[K-Women Talk] Like 'Kim Don-i,' Who Lives Persistently Despite Being Ordinary

There was a woman named Kim Don. Most people would say, "Who is she?" And that’s understandable. She did not stand at any great moment in history, nor did she have a remarkable husband, nor did she raise any great children. In fact, she herself was a person full of flaws. Her second cousin was the Queen of Injong. Because of this, Kim Don often went to her aunt’s house to play and stayed out overnight, which worried her husband. Even as she grew older, she would go out here and there with her daughter. Her housekeeping skills were poor. She made necessary formal clothes in a complete mess and even forgot to wash her husband’s underwear. When her husband got angry, instead of reflecting, she would act cute and brush it off. She was disrespectful to her elder brothers-in-law, and when her nephew came to greet her, she sent him away hungry, saying there was no food.

Kim Don was also unlucky with children. Most of the children she bore died young, and only one son and one daughter survived. Moreover, her son had an intellectual disability. In a time when passing the state examination and achieving success was the life goal, her son couldn’t even sit still to study and only tried to run away. Then her husband mercilessly tormented their son. He beat him dozens of times, pulled out handfuls of his hair, poured sewage into his mouth, forced him to lick the filth off the floor, and verbally abused him as a bug and an animal. All the relatives remained silent and pretended not to see this abuse. But Kim Don did not. "Our child’s illness is your fault!" she confronted and fought with her husband.

Then the Eulsa Sahwa incident occurred. Her husband became a criminal at the age of sixty and was exiled to Seongju, Gyeongsangbuk-do. Kim Don went with him to Seongju and started sericulture and weaving herself to revive the household. Of course, things did not go as planned. Her son died early, leaving two granddaughters and one grandson. Her husband pinned all his hopes on the grandson?but that was the problem. He devoted himself to writing the grandson’s childcare diary, but again, unable to control his temper, he pressured and abused the grandson, who eventually went astray. Kim Don could not stop her husband, but she was probably too busy to do so. The sericulture she was engaged in was by no means easy. Picking mulberry leaves, raising silkworms to extract thread from cocoons, bleaching, weaving cloth, and even dyeing?all required a lot of work and many hands. Within just a few years, the once frivolous and playful Seoul-born Kim Don became a mulberry picker, a dyeing mother, and a market woman in Seongju, inviting them to her birthday party and enjoying lively times together. What an astonishing transformation. Despite the meager income during exile, it was thanks to Kim Don that the family could survive.

Nevertheless, Kim Don ultimately could not stop her husband’s violence against the grandson, nor did she succeed in finding a good marriage match for her granddaughter. Her husband’s exile was never lifted, and Kim Don suffered from various illnesses and was buried in Seongju at the age of seventy. Her husband wrote an epitaph for her. Although it was somewhat embellished, it said she "cultivated and maintained a woman’s duty and learned propriety." Meanwhile, Kim Don’s granddaughter, Lee Suk-nyeo, was also unlucky in marriage. During the Imjin War, her husband Song Sang-hyeon died a martyr in Dongnae, saying, "It is easy to die, but we cannot yield the path." However, the widowed granddaughter likely lived well afterward. Not great or extraordinary, but surviving harshly and greeting the next day. Just like her grandmother?Kim Don, the wife of Mukjae Lee Moon-geon, who wrote the Mukjae Diary and Yang-a-rok.

Writer Lee Han