in broad outline the basic beliefs these contemporaries shared about poetry and its place in Koryo society, in which an erudite and spontaneous poetic response to whatever situation might present itself was considered the hallmark of a cultivated person. In Koryo, poetry was not what we think of it as today, not something done in solitude by those listening to voices others cannot hear, but something practiced by most members of the educated class, the aristocracy, with about as much frequency as we talk on the telephone. It was the opportunity they afforded themselves to use the knowledge of the Chinese classics they had to acquire in order to pass the civil service examination in the service of an aesthetic sense that prized spontaneity and playfulness and took particular delight in making unexpected linkages by way of allusion.

At court, the king would have to be pleased with poems praising the beauty of the peonies when they were in full bloom, the chrysanthemums in the fall, azalea bushes in late spring; notched candle contests were held monthly, in which the contestants had to compose poems in couplets, with an end rhyme and subject chosen by the king, in the time it took a flame to burn the length of a notch made in a candlestick. Dispatched to the provinces on official business, scholar-officials wrote poems at riverside pavilions, on mountain cliffs, on trees, on post station walls, sometimes signed and sometimes anonymous, and their contents would be passed along by word of mouth. As we will see, "kisaeng poems," those written to kisaeng or by them, traveled along one of the circuits in this poetry network. Unfortunately for us, understanding and appreciating them will necessitate a a certain amount of heavyhanded prompting, since these poems rely so heavily for their effects upon allusions to classical Chinese literature that are beyond our frame of reference.

The author of Collection of Poems to Dispel Boredom, Yi II-lo, chose to include in his anthology a poem written to a kisaeng by a friend named Im Ch'un, one known for his writing talent, but who never succeeded in passing the civil service examination and died in poverty at an early age. Im Ch'un's poem recounts undoubtedly the most famous romantic encounter with a Koryo kisaeng to have almost taken place. It seems that when night fell the kisaeng sent to accompany him simply decided not to stay! Contrasting this unfortunate denouement to the happy consummation of the relationship between the legendary flute-player Hsiao Shih, of Chinese legend, and his beautiful wife Lung Yu—her father, the Duke of Ch'in, built the Phoenix Pavilion for them, and one day they ascended into heaven accompanied by a phoenix—Im Ch'un ironically likens his own lot to that of the archer I, whose wife ran away from him and escaped to the moon with the elixir of immortality he had been guarding for the Queen Mother of the West, and thereafter became the goddess of the moon, forever out of reach.

(Soha) Im Ch'un tired of pursuing an official post and went to stay for a while in Songsan County. The local official there was well aware of his reputation and sent a kisaeng to sleep with him.
(15-2, p. 11) But when night fell she took off and went back to her own quarters. Disappointed and chagrined, Im wrote this poem:

She climbed the Phoenix Tower but not to be
   Hsiao Shih's companion.
From there she fled up to the sky to became the goddess
   of the moon instead,
unconcerned that she'd disobeyed the magistrate's command,
and muttering at her bad luck in being assigned to such
   a vagabond.

His use of classical references was extremely skillful, like the way artisans of old used to weave gold into brocade, leaving not a trace of the needle.4

Looking beyond the charming and amusing poem contained in this anecdote, it is heartening to see that in at least some instances kisaeng were allowed to follow their own inclinations in deciding with whom they were going to spend the night. We are left with the distinct impression, though, that had her guest been one who bore an official rank instead of the diploma-less Im Ch'un, either she would not have made so bold, or there would have been severe consequences for her act.

Sobering Glimpse

The following anecdote, again related by Yi Il-lo, offers a far more sobering glimpse of the vagaries and compensations involved in living the life of a kisaeng in the Koryo period. (Yi Il-lo and his contemporaries are expecting you to remember that the [Chinese] Lady Teng5 was once left with a scar on her cheek when Sun Ho, who was performing a dance, bumped into her. Her doctor advised that a salve containing the marrow from an otter's bone would cause the scar to disappear. And the reference below to Five Tombs [Wu-ling], five neighborhoods in the city of Ch'ang-an where pleasure-seeking young men of means used to gather, is of course meant to stand for Koryo's own young men of means.)

In the roster of entertainers in Namju there was one kisaeng who was more beautiful and talented than all the rest. A county magistrate there, whose name I have forgotten, took a great fancy to her. When his term of office was up and he was about to return to the capital, he got terribly drunk. "Before I've gone ten paces down the road somebody else is going to take her over," he said to his attendants, then he took a burning candle to both of her cheeks, so that her whole face was scarred.

Later, when the Lord of Yongyang [Chong Sum-myong, ?- 1151] passed through there on official government business, he (15-2, p. 12) saw this kisaeng and was angry and saddened by what had been done to her. He took out a scroll of fine paper patterned with faint indigo clouds and wrote a quatrain on it and gave it to her.

She was among all these flowers the most delicate and frail,
   but her beauty was marred by a savage wind.
No salve of otter's marrow can heal cheeks once smooth as
   jade;
and the grief of those nobles' sons seeking pleasure
   in Wu-ling will never end.

Then he gave her the following advice: "Any time an official comes through here on government business, you should show this poem to him." The kisaeng scrupulously followed his instruction, and everyone who saw the poem promptly gave something to help her out, since they wanted the Lord of Yongyang to hear about their generosity. And because of this special favor she received, the kisaeng earned twice what she had originally.6

Since the first and probably strongest reaction of those reading this story today is sympathy for the Namju kisaeng and anger at the person who cruelly abused her, it is for us a story without real resolution. It is instructive to note, however, that Yi II-lo's focus is elsewhere: she provides an occasion for the Lord of Yongyang to exhibit his poetic talent and solicitude; and the resolution of the story turns on his being able to provide her with an even more ample livelihood than she had enjoyed before. (How lucky for her!) It seems clear as well that from the kisaeng's point of view, her salvation came not in having someone write a moving and well-wrought poem about her plight but in the fact that the writer was someone of high status. Perhaps a goodly number of poems of mediocre quality or worse may also have been assiduously preserved by kisaeng seeking to enhance their stature.

Ch'oe Cha, in his Supplement to the Collection of Poems to Dispel Boredom (Pohanjip) even includes a very small number of poems written by kisaeng themselves. Acutely conscious of his reputation as a Confucian scholar (he in fact was a distant relation of Korea's foremost proponent of Confucianism, Ch'oe Ch'ung) Ch'oe Cha evidently felt vulnerable to criticism that in including poems by kisaeng he was being entirely too frivolous, and so goes out of his way in his preface to make it clear that he's not taking these women seriously as poets. "I've even put in some poems by women," he says, "even though they're not very good, just to give you a laugh," and he places these poems at the very end of the last section of his book.

Surprising Interests

But he remarks that Tonginhong (literally, "Inspiring-men Radiance"), a kisaeng from P'aengwon, a town in the north, "was surprisingly good at coming up with the right phrase," and mentions also that she once asked a student to teach her about the prose of the Chinese writer Han Yu (768-824), a request to which he acceded only after she had written a poem for him.

It is not difficult to understand why Ch'oe Cha would go out of his way to relate that Tonginhong wanted to study the prose of the Chinese writer Han Yu. If it were reported in the press today that Madonna had sought out an expert on the writings of Montaigne, there are many who would be similarly surprised. Had she asked to read the poems of Li Po, whose love of wine and moonlight was legendary, and who often included kisaeng in the settings of his poems, or the late T'ang poet Tu Mu, who spoke of wandering about the Yangtze River region carrying wine wherever he went, "with women beautiful as the fabled dancing girls of Ch'u," such an aspiration would hardly be worthy of comment, since in their poems she would find material she could put to valuable use when a boat ride in the moonlight or an exchange of drinking cups required it. But such a serious interest in prose writing for its own sake was indeed remarkable.

The fragments of her poems which Ch'oe Cha gives as examples of Tonginhong's wit and skill show that she was familiar with the Chinese Classic of Poetry, particularly a well-known poem from the Songs of Yung in which the metaphor of a cypress bark boat bobbing on the waves is used to suggest the vulnerability of a young woman whose fiance has suddenly died: she is being forced by her family to marry someone else, even though she wants desperately to remain faithful to her fiance's memory.

In "Giving vent to one's own feelings" she says,

A singing girl and a woman who is free,
   how far apart can their hearts be?
I truly admire the constancy of the one who
   sang about a cypress boat
and swore "until the day I die
   there'll be no other man for me."7

Ch'oe Cha felt compelled to add, "What she has in mind here ... seems similar to a wife's chaste devotion to her husband,"an explanation that underscores how puzzled he was by her claim that a kisaeng might understand and desire to demonstrate sexual fidelity to one man, as well-born women were expected to. (15-2, p. 13)

Flogged for her Impertinence

If Tonginhong is in truth "giving vent to her feelings," as the title suggests, then her insistence that enslaved women as well as well- born ones would serve "one husband only" if they could, is distinctly echoed several centuries later by the famous fictional heroine Ch'unhyang, a kisaeng (or daughter of a kisaeng, in a variant text) who refused a magistrate whom she had been ordered to accompany because of a vow made earlier to a young (well-born) lover. "A woman's virtue is the same for those of high rank and low," she protested, and was flogged and imprisoned for her impertinence.

The last entry in Ch'oe Cha's collection is about Udol (her name is said to be onomatopoeia for a sound made when expressing admiring approval), a kisaeng assigned to a military post in the northwest frontier town of Yongsong. Around the year 1254, when his book was printed, this was an area in which remnant bands of Khitan soldiers were still active, although their threat to the security of the country as a whole had been eliminated in 1219, when the Mongol and Koryo armies had joined to defeat them. In the story retold here, Udol encounters a civil official named Song Kuk-ch'om, a man of such frosty demeanor that even the Mongol Commander-in-Chief Sartaq had praised his stern composure during treaty negotiations in 1231. The kind of self-control which Song Kuk-ch'om prided himself upon having was often attributed in Koryo verse to a T'ang dynasty statesman, the Lord of Kwangp'ing, whom a late T'ang poet had once praised for his "stomach of iron and heart of stone."

When Song Kuk-ch'om was serving as an inspector, he was sent out as an advisor to the Northwest Military Command. In Yongsong there was a kisaeng at the government office named Udol, and she was the one of whom all the diplomats became enamored when they passed through there on official business. She was good at matching impromptu verses sung by the guests and made sure that everyone always had a really good time. Song Kuk-ch'om was the only one who did not become intimate with her, so she wrote a poem and presented it to him. It went:

You have Kwang-p'ing's iron will, and I've always
   known that's true,
so it was never my intention to share a pillow with you.
I had hoped for an evening of poetry and wine,
where the elegant verses we'd compose would be the bond
   between us two.8

Udol has masterfully turned the tables on Song Kuk-ch'om and incorporated his rebuff into a poem in which she effectively has the last word, in a teasing suggestion that he is somewhat of a philistine, uncomprehending of the "spiritual bond" she sought, which would have found its expression in the exchange of poetry.

The wit embodied in this verse, and particularly the lightfooted ease with which Udol manages to turn a setting that might seem potentially embarrassing or at the least an unpromising opportunity, into a setting for a poem, was a skill particularly prized by Koryo writers. A talent for witty repartee was always valued in a kisaeng, and there are quite a number of anecdotes in which unsuspecting and arrogant gentlemen have had their pretensions punctured by a kisaeng's acerbic tongue.

Viewed from our late twentieth-century vantage, it is of course a matter of no inconsiderable anguish that what has come down to us reflecting the lives, concerns and literary talents of women during the 500 years of the Koryo dynasty should be contained in just these two poems by Tonginhong and Udol, which Ch'oe Cha proclaimed he had included in his collection to give his readers "a good laugh." But when we look back and laud these poems as treasures "both worth a thousand pieces of gold," as the historian Yi Nung-hwa (1869-1943) has done, perhaps we can take some comfort in the wisdom of the proverbial saying: it is she who laughs last, who laughs best.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

KATHLEEN MCCARTHY received her Ph.D. in Korean literature from Harvard University in 1991. She currently teaches a course on modern Korean literature there.

Notes

1. Song Hyon, Yongchae chonghwa, Yi Sok-ho, ed., Han'guk myongjo taejonjip, trans. Yi Sang-bo (Seoul: Taeyang sojok, 1972), p. 114.
2. Hankuk Ilbo, 19 August 1990.
3. Yi Tok-hyong, Songdo kii. Taedong yasung vol. 17, p. 336. Hwang Chini's reputation evidently spread to China as well. Yi Tok-hyong goes on to relate that "At that time a Chinese envoy passed through Kaesong, and from afar and near the gentry and their wives gathered to watch the procession pass. They stood by the trees on the left side of the road. And one Tu Mu, a member of the embassy, looked over at Chini, then whipped his horse and rode over to where she was. He stared at her for a long time before continuing on. When he got to the quarters they were to stay in, he said to the interpreter, "You've got the most beautiful woman in the world in this country."
4. Yi II-lo, P'ahanjip, Hankuk myongio taejonjip, p. 145.
5. From the Shih-i-chi (Gathering Remaining Accounts) by Wang Chia (d.c. 324).
6. P'abanjip, p. 144.
7. Ch'oe Cha, Pobanjip, Hankuk myongjo taejonjip, p. 348.
8. Pohanjip, p. 350.