A Nation Speaks
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 5: What a Morning Can Hold
The test was her father’s idea, but Eun-bin had been thinking it first.
She knew this because when he summoned her to the garden and described what he intended, she felt not surprise but the relief of a thought that had been living alone in her head finally finding company. He wanted two families from different parts of Korea — uneducated, untouched by Hanja, people for whom classical Chinese script was as foreign as birdsong is to fish. He wanted them taught the new alphabet and then separated, sent back to their villages, and set to writing letters to each other. The letters would be collected and examined. If a farming family from the southern coast and a farming family from the northwest could correspond in written Korean without having met, without sharing a dialect, without anything between them but the alphabet — then the alphabet worked.
If they couldn’t, it needed more work.
He said this the way he said things when he was thinking aloud, not issuing but testing, his hands behind his back, his eyes on the middle distance where the palace wall met the sky. The persimmon tree had leafed out fully now, throwing shade across the path in the late afternoon.
“A woman,” Eun-bin said. “From each family.”
He looked at her.
“If a woman with no education can learn it,” she said, “then anyone can. And—” she paused, “—women are the ones who need it most. They’re the ones who have been most completely shut out.”
He was quiet for a moment. “The scholars will say a woman’s testimony about the alphabet’s effectiveness is not reliable evidence.”
“The scholars don’t need to know the sex of the correspondents until after they’ve evaluated the letters.”
Something moved across her father’s face, briefly, that she thought might have been the expression a person wore when they were proud of someone and were trying not to show it too completely.
“Two women,” he said. “Yes.”
Their names were Bok-soon and Sun-i.
Eun-bin learned this through channels she was not supposed to have, which meant through Hwa-yeon, who had learned it from her mother’s lady’s maid, who had a cousin in the Office of Royal Household Affairs. Bok-soon was from a fishing village outside Yeosu on the southern coast, the wife of a net-mender, thirty-one years old, with three children and no written language of any kind. Sun-i was from a farming settlement two days north of Pyongyang, twenty-six, unmarried, who worked her family’s millet fields and had, according to the household official who’d assessed her, an unusually retentive memory.
They were brought to the palace separately and housed in the outer servant quarters. They were each assigned a scholar to teach them — Scholar Park for Bok-soon, a younger assistant for Sun-i — and the teaching sessions lasted three days.
Eun-bin was not permitted to observe.
She sat in the Hall of Worthies during this period and did her embroidery — the embroidery she was not actually making — and listened to Scholar Choe pace and Scholar Jeong read and Scholar Park’s absence from the room, and she thought about two women on the other side of the palace learning in three days what she had built over four months.
On the evening of the second day she was walking back from the Hall when she heard laughter from the direction of the outer quarters — a woman’s laughter, low and genuine, the laughter of someone who had just understood something unexpected. She stopped walking. She stood in the path between the buildings and listened until it faded, and then she walked on.
That night she wrote to Hwa-yeon. She described the laughter without knowing whose it was, Bok-soon’s or Sun-i’s, and said she thought it was the best evidence she’d gathered so far. Hwa-yeon wrote back three days later — Of course it works. We already knew it worked. Tell the scholars to stop being so anxious about it — in her left-leaning script, in the alphabet, which had now traveled back and forth between them enough times that reading it felt as natural as reading anything.
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