Where have all the singa gone?

Singa (싱아)

Aconogonum polymorphum (Ledeb.)

Nakai ex Mori [싱아]

(Image from Plant DNA Bank in Korea)

Had I not read Park Wan-suh's book, I wouldn't even know that any singa (싱아) had ever existed, but I also now wonder where the singa have all gone.

Last night, I had a chance to ask Park Wan-suh herself. Purely for the accident of my having been randomly chosen to review the English manuscript of her novel Who Ate Up All Those Singa?, I was invited to a private dinner along with the translators Yu Young-nan and Stephen J. Epstein.

I'd met Stephen before, as readers of my blog may recall, but Yu Young-nan was a new face for me. She, in fact, writing to Stephen last Friday, is the person who invited me:

If Jeffrey would like to join us on Monday night, that would be great. I can change our reservation easily. Please let me know.

At least, I think that this "Jeffrey" was me. Usually, I insist on my being the person "Jeffery," but I wasn't about to draw fine syllabic distinctions between "Jeff-rey" and "Jeff-er-y" when such might get me dis-invited:

Sorry, we were looking for a 'Jeffrey'...

For one evening, therefore, I went as "Jeffrey," pretending to be someone whom I'm not -- not too difficult, actually, since I've already spent years pretending to be something of a scholar.

And in my work as a something-of-a-scholar, I'm expected to write scholarly book reviews, such as my recent review of Park's Singa book for the Daesan Foundation:

The work is eminently readable, which I attribute to both the genius of the original author, Park Wan-suh, and the talent of the two gifted translators, Yu Young-nan and Stephen Epstein. I believe that this literary work can find a ready readership among native speakers of English. The story is very interesting.

For this hard work, I received my restaurant invitation from Young-nan:

Thanks for writing such a glowing review on Singa, which I received this morning. I'd be happy to meet you on Monday at a subway station and go to the restaurant with you.

I'll have to write more "glowing" reviews if they so easily get me dinner invitations with eminent translators and writers. But having never seen each other, Young-nan and I needed some means of recognizing who we were, so I wrote:

I'll be wearing a Muslim-appearing cap, standing about 6 feet tall, and looking very foreign.

Young-nan replied:

Look for a woman in her 50s with short gray hair.

Despite how that sounds, Young-nan looked as her name implies: Young. Youthful, slender, and energetic, she greeted me at the Gwangnaru Station, and together we hailed a taxi and rode to a prearranged spot in the Seoul suburb of Guri, where Park Wan-suh and her daughter picked us up and drove us to the restaurant near the Han River.

On the way there, I asked Young-nan how she and Stephen had gotten to know each other, and she told me that she had sought him out after reading his positive review for her translation of Park Wan-suh's novel The Naked Tree.

Incidently, if you click that link to Stephen's review, you discover that Park Wan-seo is not the only variant of Park Wan-suh's transliterated name, for The Naked Tree gives its author as Pak Wan-sô. So if you start Googling for Park, you'll need to use three different spellings. Or just go with the Korean: 박완서.

Anyway, after we had arrived and were heading along the path leading up to the riverside restaurant, I looked about at the various grasses and other plants and asked Park Wan-suh:

"Is there any singa growing here?"

"No," she told me, "I haven't seen any singa in South Korea. Around Gaeseong, there were lots of singa, but in my 50 years here in the South, I've never found any singa."

The singa stayed on my mind, even after we had sat down at the table to eat. Perhaps noticing my abstracted look during the mostly Korean discussion, Young-nan asked:

"Are you following the conversation?"

"Uh..." I hesitated, "well, actually, I was still thinking about the singa."

They laughed at my obsession.

"Since it's all missing here in South Korea," I explained, "I can't imagine what singa looks like."

So, Park explained that it has a long stalk and that one can chew that part, which tastes both sweet and sour. I tried to imagine that and wondered if it would do well as part of a salad.

At that point, Stephen arrived, along with his wife and baby daughter, and the conversation veered away from the captivating topic of the mysteriously missing singa and toward the very present but equally mysterious and captivating baby, Sonia Sylvia.

Or Sylvia Sonia. I'm not certain of which. Stephen had assured us that his daughter could speak English:

[There will be five] English speakers ... if you include Sonia, who's "daaaa" (= "cat") is definitely English.

But she remained silent about her name, refusing to tell me whether she goes by Sonia Sylvia or Sylvia Sonia. She also feigned ignorance of the singa, which remained missing even from the general conversation.

I didn't give up, though, but kept searching through the night long after the dinner was over, and as you can see from the image above, I finally -- long time passing -- found a bit of singa...