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Virgin Territory
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19673 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
1,694 Words |
| Author
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Bruce Fulton
Bruce Fulton is a translator of Korean literature and a former
Peace Corps volunteer in Korea. |
FESTIVAL FOR THREE THOUSAND MAIDENS
Richard Wiley
New York: Dutton, 1991
226 pp., $18.95
It is 1968, and Bobby Comstock, a virginal young white man, is in bed with Cherry Consiliak, a sophisticated young black woman. A vignette from the civil rights movement or the Kennedy campaign? No, this particular rendezvous takes place in rural Korea, and the two principals are Peace Corps volunteers.
This is just one of the many mind-expanding experiences that await Bobby Comstock in Festival for Three Thousand Maidens, Richard Wiley's wry novel about an American awakening to the heart and soul of a very different people and culture.
Bobby arrives in the country town of Taechon, South Korea, where he has been assigned to teach English in a middle school. There he meets a cast of improbable characters--the Goma, a stunted street urchin who is eighteen but looks twelve; the biting woman, a mad creature who haunts the local train station; the teachers Judo Lee and Miss Lee, political exiles who flout the mores of their straitlaced society by being lovers; Gloria, a cheerful Korean prostitute who thrives off the camp-town life near an American Army base; and Mr. Kwak, an omnivorous reader of world literature, who would seem more at home teaching in a university than a rural middle school.
Along with these individuals come "awful impulses" that Bobby himself can't quite explain. At a wake for a relative of the middle school principal, he pilfers the memorial photograph of the deceased. On his way home after a night of drinking, he barges into his favorite tearoom and embraces its lovely proprietor--something out of character for a man who has never kissed a woman. And then back to his rented room, where the next morning he awakens to a daunting realization.
He turned then, only a little, to test his ability to do so, and he came face to face with a monster. Lying there on the floor beside him, a foot from his head, was ... a pile of excrement half the size of his head, laid there by himself when he'd dropped his pants sometime during the night.
Think of it--he had shit in his room. ... He was a disgrace, a bum, the lowest example of what a good-intentioned man could become, and he pictured the newspaper
...
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