2. When Spring Comes to Hills and Dales
When Spring Comes to Hills and Dales is about a family that suffers from leprosy. Because of people's preconceived ideas and misunderstandings about the nature of the disease, this family is condemned by society and alienated from the rest of the world.
Dallae and Father, the two protagonists of the play, live in a dreary and dark dugout. Because her mother is a leper, their life is all the more dreary and dark. To add to their misery is bureaucratic tyranny. The Magistrate wants Dallae to be one of his concubines. Father wants his daughter to run away with a village boy named Bawoo who loves her. But Dallae insists that she live with her leper mother. In the final scene of the play, they leave their village and escape to the animal land deep in a distant mountain too inaccessible for ordinary human habitation. All four of them are lepers now. They all wear leper's masks. Nevertheless, their life together here in this fairy land is bright and full of vigor with their dreary and dark past completely liquidated. Together with the animals, they dance and sing to the resurrection and rejuvenation of their life.
Whoopee!
Hurray! Hurray!
Let's move on!
My mother-in-law's mask,
My father-in-law's mask,
My beloved wife's mask,
I am going to wear myself.
Whee! Let's move on!
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This is the song the boy named Bawoo sings. As he climbs up the mound from the other side to join the family of Dallae, he sings it in a deep sonorous voice. And the entire landscape decked with azalea flowers comes to life resounding with the vigor of his song. Here, we see clearly a fertility motif. The boy's name Bawoo literally means rock, or the earth. The girl's name Dallae literally means azalea. It is a shrub found in abundance everywhere in Korea. In early spring, Korean fields and mountains are practically decked out with azalea flowers blooming all over in their splendid glory. In When Spring Comes to Hills and Dales, Dallae talks about her mother who ran into her house on fire and saved Dallae. One summer, there was a big fire on the mountain. And their house burnt down in that fire. When their house was on fire, Dallae, then a 3-year-old baby, was sleeping in her house. Dallae woke up choked by smoke and cried like crazy inside the house already wrapped up by smoke and flame. Her mother shook herself free from people who tried to stop her and ran into the burning house. Although she managed to save her baby daughter, she got herself badly burned. Dallae says:
That's how she got her withered hands, but I remember she still had the prettiest face in the whole world! With her withered hands, she did everything for me. On the mountain, she would pick me wild grapes. In the brook down in the valley, she would catch crawfish for me. She often dug out arrowroot, peeled the skin off, and gave it to me to chew. With her withered hands, she managed to plow the field. With her withered hands, she used to pestle grain in a mortar. She did all of these things for me. She raised and tended to me as if I were a flower -- an azalea flower.
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The final scene is very touching and moving. Although all of these four characters are now inflicted by the disease of leprosy, they are completely free from the manacles, shackles, and chains of reality which crippled them in their past life. And for the first time in their life, they come alive spiritually and consciously.
This spiritual rejuvenation of life reaches at its climax when Bawoo follows to join Dallae and her parents. Now all four of them wear leper's masks. And miming the gesture of weeding in the field, they climb up the mound together with the animals. And they dance and sing:
Whoopee!
Hurray! Hurray!
Let's move on!
The mask sent by Heaven,
We put on and move on.
Eking out life with vipers and greens,
We are going to move on.
When they reach the top of the mound,
they turn back together
to look down at the audience.
Slowly, they disappear
over the mound down into the evening glow.
Animals follow them dancing.
They also disappear
over the mound into the sunset.
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So, they move on together into the glow of the sunset.
And the fertility motif is combined here with another important motif -- namely, the longevity motif. At the beginning of the play, the stage direction reads:
The stage scenery reveals
clouds, pine trees and rocks.
It resembles a portion of a Korean folding screen that depicts the ten longevity symbols.
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Ten longevity symbols are sun, rock (or mountain), cloud, water, pine tree, bamboo, herb (otherwise called mysterious plant),turtle, crane and deer. Believed to represent long life, these ten elements of nature are often depicted in Oriental paintings and folk artifacts.
The play ends with the following two lines of stage direction:
Using such images as we find in the story of the egg-ghost, the disease of leprosy, and the howling wind, Choi,In-hoon defines people, in the first place, as nonentities just like the shapeless and voiceless wind. They have no voice but only the howling sound. And they have no faces or no discernible identities just like the egg-ghosts or the lepers. In Act III, Scene One of When Spring Comes to Hills and Dales, the stage direction identifies people with the wind -- or the wind with people:
The wind howls
from a distance.
It's a cold winter night.
It's the kind of howl that eventually transforms itself
into somebody's soul
when he listens to it for a good while.
The soul becomes the wind;
or the wind becomes the soul.
Whichever way it is,
it moans, wails
and cries out.
It gets struck on a corner of a huge rock.
It bleeds, sighs,
and screams.
The howling of wind
on a cold winter night.
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And at the same time, Choi offers us another image of this wind that reveals an entirely different aspect of these shapeless and voiceless people. It is indeed a very powerful image. It is the wind that expresses by proxy what these people are incapable of expressing by themselves. Father and Dallae do not speak a single word. It is the wind that speaks out for them.
The wind howls.
The howling of wind evokes in our mind
an image of several men
running down a cliff
from a distance.
In their hands they carry swords smeared with blood.
It sounds like the bloody battle cry they let out
as they dash down the cliff.
The flickering lamplight and the shadows wobbling up on the
wall--they all seem to be part of such imagery.
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Choi uses this particular image of wind repeatedly whenever there is a long pause.
The wind howls.
It's the kind of wind that evokes an image
of a gang of angry people
ferociously waving blood-stained swords
while climbing down a steep cliff
full of azalea flowers.
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And besides, Dallae's leper mother is referred several times in the stage direction to the wind. In Act Two, Scene One, she stands outside the door and urges her husband and daughter to open the door, her hoarse voice is often compared to the wind as it is in the following stage directions:
"It is a hoarse female voice. Scattered by the wind,
it is faint and hardly audible."
"Her voice howls like the wind."
"She sounds like the wind."
And eventually, by combining this image of wind with such other motifs as the ten longevity symbols and the azelea flowers, Choi establishes their identity as the fertile and vital source of tenacious and everlasting life force.