Teaching East Asia: Korea Teaching East Asia: Korea | Page 209

presented by a vocalist and accompanying drummer. These plays are still being told in the
twenty-first century, in pansori but also on television, stage and film. The author of A Yang for
Every Yin, a winner of several translation awards, has adapted these stories to the English stage,
with songs and extensive historical and cultural notes, for a modern global audience. The
dramatizations are composites of many previous generations’ versions.
The values that form the basis of these stories have proven to be quite universal. Confucians
wrote moral lessons into the stories, but loyalty, honesty, modesty and generosity are basics in
any system of values. A principle that appears in every play in this book is the ancient Chinese
relationship of yin and yang. Yin and yang is a partnership of opposing yet complementary
forces that powers everything from our individual daily lives to the all-inclusive cosmos. It is the
foundation of East Asia’s great systems of belief—Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism and
shamanism. An understanding of this is basic to understanding all aspects—economy, politics,
science and the arts—of East Asia.
The five plays are Harelip, The Song Bag, The Gourds’ Rewards, The Money Bag and Chun
Hyang Song.
Harelip
In the Palace of the East Sea the ten-thousand-year-old Dragon King is dying from a disease
which can be cured only with the liver of a hare. The King's faithful thousand-year-old Chief
Minister Tortoise makes the difficult and dangerous journey to land, where he succeeds (by
playing on Rabbit's vanity) in luring her to the Sea Kingdom. When Rabbit discovers they want
her liver she claims that she took it out that morning and hid it away for safekeeping. Tortoise
reluctantly brings her back to land to get the liver, but Rabbit escapes and then, mischievously
adding salt to Tortoise's wound, gets him to accept three of her foul-smelling "instant
concentrated rabbit liver tablets" as a substitute for her liver. She bounces off into the forest
laughing, leaving Tortoise to return to the Dragon King empty-handed. But hers is not the last
laugh.
The Dragon King, like Korea’s kings of old, could not trust most of his ministers, who
fought among themselves and were corrupt. And in Hare we can see the common person,
innocent but vain and foolish. In Tortoise, we can also see the Confucian ideal of absolute
loyalty to the person in the higher position, young to elderly and subject to ruler.
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