Tales of a Korean Grandmother Read Online Free Page A

secret. The Emperor knew of plots being hatched to cause him much trouble. With such pottery hats he could be sure that his spies would hear all that went on.
    "The people did not like these great burdensome hats, and they wanted to make them smaller," the old woman continued. "Yet I know one tale of how his great hat saved the life of a man. It happened in early spring when the river was still covered with its winter cloak of ice. A man walking across the ice stepped upon a thin place and fell through into the water. He would have drowned if his broad hat had not caught on the edges of the hole.
    "Crowds gathered on the bank like ants running to feast on a fishbone. The man's son wrung his hands. He had started forward to pull his father out by his hat. But the village elder cried, 'Wait! Do not tug at his hat. His chin strap will break and he surely will drown.'
    "The wise old man told the son to break through the crown of the big pottery hat so that he could grasp his father's topknot. Standing up stiff like a horn, it made an excellent handle. With a firm grip on the topknot the son was able to pull his father safely up out of the water."
    "What happened to all those pottery hats, Halmoni?" Yong Tu asked when the old woman paused for a breath.
    "Ai, they were probably broken at last, or else turned upside down and used for storing rice or soybeans. To please their customers, the hatmakers first left off the clay covering upon the straw framework. Then they made the hats smaller and smaller, and lighter and lighter. And since men had by that time learned to live without fighting, the Emperor's pottery hat decree was withdrawn.
    "But even today our men's hats are designed chiefly to protect and cover up their precious topknots. That is why they wear hats inside, as well as outside, their own houses. So's topknot-pulling with the dishonest peddler shows what happens to persons who go about without hats."
    Yong Tu admired above everything the tall black hats made of fine horsehair gauze, which were worn by his father and his uncles. He liked to lift them, because he never could believe hats could be so light. "They're no heavier than feathers," he used to say to Ok Cha. Indeed their father's hat weighed only a little more than an ounce.
    On cloudy days the boy was often sent to fetch the rain cover for his father's horsehair hat. The slightest dampness would melt the stiffening of its crown which stood up so proudly. An oiled-paper pleated covering, shaped like a tiny tent, was kept tucked inside Kim Hong Chip's sleeve, whence it could be quickly pulled out when the rain came.
    Yong Tu admired also the neat gauze skullcap his father wore under the hat, with his fine upstanding topknot rising through the hole in its top. Like most yangbans, Kim Hong Chip sometimes put a small silver pin in his topknot. That was to drive away evil spirits which might wish to grab it. Other times he wore in it a button of jade, amber, or turquoise.
    The amber beads on the chin strap that held his hat firmly upon his dignified head were a sign of this man's importance. More ordinary men had only a narrow black ribbon tied under their chins.
    Yong Tu never thought it strange that a boy of ten years, like himself, should wear a long braid down his back, like a girl. It never occurred to him to wonder why his father and his uncles should bother with long hair, which had to be combed and oiled with such care.
    This boy looked forward to the time when he, too, would be old enough to marry and put his hair up in the honorable topknot. That would be a great day, a lucky day chosen by the soothsayer. All the family would gather in the Hall of Ceremonies. Kim Hong Chip, as Master of the House, would unbraid his son's long hair. He would then comb it upward, giving it a firm twist and tying it tightly with string. The horsehair cap would be put on, and in his new long white coat, Yong Tu would bow before the tablets of the Ancestors. Then they, too, would