Hyo, Filial Piety: On Universal Ballet's Simcheong

 Hyo, Filial Piety: On Universal Ballet's Simcheong

She walks to the edge of the ship. The sea below is dark and churning, rendered in the theater with the particular combination of light and fabric and sound design that ballet uses to make the impossible present: the waves, the danger, the depth. She is sixteen years old, or the dancer playing her is — young enough that the sacrifice reads as a sacrifice rather than a decision, which is perhaps the point. And she jumps.

I was sitting in the Opera House at the Seoul Arts Center on the evening of May 3rd, watching Universal Ballet's fortieth anniversary production of Simcheong, and I was thinking about my father.

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The story of Simcheong is one of the oldest in the Korean repertoire — its origins lost in the oral tradition, its earliest written traces appearing in the eighteenth century, though scholars believe the tale is older. It has been told in every available form: as pansori, the single-narrator musical storytelling that is one of Korea's great art forms; as novel; as film — twice by the director Shin Sang-ok, once in South Korea in 1972 and once in 1985 when he and his wife had been abducted to North Korea, making the second version a film about captivity and duty and return in ways that exceed its folklore. Now, for four decades, Universal Ballet has been telling it in the language of the body: the leap, the arc, the stillness underwater, the lotus flower rising.

The plot is simple enough to summarize in a paragraph. Simcheong, the daughter of a blind man, learns that three hundred sacks of rice offered to the Buddha will restore her father's sight. Unable to produce three hundred sacks of rice, she sells herself to sailors as a sacrificial offering to the Dragon King of the Sea in exchange for the rice. She is thrown into the waters of Indangsu. The Dragon King, moved by the perfection of her filial devotion, returns her to the surface inside a lotus flower. She becomes an empress. Her father's eyes open.

What the summary cannot convey is the quality of the sacrifice — the specific texture of what hyo, filial piety, demands and what it costs. Hyo is the Confucian virtue that Koreans absorbed so thoroughly that it preceded Confucianism, which arrived from China and found the concept already present, already embedded in the culture's moral architecture. It is not merely respect for parents. It is the orientation of a life toward the people who gave it — the understanding that the debt of existence cannot be repaid but must be acknowledged, continuously, in the quality of one's care. The British historian Arnold Toynbee, encountering the concept in 1973*, called it "one of humanity's greatest ideals" and expressed the wish that it should "be preserved for many years and spread to the West as well." What moved him was not the abstraction but the practice: the daily orientation of the self toward the parent, the origin.

Simcheong enacts this not as daily practice but as an absolute limit case. She does not give her time or her labor or her attention. She gives herself — her body, her future, her continued existence — for the restoration of her father's sight. And the story does not treat this as tragedy. It treats it as the correct response to the situation, the action that the virtue, taken to its logical conclusion, requires.

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Every year when I visit Korea, I go to my father-in-law’s cemetery and my father's ossuary. This year I visited them with my husband. We drove to the cemetery on the hillside outside Seoul where he has been buried for several years now, and we cleaned the stone, pulled out the weeds, lit incense according to Korean tradition, and bowed twice. 

My father was not blind. He did not need three hundred sacks of rice. What he needed, in his final years, was the ordinary unglamorous forms of filial attention: presence, phone calls, the willingness to sit with him in his diminishment. I gave what I could across the distance between Seoul and Washington D.C., which was never enough and which he never said was insufficient, which was its own form of grace. Parents rarely name the debt they are owed. This is, perhaps, the greater sacrifice: that they accept what is given and do not present the account.

May 8th in Korea is Parents' Day — 어버이날, the day when children pin carnations to their parents' clothing and make the calls that should have been made more often throughout the year. The day I watched Simcheong walk to the edge of the ship was just five days before Parents' Day. The proximity was not planned, but it was felt.

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Universal Ballet has been performing Simcheong since its founding, and the fortieth anniversary production carried that accumulated weight visibly. The choreography finds in the body what the pansori finds in the voice: the shape of devotion, the arc of sacrifice, the particular posture of someone who has decided that another person's life is worth more than her own. Ballet, which speaks in the grammar of the extended body — the reach, the lift, the held line — is, it turns out, a surprisingly natural language for this story. Simcheong's devotion is expressed through extension: she gives more than seems physically possible, reaches further than the body should reach, holds the line longer than gravity permits. The arabesque that sustains itself a beat past the moment of release is the choreographer's equivalent of hyo.

The Dragon King's underwater world was the production's most visually arresting section — the dancers moving through a space that was simultaneously the sea floor and the interior of a dream, the lotus opening in slow motion as Simcheong rose within it. A Korean director once said of this story that "Simcheong is both deeply Korean and universally human — societies have always demanded sacrifice from the weak." This is the complication the fairy-tale resolution papers over: the system that required Simcheong's sacrifice was unjust. A world in which a daughter must drown herself so that her father can see is a world that has failed them both. The lotus and the happy ending do not cancel this. They place it, as Korean art often does, in a frame larger than the injustice — the frame of cosmic recompense, of the universe's long and occasionally heartening tendency to reward the irreducible virtue it did not deserve to receive.

* https://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=3049