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The old Korean song

By Lyman McLallen

Korea is one of the oldest countries in the world yet at the same time one of the newest. Its capital, Seoul, is a vast modern city, one of the largest on Earth, with more skyscrapers than you can count. Its transportation system is a marvel, for Seoul has one of the finest subway rail systems on the planet with trains that will take you to every neighborhood in the city and out to many parts of the metropolitan area and beyond.

The trains and buses run frequently and arrive and depart like clockwork, plus there are always taxis everywhere, making it so easy to get around Seoul that you don't need a car.

From early in the morning through the afternoon and late into the evening, millions of people go to work and return home riding the subway.

A couple of weeks ago I was standing in a crowded subway car in the late afternoon holding onto the strap to keep from falling when I noticed the elderly couple sitting in that section of the car reserved for older people and pregnant women. They had their two, young granddaughters with them who couldn't have been more than four or five years old.

I couldn't help but listen as the old man started singing to his granddaughters in a soft but grizzled voice, and though I couldn't tell for sure because I had never heard that song before, I knew it was a children's song and I also knew that he had learned it when he was a child himself.

While he sang he gently held his granddaughters' small tender hands in his rough old hands, hands shaped and worn by a lifetime of work, while through their sweet little children's eyes they looked deeply into their grandfather's timeworn face as he sang to them.

The next thing I knew they were singing with him, grandfather and granddaughters singing together in the crowded subway car, so softly you would hardly notice them. (The grandmother, sitting next to the grandfather, holding onto his arm, watched her granddaughters and him sing, and I thought I could hear her hum the song along with them.)

This happened in the midst a couple of thousand other people riding on the train, getting to where they needed to go so they could do their jobs to keep one of the biggest, busiest, most bustling cities on Earth moving.

I imagine that some seventy years ago in some place in old Korea long before the subway could have even been an idea, the grandfather's old hands were young and small and tender just like his granddaughters' hands are now. I also imagine that his grandfathers and grandmothers ― his granddaughters' great-great-grandparents ― held his little precious hands in their old hands while they sang an earlier rendition of that song to him, not thinking at the time that one day he would become a grandfather and sing to his own grandchildren on a subway car riding through the modern city that Seoul is today.

In an earlier time those old hands of his grandparents were themselves once small and tender and young and their grandparents surely sang to them, and so the singing between grandparents and grandchildren has been echoing down through the generations since Korea's earliest days. Even during those darkest of times when Koreans held on with nothing but hope. Long before Seoul became one of the greatest cities on Earth, long before "Made in Korea" was stamped on cars, ships, high-end electronics, and all manner of other things came to stand for quality the world over, and even long before King Sejong with his group of scholars developed "hangeul", or the Korean alphabet.

Riding on the train that afternoon it struck me that in listening to the grandfather singing with his granddaughters I was hearing melodies that had their beginnings in Korea's earliest days and I know that in time the two young girls will grow up to be mothers and then grandmothers. And they too will sing this song to their grandchildren and this is how such an ancient song of Korea lives on to reach the next generation and the next and on after that. If you listen carefully you can hear, even now, the voices from those very first Korean grandparents who sang to their grandchildren a long, long time ago.

It is not brick and mortar and stone, after all, nor steel and glass and concrete that keep a civilization going, for these solid things will not last. Long before they crumble and turn to dust people tear them down and build something newer and finer in their places, for these will quickly become worn and old and too, out-of-style to suit people's tastes and needs.

Generations of Koreans not yet born will replace even this great modern subway with some new magical invention we can't yet imagine. People who will live in that not-so-distant era will look back upon these gleaming wonders of today's modern Seoul as quaint and old-fashioned and will wonder how their ancestors who are alive now get around the way they do.

The children's song that I heard the grandfather and his granddaughters singing on that crowded subway car that afternoon a couple of weeks ago will continue to resonate through old and young Korean hearts and voices for as long as there is a Korea. Though the song has no more substance than the blue of the sky, Koreans have been singing it with their children and grandchildren since their most ancient of times. Each succeeding generation recreating the song anew, so that for me, an American listening to a grandfather and his granddaughters singing that song in harmony while riding on the subway added a little joy to the afternoon in a way I didn't expect.

The writer is a professor in the English College of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

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