ABSTRACT
Sometimes a story squeezes through the narrow apertures of an interviewer s agenda and presents itself, unexpected, fully formed, and unforgettable, the urgent presence of someth that must be told, shared, acknowledged. I have written of how the shaman, Yongsus mother, utterly subverted my attempts to conduct a simple household survey: “When we asked about marriage, the dam burst and the words poured out, rising and falling until the tale was told” (Kendall 1988, 19). The force of that flood swept me into writing The Life and Hard Times o f a Korean Shaman. Yongsu’s mother was a dominant presence in my life. Her stories punctuated nearly two years of fieldwork, and her voice was loud in my head during the years that I wrestled with the book she had all but willed me to write. The story I am about to retell does not have this history. I heard it in a single morning during an interview with a woman I never saw again. This interview haunted me for many years, but far from feeling empowered to write about it, I have wondered whether I ought to write it at all.
