I’m L.J., a translator (Korean and English), researcher, and academic/educational writer by trade. Happily partnered with a fellow nerd, ADHD mom of an adorable and spirited autistic child. I have varied interests including history, specifically the ancient history of Northeast Asia, writing historical fiction esp. about women and queer people in that area, translation, technology (specifically Linux and Emacs), the Korean musical form pansori, political economy, roleplaying games, and more.

Contact/social

If you want to talk to me about something on this blog or send other inquiries, you can send an email to lj at the url of this site.

I’m also ljwrites on the fediverse at writeout.ink, a Mastodon instance I run.

Publications

short fiction

A Very Long Malaise (2024) on the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast, a short story about bad blood between exes, espionage, intrigue, and community at the royal palace in 18th century Korea.

Between One Word and the Next (2026) will be aired as part of the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast’s fiction series. It is based on the love story between 15th-century enslaved women preyed on by a Crown Princess Consort.

poetry

A Maiden’s War (2025), a verse retelling of Mulan as a transgender woman for The Corvid Queen. It takes its form and meter from my 2020 translation of the original Ballad of Mulan.

The Building Across the Way (2025), a multi-directional shaped poem about strangers’ windows and lives, was published in the inaugural issue of The Carrier Bag!

book review

Review: The Lantern and the Night Moths (2024) on Yilin Wang’s collection of modern Chinese poetry translations and original essays for Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation

Archives/inactive

Here are some of my older web presences, on hiatus/archival for the most part:

blogs

Dreamwidth - Personal essays and observations, fannish stuff especially Avatar: The Last Airbender and a few Star Wars essays ported over from Tumblr.

Tumblr - Mostly a fannish blog. I was big into the Star Wars sequel trilogy at this point.

fanfic

Fanfiction.net - Where most of my fanfic lives. Avatar: The Last Airbender, Inuyasha, even a Disney’s Brother Bear fanfic. I also had a Final Fantasy VIII phase.

Archive of Our Own - I guess this is the cool thing now? There are Star Wars fics on this account that aren’t on ffn, plus some fandom exchange stuff. A couple of historical short stories, too.

videos

YouTube - I have a tiny channel where I upload the occasional fanvid or lyrics translation video.

Essay content warning: Sexual violence and stalking, enslavement, corporeal punishment, sexism, violent lesbophobia, classism

Introduction

Sossang and Danji were two enslaved maidservants in the Korean royal palace who were in a romantic and sexual relationship with each other, as recorded in the Annals of Sejong the fourth King of Joseon (ruled 1418–1450). I discussed this record in a large overview post on records of homosexuality in premodern Korea. When I say “earlier post” or “post on premodern homosexuality,” that is the post I am referring to. This post is an expansion of that section with historical and societal background, a translation of relevant passages from the Annals, and my own commentary.

Comments and attention on this incident have mainly focused on a third woman, the Crown Princess Consort from the family Bong, who broke Sossang up with Danji and raped Sossang. To me, though, the main point of interest in this record is that it depicts a sexual and romantic relationship between enslaved women, one violently disrupted by a jealous princess. These unique circumstances and the official investigation into them resulted in the only surviving account of named, real-life premodern Korean women in a consensual homosexual relationship, to my knowledge.

Sossang and Danji were far from unique as premodern Korean women who loved each other, of course. It is indisputable that many such relationships existed, as the record translated here itself demonstrates, along with others discussed in the earlier post. These relationships existed both in the royal palace where some of these women were caught and punished for their illicit relationships, and also in the wider society where they could not be nearly as effectively surveilled or penalized. These two particular women simply had the bad luck to be preyed on by a member of the royal family and forced into official attention and the record, in contrast to numerous other women in homosexual relationships who lived and died in what was likely a much safer obscurity.

This makes the record of these two women representative as well as individual: In addition to discussing the relationship of two specific women, it also talks about them in the larger context of similarly-situated women loving each other. It is through a hostile and violent viewpoint, to be sure, but the information we may glean from it is still valuable.

Social and historical context

The following are notes on the enormous subjects of human enslavement, societal order, and social attitudes toward homosexuality in the relevant era. I touch on them here to give context to the passages presented in the next section. If you have no background on premodern Korean society and are interested in learning, you may want to look through this section. If you would rather dive into the historical material first, feel free to jump to the Translation section and refer back for any confusing details. I will try again in the Commentary section to synthesize and contextualize the historical record.

Slavery in the Goryeo and Joseon eras

You may find it helpful to understand that Sossang and Danji were enslaved domestic servants, and what that meant in the society they lived in. By slavery I mean the institution of classes of persons who were socially viewed as the “property” of other persons or institutions, were subject to being bought and sold, and were sharply restricted in their movements, selection of livelihood, ownership of property, and family life.

These enslaved people’s status was hereditary, with some Korean societies instituting rules where a person with at least one enslaved parent was also enslaved. By the post-medieval Joseon era of Korea, the majority of enslaved persons were those who had inherited their status, meaning they were enslaved from birth. Causes for new supplies of enslaved persons other than heritage included imprisonment in war, unpaid debt, and punishment for serious offenses such as murder or treason including collective punishment of entire family lines and households.

A formal term for enslaved persons was nobi (奴婢), with no (奴) meaning enslaved men and bi (婢) enslaved women. Another included cheonmin (賤民) or cheonin (賤人) meaning the lowest classes/lowest people, focusing on their social status. Some cheonmin, such as traveling performers, meat workers in the Joseon era, or shamans were not formally enslaved. All enslaved classes were cheonmin, however. A casual term is jong (종), a derogatory word for a servant, many of whom were enslaved persons.

There were broadly two types of nobi in the Goryeo and Joseon (medieval and post-medieval) eras of Korean history, gongnobi (公奴婢) enslaved by public bodies and sanobi (私奴婢) enslaved by private families. Gongnobi were pressed into service for government and public institutions including central government departments, waystations, palace households, regional prefectures, and Confucian schools. The large numbers of Buddhist temple-bound nobi during the Goryeo era were transferred to public enslavement and became gongnobi when the temples were reduced in size and possessions.

Sanobi were generally classed into live-in and out-dwelling nobi. The former were made to live in the households of their enslavers to provide domestic or farm labor, while out-dwelling nobi kept their own households and were compelled to pay their enslavers in products or money. Out-dwelling nobi, who were the majority of sanobi in the early Joseon era, were similar to free commoners in everyday life and status including the ability to own property and grow their wealth, with the difference that their status could change at the order of their enslavers. A few such out-dwelling nobi did become famously wealthy, but of course the vast majority of nobi were impoverished from systemic exploitation.

Nobi were subject to enormous social and legal inequities. Their enslavers had the legal power to punish and control them, so long as the enslavers’ actions fell short of wilful murder or excessive cruelty. (Even this minimal restriction was routinely violated, of course.) Nobi were punished more heavily than free people for any crimes against their enslavers: The punishment for a nobi battering their enslaver was death by beheading, for instance. Nobi were also not allowed to report their enslavers’ crimes unless it was treason.

The control of enslavers over nobi extended into personal and family life as well. Since nobi status was hereditary and such heritage was the main means for the continuation of the nobi classes, the reproductive and family lives of nobi touched directly on the wealth of their enslavers. If nobi enslaved by the same entity married each other and had children, it posed no problems for the enslaver and was a welcome addition to their wealth. However, if two nobi with different enslavers had children, the enslaver of the father was perceived to have suffered a loss because the children would be claimed by their mother’s enslaver, to the gain of the mother’s enslaver and not the father’s. In such cases, enslaved fathers have been on record as being punished or forced to compensate their enslavers. The inheritance and sale of enslaved people by their enslavers also disrupted the family lives of the enslaved, as families could be split up in such processes.

The status of children born between free and enslaved persons went back and forth for much of Joseon history in a struggle between the central government and enslaving families. The government pushed to give these children their freedom so they would owe labor and taxation to the state, while the enslaving classes pushed for children of free-enslaved unions to be enslaved to them so they could continue to extract labor and payment down the generations. In 1731 the conflict was settled in favor of free status for children of these mixed unions.

The ensuing decades would see the decline of enslavement as an institution as more and more enslaved people had free children, escaped, bought out, or forged papers to free themselves. The formal institution of slavery was abolished in 1894 along with the class system itself. The remaining practices of enslavement in private life gradually disappeared with modernization.

Source: Nobi entry in the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture

Dynastic legitimacy and Confucian order in Joseon

Another crucial background of this incident is the vast political change that still reverberated through the kingdom. The record takes place in in CE 1436, Year 18 of Sejong the fourth king of Joseon, only 44 years after the kingdom was founded in 1392.¹ Sejong’s grandfather Yi Seong-gye was a late Goryeo-era general and politician who seized power in the tumult from the fall of the Mongol Yuan dynasty in China, chaos in Goryeo from geopolitical turmoil and internal conflicts, and mounting challenges to governance including the inadequacy of state revenue and failing central control. The section of the earlier premodern homosexuality post on King Gongmin discusses his failed attempts to reform and stabilize the troubled kingdom. After dethroning and executing Gongmin’s three successors, Yi Seong-gye finally took the throne for himself and founded the new kingdom of Joseon. He would be known as Taejo the founding king of Joseon.

Having wrested power from the Goryeo dynasty, Yi Seong-gye/Taejo and his line had to prove that they were not mere usurpers but worthy of ruling as kings. The new dynasty sought to establish such legitimacy in part by instilling a strict Confucian order, placing the King at the apex of secular order and fathers at the tops of their own households. The new Yi royal family could pose themselves as the enforcers of stability and order after the turmoil of the Goryeo years, and as upholders of patriarchal rule and morality in contrast to the libertine excesses of Goryeo. This direction also aligned the royal family with the Confucian bureaucrat class who were a major source of support during the late Goryeo years and beyond.

Confucianism was not only a political ideology but a program of social control over private and political life alike.

In this ideal, when applied to families, children owed filial piety and obedience to patriarchs at the heads of families, and women played roles within their households as obedient wives, daughters, and mothers. The degree and forms of such control differed greatly across social class, wealth, region, and many other factors, but the ideal existed of an order ruled by benevolent patriarchs at every level of society with all others giving their obedience and support. This entailed strict controls on women in particular, with expectations of modesty and chastity, obedience to patriarchal social order including submitting to polygamy without jealousy (while wives’ own sexuality was heavily restricted), and personal virtues of work ethic and gentle temperament essential to the maintenance and reproduction of this social order.

This neo-Confucian order is the context for understanding major points of the record in the next section, including Sejong as both king and patriarch making decisions about his son the Crown Prince’s marriage with little visible input from the Crown Prince himself, and the expectations that were placed on princesses and domestic servants alike for decorum and chastity. The issues involved more than personal distaste or even marital unfaithfulness, but implicated the stability of the royal family and the kingdom itself in the political-familial-cosmic order they took place in.

Sources: HistoryNet article on the founding of Joseon; Hyun June Ahn, “King Sejong’s Female Gender Awareness and Punishment of Homosexuals – Focusing on Crown Princess Bong’s Case,” Master’s thesis in literature for the Department of History, The Graduate School, Pukyong National University, 2021 (안현준, 세종의 여성 성(性)인식과 동성애의 처벌 – 세자빈 봉씨 사건을 중심으로. 2021년 8월 부경대학교 대학원 사학과 문학석사학위논문)

Homosexuality in Goryeo and Joseon

This incident also seems to reflect changing attitudes toward homosexuality in a time of social transition between the Goryeo and Joseon eras. One indication of Goryeo-era attitudes is that at least three kings from early and late Goryeo are on record as having been in sexual relationships with men. The records attach no moral judgment to these relationships so long as they were conducted properly, for instance so long as the king kept up his duty to uphold dynastic continuity.

Two kings of Goryeo were recorded as having homosexual relationships without being morally condemned for it: King Mokjong in the 10th century had no children with his women consorts (a Queen Consort and a concubine) and had at least one male lover, but it seems this was largely unproblematic because he adopted his young cousin to be his heir. King Chungseon in the 13th century had Korean and Mongol consorts and concubines he had many children with, and at least one male lover. He was not morally judged either for what we would today call a bisexual personal life.

In contrast, Chungseon’s grandson King Gongmin in the 14th century was heavily condemned for sexual activities with his male bodyguards because he was apparently a recipient of penetration and caused the young men to do “wanton deeds unto him as to a woman.” He also had a different male lover for whom the records used the conventional refined and non-judgmental language for such relationships. The partner himself was criticized for his abuses of power, but this was a common charge across premodern Korean and Chinese records for kings’ male lovers and female consorts alike.

Failure to carry on the dynasty was another major reason a king who had homosexual relations might face disapproval. Gongmin’s sexuality may be ambiguous in modern terms as he is famous for his emotional attachment to his queen who died having his child, but the historical record also states that sexual intimacy with even her was infrequent and nearly nonexistent with other women. The History of Goryeo blames this proclivity for Gongmin’s lack of an heir and the subsequent uncertainty surrounding his successors’ legitimacy.²

In summary, what mattered in judging the homosexual relationships of Goryeo kings was not the gender of a king’s sexual partner but rather the way the king conducted himself. For instance, was the sexual activity proper for a king’s status? And did he uphold his duties, especially the paramount one of ensuring the dynasty continued through his heirs?

There are other indications of generally positive or neutral stances toward homosexuality in the Goryeo era. A case in point is a poem by the famous writer Yi Gyubo about his friend the Buddhist monk Gonggong’s romantic relationship with a young man. I am not aware of any Goryeo-era or earlier Korean records, or even literary works about or allusions to female homosexual relationships. However, as noted in the terminology section of the earlier post, the origin of the widely-used term daeshik was in female homosexuality and knowledge of the practice was widespread. Yi Gyubo’s poem uses the term to celebrate love between men.

Joseon’s official royal records depart from the generally accepting attitude toward homosexuality in Goryeo-era records. The Annals of the kings of Joseon are to the best of my knowledge entirely devoid of any direct record of homosexual activity by kings, and the rape of Sossang by the Crown Princess Consort Bong appears to be the only record of homosexual activity by a member of the royal family, taking place in the very early years of dynastic history at that.

One explanation for this change is that the Yi dynasty really was made of entirely different stuff from the preceding Wang dynasty and were an entirely heterosexual family line that never had any homosexual or gender non-conforming leanings for half a millennium. The other is that, as part of the dynasty’s self-image as enforcers and upholders of patriarchal family order, such records were increasingly suppressed where the royal family was concerned. Having no solid factual basis for either conclusion, I will leave the matter up for readers to decide.

Nevertheless, records of homosexuality persist throughout the Joseon period in other sectors of Korean society. Unambiguous references to homosexual activity by high-ranking lords and ladies are last seen in the 15th century, but strongly suggestive to unambiguous accounts of both female and male homosexuality among working and monastic classes appear into the 19th century. For more details, refer to the latter parts of the earlier premodern homosexuality post.

It should also be noted that homosexuality was not singled out for particular condemnation compared to what was viewed as illicit heterosexual activity. As also noted in the earlier post, illicit heterosexual activity by palace attendants could carry even heavier penalties than homosexual ones, and there is no evidence of official penalties for homosexual activities outside the context of the palace as opposed to, say, male-female adultery. The national project, as discussed in the earlier section on Confucian order, was to uphold patriarchal familial and political order, and both heterosexual and homosexual activities could be a threat. In general moral rules and criminal law had much more to say about illicit heterosexual activities than homosexual ones, and other than general disapproval and penalties under some very specific circumstances (such as palace life, adultery, and false accusations), there is no evidence of official organized crackdowns on homosexuality in of itself.

Translation of excerpts from the record

[Translator’s notes and summaries in square brackets.]

Book 75 of the Annals of Sejong; second article of the 26th day of Month 10, Sejong Year 1, Year of Yellow Rat <CE 1436, Ming zhèngtǒng 正统 Year 1>

上御思政殿, 召都承旨辛引孫、同副承旨權採, 令就御榻前, 屛左右曰:

The King went out to Sajeong-jeon [the hall where state matters were discussed] where he summoned Doseungji [official of the department that sent out royal decrees] Shin Inson and Dongbuseungji [a lower official of the same department] Gwon Chae to call them before the royal seat, then sent out the other officials and said:

比年以來, 事多不諧, 心實無聊, 近又有一異事, 言之亦可羞恥。

“Since this year I have no peace because so many matters have gone amiss. Another matter has arisen lately that is shameful even to speak of.

我祖宗以來, 家法克正, 比及予身, 亦賴中宮之助。

“Order in the home has been set to utmost uprightness ever since the advent of this dynasty and court, and in matters of my own person I have been greatly aided by my Queen Consort.

中宮極柔嘉, 無妬忌之意, 太宗每稱有樛木逮下之德, 以故家道雍穆, 以至于今。

“The Queen Consort is exceedingly gentle in character and all her words and deeds are exemplary without a shadow of possessive jealousy. King Taejong [Sejong’s father, the third King of Joseon] regularly heaped praise on her virtue as being like the supple branches of a tree reaching downward. Thus was the state of affairs until the present time.”

[Here follows an account of Sejong’s son the Crown Prince’s marital history. The Crown Prince, who would go on to become the next king Munjong, was first married at the age of 14 to beget heirs early, but the first Crown Princess Consort from House Kim lost her position for a scandal involving the use of magical curses out of jealousy. Her successor as Crown Princess Consort was a young lady from House Bong, but her marital relationship with the Crown Prince was also lacking and they had no children. Sejong and his Queen Consort did their best to teach their daughter-in-law in the ways of the home and a royal wife, but “as even parents may not fully instruct their children in matters of the bedroom,” the situation improved little except in appearance. Three royal concubines were therefore selected from good families for the Crown Prince, which angered his Princess Consort who was of a jealous temperament. She was especially threatened and even wept out loud when one of her husband’s concubines, a lady from House Gwon, fell pregnant. Her parents-in-law the King and Queen remonstrated the Crown Princess Consort against such unseemly jealousy in a wife and Princess Consort, to no avail.]

[Then there follows an account of Crown Princess Consort Bong’s other improprieties, including allowing an elderly servant woman to make her parents garments out of the Crown Prince’s undergarments; falsely claiming to be pregnant and then to have miscarried; watching outsiders through cracks in the attendants’ outhouse walls; having her maidservants sing songs about loving men; personally making items such as knee protectors and pouches for palace eunuchs, leaving her no time to make items for the Crown Prince’s birthday and giving him old birthday offerings as though they were new; sending excess items and food to her mother’s house without telling the Crown Prince; and giving gifts in thanks for her father’s funerary rites, also without telling the Crown Prince.]

若此不穩之事頗多, 予皆以婦人不識大體, 故置之。

“There were many such improprieties that I let pass, thinking that she simply did not know the great courtesies of a wife.

近聞奉氏愛一宮婢召雙者, 常不離左右, 宮人或相言: “嬪與召雙常同寢處。”

“Recently I have heard that Lady Bong loved Sossang, a bi [enslaved woman] of the palace and would not let her leave her side, and the palace attendants would whisper to each other, ‘The Princess Consort always beds and abides with Sossang.’

一日, 召雙灑掃宮內, 世子忽問: “汝信與嬪同寢乎?” 召雙愕然對曰: “然。”

“One day Sossang was cleaning in the palace when the Crown Prince suddenly asked her, ‘Is it true you sleep with the Princess Consort?’ To which Sossang replied in her fright: ‘It is, Your Grace.’

其後頗聞奉氏酷愛召雙, 暫離左右, 則恨恚曰: “我雖甚愛汝, 汝則不甚愛我。”

“Afterward it was heard many a time that Lady Bong in her love for Sossang would be resentful and angry if the girl left her side for a moment, and would say, ‘I love you to distraction, yet you love me but little.’

召雙亦常謂人曰: “嬪之愛我, 頗異於常, 我甚惶恐。”

“Sossang herself would always be telling those around her, ‘The Crown Princess Consort’s love for me is quite out of the ordinary and it frightens me.’

召雙又與權承徽私婢端之相好, 或與同寢, 奉氏以私婢石加伊, 常隨其後, 使不得與端之同遊。

“Sossang was also intimate with Royal Concubine Gwon’s [the Crown Prince’s concubine’s] sabi [privately enslaved woman] Danji and the two would sleep together. Lady Bong would have her sabi Seokga’i always shadow Sossang, frustrating her attempts to spend time with Danji.

先是, 奉氏晨興, 常使侍婢斂衾枕, 自與召雙寢處以後, 不復使侍婢而自斂之, 又潛使其婢澣濯其衾。

“Previously Lady Bong would have her attending maidservant [I will use this term from here on for enslaved women in this particular context of domestic servitude] take away her pillows and bedding at dawn when she rose, but since sleeping and sharing her bedding with Sossang she never again gave the task to her attending maidservant but would gather the items herself, and have her maidservant wash the bedding in secret.

此事頗喧於宮中, 故予與中宮召召雙而問其狀, 召雙言: “去歲冬至, 嬪夜召我入內, 他婢皆在戶外, 要我同宿, 我辭之, 嬪强之, 不得已半脫衣入屛裏, 嬪盡奪餘衣, 强使入臥相戲, 有如男子交合狀。”

[CAUTION: THIS PARAGRAPH IS A VICTIM’S FIRST-HAND ACCOUNT OF RAPE BY COERCION]

“With these matters causing a stir in the palace, the Queen Consort and I summoned Sossang to ask her the truth of it. She said: ‘This past winter solstice the Princess Consort called me inside while all the other maidservants waited outside the door. She demanded I sleep with her, which I demurred. She forced the matter, however, and unable to say no, I took off half my clothes to enter behind the screen. The Princess Consort took away the rest of my clothes, made me enter and lie down, and we pleasured each other in form similar to lying with a man.’

予常聞侍女從婢等私相交好, 與同寢處, 甚惡之, 宮中嚴立禁令, 有犯者, 司察之女卽啓, 決杖七十, 猶不能禁止, 則或加杖一百, 然後其風稍息。

“Often did I hear that female attendants, maidservants and others would engage in such private unsanctioned intimacy, sleeping and abiding with each other. Loathing such custom I set up strict prohibitions in the palace, and those found in violation by the report of the watching women were put to seventy strikes; if this was insufficient to deter them they would be put to 100 more, after which the custom somewhat abated.

予之惡有此風, 殆天誘其衷而然也。豈圖世子之嬪, 亦慕此風, 蕩泆如此?

“Surely my hatred of this custom was Heaven moving my heart. How could I have ever thought that the Crown Prince’s own Consort would follow such custom to this wantonness?

乃召嬪而問之, 答曰: “召雙與端之, 常時愛好, 不獨夜同寢宿, 晝亦交頸砥舌, 此乃彼之所爲, 我則初無同宿之事。”

“I summoned the Princess Consort to ask her about this matter, to which she answered: ‘Sossang and Danji were constant in their loving intimacy and would not only lie together at night, but also embrace neck-to-neck and suck on each others’ tongues in the day. These were things they did together, that is all, and from the first there was never a time when I lay together.’

然諸證甚明, 豈能終諱? 且彼人交頸砥舌之事, 亦豈嬪之所宜知乎? 常見其事而歆羨, 則其勢必效而爲之, 益無疑矣。

“Yet with the evidence so clear, how could the truth be hidden to the end? And how could the Princess Consort have known that those two sucked tongue neck-to-neck? Doubtless that in always watching and envying such conduct, the weight of events would balance toward emulation and action.

其餘使侍婢唱歌及窺壁隙等事, 悉皆自服, 然餘事皆輕, 若非召雙之事, 則雖置之可也, 及聞召雙之事, 然後予意斷然欲廢。

“Other matters, such as causing maidservants to sing and looking out through wall cracks, she has confessed to in their entirety. The others are all relatively minor in nature, and if it were not for the matter of Sossang I could leave things be. However, having heard about the matter of Sossang, I am resolved to remove [the Princess Consort] from her position.

夫冢婦之職, 所係匪輕, 有此失德, 其何以承宗祀而母儀於一國乎?

“The office of the eldest legitimate son’s wife is no light thing. With her having thus lapsed in her virtue, how could she uphold the house and set an example as the mother of the nation?”

[Sejong then goes into the intricacies of the situation and the gravity of removing a Princess Consort to raise another, especially when he had already removed one Crown Princess Consort. He discusses precedent from Chinese antiquity both for and against the decision, and how a second removal of a Crown Princess Consort would shock and unsettle the country. He consulted on the matter with high officials who were unanimous that Crown Princess Consort Bong must be expelled.]

斷以大義, 不得不然, 卿等詳知首末, 作敎旨草以進。 昔金氏之廢, 予方年少氣銳, 謂廢立重事, 不可曖昧, 故詳載其事於敎書, 今則不必然也。

“For the greater good I assuredly cannot do otherwise. You, sirs, are apprised of the matter from its very beginning; you will draft the decree and submit it. Back when I removed Lady Kim [the former Crown Princess Consort before Lady Bong] I was young in age and sharp of temperament, and had the matter accounted in detail in the decree because I deemed removing [a Princess Consort] and raising [another] to be a manner of great gravity where nothing may rightly be left ambiguous. That will not be necessary, however, in the present case.

奉氏與宮婢同宿之事極醜, 不可載於敎旨, 姑以性妬無子, 又唱歌等四五事數之, 與三大臣同議, 速製敎旨以進。

“Lady Bong’s conduct in lying with a maidservant of the palace is ugly in the extreme and cannot be stated in official decree. Therefore, first count among her crimes four or five matters including her jealous nature and childlessness, and the singing. Then discuss the matter with the three high officials [Hwang Hui, No Han, and Shin Gae that he had previously consulted with] and swiftly draft the decree for submission.”

引孫與採宣上旨于黃喜、盧閈、申槪, 同草敎旨以進, 卽令入直同知中樞金孟誠爲行香使, 以廢嬪告于宗廟, 廢黜奉氏爲庶人, 還于私第。

[The two officials] Inson and Chae [here referred to by their given names] passed on the King’s will to Hwang Hui, No Han, and Shin Gae, after which they drafted the decree together for submission. Dongjijungchu [an official of a department in charge of carrying out royal orders and enforcing palace security] Kim Maeng was immediately on duty to take on the charge of incense-bearer and announced before the royal ancestral shrine that the Princess Consort would be removed. Lady Bong was expelled to commoner status and sent back to her family home.

[The contents of the royal decree follow, citing her improper conduct such as jealousy, lack of heirs, the love songs, and handling of palace property, without any mention of adultery with a maidservant.]

Source: Article in the Annals of Sejong on the disgrace of the Princess

Commentary

This incident appears to have been a perfect storm of the pressures and mores of the age. Sejong betrays his, and his house’s, self-consciousness as the king of a still-new dynasty (“ever since the advent of this dynasty and court…”), and is eager to make his own house an exemplar of domestic propriety and harmony, something he credits in part to the assistance of his virtuous chief consort the Queen. The ideological and political need to establish the still-new dynasty as the chief protector of family virtue and order resulted in a zeal to clean house, especially by controlling the conduct of women as a centerpiece of patriarchal order.

Leadership by example from the virtuous wife of the patriarch was particularly important to establish such familial order. To this end, the impeccable conduct of Sejong’s Queen Consort is contrasted to Crown Princess Consort Bong’s wanton and improper ways, with the Queen held up as the ideal the Crown Princess Consort must live up to as the future Queen Consort herself.

It is telling that Crown Princess Consort Bong was her husband’s second Crown Princess Consort to be expelled from court, and the third for the new dynasty. As discussed by Sejong, there was a Crown Princess Consort Kim before her who was removed for jealousy and the use of magic, which were violations of wifely virtues such as acceptance of a husband’s other partners and spiritual purity dictated by Confucianism. Going back two reigns to Sejong’s grandfather Taejo the first King of Joseon, and only in the second year of his reign and of the dynasty in fact, Taejo’s daughter-in-law the Crown Princess Consort Yu was also removed from her position and sent back home. Though Taejo refused to share the reason for the expulsion with his officials much to their consternation,³ the beheading of a eunuch named Kim Manri at the same time led to the speculation that some improper conduct had taken place.

These expulsion incidents so early in the dynasty seem to be a sign of a clash between old and new norms. It seems unlikely that three different young women of very prominent families chosen by an intensive selection process were wholly unaware and unprepared for the demands of being a Princess Consort, and it is more plausible that they fell afoul of new norms that they did not expect. The records of the previous Goryeo dynasty are rife with accounts of royal women taking lovers and having children out of wedlock. It may be that highborn women used to greater sexual and personal freedoms failed to meet more restrictive social norms that had not entirely settled in yet in the first decades of the Joseon dynasty.

Greater control and repression took effect for women at the bottom of the palace hierarchy as well as those at the top. Sejong’s account of love among female palace attendants and maidservants (enslaved female domestic servants) is an incontrovertible record of women workers loving other women. His fervency in attempting to stamp out what he found a loathsome custom was another aspect of his efforts to mold his household, the highest in the land, into the exemplary Confucian ideal of feminine modesty and propriety.

As live-in domestic servants, Sossang and Danji also led some of the most restricted and closely-watched lives among enslaved classes of people. The record shows that Sossang was enslaved by a public institution while Danji was a privately enslaved live-in domestic worker who was in the palace as part of a royal concubine’s household. In practice they would both have been live-in enslaved persons pressed into domestic servitude, since palace households doubled as both public institutions and family homes. This meant they had no households of their own and were continuously on duty. Even aside from the control their enslavers had over their family and reproduction as enslaved women, simply forming unions and having children in the first place may have been unacceptable given the exploitative labor demands placed on them.

Under these circumstances, loving other women would have been a plausible avenue of sexuality and intimacy for those working-class women in the palace inclined to engage in it. The Goryeo dynasty’s institution of slavery and labor exploitation was at least as rapacious as Joseon’s, but Goryeo-era attitudes toward homosexuality and women’s sexuality were comparatively lenient compared to the more restrictive social mores the new Joseon dynasty was implementing. These private intimacies may have developed into a custom that the next dynasty would come to decry and try to suppress with corporeal punishment.

“Try” is the operative word, of course, when it comes to suppressing women’s love. As discussed in the earlier homosexuality post, records and contemporary commentary state or strongly suggest that the more elite ranks of female palace attendants persisted in sexual relationships with women as well as men. While the sex lives of enslaved women workers in the palace fade from the later official records, it seems likely that homosexual affairs continued to feature in some of their lives as well. It is impossible to tell whether sexual affairs between enslaved women workers in the palace even abated in Sejong’s own time or were simply hidden better, despite the credit he gave himself for phasing out this custom with violent crackdowns.

These efforts to suppress women’s homosexuality were limited in scope as well as effectiveness. This is without discounting how violent, repressive, and destructive these penalties were to the women who were caught up in them, of course. Sejong himself only spoke of setting up strict prohibitions in the palace, not the entirety of Joseon where there is no evidence of a general ban on male or female homosexuality though plenty of societal disapproval.

The official criminal codes of the time are silent on consensual homosexuality, though there is no doubt that the general and increasing restrictions placed on women’s lives and sexuality would have sharply limited their sexual activities with women as well as with men. It is likely that there were also many incidents of private violence and discrimination that were never committed to the written record. In the case of rape, there were codes that punished the rape of a man by a man, but not of a woman by a woman such as Crown Princess Consort Bong was described as perpetuating on Sossang.

Criminal codes against rape would not have protected Sossang in any case. As an enslaved woman she was not legally protected from her enslavers’ violence against her whatever their gender, and she would not have been able to report them through official channels. Nor would a nobleman, far less a male member of the royal household, have faced any consequences for assaulting her. Princess Consort Bong was removed from her position not for rape but for having an adulterous affair, much as Princess Consort Yu apparently was four decades earlier for her affair with a eunuch.

Furthermore, as previously discussed, homosexuality was a form of improper sex but not the only form. Though homosexual activities by women was officially repressed in certain limited contexts, they were not singled out for homosexuality in of itself but rather for the crime of illicit sex, whether with men or with women. Depending on the time period, a palace attendant having sex with a man other than the king was punishable by beheading for both parties, in contrast to the 70 blows on a first offense as mentioned by Sejong for homosexual activity. Kim Manri, the eunuch who appears to have been accused of adultery with Crown Princess Consort Yu in the first expulsion of a Princess Consort of Joseon, was similarly beheaded.

The record makes no mention of Sossang’s and her lover Danji’s fates, but we can speculate. It seems unlikely that they were given an official death sentence, especially since there were so many indications that Sossang was not a willing participant in the Princess’s adultery. They could still have been punished for their relationship with each other, however, and may have been run out to fend for themselves or transferred to far harsher conditions. Even more grimly, it would not have been difficult to permanently silence two extremely vulnerable and marginalized women for the sake of preventing further embarrassment to the royal family.

A final point is the clarification that there was certainly homophobia in Joseon, and the specifics of criminal codes do nothing to take away from bigotry. It is itself sexist and homophobic, after all, to view homosexuality especially between women, and rape of a woman by a woman, as “lesser” activities that do not “count.” There are also passages from scholarly texts in the late Joseon era showing clear disdain and disapproval of male homosexuality and possibly of female homosexuality, as discussed in the earlier post. The contention is not that there was no homophobia in Joseon, but rather that homosexuality was considered no more of a threat to the prevailing neo-Confucian order than illicit forms of heterosexuality. As with the social forms of homosexuality itself, the specifics of homophobia also differ by society and context.

Source: Han hee sook, “The significance of the expulsion of the Crown princess under the reign of Taejo and Sejong of the Joseon dynasty - Focusing on Hyenbin Ue, Whubin Kim, and Sunbing Bong -”, Journal of Korean Personal History No. 14 (2010) 217-248 (한희숙, 조선 태조·세종대 세자빈 폐출 사건의 의미 - 현빈 유씨, 휘빈 김씨, 순빈 봉씨를 중심으로 -, 한국인물사연구 제14호 217-248).

Conclusion

We know about Sossang and Danji because their lives were turned upside-down by events outside their control. Their relationship was recorded under their true names and known to this day only because a princess stalked and raped Sossang, and the state bureaucracy headed by the princess’s father-in-law deemed this a matter worthy of investigation—not as rape, but as sexual indiscretion unbecoming of a wife’s virtue. Sejong’s comments provide a window into the broader custom of working women in the palace, attendants and enslaved domestic servants, entering into romantic and sexual relationships with each other.

A part of Sossang and Danji’s story still comes through with moving truth and immediacy even through this hostile lens of interpersonal and institutional violence: These two enslaved women shared a relationship that aroused the envy of a princess who felt entitled to strip away the comfort shared by women in servitude who had so little else. At the same time, the broader community of working women who loved women aroused the king’s moralistic ire in a violent backlash.

Sejong’s attempts to eradicate women’s love in the palace were a failure, however. Later records and commentary attest that this custom he so hated persisted in the very heart of Joseon’s moralistic patriarchal order, the palace where his ancestral spirit was enshrined after his death. The king claimed Heaven had moved his heart to loathe the custom of women loving women. Perhaps these women were moved by a less lofty and more abiding power to be so constant in their loving intimacy with each other.

Background, how to use this post, and warning

Late last year I downloaded my Kobo e-books to my Arch Linux computer through the Kobo desktop app and removed DRM protections using Calibre and the Obok plugin. See The Weird Rules Governing What We Download for general background information on DRM protections and why they are anti-consumer (link changed 2025-01-17). For my part I don’t like the reading software and environments that Kobo’s DRM restricted me to, and I want to own and control my purchases by being able to read and store my books freely without the risk of losing access to them.

I’ll detail the de-DRM process here to document it, and so others can follow along if they want. Let me know at my email (lj [at] ljwrites [dot] blog) or my Mastodon account above if you have comments or questions, I’ll try to help you and update the post accordingly. If you’re on Windows or Mac and don’t need to install the Kobo Desktop Edition through Wine, you can skip to the final section on Calibre and the Obok plugin.

WARNING (added 2025-01-17): Stripping DRM from your content may be ILLEGAL depending on your jurisdiction. This post comes with no warranty whatsoever that the described activity is legal where you are: There is a possibility that you may be subject to measures such as having your account removed, or to civil, criminal, and other liabilities. You should undertake de-DRM solely at your own risk and with whatever advice you feel you need, and I can take no responsibility for the consequences.

That said, as a practical matter you are unlikely to be detected or pursued as long as you keep your files for your own use on devices you own and don’t pirate the books by indiscriminately distributing them. You should refrain from piracy in most circumstances anyway, both to reduce your exposure to legal risk and as a basic courtesy to authors who depend not only on income from sales but also on sales figures for career options and algorithmic promotion.

The warning above, incidentally, is exactly why individually implemented technological fixes are not a replacement for regulatory changes. DRM needs to be destroyed or overhauled, not simply tiptoed around, and I recognize that options available to a few technically skilled individuals who are willing to brave some legal risk are a stopgap at best, for much the same reasons that Self-Hosting Isn’t a Solution; It’s a Patch. Tutorials like this one are workarounds for a few and obviously do not scale like solutions and improvements at a societal level.

Set up Wine for a 32-bit installation

For me, setting up Wine on my 64-bit architecture for a 32-bit installation was the most time-consuming part of the process. I’m not even sure why I’m supposed to trick Wine into thinking it’s on a 32-bit architecture, but it didn’t work until I did.

You can check your kernel architecture with uname -a. Here’s my output:

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$ uname -a
Linux arch 6.12.4-arch1-1 [hash] 1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Mon, 09 Dec 2024 14:31:57 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux

The x86_64 part means it’s a 64-bit architecture. Outputs such as i386 and i686 are 32-bit.

Though I already had a Wine installation, I kept getting architecture-related errors so I uninstalled and reinstalled everything Wine-related:

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$ sudo pacman -S wine
$ sudo pacman -S wine-gecko
$ sudo pacman -S wine-mono
$ sudo pacman -S lib32-gnutls

I then set environmental variables to get Wine working in 32-bit mode:

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$ export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32
$ export WINEPATH=~/.wine32
$ export WINEARCH=win32
$ wineboot -u

(.wine32 is just a random blank directory I created under my home directory because the default .wine directory is 64-bit and was giving me errors.)

Since environmental variables exported from the terminal will only last for that session, I also put the following lines in ~/.bashrc to make the variables persistent:

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export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32
export WINEPATH=~/.wine32
export WINEARCH=win32

Originally I had $WINEPREFIX set to a prefix subdirectory under ~/.wine32 as seen below, per advice I saw on a forum, but for me it worked either way. If the above $WINEPREFIX does not work, maybe having it point to a subdirectory will, like so:

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export WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32/prefix

Install Kobo Desktop Edition through Wine

After setting up Wine, I downloaded the kobosetup.exe file. Updated on 2025-11-11: The easiest way is to grab the executable linked at the “Install Kobo Desktop on Windows” section of the Install Kobo Desktop on your PC or Mac page.¹ Because nothing can ever be easy, the download button reached through https://kobosetup.com didn’t work for me and I had to search the button text (“Download now”) in the page source and then the id of that button for the href attribute. As of the date of this blog post (January 12, 2025) the direct link to the file is https://cdn.kobo.com/downloads/desktop/kobodesktop/kobosetup.exe , but that may change in the future.

I then executed the file through Wine:

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$ wine ~/Download/kobosetup.exe

The output stalled so I assumed it didn’t work, but when I navigated to the directory manually I found the installation and ran the executable:

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$ wine ~/.wine32/drive_c/Program\ Files/Kobo/Kobo.exe

As a convenience function I also put a shorthand alias in my ~/.bashrc to open Kobo Desktop Edition with a simple command, in my case kobo.

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alias kobo='wine ~/.wine32/drive_c/Program\ Files/Kobo/Kobo.exe'

I logged into my account on the Kobo Desktop Edition app and downloaded all the books in my library. The app should be shut down before the next step, which is the actual de-DRM process using the Obok plugin.

Remove DRM with the Obok plugin on Calibre

I already had Calibre installed through the Arch Linux repository:

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$ sudo pacman -S calibre

Obok is part of DeDRM Tools, available through the Github repo. Unzip the file and obok_plugin.zip should be one of the files that appear in the folder.

As detailed in the repository’s readme file, open Calibre and navigate to Preferences > Plugins and then the “Load plugin from file” button at the bottom of the Plugins window. Select the obok_plugin.zip file from the file navigation that pops up. Choose what menus to access Obok through, then click through the installation.

I then configured Obok through Preferences > Plugins > Obok to manually set the Kobo Desktop Edition library folder that Obok should access. In my case the directory was ~/.wine32/drive_c/users/lj/AppData/Local/Kobo/Kobo Desktop Edition. I think the folder is automatically detected on Windows and Mac. Maybe there’s auto-detect on Linux systems, too, but it didn’t happen for me.

Click on the Obok icon, which in my case is on the top menu bar of Calibre, and a popup window will show decrypted versions of books downloaded through Kobo Desktop Edition. All that remains is to import them into the Calibre library as DRM-free epubs that you can read on any device and software that supports the format.

Conclusion and postscript

Since removing DRM restrictions on my Kobo library I’ve been reading my epubs on everything from the Emacs nov-mode package on desktop to Foliate on Steam Deck’s desktop mode (a.k.a. my second Arch machine). It’s made reading ebooks more fun and I’ve been reading more as a result. My decrypted books are also in local and remote locations through my usual backups, so I know I won’t lose access to them by some whim of the bookshop or publisher.

I hope DRM removal will be a similarly positive experience for others, especially those like me with large Kobo libraries.

I shared a piece of creative writing on the internet for the first time while my parents’ home was being renovated and I needed a place other than the motel to kill a few hours during the day. At my request, Mom dropped me off at what we call a PC room but is probably recognizable to more English speakers as an “internet café.” In Korea it was and is primarily a place where people can get on high-spec computers to play online games. Starcraft was the leading obsession at the time.

This was in 2001, three years since I had first gone online on the wide Web as a college freshman. I had been reading a lot of stories on fanfiction.net, and by this point I had decided I wanted to try writing—and, more scarily, sharing—my own. Either I copied-and-pasted a chapter I had pre-written, or pecked out my first chapter right then and there while my neighbors inhaled cup noodles and battled (as) Zergs.

I published my chapter. It was the start of a decades-long preoccupation.

When fanfic was good, it was very, very good

Since that day in 2001 I wrote fanfic on and off for around 20 years, through years studying abroad and overseas moves, marriage, career changes and more. The habit persisted across several different fandoms including Final Fantasy VIII, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Star Wars. Fanfic was my first opportunity to show my writing in public, talk to other writers, and join in fandom discussions and analysis.

The built-in community of a good-sized fandom was a great platform for me to share my stories, get feedback on them, and join in world and character discussions. As a beginning author, or even realistically as part of many “real” writing careers, I was unlikely to get hundreds of comments over the years, get sent fan art of scenes from my stories, or be translated into Japanese and Spanish. In that sense I’d call my fanfic writing years a creative career of itself, right down to making no money from it but getting plenty of fulfillment.

A highly flattering comment that stuck in my memory from my early fandom days was “What are you doing writing FAN fiction?” Well, I was getting comments and reactions like these, to my great joy! :D

Fandom peaked for me with Avatar: The Last Airbender in the early 2010s. This was the period when I wrote Shadow of the Dragon King, a political pre-show fic that not only engaged deeply with the show’s lore and my love for it, but also showed me what directions I wanted to take my creative writing. For me it provided some of the best experiences fanfic can provide, with existing characters, lore, and world providing structure and inspiration to build on. I got great reactions and intense conversations out of this fic, exactly the kind of thing I wanted as a writer.

Things were very, very good. They were ready to turn horrid.

Then fandom went from limiting to excruciating

Even while I was having the most fun I had ever had in fandom, cracks were appearing in my relationship with it. Some of these were small and harmless mismatches, like realizing that some of my English-speaking audience understood ATLA canon differently than I did,¹ so much so that some readers thought my painstakingly canon-compliant fics were AU.² That was perfectly fine: I don’t own anyone’s understanding of any work, including my own. The author is dead, long live the author, etc.

However, for the first time fanfic started feeling like less of a boost and more of a constriction. The old joking question—what I was doing writing fan fiction?—started taking on more weight. More and more I hankered to play in a world of my own creation or interpretation, exploring stories that pulled at me. Now that the experience with Shadow had given me confidence that I could finish a long fic, I wanted to try my hand at the wild wide world of original fiction, so-called.

Other fandom discordances were more serious. My severe disappointment with the ATLA sequel Legend of Korra was another and deeper crack that not only distanced me from the franchise but led me to question my love of the original show. As I put it in an early ’10s book review, my political and literary views had become inextricable from each other. I was increasingly facing down the fact that I could not rely on corporate media to tell the kinds of stories I wanted.

Looking back, Disney’s new Star Wars was my last stab at making fandom work out for me. There were definitely good times, lovely camaraderie and intense nerdiness, but the unending sludge of antiblack racism against the character Finn and his Black fans brought home just how sickeningly white supremacist fandom could be, and had always been as incidents like Racefail ‘09 demonstrated. I just hadn’t smacked into this face of fandom quite so hard before because the franchises I was into didn’t have major Black characters (which is a whole conversation of its own).

After these experiences I couldn’t enjoy Star Wars or even my earlier fandoms the same way anymore. Between major life changes and the work of developing my original fiction ideas, I didn’t want to spend that kind of energy on a space I no longer found enjoyable. From around 2020 my fandom activities including fanfic became sporadic and I have not engaged in fandom with the same intensity since.

So I left… or did I?

It’s funny, because while I’m mostly out of mainstream fandom now, I’m still as fannish as ever and more happily so than I ever was. I simply shifted the lens of my obsessions from a focus on for-profit corporate media to smaller, queerer, more liberationist works, often created by friends I trust and regularly talk to. My emotional well-being and creative energy have skyrocketed since I started engaging in works that are more aligned to me, while spending my time on gentle, compassionate, and fun conversations based on a mutual love of stories and not reactions to repetitive bigotry that wore me down.

The best parts of writing fanfic have followed me out of fandom. I pursue the exact kinds of stories I want in the world while taking part in welcoming yet endlessly stimulating creative communities. My “original,” or saleable, subject matter puts me in conversation with what has been and is being created in queer history and mythology, anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism, labor solidarity and more. I’ve been fortunate enough to have my queer and critical works in prose and verse accepted by publications I enjoy and respect, and found more community in fantastic editors and fellow authors.

In a way I’ve lost fanfic and fandom, but in another sense I haven’t lost them at all. I simply moved on and found people and spaces that better fit the shapes I’ve come to take, that allow me to stretch out in ways that make sense to me.

I needed to write and share fanfic that day in 2001 and for many, many days afterward while my world and self shifted around. When those changes came to a head, I needed to stop writing fanfic and being part of fandom so I could work on other things and be parts of other conversations.

Fanfic and fandom in the formal senses are mostly in my past now, but the ongoing give-and-take of creation, the shaping of worlds and meaning in joyous collision with minds near and far, will never stop as long as I live and will long outlast my individual life. I am deeply content with where I have drifted to and looking forward to what comes next.

You can read the review on the Exchanges website or the reproduced text below:

—

The Lantern and the Night Moths

Edited and Translated by Yilin Wang

Invisible Publishing, 120 pp., $16.95 (paper)

Review by L.J. Lee

The preservation of the ephemeral and easily-forgotten is an explicit goal of The Lantern and the Night Moths (Invisible Publishing, 2024), a selection of poetry by five modern and contemporary Chinese poets translated by Chinese-Canadian writer and translator Yilin Wang. The collection, accompanied by Wang’s original essays and notes, spans the first glimmers of the 20th century to the present. It passes through the turmoil of China’s Republic years, the exciting anxieties of the New Culture movement, and the imagery, dilemmas, and yearnings of 21st-century life.

Yet Night Moths takes a branch off the most-travelled paths across the vast landscape of modern Chinese poetry, offering a different scenery. In making the selections, Wang deliberately avoided the most famous and translated modernist poets, stating “I also step around the latest, bestselling, and most renowned Sinophone literary works to seek out poetry that has been overlooked.” Also, “By experimenting with recreating [the] work [of underrepresented poets] in English, I hope to expand existing understandings of Sinophone poetry in the Anglosphere.”

These are ambitious goals for a first collection, and the result of Wang’s design principle is a work that is less familiar, more female, and more eclectic than a conventional collection covering the same eras. You will find no poems in these pages by mainstays like Xu Zhimo, Bei Dao, or Ai Qing. The emerging and acclaimed women poets Zhang Qiaohui and Xiao Xi are published for the first time in English translation, and the anti-Qing Dynasty rebel Qiu Jin receives focus as a poet in addition to the historical figure she is conventionally known as. Wang’s self-assurance as a curator and translator of poetry is on full display, as is a confidence that this different view of Chinese modern and contemporary poetry is more than worth experiencing—and remembering.

Fortunately, the poet-translator does not simply leave readers unmoored in waters that may be unfamiliar even to the well-versed. Wang ably guides the reader, not only intellectually but also emotionally, in essays and commentary included at the end of each poet’s section. The varied approaches of these notes add further levels of understanding and reading pleasure: the commentary on Qiu Jin’s poetry is an intimate epistolary essay addressed to the poet, who is Wang’s personal hero as well as scholarly and literary subject; the short notes for each of Zhang Qiaohui’s poems explore diasporic yearnings and the fleeting nature of memory in a format that loses nothing for its brevity. Fei Ming, meanwhile, is treated to an intensely researched intellectual and spiritual history, entwined with process notes for the difficult task of translating his infamously enigmatic work. Poem-by-poem notes on Xiao Xi go over the challenges of translation in the context of contemporary history and references. The final essay on the eminent early 20th-century poet and translator Dai Wangshu doubles as a partial biography that draws from his times to better understand our own.

There is a sense of urgency in this project of remembrance and celebration, as so much writing is forgotten and lost in the interplay between memory and oblivion. In an anecdote shared in the translator’s note to “Soliloquy” by Zhang Qiaohui, Wang’s wàipó (maternal grandmother) was drafting a memoir which she promised to show her grandchild the next time they met. After wàipó’s death, however, Wang searched for the manuscript in vain. What happened to it, and what story might it have told? The answer is locked in shadows, much like the matrilineal history such a manuscript may have revealed to a grieving grandchild. A driving force in The Lantern and the Night Moths is episodes like these: the reality that women’s voices and stories are disproportionately forgotten, lost, and erased.

If perception is the great resistance to oblivion, books may be the preservation of perception into a hope of eternity. These books may find their way to someone’s bedside and become a repository of their happiness, as Dai Wangshu said of his own books. They may also be lovingly collected by eclectic routes ranging from ethnic grocery stores to the luggage bags of friends, like Wang’s own hard-won collection of Chinese-language books. Books, after all, are a communion with their writers, and with the people who helped put the books in the reader’s hands, from booksellers to generous friends. “the lantern light seems to have written a poem; / they feel lonesome since i won’t read them,” Fei Ming writes in “lantern.” To be unread is loneliness, a fading out from the shared memory of community.

A translated book, then, is the ultimate defiance against ephemerality, not only preserving the existence of a work but also expanding its reach to other lands and other peoples across the distance of language and context. Surprising things emerge when this crossing is made: In the translation of Dai Wangshu’s poem “Night Moths,” for instance, the poet’s shadow has been “abandoned . . . in grave darkness.” Two lines down, the poem ends with “that day I transformed into a phoenix,” juxtaposing “grave darkness” with the common Western image of a phoenix coming back to life from the ashes.

Yet those familiar with the cultural conventions involved may realize that the original Chinese word fēng 凤 , meaning the male of mythical noble birds, does not traditionally have the connotation of periodic death and rebirth despite commonly being translated into English as “phoenix.” Wang’s translation, refracting language and mythical reference through layers of subtly unmatched imagery and double meaning, lends the poem a new reading in English while staying true to the Chinese original by foregrounding the association of yōuàn 幽暗 (deep darkness) with the underground and graves. One suspects Dai would have approved, as a culture-spanning poet-translator himself who wedded Zhuangzi to Descartes in the verse “I think, therefore I am a butterfly…” in the poem “I Think.”

At other times things are dropped in the crossing, echoing in the crevice between worlds. A reader of both languages might mourn the loss of Qiu Jin’s pun and rhyme in “A River of Crimson: A Brief Stay in the Glorious Capital,” where under Wang’s hand, the lines

became the following:

There was also the choice, freely acknowledged in the translation notes, to abandon the repetition of zhùyì 注意 in Xiao Xi’s “the car is backing up, please pay attention,” in favor of using different wording for the many nuances of the word: “be mindful of,” “watch out for,” “take note of” and more. Those who love the cadence and wordplay of the originals may object, but we who have taken the leap between languages know there is no such thing as having it all.

Knowing these limitations all too well, Wang calls the poetic translation process “cultivating the inexpressible,” where “every iteration bears testimony to that which has been lost, and even more importantly, all that courageously endures.” Yet Wang rejects the facile narrative that poetry is “untranslatable,” citing Dai Wangshu’s 1944 essay Brief Fragments on Poetic Theory that a poem, so long as it goes beyond superficial wordplay, should always be translatable into other languages. Wang calls the power of literary translation “infinite” and demonstrates it in projects such as five different translations of Song dynasty poet Li Qingzhao’s poem, undertaken with Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li.

If remembrance is key to continued life in a community of memory, what does it mean when translated poetry is indeed recorded and perceived but the translator is unnamed, as though there never was one? How fleeting, ephemeral, and forgotten is the translator of poetry whose carried-over words ring in the center of Empire like a disembodied echo! Of course, the translator was and is not lost to inevitable, self-effacing invisibility, but rather actively erased, as the British Museum did in its uncredited, unauthorized use of Wang’s Qiu Jin translations—a disregard it only corrected after a much-publicized legal campaign. This story recurs around the globe, backed by the dismissal of translation as easy and easily-replaced work that is nevertheless somehow good enough to be used. The exploitation is sometimes framed as a favor to the translator conferring prestige and visibility, as the British Museum’s early correspondence with Wang implied. Subtler forms of consent violations and disrespect abound every day, such as publishing translations without proper contracts.

All this buildup is now set to spike to a crescendo of exploitation and erasure as never before, with the product of untold of hours of translators’ labor scraped into large language models that prognosticators smugly promise will make us obsolete. Though the form may be new, the foundations of the rhetoric that translators are superfluous and outdated have been laid over decades: Even Dai Wangshu, living in a period when literary translation was highly regarded and prized by writers and scholars, criticized the publishing industry’s devaluation of poetry translations in his day, matching Wang’s observation of today’s mainstream Anglophone and Sinophone publishing spaces.

Yet, as Wang points out, “many poet-translators continue to work from the margins, as persistent as ever.” The voices of these poets who lived through China’s modernity from the beginning to the present moment, given life for an Anglophone audience by Wang’s careful work and keen commentary, are not only a collection of poetry translations and essays, but a lively and continuing conversation. The Lantern and the Night Moths speaks not only to fellow travellers straddling the two disciplines of poetry and translation regularly declared worthless, unnecessary, and obsolete, but also to a global community who bear the scars and triumphs of this construct called modernity, and to workforces around the world increasingly consigned to the shadows of corporate and technical glitz. In this time, the words that Wang imagines Dai Wangshu speaking across the expanse of time resonate above all: “Don’t worry, poetry isn’t what is lost in translation, but rather, what survives it.”

—

L.J. Lee is a professional legal translator from Korea, writer of historical fiction and occasional translator of classical Chinese poetry. Her essays and translations can be found at https://ljwrites.blog/ and she is on the Fediverse as @ljwrites@writeout.ink. Her short story about palace espionage, romance, and queer community in 18th century Korea is coming out this year on the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast.

I am greatly indebted in the preparation of this write-up to Professor Kang Moon-jong’s Studies on the traditional era homosexuality, published in the journal Yeongju Eomun Vol. 30 (June 2015), especially for alerting me to the existence of Yi Gyubo’s Poem Prompted by the 50 Verses Sent by Enlightened Gongong to young Master Bak and some of the events and writings from the Joseon era. The section on terminology also follows both the format of his paper and draws directly from his summation of the terms, with some modifications and additions. Where I was unable to independently confirm a primary or secondary source cited by Professor Kang but rather rely on the paper itself, I have cited it as “Kang (2015)” or “via Kang (2015).”

Content warnings for this write-up include sexual violence, age gap/possible underage relationships, corporeal punishment and other violence against queer people, general political violence including murder, death from coerced labor, cisnormativity, sexism/patriarchy, etc.

Premodern Korean terminology on homosexuality

The most common word for homosexuality in premodern Korea was daeshik 對食 (“eat together”). Originating from the Han Dynasty of China, this referred to palace servants including maids and eunuchs entering into marriage-like committed relationships with each other. In premodern Korea the word came to mean homosexuality in general between men and women alike, though its original meaning of love in the specific setting of court was also preserved. A related though rarer and more limited term is gyobung 交朋 (“making friends”), a term that is listed to this day in the dictionary as a traditional term for female homosexuality, though it has faded from everyday use.

Other common terms included namchong 男寵 (“favor of men”) and the related one of namsaek 男色 (“sex with men”), which referred exclusively to male homosexuality.¹ Yongyang 龍陽 (“dragon sunlight”) was a related term referring to the title given to a king’s favored male lover from the ancient Wei Dynasty of China, and can be seen especially in the History of Goryeo regarding favors given by kings to male lovers.

There are also terms relating to rape of men by men, gyegan 鷄姦 (“chicken fornication?”), also of Chinese origin. Other terms relating to this crime that has seen some use in premodern Korea are bukchung 北衝 (“northern/hind stabbing”) and namgan 男奸 (“male fornication”) which seem to refer primarily to anal rape.

There are also the Korean terms biyeokjil 비역질 for sex between men and baendaejil 밴대질 for sex between women, but the latter is of uncertain origin and there is no existing premodern record using the term.

Overall, then, the leading terms for homosexuality in premodern Korean societies include daeshik (women and men), namchong (men), namsaek (men), biyeokjil (men), and in some specific circumstances, yongyang for men in court. These terms show widespread awareness of homosexual activity in premodern Korea, with differentiation for specific social contexts.

Sources: Kang (2015), Naver Dictionary entry on gyobung, various History of Goryeo articles (see sections on the kings of Goryeo)

King Hyegong of Shilla (8th century): A woman born in a man’s body

The reign of King Hyegong, the 36th king of the ancient Korean kingdom of Shilla, was marked by strife and chaos ever since taking the throne at the age of eight, with power struggles and rebellions compounded by catastrophic natural disasters. The king was eventually slain in the political turmoil, and the end of this monarch’s reign marks the close of the Middle Period of Shilla and the start of its Final Period.

It is said that King Gyeongdeok, Hyegong’s father, badly wanted a son, having set aside his first queen for the lack of a son and wedded a second queen. The story goes that King Gyeongdeok asked a spiritual man, Pyohun, to petition the Jade Emperor in Heaven for a royal son. Pyohun, after meeting with the Jade Emperor, gave word from on high that there was a daughter for the king but no son. King Gyeongdeok, persistent in his goal, asked that the daughter be exchanged for a son. The Jade Emperor warned that it was possible, but the change would endanger the kingdom. Gyeongdeok was unwavering, and indeed his wife gave birth to a male-assigned baby.

It was said that the future King Hyegong’s unnatural birth that switched a girl into a boy caused disturbing portents, with intense thunder and lightning storms and 16 Buddhist temples being struck by lightning. The young prince enjoyed girls’ amusements and adornments from a young age, causing people to comment on the child’s lack of fitness as a future king. Some say the allegations of the prince’s birth and femininity are a commentary on King Hyegong’s ineffectual reign.

King Hyegong, along with regent and mother Queen Dowager Manwol, made many attempts from early in the young king’s reign to reinforce the failing power of the monarchy, including reforms to ancestral rites and inspecting the regions. However, it was not enough to turn the tides of the increasing disorder from the father King Gyeongdeok’s time. Hyegong was said to be a soft and undisciplined king who was enamored of music and women, and was ultimately slain by high-ranking nobility at the age of 22.

Source: HistoryNet entry

King Mokjong of Goryeo (10th century): The childless king with a known male lover

The seventh king of the medieval Korean kingdom of Goryeo and son of Gyeongjong the fifth king, Mokjong was known for his talent from a young age and for wise and beneficient policies a king, such as diplomatic efforts that promoted peace and establishment of bureaucratic and military systems for the still-new kingdom. His reign, however, was marred by his failure to control the arbitrary abuses of power by his mother Queen Dowager Heonae. In the end the confusion caused by the Queen Dowager’s attempts to take power with her lover Kim Chi-yang led to a rebellion, and Mokjong was assassinated at the age of 28.

Mokjong had a queen and a concubine but was known to be uninterested in women and had no children, something that he expressed concern for. He named his nephew (the son of his mother’s late sister) First Prince Daeryang as his heir, and Prince Daeryang went on to be King Hyeonjong after him.

Mokjong had a lover, Yu Haeng-gan, a beautiful man who gained the king’s favor and rose to high office on that basis in a relationship referred to as yongyang. Yu Haeng-gan was said to be a power-hungry and arrogant man of little ability or wisdom who leaned on the king’s favor to exercise power and prestige beyond his station and talents. Yu Haeng-gan was opposed to Mokjong making Prince Daeryang the royal heir, so much that Mokjong made the preparations a secret from his lover. There is speculation that Yu Chungjeong, another man that Yu Haeng-gan introduced to the king, was also a royal lover, but unlike with Yu Haeng-gan there is no direct record of a sexual relationship between Mokjong and Yu Chungjeong. Yu Haeng-gan was also killed during the rebellion that ended Mokjong’s reign, while there is no record of Yu Chungjeong’s death though he was recorded as being by Mokjong’s side when the king was expelled from the palace prior to his death.

Sources: Encyclopedia of Korean Culture entry, Mokjong’s entries in the History of Goryeo, Yu Haeng-gan’s entry in the book of lowly flatterers

Gonggong the Enlightened (13th century): The monk unmoved by feminine temptations falls for a lovely youth

Gonggong 空空 was the name taken by Great Yuga Master Gyeongjo, who was a monk in the Yuga tradition of Buddhism (originating from an order of monks who cultivated yoga practice) and rose to the rank of Threefold Great Master. A free spirit who loved the companionship of boys, he was also known as the Poet Monk for his aptitude with verse and the King of Dharma for his deep knowledge of Buddhist doctrine. His fame reached as far as Song in China, and he was gifted a staff, lacquered begging bowls, and prayer beads along with a poem by an esteemed monk. He was friends with fellow literary talents of his day, and some of his religious poetry survives today.

The story of the love between Gonggong and a bright young man with the surname Bak is told in verse by Gonggong’s friend Yi Gyubo, a celebrated poet and essayist in 12th and 13th century Korea. Yi Gyubo wrote the poem, 次韻空空上人贈朴少年五十韻 (Poem Prompted by the 50 Verses Sent by Enlightened Gongong to young Master Bak), in response to verse written by Gonggong for his young lover. The original that Yi was responding to did not survive, but this reply poem is clear enough on the nature of the relationship.

After an opening that discusses the yin and yang principles of the universe and the crucial role of marriage and romantic love, Yi discusses his friend Gonggong’s indifference to women:

Instead, Yi says, Gonggong chose a simple life in spiritual retreat:

Yet one man, the young Master Bak, captures the great spiritual master’s heart:

Yi vividly describes the feelings induced by this young man in his esteemed friend:

The emotional intimacy and longing as well as the strong desire in the relationship are made clear in the poem:

The qualities of the young man Bak are praised in the poem as well, as a fitting match for the learned and accomplished Gonggong:

The poem is unambiguous about the nature of the relationship, that there were not only emotional and intellectual but also sexual exchange as well. The term daeshik, with the explicit reference to the Book of Han, leaves no question that this was a male homosexual relationship, given its usage in Korea and given that neither man was a maidservant or eunuch.

Sources: Gyeongjo’s Encyclopedia of Korean Culture entry, The Latter Collection of Lord Yi in the Eastern Lands Vol. 9 (東國李相國後集 第九卷), The Latter Collection of Lord Yi in the Eastern Lands Vol. 11, Records (東國李相國後集 第十一卷 記)

King Chungseon of Goryeo (13th-14th centuries): The king with many concubines and a male lover

The 26th King of Goryeo, King Chungseon was the eldest son of King Chungryeol and Princess Supreme Jeguk, Borjigin Qutlugh Kelmysh daughter of Kubilai Khan. Born after Goryeo’s capitulation to the Mongol Chinese Empire of Yuan, Chungseon was the product of his father Chungryeol’s strategic marriage to a Mongol princess to strengthen the royal family. Chungseon himself would go on to marry a Mongol Princess, Princess Supreme Gyeguk, Borjigin Budashiri great-granddaughter of Kubilai Khan.

Despite these efforts, King Chungseon’s reign was never stable. He was ousted and called to the Yuan court in favor of his father Chungryeol a mere eight months into his reign, and returned to the throne in Goryeo after Chungryeol’s death. This kind of instability would be a feature of Goryeo kingship during the period of Yuan interference, intensified by the ties of blood and marriage. Only three months into his return as Goryeo’s king he went back to the the Yuan court where he ruled from afar despite repeated requests from Goryeo to return, and would exercise heavy influence even after passing the throne onto his son King Chungsuk. An active player in the Yuan Imperial Court, a collector of books and a promoter of scholarly exchange between Yuan and Goryeo, Chungseon was awarded princehood by Külüg Khan after helping the latter come to power, and was also exiled to Tibet in his later years during power struggles in the court before he returned and died in Yuan at the age of 50.

Chungseon had six queen consorts, ranging from his chief consort Princess Gyeguk, his second queen who was a Mongol woman not from the Imperial family, and four ethnic Korean queens. He also had sexual relations with unnamed female servants, two of whom he is on record as gifting to his followers. One of his mistresses was formerly his father Chungryeol’s Royal Concubine Sukchang from the house of Kim. Lady Kim was said to have been vain and extravagant, intervening in affairs of state and throwing a party during the mourning period for her own mother.

In addition to having many women Chungseon is described as “greatly enjoying male love (多愛男色)” and his favors, using the phrase the favors of yongyang (龍陽之寵), were given to Won Chung, a young man of no particular personal distinction from a high-ranking family. Won Chung was called at age 18 by Chungseon to office greeting guests and managing the household. At this point Chungseon was a prince-in-exile residing in Dàdū (modern-day Beijing), ousted from the Goryeo throne and in between his two reigns as King, though he was now in high favor with the Yuan court and would shortly be returning for his second reign. Chungseon’s favor was such that he gave Won Chung the royal surname of Wang and changed his name to Wang Ju.

However when Chungseon, two years into his return as King of Goryeo, tried to award Won Chung/Wang Ju even higher office, the man demurred saying he was neither experienced nor capable enough (he was not yet 20 at this time). Angered, Chungseon took Won Chung’s royal name away and demoted him. The two men reconciled later on when Won Chung greeted Chungseon on his return from Yuan, coming all the way out to Goryeo’s northern frontier of the Amnok River to meet him and treating him with care and courtesy the same as ever. He eventually rose to the high office he had refused earlier and had the king’s trust.

When Chungseon spoke to his son Chungsuk about Won Chung it was with praise, saying the man had served the royal family through generations and had ties through marriage, making him incomparable to other vassals. Chungseon also told Won Chung to serve the king with loyalty forever. Won Chung would go on to serve Chungseon’s son Chungsuk and grandson Chunghye, rising to high office and going on diplomatic missions. He was said to be restrained and diligent, taciturn, and a good administrator though he had little learning, and had three sons.

Sources: Encyclopedia of Korean Culture entry, Yi Neung-gan’s entry in Biographies of Vassals, Royal Concubine Sukchang’s Encyclopedia of Korea Culture entry, Won Chung’s Encyclopedia of Korean Culture entry, Won Chung’s entry in Biographies of Vassals, entry in the Compact History of Goryeo about Won Chung turning down high office

King Gongmin of Goryeo (14th century): No woman but his wife, crossdressing, male lovers

The 31st King of Goryeo, he was a grandson of King Chungseon and functionally the last recognized king of Goryeo. It should be noted that many scholars express skepticism on the accuracy of accounts on King Gongmin; the legitimacy of his heirs, or lack thereof, had a direct impact on that of the next dynasty, Joseon, which was when the History of Goryeo was compiled. Nevertheless, there is no indication that these records were manufactured out of whole cloth, though readers should certainly be aware of biases from political agendas. The necessity for such caution arguably holds true for all historical records.

Gongmin is widely known and admired in Korean history for breaking Goryeo away from the Yuan Empire’s interference as Yuan’s power waned. He took back territory conquered by Yuan, and ceased the use of the Mongol empire’s calendar and customs. Internally, he purged pro-Yuan elements in court and resettled the balance of power by weakening the political control of the military leadership and nurturing a new generation of Confucian scholar-bureaucrats. The latter, ironically, would be some of the main forces behind the founding of Joseon which would replace Goryeo.

The fall of Yuan and the turmoil in the Goryeo power structure, however, caused external and internal chaos that undermined any attempts to rule. He had to flee the palace when hundreds of thousands of Red Turban rebels who had rose up against Yuan invaded Goryeo. He survived internal rebellions and assassination attempts, and the purges and punishments he handed down as he grew increasingly suspicious only isolated him farther.

The queen who supported him unconditionally throughout his anti-Yuan independence policy and internal turmoil was the Mongol Princess Supreme Noguk of Yuan, born Borjigin Budashiri. Like every king in his line since his great-grandfather Chungryeol he wedded a Yuan Princess for political backing, but the history is very clear that King Gongmin and his wife were deeply in love—and the historians were not always approving about it. Their love is the stuff of legend in Korean history, such as the time the Princess Supreme sat before the doors to her husband’s room to protect him from rebel assassins, a courage praised down the ages well into the Joseon era. There is also a charming anecdote that Gongmin, an artist who disliked horseback riding and was the only king of Goryeo who did not hunt, practiced riding with the Princess at her behest during their displacement from court.

The fatal flaw in their love from a patriarchal perspective was Princess Noguk’s infertility. This couple had no children 15 years into their marriage, which was a source of instability and concern for the dynasty. By itself this bad luck could generally be remedied by royal polygamy, but according to the History of Goryeo he never much enjoyed intimacy with women and his visits to Princess Noguk were very rare. The Princess reluctantly and sorrowfully acquiesced to the king marrying a second queen 10 years into the childless marriage, but it appears he was not intimate with the other lady at all.

When the Princess finally fell pregnant with the couple’s long-awaited child, such was Gongmin’s desire for a safe birth that he pardoned prisoners and had temples and shrines across the kingdom pray for her. Unfortunately she died during a difficult birth, and the baby died with her. It was a catastrophe in an already unstable reign, often seen as the beginning of the end for the king both personally and politically.

The loss of a strong political backing from his marriage to the Princess led Gongmin to take drastic measures to carry on his reforms, the foremost of which was appointing Shin Don, a former monk with no noble background or bureaucratic qualification, to head those reforms. Shin Don is called both a bold reformer who put brakes on the nobility’s abuse of power and mistreatment of the people, and an illegitimate despot who himself abused the power given to him by an increasingly unstable king. It was Gongmin himself who eventually turned on Shin Don by arresting and executing him on charges of treachery against the throne, and the reforms ultimately failed.

According to the framing of the History of Goryeo, which as seen in the caveat above may be biased for the political agenda of justifying the next dynasty, Gongmin’s “excessive” grief for his beloved queen also contributed to the fall of his kingdom. He started wasteful construction projects for her shrine, the size of which was an enormous drain on the already embattled kingdom’s resources. The work itself caused the deaths of workers and suffering for the populace from the literally monumental effort to carry the materials from afar and build the edifice. He would take meals in front of her portrait, speaking to her as though to a living wife, and his continued refusal to be intimate with his other wives meant he had no heir. When asked by his mother eight years after the Princess’s death why he did not frequent his queen consorts’ chambers, he replied weeping that there were none like the Princess, which his mother reprimanded as shameful and excessive grief.

According to the records he was not, however, adverse to intimacy with men. The History of Goryeo records King Gongmin gathering young men from good families around him as his personal bodyguard, the Jajewi, on whom he bestowed numerous favors. Some see this as analogous to the decade Gongmin himself spent as a young prince at Yuan court as an imperial bodyguard and hostage. He also had a male lover, Kim Heung-gyeong, who received the king’s yongyang favor and high office. He was also placed in charge of the Jajewi.

The History of Goryeo records the Jajewi doing “wanton and filthy” deeds for the king’s favor, which included sex with the king but was not described in the refined language of yongyang or even namsaek, perhaps because the sex acts with the men in question were not considered befitting a high-ranking man’s dignity. This allegedly consisted of the king putting on women’s cosmetics, ordering the young men of the Jajewi to have sex with a young servant girl while he watched from the next room, and then having the men do “wanton deeds unto him as to a woman.” This seems to imply being a recipient of penetration (i.e. a bottom), considered in many cultures to be shameful and submissive for a man of dominant status where being the penetrator of a man was acceptable.

According to the record, Gongmin also planned to resolve the problem of begetting an heir by having these young bodyguards rape his queens, something the ladies resisted threatening suicide but one of them relented when Gongmin threatened her at swordpoint. These actions became the king’s downfall when she fell pregnant from the rapes by Hong Ryun, a leading member of the Jajewi. Gongmin, on being told by a eunuch Choi Mansaeng about the pregnancy, announced that he would have Hong Ryun killed—and then, inexplicably, told Choi Mansaeng that he would be killed as well for knowing this. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Choi Mansaeng and Hong Ryun later burst into Gongmin’s bedchamber where the king was in drunken slumber and stabbed him to death.

Though Gongmin did have a son, or said he did, there were so many doubts cast on the boy’s birth that he never gained legitimacy and was ultimately executed by the rising coalition of soldiers and scholars who would ultimately bring down Goryeo and found the new kingdom of Joseon. Gongmin never mentioned the boy until a few years after his birth, claiming he had made a royal visit to the late Shin Don’s home where he lay with a female servant of Shin Don, Banya, who later gave birth to a boy. After Shin Don’s execution Gongmin brought the boy to the palace to be raised as a prince and be his heir, but even taking his story at face value the boy Wu had no right to be the king’s heir because he was born outside recognized marriage or concubinage. As it were, many doubted Wu’s paternity and both Wu and his son Chang were later executed, and were called Shin Wu and Shin Chang as descendants of Shin Don rather than the royal surname of Wang.

Though we might not be able to take all of the History of Goryeo at face value especially at the end of the dynasty, by the History’s framing King Gongmin’s favors and immoral acts with men, together with an aversion to physical intimacy with women, perhaps compounded by what was viewed as an unusual and shameful level of affection for an infertile—and later dead—queen, contributed to the instability and fall of his kingdom. It should be noted that a king having male lovers was not in itself problematic or unusual in the eyes of the history writers, but rather the shameful nature of some of these sexual acts together with the attempt to adulterate the royal line through cuckoldry.

Sources: Encyclopedia of Korean Culture entry, Princess Supreme Noguk’s Encyclopedia of Korean Culture entry, King Gongmin’s section of the History of Goryeo, History of Goryeo description of the Jajewi’s sexual misdeeds, History of Goryeo describing Kim Heung-gyeong as the king’s lover

Sossang and Danji (15th century): Enslaved women in a known sexual relationship

Sossang and Danji were servants in the palace of the Joseon dynasty in its early years. Sossang was a servant of the palace, meaning she was indentured to the state, while Danji was a private servant in the household of one of the Crown Prince’s royal concubines.

According to the record, Sossang and Danji were in love and sometimes slept together, leaving no doubt that the relationship was sexual in nature. The Crown Princess Consort at the time from the house of Bong, when later interrogated by her father-in-law the king, described how Sossang and Danji not only slept together at night but also embraced neck to neck and sucked each others’ tongues because they were “always loving and joyful (常時愛好)” with each other, in what may be the only surviving description of consenting erotic activity between women from premodern Korea.

Neither Sossang nor Danji had full freedom to marry of their own volition as enslaved persons, though enslavers might give their blessings or at least tolerate male-female unions involving the persons they had enslaved. Nevertheless, it seemed these two had some space to have a relationship with each other which, if technically illegitimate, was at least a known phenomenon and one that was not particularly more stringently punished than male-female adultery, as discussed below.

Such female homosexual relationships and the women in them were almost never recorded, and the reason we know these two particular women’s names and their relationship is because the aforementioned Crown Princess Consort Bong developed a sexual interest in Sossang and, per Sossang’s accusation, raped the servant “in form similar to a man lying with a woman.” The Crown Princess also stalked and spied on Sossang and Danji to keep them apart, and jealously kept the fearful Sossang by her side.

This coerced sexual relationship between the Princess Consort and Sossang became known to the palace, and as it was adultery by the Princess Consort against her husband the Crown Prince, it was viewed as a violation of the royal family’s dignity and integrity and ultimately became the reason for the Princess’s expulsion from her position. The King considered the adultery with Sossang too shameful to publicly state as a reason for the expulsion, however, and named the Princess’s other misdeeds instead, such as jealousy of her husband’s concubines, peering at people outside through the servants’ outhouse walls, and improper handling of royal property.

The king who made this decision, Sejong, professed a particular hatred for such illegitimate assignations between female servants, enslaved women and others, and discussed how he would have them corporeally punished by 70 blows to the buttocks and 100 more on repeat offenses. Given that these punishments used large wooden paddles, such beatings could result in not only injury but disability and even death. Believing that Heaven had guided his heart to hate the practice of female homosexuality, he boasted of reducing this custom with such strict measures. However, this was certainly not the last instance of recorded female homosexuality in the Joseon palace, as later discussed.

Depiction of the punitive beating gonjang. Image source

For context, it does not appear that female homosexuality was a particularly greater crime than illicit male-female sex. In the Great Laws of Ming (大明律), the criminal code of the Chinese Ming dynasty that became the basis of Joseon criminal law, the basic punishment for illegitimate sex between a man and woman who were not married to each other was 80 blows for both the man and woman, or 90 blows for a married woman.

Of course, it is doubtful that the law was enforced for unmarried men and women who had consenting sex, for both lack of social stigma for such activities and limitations in state resources. However, Sejong’s own prohibition of relationships between palace servants was not a blanket ban on female homosexuality throughout the land of Joseon either, but rather took place in the specific context of the palace which was at the center and source of the kingdom’s Confucian rule, where even unmarried servants were held to a standard of conduct befitting the dignity of the royal household.

Sources: Description of the Sossang incident, female palace servants and male attendants punished and enslaved for adultery and theft

Yi Seon (15th century): A nobleman’s male “concubine” and cuckoldry

Also during the time of Sejong, a nobleman named Yi Seon was given high office and put in charge of Joseon’s military. The record of his promotion states three main points against Yi Seon’s character that made him unfit for office, in this order:

1. He is small-minded, stubborn, strange-tempered, arrogant, and is neither capable himself nor trusting of colleagues and subordinates, and thus almost always ruins the work wherever he goes.

2. He has a handsome male slave who he keeps in a room as he would a wife or concubine, who is indeed known in the neighborhood as Lord Yi’s concubine. This slave even goes willfully into the marital bedroom and sleeps with Yi Seon’s wife, with the noise audible from the outside, something Yi Seon neither prohibits nor minds.

3. He has his servants go around digging under the walls of his neighbors, causing the neighbors to move away when the walls cave, and he promptly incorporates these lands as fields attached to his own compound. He also incorporated a formerly communal well by putting a human corpse next to it and then walling it around when people stopped coming.

The perceived sexual inappropriateness of allowing his male lover to commit adultery with his wife, it seems, was considered to be equivalent with other character flaws of incompetence and avarice in one of the highest officials in the land. This was not considered a criminal offense, however, (though the handling of property may well have constituted a crime if laws were properly enforced) nor even a disqualification given that Yi Seon continued to serve in high office.

Source: Allegations of Yi Seon’s poor character

Lady Bak (15th century): Manufactured allegations of affairs with maidservants

A lady from the house Bak, the wife of Prince Je-an of the royal family, was alleged to have been in affairs with three maidservants. Lady Bak herself maintained her innocence, saying that it was the maidservants who tried to seduce her, forcibly kissed her, and touched her breasts without her consent.

Under interrogation a maidservant confessed that the prince’s nurse was behind it, trying to frame Lady Bak so the prince could remarry his former wife. In the end, despite the lady’s proven innocence, Prince Je-an convinced his kinsman King Seongjong to let him divorce Lady Bak and remarry his divorced wife Lady Kim. Though this is not a case of consensual homosexual activity between women, it shows that female homosexuality was a known practice and was potentially marriage-ending and incriminating much like adultery with a man.

Sources: Kang Moon-jong (2015), Allegations against Lady Bak

Palace attendants (15th-18th centuries): Complaints and alleged punishments of female homosexuality

Photograph from 1906 at the royal palace. Image source

Palace attendants (內人, na’in) and senior ladies (尙宮, sanggung) were a different class of women from the enslaved women who served at the palace, though in a broad sense they might all be called palace attendants (宮女 gungnyeo, 宮人 gung-in). In the narrow sense, palace attendants were not menial laborers of the palace but professional assistants, craftswomen, and cooks who had their own maidservants. The attendants were taught to read and write Hangul, and served the royals close by or were in charge of the royals’ food, clothing, and decorations. The sanggung, meanwhile, were the senior management who gave orders to the na’in. The term “attendants,” for the purpose of this section, refers to this narrow sense of more elite palace workers, and will include the sanggung because they were promoted from the ranks of na’in.

Attendants were born from a range of different classes, from enslaved to nobility. Their special functions in the palace set them apart with certain significant benefits such as higher wages than most women of the time could command, social status, and a degree of leisure. These privileges also entailed many restrictions, a major one being that they could not leave the palace except on special occasions, when expelled, or when sick or close to death. Another was that they were forbidden to marry as they were technically sexually committed and available to the king, though this remained theoretical for almost all of these women and in practice it meant enforced celibacy. Adultery with men was punishable by death, for instance.

There are seeming allegations of adultery with women as well, that is between each other or with outside women, though the references are not entirely clear and an oft-cited example does not appear to be about homosexuality at all. That is, though it was alleged by some modern commentators that the reference in late 15th-century records to attendants sharing friendship (gyobung) with each other meant female homosexuality, punishable by being branded with the words “illegal friendship (違法交朋), an examination of the primary record does not indicate anything sexual about these illegal friendships and the punishment for them but rather factionism/partisanship and breach of palace security.

Gyobung has been used elsewhere in the records in a political sense referring to “factions of friends (朋堂)” meaning partisanship that was widely decried as a source of political disorder and corruption. The complaint about palace attendants’ gyobung, furthermore, was about attendants forming factions and leaking palace secrets, and from my reading there was no sexual content to these accusations.² Nevertheless, given the listing of gyobung as a term for female homosexuality and leaving open the possibility that I may have missed some nuances and references as a non-expert researcher, I am mentioning these passages and linking to the online database entry so others may judge for themselves.

A somewhat likelier reference to female homosexuality by palace attendants is a complaint from the 18th century that attendants were consorting with crafty Buddhist nuns and lowborn widows and calling it daeshik. Daeshik, as discussed above in the terminology section, means sharing meals together, in this context visits by friends from outside the palace, and was also a widespread term in premodern Korea for homosexuality.

In full context this complaint may also refer to the need for order and secrecy in the palace, as the immediately preceding passage discusses corruption and the leakage of palace secrets. The use of the term daeshik is nevertheless suggestive, and may have been a veiled reference to the entwined problems of corruption, security breaches, and sexual inappropriateness in the palace. This may have been as close to a reference as propriety allowed in open court. This is in contrast to the passages involving Princess Consort Bong’s rape of the maidservant Sossang, which recorded consultations made in secret between Sejong and his closest advisors because the matter was so sensitive. Certainly, given how widespread the use of “daeshik” was, it is unlikely that a classically educated audience of courtiers were ignorant of the innuendo.

It is further worth noting that the crafty nuns and lowborn widows referenced in the complaint are female counterparts to the “common ruffians and unseemly monks” referenced by Yi Gyu-gyeong while discussing male homosexuality, see next section. In this way, the daeshik custom between palace attendants presents a window into female homosexuality in other sections of society as well, where despite the kingdom’s repressive mores the people were subject to far less direct control in sexual matters.

As also noted in the section on Sossang and Danji, prohibitions and penalties were not unique to female homosexuality in a palace setting, with prohibitions against adultery with men being at least as heavy. In fact by the time of King Yeongjo, when the above complaint was made, the laws had become considerably stricter for palace attendants who consorted with outside men, a crime made punishable by beheading both the man and woman in Yeongjo’s time as opposed to corporeal punishment for sexual activity with women mentioned in Sejong’s time three hundred years before. There is no evidence of a ban on homosexuality, male or female, for the general populace.

Via Kang (2015), a number of scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries delved into the history of and terms for homosexuality, such as the origin and meaning of terms such as daeshik and namchong. Of these, Yi Hakgyu explained the meaning of daeshik as a part of palace affairs and mentioned that it was quite popular at the time, providing farther record of daeshik as a continuing practice in the Joseon dynasty.

Sources: Encyclopedia of Korean Culture entry on palace attendants, complaint of attendants’ partisanship and disclosure of palace secrets, branding punishment for “illegal friendship”, complaint of palace attendants’ inappropriate behavior with outside women, reference to adultery between palace attendants and men being punishable by death

Ruffians and monks (18th-19th centuries): Practitioners of male homosexuality

Yi Gyugyeong was an 18th to 19th century scholar whose greatest single work is the Oju Yeonmun Jangjeon San-go (五洲衍文長箋散稿), an encyclopedic compilation of over 1,400 entries comprising knowledge from around the world on a plethora of subjects from history and antiquity to science and agriculture. Homosexuality was one of the many subjects Yi Gyugyeong wrote about, and in exploring the history of namchong with examples from China and Japan, he ends the article on a note critical of homosexuality. “Who says this is a beautiful custom to be shared across the world? In our eastern land [Joseon], it is merely taught and learned among common ruffians and unseemly monks at temples.”

This offhand disapproving comment provides a window into the classes of men who were thought to engage in male homosexuality. Together with the above-discussed complaints of “crafty nuns and lowborn widows” as purveyors of daeshik, it may be indicative of the intertwining of class and position with sexual inappropriateness such as homosexuality: The unpropertied, unmarrigeable, and monastic outside the strict Confucian order built on the ideal of a propertied male-headed household.

Given the long and widespread practice of homosexuality in Korea, however, Yi Gyugyeong’s claim of its confinement to certain defined and despised classes seems more based on ideal than fact. Kings during the Goryeo dynasty were in open homosexual relationships, and a leading literary talent of the day wrote in praise of homosexual love. Even in the early Joseon period there were high-ranking officials in open homosexual relationships, and there are persistent records of working-class women engaging in female homosexuality in the royal palace of Joseon.

Conclusions

Records from premodern Korea going back over 1,000 years attest to the existence of people who did not conform to strict ideas of cisnormativity and heteronormativity. While the existence of homosexual, bisexual, and gender non-conforming people is a constant, there have been different understandings of attitudes toward their proclivities, from a gender inversion by Heaven to refined courtly love to social disorder and adultery against the King. Queer people have always been here and are no Western invention, and understandings of our existence will always be contextual and dynamic. One constant seems to be that the open existence of queer people outside of narrow constraints is construed as a threat to prevailing orders of patriarchy and property, or outside or parallel to such dominant order. This may be the ultimate subsersive promise of queerness. If queerness can threaten and dismantle kingdoms, what are the other possibilities?

The Lantern and the Night Moths (2024 Invisible Publishing) is a collection of modern and contemporary Chinese poetry translated by Yilin Wang and accompanied by Wang’s original essays. The diverse works and voices represented are made accessible by the lyrical, heartfelt translations no matter what the reader’s relationship with the original language: Shaky and uncertain in my case, but with no barriers to non-speakers and likely enjoyable even to fluent Chinese speakers for the lesser-traveled route through modernist Chinese poetry and the author’s deft guide through poetics, literary history, and the art of translation.

It was quite the experience to be immersed in such different ages and styles in one volume, from feminist revolutionary Qiu Jin’s fierce yearnings expressed in classical form, to early modernist Fei Ming’s bridging between the old and new in experimental, enigmatic verse. Poet-translator Dai Wangshu’s wistful reflections, together with contemporary poets Zhang Qiaohui and Xiao Xi’s everyday imagery and vivid poetic language, completed the journey through modernity to the present.

The effect is one of lively dialogue between these remarkable poets through their differences and convergences in style and imagery. “I shall declare, I have swept the dust of the world away,” proclaims the rebellious warrior Qiu Jin, while Fei Ming philosophically muses, “the universe is a particle of indestructible dust floating in the air.” Zhang Qiaohui patiently builds narrative in weighty blocks of language (“a pseudo-classical reconstruction made of bricks and reinforced concrete/It comforts me with its mundanity”) while Xiao Xi throws searing moments packaged in the rhythm of hyper-condensed language that beats with the consciousness of the now (“some people . . . auction their kidneys off to pay for iPhones”). Dai Wangshu, a seasoned flyer between worlds of thought and language, casually melds Asian and European philosophy together (“I think, therefore I am a butterfly…”) and sinks deep into existential meditations that waver like a flame between meanings, skillfully captured by the translator.

A must-read for anyone with a stake in the art of poetry and its translation, The Lantern and the Night Moths is a unique and necessary collection that raises urgent questions about the future of translation and translators in an age of upheaval, where old forms of devaluation and exploitation—as brought home by the British Museum’s uncredited and unpaid use of Wang’s Qiu Jin translations for its 2023 exhibit—coexist with the new in the use of technological sleight-of-hand to erase and appropriate translators’ labor. The Lantern and the Night Moths is both a literary treat and a clarion call that contains multitudes in a slim volume, a celebration, mourning, and hopeful anticipation of what has been and might yet be.

I’ve been aware for a while that I should do things in small increments, but it really came into focus for me with housekeeping advice videos I’ve been listening to. They all emphasized that cleaning is a matter of habit, not the occasional Herculean effort and helped me realize I’d been psyching myself out of consistent cleaning by thinking I needed to take out a full day to get EVERYTHING done in one go.

Unfortunately that was how I was brought up, with my mom telling me I should do the whole house when I cleaned because otherwise the dirt would spread from the uncleaned rooms to the clean one. So I ended up not cleaning on days I couldn’t do the whole house, which was most days… all days… yeah.

There’s some truth in what she said and I know she meant to help and not sabotage me, but it turned out to be unhelpful once I started keeping a home. I’m not a stay-at-home mom the way she was, I work for income in a home that’s still in the process of decluttering. Daily full house-cleaning is just not in the cards at this point. The dirt-spreading effect is also greatly reduced if rooms are cleaned on rotation because there’s less dirt overall to spread around. It’s a heck of a lot better than not getting started in the first place, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough, etc.

Once I accepted my starting point and circumstances instead of holding myself to standards for a completely different situation, I could start cleaning and tidying in bits and pieces rather than try to do everything all at once or organize a Grand Day of Reckoning after which everything would be perfect. Not like I’m opposed to big cleaning days, they can be satisfying and helpful, but a) they are intimidating to arrange and get started on, and b) I know myself well enough to realize that without a consistent habit things are going to fall apart around my ears again. Ask me how I know. Cries in years of exhausted ADHD working parent

In recent days I’ve been setting myself limited tasks every day, ideally with just one focus, such as “get the gross grease and food gunk off the kitchen floor with Magic Blocks and elbow oil. Yeah, just the floor, do not do the counters, do not clean the oven,” or “sweep the home office floor—yeah I know it’s a huge cluttered mess, we can get to that, just clean the reachable parts, please.”

And you know what? Things are better. Not perfect, I can still identify problems everywhere I look, but floors are cleaner and don’t feel disgusting to walk on. It gives me more energy and confidence to start working on bigger-ticket items, like space management in the home office, the big… basically… pile of garbage on the verandah, and the related entanglements of family-given items we don’t have a use for, the organizational issues of tossing vs. rehoming, guilt about potentially creating so much waste and so on.

And that’s okay. We’ll figure it out as we go. Not in one fell swoop, not on a Day of Salvation that will be the end of our problems, but bit by bit as time goes on and while we’re kind to ourselves moving the business of Life along.

This morning my husband and I cleaned the living room sitting mat and the floor underneath which was ick but doable, and we felt a lot better afterward. That’s our cleaning for today. Tomorrow I’ll probably wipe down and clean the big bedroom floor. That’ll be it for tomorrow. Eventually we’ll figure out things that take more organization and have more moving pieces, and we’ll get there. We will gradually, inexorably, habitually unfuck our habitat and feel more in control and relaxed about the house.

We’ll never live in a magazine-ready home but it’ll be cozy and ours, which is what counts. I know it works, because it’s already working and we’ll keep at it. It’ll be okay. Never perfect, but okay.

• Yi Gyubo (李奎報, 1168-1241), medieval Korean public official, essayist, and poet

I was given an advance reader copy of this book through BookSirens. This post is an edited version of the Goodreads review I posted. If you care about spoilers for non-fiction books, this review contains a discussion of the ending.

Also a warning for discussion of interpersonal antisemitism, which I did not include in the original Goodreads review.

Sad Sacked is a humorous and vividly-written exploration of a U.S. middle-class suburban family’s brush with financial insecurity when the author’s husband Rich loses his job and the family lives for a year on his severance package. The whole time the author scrambles to keep everything together, taking on crappy writing jobs to pay the bills while trying to motivate Rich to get a new job.

I sympathized deeply with the author’s growing anxiety and frustration as the shadow of her husband’s unemployment grew longer and financial apocalypse loomed, all the while squeezed by the pressure to keep up with the Jones in her affluent New Jersey neighborhood. It’s both an intimate portrayal of one family’s struggle and a dark look into the evaporation of employment and financial security even for the more affluent classes of U.S. society and elsewhere.

That said, I found the narrative ultimately limited by a seeming inability to think outside the status quo. (This is solely based on what was in the book, of course, since no doubt a lot more took place in real life than could be written about.) I found myself annoyed by the author and her husband’s seeming unwillingness to communicate about what seemed like conflicting goals and wants. The possibility of moving to a less expensive neighborhood is brought up but never seriously discussed or planned for in the narrative of the book, even though Rich drags his feet on looking for a new job for half a year. It’s mentioned from the start that he’s unhappy and disenchanted with his job, yet this appears to be dismissed as unimportant in the overriding quest to keep the family in their current lifestyle and neighborhood.

This unwillingness to communicate builds up resentments and ugly fights between the couple as pressures and anxieties mount, culminating in an antisemitic moment over the holidays when the author tells her husband that Christmas—a holiday he had been celebrating with her and their three children all their marriage and possibly before—isn’t his holiday.

It felt weird because there’s no self-reflection in the book about making such a hurtful and exclusionary comment, or a serious apology from what I could tell. It’s even more surreal because the very next scene is of their neighbor making a comment stereotyping Jewish people and the author, while recognizing the bigotry, doesn’t push back against it. So what I get out of what Liz Alterman has chosen to present in her own memoir, leaving aside the complexities of real life that I’m not privy to, is that she gets bigoted toward her own husband when she’s angry enough, doesn’t apologize for it, and also doesn’t defend him when others are bigoted against him. That was certainly a choice.

Moving on to the ending: I usually wouldn’t discuss endings in a review of a book that has a narrative, even non-fiction, but it’s a big chunk of what spoiled (heh) the book for me so I figured I’d go into it. Spoiler alert, the husband does get a new and higher-paying job at the last minute as his severance runs out. The family get to keep the house and go on as before. Yay, all’s well that ends well, right?

Unfortunately it rang hollow for me, because the only thing the couple seems to have learned from this time in their life is that they need to be grateful, not take anything for granted, and work hard. Evidently it doesn’t matter that the husband was miserable working in this field. No, he should be grateful to have a job at all and he’s learned his lesson! Don’t even think about the possibility of a new career/lifestyle or stepping off the light-speed social prestige treadmill, just keep your head down, say yes sir and yes ma’am, and keep working!

The final chapter/epilogue where the author states these lessons felt creepily docile and saccharine, so unlike the verve and humor that had attracted me to the book in the first place. Maybe that’s appropriate for an ending that may read on the surface as happy but is actually one of accepting the status quo and learning to comply with it. This lack of imagination, this beaten-down acquiescence to social pressure, may be the most sadsack thing about Sad Sacked.

Read the story first!

The Schwarzschild Defence (2023) by M. V. Melcer is a very fun short science fiction story and highly recommended reading. UPDATE (June 23, 2024): Given the story is now paywalled, I replaced the link with an archived version. I particularly love its punchy style that delivers so much in so few words. Its choices are effective for the story told, from the format giving only one side of the interview to the downright chilling twists, delivered so nonchalantly. It feels fresh while maintaining a classic sci-fi feel, down to the commentary on gender roles and violence against women (consider that a content warning).

Still, I can’t be the only one who thinks the argument as presented doesn’t work legally or even physics-wise, right? If you like overthinking things, and more importantly if you’ve read the story, maybe you’d like to join me in overthinking a delightful story!

Seriously. Read it. It’s less than a thousand words and brilliantly written. I’ll wait.

Checking the laws

So, can you see which parts don’t hold up? Legally speaking, even if we take the narrator of the story, let’s call her “Mileva,” at her word that Xavier will not die (a claim I highly doubt, see below), she has by her admission committed some pretty serious crimes.

One is the crime of false imprisonment, meaning detaining someone against their will without legal justification. Mileva sabotaged Xavier into an inescapable prison and there’s no way this doesn’t count as false imprisonment, especially when she was reckless enough to admit at least twice to the police that this wasn’t what Xavier intended or wanted with the flight.

In the jurisdiction I live in, false imprisonment carries a penalty of up to 10 years’ incarceration if committed against a spouse or other close family member. Committing cruel acts against a close family member while keeping them falsely imprisoned carries a penalty of at least 2 years’ imprisonment. The penalty is increased by up to 50% if the false imprisonment is done with the possession of a dangerous object, and both the black hole and the tampered-with spaceship arguably qualify.

Overall, Mileva is looking at some pretty heavy charges and had better get her lawyers scrambling. Given the severity of the effects, the incontrovertible evidence, and her intent, freely admitted to a police detective—without a lawyer to advise her, what was she thinking?!—to trap Xavier in the black hole, it is very likely she will have the book thrown at her.

Mileva has also, by her admission, tampered with sensitive equipment, damaging Xavier’s property knowing he is undertaking a dangerous and sensitive flight. Through this she caused Xavier to make unwanted contact with the event horizon of the black hole, which is battery.

Even if Xavier suffers no other physical harm (which I doubt, more on that soon), slowing down his physical process well beyond human levels is unwanted interference with his body, a form of inflicted physical injury that exacerbates the crimes of false imprisonment and battery. I’m sure there have been more crimes committed, but these are some of the big ones.

Checking the laws of physics

The charges outlined above rest on Mileva’s insistence that Xavier is physically unharmed and will live a long, long time in the black hole. But will he? I’m not formally trained in physics so I’m on less certain ground here, but it doesn’t seem that way to me, and discussions like this one seem to confirm my suspicion.

If time slows down as you go down a black hole and the gravitational pull becomes inescapable, wouldn’t the parts of the spaceship and of Xavier be pulled down at different rates, meaning he and the spaceship will be literally atomized? If anything he’s going to have the longest, most protracted death ever. Not that I care, the guy’s an ass and deserves it, but the whole twist of the story depends on Mileva’s actions not being murder.

I mean maybe Mileva is right, and the story was worded very cleverly here, that this Xavier-molasses and his eventual atom-level dissolution will happen so slowly in a Schwarzschild black hole, at a time scale well beyond everyone’s lifespans, that it can’t be murder in the conventional sense. Murder revolves around the idea of cutting someone’s life short, so what do you do when someone stretches it out, longer and longer beyond the shape lives were ever meant to take, before a horrible end?

This is why I believe the better legal tacks to take are false imprisonment, battery, and attendant serious injury with property damage and sabotage sprinkled in for spice. But under no circumstance can Mileva get away scot-free as she claims.

Notes & conclusions

I’d like to note this isn’t me endorsing the incarceral state, far less the misogyny and threats Mileva was subjected to by her account. All I’m doing is analyzing the internal logic of the story, which is remarkable for raising these questions at all. If Isaac Asimov in his classic The Billiard Ball (1967) can stretch, or shall we say fail to stretch, the science in almost exactly the same way,¹ I don’t see why M. V. Melcer can’t be afforded the same leniency. Science fiction is fiction in the end, and between perfect fidelity to the facts and a good story there’s no harm in choosing the latter.

I also think that, if we read the story “straight” along with the fact-checking, a very different reading can emerge than the original impression of a domestic violence survivor putting her abuser away from good and walking away cackling with his fortune: Instead the story can become one of a traumatized survivor who saved herself with an unthinkable act of desperation that has changed her forever, and ended up self-sabotaging herself in her panic and inability to accept the reality of what she’s done. That’s another thing about fiction, that it’s roomy enough for different interpretations, and arguably it’s a great story that can admit so many readings in such an economy of words.

On the god of plague and the story of Cheoyong

Content note: Mythological events that may be read as sexual violence or adultery.

Before Koreans knew smallpox as a virus, we knew her as a god. With no way to prevent this terrible infectious disease which had a mortality rate of up to 80% and often left survivors scarred and disabled, we called smallpox by names like “Great Lady” or “Great Guest.”

You could not try to exorcise or even use medicine against the Lady-God; you offered her food and prayed to her in the hope she would spare your loved one, who all too often was a child. Make her angry by disrespecting her, and she could kill the patient or leave them alive but badly scarred, even blinded.

Though the god of smallpox has been personified as different genders and forms from all walks of life, as befitting a disease that could be spread and suffered by anyone, the most familiar shamanic representation is that of a beautiful young woman and that is the version I will go with.

A painting of Hogumama, the smallpox goddess. Source

Now, one figure from the Korean kingdom of Silla in the late ninth century earned the respect and repentance of this terrible and formidable god. This man, Cheoyong(處容), has a strange story of his own:

Heon-gang, the king of Silla at the time, was returning from a seaside excursion when all of a sudden cloud and fog rolled in, causing the entire party to lose their way. The royal sun-administrator, as the weather official who was also in charge of weather-related omens and divination, advised the king that this was the work of the Dragon King of the East Sea, who should be appeased by some good deed.

Though the king was skeptical, no one could see anything because of the strange weather and he had to do something. He ordered a temple be built in that place for the dragon; the instant he said the words, the fog and clouds disappeared.

Pleased at this respectful treatment from the king, the Dragon of the East Sea appeared before the royal retinue with his seven sons to dance and play music, praising the king’s virtue. The dragon then left one of his sons, Cheoyong, with the king to aid him at the capital. The king, happy to have the Dragon’s son by his side, arranged his match to a beautiful woman and gave him a high office to have him settle in the capital.

Cheoyong’s wife was very beautiful, and was admired by all. The god of plague, enamored of her, transformed to come to Cheoyong’s house and secretly lie in his wife’s bed. Cheoyong came home late at night to look upon his bed, only to see two people in it. One was his wife, but he did not recognize the other. At the sight he withdrew, dancing and singing:

The god of plague showed her true form and knelt before Cheoyong, contrite. Said she, “I envied your wife and have now violated her. Yet you showed no anger at the sight, and this beautiful conduct has moved me deeply. I swear to you, if I but see your form in paint I will not enter that door.”

This was how people started putting up portraits of Cheoyong to deter plague and for good luck. The temple the king built for the dragon was called Mang-hae-sa (望海寺), the Temple of the Ocean View. Cheoyong’s song and dance named for him have been passed on to posterity and the dance is performed to this day, designated as a UNESCO intangible heritage.

The Middle Eastern hypothesis of Cheoyong’s origin

One intriguing hypothesis about Cheoyong’s identity is that he was an Arab or Persian merchant, possibly a doctor. Though there are no explicit records, traders from the Middle East may have been in Silla at this time. At the very least Silla was known in the Middle East, with scholars such as Ibn Khurdaziba in the ninth century writing about Silla as a land beyond China where Muslims happily settled because it was a such a good and plentiful land—as Cheoyong did in the story. In the Persian epic poem Kush-Nama the hero Abtin marries Fararang, a princess of Basila which is alleged to be a mythical version of Silla.

Also, the later Korean dynasty of Goryeo clearly did engage in trade with the Islam world. Not only are there records of large trading parties from the land of Daesik (對食國), meaning Arabia, the name “Korea” itself became known to the West through Middle Eastern merchants. It is an intriguing possibility that exchange between the Korean Peninsula and the Middle East started even before it was formally recorded in the Goryeo era, with the tale of Cheoyong passed down as a mythologized hint much like Ibn Khurdaziba’s writings on Silla or the adventures of the Kush-Nama.

The accounts of Cheoyong’s appearance before the king are suggestive as well. The fact that he and his family rose out of the sea could be a mythologized rendition of their seafaring, while their strange appearance and clothing astonished the Korean onlookers and caused them to call the strangers “spirits of the sea.” More specifically, Cheoyong was said to have deep-set eyes and a prominent nose, features that have been preserved in an exaggerated form in his portraiture and the mask performers wear for his dance.

A performance of Cheoyong’s dance in his mask. Source

The Islamic world also had some of the most advanced medical knowledge in the world at this time, building on the preserved knowledge from the classical world and adding to it with innovation and observation. The year 879 when Cheoyong was said to have come from the sea was early in the career of Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (854-925), a Persian doctor and polymath who wrote a pioneering book on smallpox and measles.

If Cheoyong were a Middle Eastern man with medical knowledge he may well have had access to the kind of research and methods Al-Razi used, if not the specific book, which may have enabled him to treat people afflicted with smallpox. These events may then have been mythologized as Koreans at the time understood it, a ceremonial appeasement of the smallpox god, making him an enduring legend and himself a beloved god in our pantheon.

In conclusion: Solidarity in times of plague

Cheoyong’s exact identity and background, including whether he was a real person, will always remain mysterious and up for debate. Nevertheless, the possibility that he was an Arab or Persian is particularly poignant at a time when COVID-19 is bringing out virulent xenophobia and racism around the world. Cheoyong may well have been a foreigner risking his life in a strange land to help patients struck with a deadly and highly contagious disease.

And now, 1,100 years later, Iran is hard hit by the disease and by the sanctions that are undercutting its response. It is requesting Korea’s aid to secure more testing kits for citizens, an effort made difficult by the sanctions imposed against it. This may very well be the time Korea can repay the debt it owes Cheoyong. Wouldn’t such beautiful conduct move even the fearsome god of plague?

References

The original tale: Ilyeon (1281, King Chungryeol Year 7). Sir Cheoyong and the Temple of the Ocean View (處容郞望海寺), Book 2 of Stories from the Three Kingdoms (三國遺事).

Cheoyong’s tale as an appeasement of the smallpox god: Hwang Byeong-ik (2011). The Study about Original Form of Small Pox Goddess & the Meaning of Silla 〈Cheoyong-ga〉. Journal of Korean Studies (formerly Journal of Spiritual Culture Studies), 34(2), 127-152.

Silla-Middle East relations: Muhammad Kansu/Jeong Su-il (1990). The History of Relations Between Silla and Arab Muslim Countries. Ph.D. thesis for the History Department of Dankook University.

— Du Fu (杜甫), 8th century Chinese poet

— Li Bai (李白), 8th-century Chinese poet

靑山橫北郭

The mountains green lie ’thwart the Northern walls,

白水遶東城

The river glows wrapped round the Eastern hold.

此地一爲別

When on this ground we once do say farewell,

孤蓬萬里征

Alone, far-flung, we’ll tread a thousand miles.

浮雲遊子意

The clouds drift on as do our wanderers’ hearts;

落日故人情

The setting sun with strength of yearning burns.

揮手自玆去

We wave our hands and from this place depart–

蕭蕭班馬鳴

Our mounts call out on parting, quite forlorn.

Yeah I took an ancient Chinese poem and made it cynical & gay lol. I was inspired by Zoë C.’s translation of the same poem, found here, to make a quite different translation.

The differences are very indicative of our styles, I think, and I enjoyed the understated and quietly intense lyricism and voice of Zoë’s rendition. Whereas I, as always, prefer classical iambic metre for classical poetry and use it to build up to big, dramatic emotions.

— Hwang Jinyi (1506-1567), poet, artist, performer and courtesan.

Here are the year’s writing statistics from writing most days from January 2 to December 31, 2022, taken using functionalities and packages of Emacs Org Mode, and my takeaways from these numbers.

The words and the hours

According to a word count and Org Mode’s clock table report, I wrote somewhere around 170,000 words this year in 11 days, 2 hours, and 9 minutes, or around 266 hours of writing.

These numbers come with some caveats: The word count function does give me an exact count, 174,369, but this is an overcount that includes elements that won’t be exported such as header (scene) labels, in-file notes, and time stamps. This works for me, since I only need a rough estimate of where I am and not a laser-precise word count. Besides, even considering the overcount I know this is Too Much! I’m going to hate my first-draft self once I have my editing hat on, that’s for sure.

The hours spent writing are similarly imprecise. I started using Org Mode’s clocking commands fairly early in the year (January 5) to start keeping track of writing time, and there’s some undercount from the first few days when the clock was not used. Discounting that fairly small gap, which can’t be by more than 2 hours, I was also inconsistent at times about running the clock. Sometimes I ran the clock but was not writing, and at other times it was the other way around, though this was rarer. For these reasons both the word count and reported time are more estimates than exact measures.

Words per hour and day

Keeping those limitations in mind, a very rough estimate of my writing speed this year was 639 words/hour, and I wrote an average of 465 words a day during the year, counting the skipped days. On the days I did write the average was 544 words a day.

The estimated hourly word rate largely matches up with what I’ve sensed on a regular day of writing, that I tend to produce about 100 words per 10 minutes or maybe a little more. The per-day rate is a bit of a surprise, given that my goal was to write 300 words a day and I often did stop at almost exactly 300 words, especially on days the words weren’t coming. I guess it makes sense though, since I did overachieve a lot of days, by a lot at times.

The ironic/interesting part is, I think it was my keeping the goal at 300 words that allowed me to write an average of 500 words a day. A lot of days I could only bear to start writing because I told myself I just had to do 300 words, and actually stopped at 300 when I was struggling and tired. There were many days I could not have started at all at the thought of having to write 500 words a day, and that would have meant a lot fewer words.

Habit consistency and achievement

In addition to writing and getting these stats in Org Mode, I had also been tracking my writing as a habit. At the end of 2022 I used a neat package called org-habit-stats to get a calendar view and some statistics on the writing habit.

According to the statistics, I wrote 312 days out of the year, or 85% of days in 2022. Nearly a third of the missed days come from February when I was having a hard time keeping up with writing, as seen in this calendar view of writing statistics:

As you can see I generally wrote on most days of the month, usually missing two to four days in a month. Those would have been the days when I was overwhelmed by work or family obligations, or just needed a break.

The one outlier is February, when I was missing over half the days of the month. This was likely because I was wrapping up my last academic gig during that month before I turned to full-time translation in March, something that made a huge difference in my free time and energy levels.

It wasn’t as though I became a different person with more energy or “willpower” between the end of February and the start of March. I had simply structured my life in a way that made room for writing and that made all the difference, which may be the true takeaway from this year of writing.

Numbers, for what they’re worth

Word count and hours spent writing are just numbers at the end of the day–or year, as it were. They’re mostly meaningful to me as an indication for how far I’ve come, even as I realize how far I still have to go. The story has grown in length far beyond my original expectations and I’m just slogging on to get to the end of my originally envisioned story, so I can turn around to figure out stuff like editing (I expect to cut extravagantly) and book divisions.

I’d frankly have been happier to have reached the end of my draft than to have written so many words, but I’m letting the process take control for now as I try to feel out the world and narrative by writing through them. Stats are one part of that journey but far from the whole experience, any more than kilometers and hours driven can tell you about the scenery seen outside the window or the smell of the car seats.

What is most meaningful to me about my writing habit is that the dream of writing this story is no longer a dream but my waking reality, and that it will be done at some point barring some huge, unforeseen change. I know I am moving toward the endpoint, steadily if slowly. Once I get there, I will know the key was the momentum of consistent habit.

It was kind of background knowledge for me that object storage was an option in Mastodon hosting, but I never felt much need for it on my tiny instance. Then it became an urgent issue when fedi activity exploded in November in the wake of the Twitter meltdown. My instance database started crashing from the 40 GB local drive overflowing with cached media, and constantly ran at above 30 GB even when I left only one day’s worth of cache at media cleanup (tootctl media remove --days 1).

I already had a Backblaze/B2 account that I had been using for my personal offsite backups, and I calculated that I could similarly hook it up to my Hometown/Mastodon instance at a fraction of the cost of adding more storage volume to the Hetzner server. I also wanted to keep using B2 for this rather than create a new account with AWS or some other storage service, feeling no need to complicate things with yet another account and service to keep track of.

The problem I ran into was that this particular combination of Mastodon and B2 is woefully underdocumented, even with B2’s S3-compatibility. This led me into a lot of trial and error because the documentation I did find was outdated¹ and/or did not mention issues unique to B2, like a huge authentication pitfall that I ended up pitching headfirst into.

Let me discuss that pitfall first, in case you don’t need the rest of this guide: You need to use a B2 application key, NOT a master application key, for this purpose. If, like me, you have everything set up correctly and media uploads fail for an unexplained reason, this might be why. More details in Step 1 below.

So here it is, the walkthrough of the process and settings that I wished I had when I configured my setup, put together from other sources and my own trial and error.

Step 1: Set up a B2 bucket and application key for your instance

This part is going to be pretty obvious if you already use B2. Otherwise, the official tutorial for creating a bucket should be enough. Everything I have read says the privacy setting of the bucket should be public, though this comes at a risk because it means anyone can download from the bucket which could potentially eat into your traffic limit and cost you. If you haven’t done so already, you might have to verify your email to set the bucket to public.

Make note of the bucket’s address, which will be the endpoint noted in your bucket information preceded by your bucket name. If you named your bucket my-instance-media your bucket address would be something like:

my-instance-media.s3.us-west-900.backblazeb2.com

You can verify this by uploading a file to the bucket and viewing the address of the file, which will be something like:

my-instance-media.s3.us-west-900.backblazeb2.com/my-test-file.txt

If you don’t have a B2 application key, their official tutorial should get you started. Also, as discussed above, make sure you use a non-master application key pair for this setup in Step 4 below. Master application keys are NOT S3-compatible (see “Warning”), and if you set up your .env.production with it your setup will not work!

Note down the application key id-application key pair in a secure location such as your password manager, especially the application key which will only be shown once and never again in your browser interface or otherwise.

Step 2: Set up a proxy on nginx

As noted in the official Mastodon documentation, it is very much recommended that you set up a proxy local to the server to cache media requested from the bucket on your server. If every request were to go directly to your bucket your traffic meter could climb rapidly and cost you more money than it has to. I modeled my nginx configuration for this on a configuration for a different S3-compatible service, and followed the directions in the Mastodon documentation on configuring the proxy.

Here’s what my configuration, anonymized to /etc/nginx/sites-available/files.example.com, looks like:

    proxy_cache_path   /tmp/nginx-cache-instance-media levels=1:2 keys_zone=s3_cache:10m max_size=10g
    inactive=48h use_temp_path=off;

    server {

      listen 443 ssl http2;
      listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
      # CUSTOMIZE THE VALUE BELOW TO YOUR OWN SUBDOMAIN
      server_name files.example.com;

      root /home/mastodon/live/public/system;

      access_log off;
      # CUSTOMIZE THE VALUE BELOW TO YOUR DESIRED ERROR LOG FILE NAME
      error_log /var/log/nginx/files-error.log;

      keepalive_timeout 60;

      location = / {
        index index.html;
      }

      location / {
        try_files $uri @s3;
      }

      # CUSTOMIZE THE VALUE BELOW TO YOUR BUCKET ADDRESS
      set $s3_backend 'https://my-instance-media.s3.us-west-900.backblazeb2.com';

 location @s3 {
   limit_except GET {
     deny all;
   }

   resolver 9.9.9.9;
   # CUSTOMIZE THE VALUE BELOW TO YOUR BUCKET ADDRESS
   proxy_set_header Host 'my-instance-media.s3.us-west-900.backblazeb2.com';
   proxy_set_header Connection '';
   proxy_set_header Authorization '';
   proxy_hide_header Set-Cookie;
   proxy_hide_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin';
   proxy_hide_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods';
   proxy_hide_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers';
   proxy_hide_header x-amz-id-2;
   proxy_hide_header x-amz-request-id;
   proxy_hide_header x-amz-meta-server-side-encryption;
   proxy_hide_header x-amz-server-side-encryption;
   proxy_hide_header x-amz-bucket-region;
   proxy_hide_header x-amzn-requestid;
   proxy_ignore_headers Set-Cookie;
   proxy_pass $s3_backend$uri;
   proxy_intercept_errors off;

   proxy_cache s3_cache;
   proxy_cache_valid 200 304 48h;
   proxy_cache_use_stale error timeout updating http_500 http_502 http_503 http_504;
   proxy_cache_lock on;

   expires 1y;
   add_header Cache-Control public;
   add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' '*';
   add_header X-Cache-Status $upstream_cache_status;
  }

}

The specific addresses and names should be customized to your desired settings, as marked in the configuration text.

When the configuration file is written to your satisfaction, save it and symlink it from /etc/nginx/sites-enabled, and reload nginx by running (with sudo if you are not the root user here):

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/files.example.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
systemctl reload nginx

Then get a SSL certificate for the domain, as seen in the Mastodon documentation.

certbot --nginx -d files.example.com
systemctl reload nginx

This was the main place I diverged from the configuration posted on the thomas-leister.de website, by the way: I use port 443 for an encrypted connection per the Mastodon documentation rather than 80 for an unencrypted one like Thomas Leister did, mainly because the unencrypted connection broke all the images on my instance lol.

Step 3: Upload existing Mastodon media to your bucket

If your instance is already in use, you should upload previously downloaded media to the instance bucket. There are several different tools to achieve this, and if you already use an S3-compatible tool like aws or s3cmd it should do the job. Just be aware that you’ll need to use an S3-compatible non-master B2 application key to authenticate it, as discussed.

I used the official b2 command line tool, since it’s a simple binary and fairly easy to use. I downloaded b2 for Linux through the link on this page, uploaded it to the /home/mastodon/live directory (though in hindsight its bin subdirectory would have been more fitting), changed the owner to the mastodon user with:

sudo chown mastodon:mastodon b2-linux

Switched to the mastodon user:

sudo su - mastodon

Changed the file name to b2 for simplicity’s sake:

mv b2-linux b2

Also gave it execution permission.

chmod +x b2

I didn’t mess with $PATH or anything like that, since this wasn’t going to be an everyday operation.

You can then create an authentication profile using the application key ID and application key pair generated in Step 1 above.

./b2 authorize-account --profile my-instance $B2_Application_Key_ID $B2_Application_Key

The variables $B2_Application_Key_ID and $B2_Application_Key should be replaced by the actual values, of course. Or you can actually define the variables I guess, but I didn’t feel the need since authentication was a one-time thing and, once successful, the switch --profile my-instance is enough to authenticate all operations.

After setting up the profile with authorize-account you can use some short, harmless command like list-buckets to test whether authentication works:

./b2 list-buckets --profile my-instance

Or maybe try uploading a small file or something. The --help switch is helpful for figuring out the commands and syntax, or simply running b2 without any arguments will also bring up the help options.

Once authentication is confirmed to work, sync the public/system directory to the remote b2 bucket using the sync command. If you haven’t already, it’s a good idea to run some media cleanup commands to minimize the amount of files to upload to the bucket. Here are the ones I used, from /home/mastodon/bin:

  ./tootctl media remove --days 1
./tootctl media remove --prune-profiles
./tootctl media remove --remove-headers

When you are ready to start moving the files, assuming the command is run from the /home/mastodon/live directory:

./b2 sync --profile my-instance ./public/system/ b2://my-instance-media/

You can read more about b2’s sync command options, but I found the default options satisfactory.

Step 4: Mastodon configuration

My Mastodon configuration in live/.env.production to enable the object storage looks something like this:

S3_ENABLED=true
S3_PROTOCOL=https
# EVERYTHING BELOW THIS POINT SHOULD BE CUSTOMIZED
S3_BUCKET=my-instance-media
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=$B2_Application_Key_ID
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=$B2_Application_Key
S3_ALIAS_HOST=files.example.com
S3_HOSTNAME=files.example.com
S3_REGION=us-west-900
S3_ENDPOINT=https://s3.us-west-900.backblazeb2.com

In addition to the earlier point that the application key ID and application key pair should have been generated as a non-master application key, also note the https:// in front of the S3_ENDPOINT value. For me that was the final hurdle to getting the setup to work.

Switch to admin or some other user with sudo power. From the mastodon user, it just takes an exit command in my case. Restart the Mastodon processes:

sudo systemctl restart mastodon-*.service

Check if the instance works normally. If it’s down, the API call to Backblaze storage may be failing and the key id and application key values should be double-checked.

Step 5: Check if object storage is working

As discussed in the Thomas Leister writeup (“Checking if it works”), check the browser’s console to see if the correct server proxy is loading up for media, and whether media are properly displayed.

Also, try attaching a piece of media to a post. If the attachment fails with a 500 error, you need to check your settings.

Even after I ironed out the authentication issues with the application key I found media uploads were, understandably, slower than before and they sometimes timed out. This was why I set the keepalive_timeout value to 60 rather than 30 in the nginx proxy settings and image uploads have not timed out since.

Though Mastodon will be uploading new media to the remote bucket and requesting it remotely, for preexisting media files it will look to the local public/system directory first. This can make it harder to tell if the bucket setup is working or it’s just the local storage doing the work, so if you’re impatient you can get rid of that directory to force the instance to load everything from the bucket instead. From /home/mastodon/live/public you can run:

mv system/ system_/

to change the name of the system directory without immediately deleting everything in it.

You can’t simply leave public/system missing, though, if you want to keep the nginx proxy settings as they are. Guess who found out the hard way this will crash the instance… :’) Instead, create a new empty system directory so the setting will have somewhere to look to and not throw an error.

mkdir system

If the media still loads properly after this, and new media is fetched and uploaded, it means the setup is working. Yay!

Cleanup, afterwork and thoughts

You can let this setup run a few days to see whether it keeps working, doesn’t overrun your traffic meters etc., before you empty out your local public/system directory, or delete public/system_ if you did the directory switch I detailed above. I can tell you it was quite a weight off to reclaim half my disk space from all that media.

I also ran some accounts refresh jobs because I had missing remote profile pics from emergency media deletions, back when my disk had overflowed and the database crashed. Yeah, things were that bad.

Media loads correctly again on my instance, though there is an initial loading time, and I can get a proper media cache going without my disk at constant risk of running out. Instance management has become enjoyable again without the constant risk of unplanned server downtime, and I am now able to consider putting other services on the server.

In the long term, media storage is something federated software and communities are going to have to figure out. Services like Jortage look interesting, and something like it may be the future of media storage in the fediverse. For now I have found a solution that works for my instance, and if this write-up helps others avoid some of my confusion and mistakes I will be happy–although, let’s be real, these tech posts have mainly been helpful to myself for the purpose of record-keeping and documentation.

(Updated on 12/18/2023: Fixed a line break in the first line of the nginx configuration, added an advisory to clean up media before syncing.)

I didn’t write 50,000 words of a novel in a month for Camp NaNoWriMo in July of 2014, one of the alternate months of the National Novel Writing Month challenge.

I wrote 100,000 words.

Then I promptly flamed out and could barely write for months at a time, in a writing slump that lasted for years.

Spoiler alert, there’s an eventual happy ending, or happy ongoing: I came back from the burnout after some years and now have a stable writing routine, making progress on the story. Still, boy was that experience a crash course, emphasis on “crash,” in what does and does not work for me.

In which we start out with great expectations

I’d been meaning for some time to work on the story idea I’d been sporadically working on and researching for since around 2008. I found the idea of National Novel-Writing Month attractive as a way of getting a first draft–no matter how shitty–in hand quickly. Between grad school and a job, it was hard to get the time and energy to write and I thought forcing myself to write a Ridiculous Amount every day might be a way to do it. You can probably glimpse the seeds of failure already in my line of thinking.

As I often do when I start something new, I read a whole book on the subject: No Plot? No Problem! by the founder of NaNo himself. I thought I had the idea down and liked the thought of getting words out in a gush from the subconscious, silencing the inner critic by making myself meet a word count threshold no matter what.

Already familiar with the technique from freewriting which I had used in journaling, I was ready to apply it to my first draft. I also had an outline ready ahead of time, since I was used to writing by outline.

In which our hero does everything right, or so she thought

Come July, I wrote every single day. I wrote on subways and buses on commute; I wrote at home, I wrote riding on the exercise bike. About 50,000 words into my original outline and with time left in the month, I decided the direction I was taking the story didn’t work and outlined again. The second outline was a bust, too, and so was the short-lived third outline.

Still, I kept writing no matter how crappy the output, trusting in the process and trying to soar on the wings of my subconscious through a maelstrom of terrible writing. By the end of the month I had blown past the original 50,000-word goal and pushed out 100,000 words on three different drafts. Progress, right?

Well… no. Not in a straight line, anyway. None of the drafts I had written ultimately worked, and I couldn’t even bear to look back on them, not only because they were awful and no longer usable for my evolving conception of the story, but because they were associated with the memory of pushing myself to write beyond my own comfort.

My problems didn’t stop with the unusable drafts: I also burned out on writing and couldn’t work on the story for months. I’d work on it for a few days and then put it on hold for months, even over a year at a time, not helped by the continuing rush of school and work. It would be a while and some life changes before I found a workable direction and a settled routine that let me make steady progress with the story.

In which we reflect on lessons learned

Maybe NaNoWriMo did help me in the sense that I needed to run down those dead ends to get to where I am in the story, and NaNo let me get the trial-and-error out of the way on fast forward. Even more valuable, though, was that I learned about my own process as a writer, both what works and doesn’t work for me.

First, the freewriting-style “let your subconscious take over” school of writing does not work for me when writing fiction. I’d gotten some mileage out of it for journaling, as discussed, but it’s just not how I work on story drafts, even first drafts. I certainly don’t need or want a perfect, or even good, first draft, but I do need to put some thought into making things at least coherent if I want to make the draft a meaningful basis for future work.

Second, for me, forcing a large word count is a recipe for burnout. It’s too painful, and ultimately unsustainable. I’m very much a “slow and steady” kind of writer, and in a way I owe that self-knowledge to NaNo. Live and learn, though the lesson may be painful.

Third, my experience with NaNo may also have been when I started to let go of the fantasy of having it all, and realized I couldn’t fill up all my time with work and then somehow cram writing in there as well. I would have to make room in my life for a writing practice, and that would entail real life changes, scary as they were. There were no shortcuts. I had to put in the time, effort, and commitment. Actually acting on this realization would take more time and effort, and is a story for another time.

Conclusion: Don’t look back in anger

NaNo might not have worked for me and I will never do it in its full form again, but I learned from it and I wish good luck and good fun to the many thousands of writers who will be undertaking the challenge this coming November and afterward. I’ll be cheering from the sidelines, continuing in my own way and at my own pace.

What I haven’t seen discussed as much is that the titular protagonist Carto appears to be a nonspeaking person, or one who only occasionally speaks. Though reviews like this one or this one alluded to her silence, they generally put it down to her being quiet or shy. Carto may be quiet, but shy? Nah. There’s no reason to discount neurodivergence as an explanation and here’s my case for it.

SPOILER WARNING: The rest of this post contains spoilers about the world and story of the game Carto.

A smile is worth a thousand words :-)

From the first I found it slightly odd that Carto’s “dialogue” was represented by emojis, most commonly the smile emoji :-) accompanied by her sprite representation smiling. Every other character’s lines were represented by actual words, after all. She also did not seem to be deaf, since she understood when other characters addressed her in spoken language.

I was excited at the thought that Carto might be hearing but nonspeaking, since my son is mostly nonspeaking and I’m always thrilled at good autistic representation in media. Still, I thought the emojis could be an abstraction of Carto’s lines rather than a literal depiction so I didn’t get my hopes up too much. There was so much else to enjoy about the game, after all.

Undoubted confirmation came toward the end of the game, like a gift. When Carto finally meets up with her grandmother, her best friend Shianan jokes about not hearing much about the grandmother because Carto is so quiet.

It looks like Shianan could have heard a lot about Grandma if she’d had time to learn sign language, though, because Grandma’s last letter prior to the meeting has a sketch of her and Carto signing to each other.

Carto also speaks a little toward the end, mostly names–“Grandma!” “Carto and Shianan!” and so on, showing that her earlier emoji-talk was not an abstraction but actual representations of facial expressions without spoken words.

So there you have it, Carto is a hearing and nonspeaking or minimally speaking character who speaks primarily in sign language. She seems to have little trouble with verbal comprehension or writing, the latter seen in a letter she sends Shianan in the epilogue.

It was such a rare case of a nonspeaking character, the main character at that, shown in a way that’s not left open for interpretation or headcanons but made explicitly clear as canon. It’s hard to express the depth of my appreciation for this, except maybe by writing a giant review and shoutout post on that one subject I guess.

No big deal, because it isn’t

Something else I found refreshing is that Carto’s being nonspeaking is no big deal at all to the other characters. Shianan mentions it once, as discussed above, in a gently teasing/apologetic way after she and Carto have become good friends. Otherwise, the characters Carto comes across don’t bring it up, interacting without making a fuss when Carto communicates nonverbally, such as by signing or showing “sand” to them when she wants directions to the desert.

One moment of respectful but casual accommodation that comes to mind is when Carto was at the volcano hotel¹ rebooting their water heating system. The machinery is accessible by climbing a rope down a pit, and one of the hotel’s proprietors remains at the top while Carto climbs down. When Carto reaches the boiler room at the bottom, the proprietor calls out to her to pull on the rope when she wants to climb back up.

This left an impression because the two characters are never out of shouting distance from each other, and the proprietor guides Carto through the ultimately disastrous reboot sequence by vocal instruction. The proprietor, in other words, noticed Carto doesn’t speak and made no comment about it, but opted to give her the instruction to pull on the rope rather than shout, accommodating the lack of vocal communication.

In a better world this is how all accommodation would happen, respectfully and with minimal comment. In an even better world hotel proprietors would also not send guests into dangerous locations to do their repair work. But we can’t have everything now, can we?

Maybe one reason the characters find Carto’s neurodivergence entirely unremarkable is that the world of the game is itself diverse, with many different ways of life coexisting. Carto’s own clan fly all around the world on blimps. We start her in-game adventures on an island where no one comes back home after leaving as a teenager. Later we move on to a forest where people grow huge beards, have animal companions, and one chosen person guards a giant growing tree for decades, away from human settlements.

Against this backdrop a girl who doesn’t speak is positively ordinary, and whether the reasons are neurological, cultural, or otherwise it doesn’t seem to be considered anyone else’s business. Is she physically or neurologically unable to speak? Does she not speak the local language? Did she take a vow of silence? Who knows, and what does it matter?

Cultural diversity leading to neurodivergence acceptance makes sense to me because neurotype normativity is just one of the many pressures for conformity that form the basis of bigotry in our world. This kind of coexistence between vastly different peoples is a fascinating aspect of Carto’s world.

I guess there should be a conclusion

Carto is a great little game that puzzle game lovers are likely to enjoy, one with a straightforward and entertaining story. It may also enhance your enjoyment that the hero of the game is a nonspeaking and, to my mind, autistic girl who enjoys full respect from the people around her, who is at no point seen as an aberration or tragedy.

Needless to say, I highly recommend the game. It’s fun and a little different, like Carto herself.