Nostalgia For Yontan-Stove > IDEAS & IDEALS

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  IDEAS & IDEALS

Nostalgia For Yontan-Stove

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 All the "yontan-stoves," once so common and ubiquitous, have disappeared from our life unawares, and I cannot see one anywhere around me, even if I try to look for one on purpose. With the disappearance of the stoves, the black yontans, the black yountan-carts and the yontan-carrying men are all gone from my sight. Since we became better off and began to burn oil and gas instead of coal, yontan, another name and form of coal, the most important as well as indispensable means of heating and cooking in Korea for more than three or four decades, has lost its place as well as its value in our life. I know yontan is still being used by the poor, but since I moved to an apartment I have lost contact with it and also with the stove in which we burned it.

      Once we could not live without it. Every year, before winter started in earnest, I installed a yontan-stove at a corner of my living room without fail, making the narrow space narrower. The work had become something like a ritual for me. I don't remember exactly when I first began to set up this cumbersome piece of furniture in winter. There were of course kerosene-stoves, but they were a luxury for me at that time. I could not afford to use them. The yontan - large and round briquette with 16 or 19 holes in it was cheap, more than anything else, and it served multiple services so satisfactorily. The stove I had in my room burned two yontans at a time up and below. I put the stove first in the right place, connected a tin pipe to it and let the pipe go out through the window of the room up to the eves of the roof. I also hung an emepty Coca-Cola can in the middle of the pipe so that it could receive the dirty liquid that was produced during the yontan burning. It could drop anywhere dirtying everything.

      Although looking dull and blunt in outward appearance, this stove was a much more subtle and delicate thing than you could imagine. As the nature of any briquette is such, yontan burned slowly and steadily once it caught fire, and you might as well trust it. But at a moment's negligence it went out. You find your room suddenly colder than it ought to be with the stove burning. You feel the stove-pipe first with your hand, and finding it icy cold, you hastily open the top and look in. You find the yontan, which should be burning red by now, is bluish black, the sign of going out. Panicked, you go out, sometimes at the dead of the cold midnight, to buy some speciallly-made charcoal with which to rekindle the dying yontan. Like a surgeon engaged desperately in an operation on an emergency patient, you try everything you can frantically to revive the dying yontan. In the meantime, you must open all the windows in the room to let the smoke out, evacuate the families from the place, and struggle with the smoke and smell in tears for more than an hour, and luckily you succeed in reviving the fire at last, and will be surprised once more at the susceptibility of the obtuse thing, because all these hurly-burlys have been made by your being late exactly ten minutes in replacing the one of the two yontans in turn.

      Controlling the small air-door at the bottom of the stove was another difficulty. It was not so easy as you thought it was. It had something to do with the shape of the stove, with the quality of the yontan, with the length of the stove-pipe, and most of all, with the temper and the financial ability of the man who used the stove. The easiest and surest way was, of course, to open it to a certain degree and never touch it again. But circumstances didn't allow this easiness. When it was beastly cold, or when you had to cook something on it quickly, you must open it to the extremity. But you must close it almost entirely when the weather was warm again, or when you went out with all of your family for shopping in order to keep it from wasting its valuable heat all unnecessarily. The word "almost" was of special importance in this case because if you shut it fast, the stove went out without fail. It was also not wise for you to open it too wide immediately after the replacement of a yontan out of impatience to make your room warm quickly, because there was also the possibility of going out unless the heat of the burning yontan at the bottom was strong enough to kindle the new replacement.  

      In short, the yontan-stove was a big nuisance as well as a benefactor. It was slow to warm your room and took time, energy and care to keep it. It retained all the evils that our time of technology had already jettisoned or is ready to get rid of. In this age of speed, efficiency, and convenience, what the devil it was to be so slow, cumbersome, and full of trouble? One winter, I remember, my yontan-stove went out five times, disregarding my meticulous care. And each time I couldn't have been more miserable, and every time I made a sworn vow that I would buy a kerosene stove in the coming year at any cost.

      With the kerosene stove there would be no worry about changing the yontans regularly, no worry about controlling the air-door of the stove, no more going out into the cold streets at night to rekindle the dying yontan, no more opening of the windows because there would be no smoke at all, and to top these all, there would be no more worry about the deadly carbon monoxide. A turn of a switch would take care of everything, and I could just sit and enjoy the comfort the new gadget would bring to me and be happy. That was all.

      But I miss the yontan-stove now. Since I moved to the present apartment about ten and more years ago, the central heating system has made not only the time-honored yontan-stove, but also the two Aladdin kerosene stoves and one electric stove useless and obsolete, and they are gathering dust silently in the closet. It was not an ordinary decision to make for me and my wife to buy them. But I miss the yontan-stove more than these fancy things. I wonder why.

      Before the yontan-stove there had been something like a pot or basin made of clay or metal for burning charcoal. We can still find out the yontan-stoves somewhere around us if we look for hard, but these charcoal braziers, one of the most useful and dearest items in our everyday life for hundreds, nay, thousands of years, have already found their way to the folk museum, along with the hand mills made of stone, the mortars made of wood or stone, the short-handled hoes, the sickles, the wooden back-carriers in the shape of A. It is nice and good to be better off and live well and easy, but it is also a sad thing to see these long-beloved and long-accustomed things become useless and go and disappear one by one with the flow of time, especially more so when these things had been with us for so long and lived the hard times together.
                                                                                                           (April 1, 2001)

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