Cursed Bunny(13)
Grandfather doesn’t remember how the son of such a respected family and himself, whose house made cursed fetishes, became friends. “I don’t really recall,” he has said to me several times. Grandfather’s family, my family in other words, are officially “ironsmiths.” We do in fact make or fix farming implements and all sorts of metal things when tasked, but everyone in our neighborhood, down to the little children, knows what our real work is.
Every profession referred to by the polite, contemporary term “occultist”—shamans, fortune-tellers, and morticians— was treated like dirt back then. Such discrimination was far from fair, but that’s the way it was. Grandfather’s family, or I should say my family, were barely afforded the most basic gestures of courtesy. People had no idea what to make of us. We weren’t shamans, we didn’t offer exorcism rituals for a price, we couldn’t tell people’s fortunes, and we were completely unrelated to the business of preparing corpses or the funeral trade. We had something to do with the occult, but no one dared to say out loud what it was, and our ironsmith trade did solid business on the surface. On top of everything else, there was a rumor that we would put a curse on anyone who crossed us. My family would never use a cursed fetish on someone we knew personally, but our neighbors wouldn’t have known that, and even if they had, they wouldn’t have bothered us, anyways. In any event, we were given a wide berth.
“But my friend did not care about that sort of thing,” Grandfather repeatedly insisted. This friend didn’t care about the rumors about town, the whispers of the others, the terrified yet curious glances of the neighbors. To the spirit artisan’s son, all of the neighborhood children were his friends by default, and he found no reason to not play with someone simply because of their parents’ occupation. And because the son of the rich, landed distillery family considered Grandfather a friend, the other children came to accept Grandfather as well.
“His parents were good and wise,” Grandfather emphasizes yet again. “They never used their money or power as an excuse to treat others harshly—they bowed as low as anyone else when they greeted their neighbors, and they were always the first to help out with weddings and funerals and such.”
This family also happened to be, in today’s parlance, innovative entrepreneurs. They had humble beginnings, distilling a batch of spirits whenever they felt like it for their neighbors, and moved on to standardizing and modernizing their production, expanding their sales network nationally. Then, the Korean War. They fled southward like everyone else and returned after the war to find the distillery and neighborhood in ruins. But the family was not disheartened. If anything, they were more determined than ever to use this as an opportunity to start afresh with truly modernized, standardized production.
My grandfather’s friend understood his parents’ ambitions and inherited them himself.
“We thought he would study business in college because he was going to be the owner, but he specialized in engineering instead. He said he would figure out how to mass produce the taste of wine that was distilled by hand from hardsteamed rice. A nineteen-year-old, fresh out of high school, saying he would conquer the world with his family’s spirits! He was all fired up back then.”
What threw a wrench into his plans was a new national food policy. At its core was the government’s insistence that Korea secure its rice supply, and the use of rice in the fermenting of spirits was subsequently forbidden. The traditional method—of pouring water into a mixture of hardsteamed and malted rice and letting it ferment—was replaced by ethanol, an industrial alcohol, which flooded the market. To make this revolting solution palatable, beverage companies mixed the ethanol with water and artificial flavoring.
My grandfather’s friend was devastated. But he didn’t give up. He was the last of several generations of skilled distillers, armed with specialized knowledge in this particular area. He accepted the government’s stance that rice was precious, that eating it was more important than drinking it. He researched production methods that could restore the old taste by imitating the traditional by-hand methods—the proportion of ingredients, alcohol level, fermentation temperature, and distillation methods—as much as possible within compliance of national policy.
Grandfather always pauses dramatically at this point in the story. “So, what do you think happened after that? Can you guess if he succeeded or failed?”
Again, I’ve heard the story many times. I already know the answer. But as always, I smile and shake my head.
“He succeeded. He was a smart and steadfast kid.” Then, Grandfather smiles sadly. “But then he lost everything.”
Grandfather’s friend cared only about developing delicious, healthy spirits; he had no idea that in the new, post-war age, connections with government higher-ups, networking, entertaining, and the occasional bribe and backdoor dealing were more important than product quality or technology.
And there was a much larger company that had the transitioning liquor market in their sights, a company that had strong political connections and was skilled in said business-related entertaining. This company had the gall to advertise their mixture of alcohol and artificial flavoring as “a drink for the people” and “the taste of tradition.” They ran legitimate ads in newspapers and television while organizing a parallel slander campaign, spreading the lie that the company of my grandfather’s friend mixed “industrial-use alcohol” into their beverages. They claimed that anyone who drank it would become blind, lame, or even fatally poisoned.