One day, the son of the heavenly king came upon a she-bear and a tigress. He gave each twenty pieces of garlic and some mugwort and sent them into a cave where they were to stay one hundred nights. Inside the dark cave, nights and days passed ever so slowly. A few nights later, the tigress got restless and bored and left the cave for her enchanted forest. But the she-bear endured those dark one hundred nights and emerged as a beautiful woman to marry the son of the king of heaven. I had seen the beginning of the Korean people.
Those thousands of years shifted restlessly and tumultuously as I slept. I saw how Korean women, the descendants of the she-bear woman and the |
