— By Lee Jong-mun
A woman from Hadong, widowed at 55, buries her husband in the hills and returns home beating the ground in grief. Her 82-year-old mother-in-law stands at the door and says: Give me rice.
If the Hadong woman is 55, we can guess her departed husband was around 60 — an age still in the prime of life, too young even for senior discounts. We cannot know the circumstances, but his journey through this world ended abruptly. The mother-in-law appears not to have gone to the burial site. Did the family hold her back, hoping to spare her the grief of outliving her child? Yet a single line of greeting to her daughter-in-law tells us everything at once. And the phrase is striking — not "bap jwo," the standard Korean for "give me rice," but "bap do," the Gyeongsang dialect. Was the mother-in-law reminding us anew that rice itself is the Way? On days when innocent people are dying in wars and disasters on the far side of the world, are we not all crying out "bap do" as if nothing were amiss?
