The South Korean traditional piece of writing I have chosen to evaluate is entitled Why The Sea Is Salty. It was translated by Suzanne Crowder Han in 1991. It is about a magical stone hand mill owned by an ancient king that would produce anything the owner would ask for. One day, a thief took the mill, sailed out to sea and asked for the most valuable thing of all in ancient times; salt. The salt filled his boat and it sank, drowning the thief. The mill has not been told to stop and continues to produce salt to this day. Like most folktales, this story has a moral: Greed and too much of something won’t get you anywhere. The story is an overly simplified English translation and does not give many clues about the Korean culture, but will do my best to maximize each one. In this story, no references were made to a god, and this suggests that the society was very dependent on its leaders for guidance, in this case, a king. The fact that the thief desperately wanted to steal the stone mill shows that the culture heavily values material possessions and is identical to western culture in this regard. An easily overlooked detail in the story is the thief’s escape method. He sailed a boat out to his hometown, and this only happens next to the sea, and along the coast. This environment is not hard to come by in Korea. There are no other issues in this story aside from the mill being stolen from the mill being stolen from the King and the Thief drowning and there are mo unique uses of language ether. This is probably because the story is directed to a young audience and is meant to be easily understood.
http://park.org/Korea/Pavilions/PublicPavilions/KoreaImage/hangul/litera/mill/index.htm
Juha
