Poetry underneath the essays, and a pair of children’s names

Pi Cheon-deuk is familiar as an essayist, this reading writes, but his literary starting point was poetry, and that, they suggest, is why the essays are easy to picture. Brief, lyrical figures let even a first-time reader of essays come in without strain. From a collection they name Inyeon they lift a passage in the essay “Seo-yeong and Nan-yeong”: the faintly blue-black, moist eyes of a baby, and the claim that to liken those eyes to a jewel or a star is a mistake. They place that sentence at this reading’ page 143.

Asako, three times: sneakers, an umbrella, a lily

The essay the writer loves best — and, they add, the most famous of Pi Cheon-deuk’s essays — is “Inyeon.” It is the story of Pi Cheon-deuk and Asako, the child of the house where he lodged, and in truth, they write, there is no especially recordable incident. They met when Asako was a child, again briefly ten years later, and a last time ten years after that. What makes so plain a story feel precious, they argue, is both the feeling he brings to the memory and the grain of the prose.

The child Asako shows him white sneakers, going as far as her school; ten years later she comes running with a light-green umbrella; at the last meeting he figures her as a wilting lily, a figure they say lets even a stranger gauge what kind of person she was. They quote: “One may long for someone and yet never meet them again; one may go through a life unable to forget, and still choose not to meet. Asako and I met three times. The third time, it would have been better not to have met.” The line, they place at page 157. That last sentence lands, they add, only because the days before it were written so clearly.

A dog in a summer alley, and a fourth meeting the writer would still keep

Beside Asako the writer sets a stray dog. In middle school, on a hot summer day, they met a dog rooting through a heap of rubbish in an alley: a dog that had once been white, now grey, too tired to notice a person approaching, its frayed collar still looking, they write, like a thread of hope toward an owner. They rinsed an empty plastic bottle from a bag and gave it water; the dog drank at once and looked up with a kind eye. For days the eye kept them from sleep. When the rains came they walked the alley again, found the dog wetter and thinner under a utility pole, and brought it home; a mother who had objected softened in the doorway, a father said they might keep it if no owner came. At the hospital they were told infection from long life on the street would end the dog within days. A few days later, they write, no miracle came.

The wilted lily made them think of that dog. They would have been less sad, they admit, had they not met again; they also think it was well that they did, so the dog’s last days were warm. The loneliness of a passed bond, they conclude, is the price of the kindness and love felt before it passed. They would meet a fourth or fifth time even so. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. This reading, a student reading of Pi Cheon-deuk’s essay “Inyeon,” with Asako’s three meetings, the quoted lines as this reading places them, and a stray-dog analogy left as the writer sets it.

Last updated: 15 November 2026