Translator's Reflection for I Have Come on a Lonely Path: Memoir of a Shaman

Psalm 84:5-7

Blessed are those whose strength is in God,

whose lives become roads God travels,

When they wind through the Valley of Weeping,

they make it a place of refreshing springs;

the early rain also covers it with blessings.

They go from strength to strength;

until the God of Gods will be seen atop the mountain!

I Have Come on a Lonely Path is a spiritual autobiography written by the late Keum-hwa Kim, Korea’s most nationally renowned manshin. After living for decades as an outcast, she was much belatedly recognized as a carrier of intangible cultural treasures. This memoir, published in her 60th year as an initiated and celebrated shaman, chronicles her harrowing life story against the backdrop of a cataclysmic Korean history - a country at once ravaged by Japanese occupation, war, ensuing division, and military occupation as well as western modernization. It is written in the intimate voice of a woman who has known deep pain and conveys the wisdom distilled from the decades she has served as a mediator between humans and gods.

It is a miracle that I got to participate in the creating this book as an offering for the Korean diaspora. Reading Kim's memoir for the first time during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic as an Asian American feminist was profoundly healing. I longed for this book to be made available to the diaspora, and I am amazed that this dream is coming true. Spirit Grandmother Kim Keum-Hwa is North Korean, and her writing is filled with the sounds and accents of her northern home. I am grateful for the support I have received in translating unfamiliar words from both Kim Hye-Kyoung and Lee Mi-Young, initiated mudangs carrying on our ancient sacred traditions.

This book was translated during a time of great transition for me personally, as my partner and I moved to another state to provide care for dying family members - a fairly common incidence in the life of many Asians, especially immigrants. It was a very bleak and cold season wherein, facing the death of loved ones, we had to make sense of the past and how historical traumas continue to animate the present. This book served as a living guide through the bitter mountain range I found myself climbing and helped me stay present to the mountain of death, to the mountain of accounting for and honoring a life, and to the mountain of staying committed to life even when it feels like the sky has fallen.

In painting the shaman's path as a lonely pilgrimage, Spirit Grandmother Kim Keum-hwa reminds us that the human journey we each must take through life and death is paved with difficulty. Those who are weary and worn out from our respective journeys thus far would do well to remember that wanting to give up and finding themselves crumpled, defeated, and fallen is part of it. We are invited to “keep falling countless times and keep rising countless times.” But for what do we keep enduring and keep rising?

I am haunted by the portrait of a beloved community that once was and can be again for our living. Kim portrays her hometown village of pre-war Northern Korea as a haven, as a thriving community of jeong that ensured that absolutely everyone in the village, down to the lonely old man and even the village ghosts, was remembered, accounted for, and fed during village feasts and holy days. Kim’s deepest lament throughout the book are how people have forsaken sacred and human laws and have turned away from each other. She was most passionate about upholding the traditions and ways of her ancestors, keeping their memories and sacred rituals alive.

Spirit Grandmother Kim Keum-hwa serves as a living oracle to the pathway of divinity, inviting us to have faith that our ancestors and our deities are here to remind us of our dignity and path forward. She invites us to a living communion with them and to trust that death is not the end. We continue because we are carried on and led ahead by the songs of our ancestors, and we know there is a heavenly feast waiting for those willing to travel far and wide to reach a place where one is known, remembered, and longed for.

There is a gut, a feast where humans are invited to stand in the presence of ancestors both human and divine, where truths are revealed and unveiled, grievances and pains aired and held, where reconciliations and forgiveness flower, and everyone is invited to a beautiful table of delicious food and rice cakes. There, those gathered are asked to dance under the whirling and colorful banners of Spirit, bespeaking joy and new life.

August 2023