Schoolmaster Kim

Their story

Cheonghak-dong, Blue Crane Village, is a valley high on Jirisan named for a legend about a hidden paradise where blue cranes nest, and people there still keep the old ways. For forty years he has taught the classics in its traditional one-room village school. In school holidays city kids come to learn manners, and the parents who brought them kept begging, "Please, look at my child's study path," so he began reading saju with what the old schoolmaster before him had taught him. Now it's mostly adults with exams and parents worried about their kids. Married men traditionally tie a topknot, but his wife likes his long braid better, so he has kept the braid for forty years. He always keeps a bundle of switch twigs by his side, and in forty years he has never once brought it down.