A Nation Speaks
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 6: The Men Who Feared Reading
The opposition came from the direction she had expected, which did not make it easier to watch.
His name was Choe Manri, and he was not a small man in any sense — not in physical presence, not in the weight of his reputation, not in the volume of conviction he brought to any room he entered. He was a senior official of the Hall of Worthies, which meant he outranked every scholar Eun-bin had been sitting among for months, and he arrived at the project the way weather arrived, changing the atmosphere of things before he’d said a word.
He had written a petition. Ten scholars had signed it. The petition argued, in the elegant and exhaustive language that classical Chinese allowed for argument, that the creation of a vernacular Korean alphabet was an act of cultural self-diminishment — that Korea’s participation in the civilized world depended on its literacy in Chinese, that a separate Korean script would isolate the kingdom from the scholarship and governance structures of the region, that common people learning to read and write in a single morning represented not an elevation of the populace but a degradation of learning itself.
Eun-bin read the petition because her father showed it to her, sitting across from her in the garden in the early morning before the court day began, his expression giving nothing away.
She read it twice. Then she set it down on the stone bench between them.
“He believes it,” she said.
“Yes.”
“He isn’t wrong about everything. Korean literacy in Chinese does connect us to regional scholarship. That’s real.”
Her father looked at her with the expression that meant he was waiting for the rest of it.
“But he’s deciding that connection matters more than Sun-i’s letter.” She looked at the petition on the bench between them. “He’s never read Sun-i’s letter. He doesn’t know it exists. He’s arguing about an idea of common people, not about Bok-soon showing her husband his name written in burnt stick on a piece of wood.” She paused. “He can afford to argue about ideas. He learned to read when he was four.”
Sejong was quiet for a moment. Birds moved through the persimmon tree without ceremony.
“He will bring the petition to full court,” her father said. “There will be a formal debate. The scholars who support the alphabet will argue against those who oppose it.”
“And you’ve already decided.”
“I decided the night you taught me.” He picked up the petition and looked at it without expression. “But a king who decides without hearing argument is a king who stops being argued with. That has its own costs.”
She understood this. She understood it the way she understood the doubling mark — not because someone had explained it but because the logic was visible once you knew where to look.
“Will Scholar Jeong speak for it?”
“He will lead the argument in favor.”
She thought about Scholar Jeong’s face when he’d read Sun-i’s letter, the way he’d smoothed it flat with one hand. “Good.”
Her father set the petition down again. “You will not be at the debate.”
She had known this. “No.”
“I will tell you how it goes.”
“I know you will.”
They sat for a moment in the early light, the petition between them on the bench, the birds in the tree, the palace beginning its morning sounds around them — the distant bell, the first movements of the court day assembling itself out of silence.
“He called it a morning script,” she said. “In the petition. Amgeul. A script for women and children.”
“Yes.”
“He meant it as an insult.”
“Yes.”
She looked at the persimmon tree. Its leaves moved in a small wind that didn’t reach the bench. “A woman with no education learned it in a morning and wrote a letter that made Scholar Park press his fingers to his mouth. I don’t think morning is an insult.”
Her father said nothing. But his hand, resting on the stone bench beside the petition, turned briefly palm-up — an unfinished gesture, there and gone — and she understood it the way she understood everything he didn’t say directly.
She was not at the debate.
She was in her chamber with her embroidery — the real embroidery this time, a length of silk she was making for her mother — and Hwa-yeon, who had arrived the previous day for a visit timed, Eun-bin suspected, by some instinct for when she was needed.
Hwa-yeon sat across from her, supposedly working on her own needlework, actually watching Eun-bin’s face.
“Stop watching me.”
“I’m not watching you.”
“You are.”
“I’m watching the door. In case news comes.”
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