The protagonist of the fable “The Red Bean Porridge Granny and the Tiger” is a poor woman. The story is about her victory—with the help of things like an A-frame carrier, an awl, an egg, a straw mat—against a tiger who harasses her, and it is satisfying and entertaining to see the king of the mountain suffer helplessly at the hands of such insignificant things. Its framework is comparable to that of the movie Home Alone (directed by Chris Columbus, 1990), but unlike that lighthearted movie, this story has a deeper metaphorical meaning.

You don’t particularly need to picture the protagonist as an extremely old, white-haired woman with no teeth. In the past, it was quite common for women in their 40s to be called “granny,” and today, “ajumma” [a term for middle-aged women, usually who are married] or “granny” are used to call “any woman that is no longer sexy.” Recently, I even heard about a male first year college student calling a female fourth year student an “ancestor” [josang] while gossiping about her.

In brief, the protagonist is the weakest of the weak—who for some reason could not manage to have a ‘normal family’—and lives alone on a remote mountain, without a guardian (?) or so-called ‘erotic capital’. There is no such thing as a safety net for an old woman who gets by one day at a time working a field or day-laboring somewhere else. She has to survive on her own.

The tiger’s target is the woman’s body. The tiger is depicted differently depending on the text: sometimes it is heinous, attacking her out of nowhere; and sometimes it is sneaky, using the weeding bet as a trap. Even worse, it belittles her by telling her to “make sure [her] lights are on brightly” as if the woman is waiting and desiring to be eaten. It is sheer shamelessness implying that she should be thankful that he's about to eat the body that no one even cares to look at. Well, the truth is that tigers in real life are much more complicated and varied. In the story, the tiger is set as ‘the bad guy’ from the start, but in reality, there are more devils who seem proper and decent. It is very difficult to reveal the abusiveness of ‘someone who’d never do something like that,’ and even when it does get revealed, it is hard to name it as violence. Absurdly, in this world, there are many more words prepared to defend the tiger than the red bean granny.

The woman does not seek help from anyone, since she knows what responses she will get. ‘Why did you even go near the mountain?’ ‘How did you behave to make the tiger come around?’ ‘Why would the great king of the mountain even bother to eat up such an old woman?’ ‘What’s your problem [with getting eaten up] when you probably have a lot of experience being eaten?’

The protagonist knows that the world’s eyes and words are on the tiger’s side and thus she cannot run to the village for help. Since she’ll die either way, she negotiates to fill herself with red bean porridge before the job gets done. Having narrowly won this reprieve, the woman boils all of the red beans she worked on all summer and fixes herself a final supper. Her sorrow and rage boil like lava in the huge iron pot. The hot steam leaves her kitchen and shakes and wakes up her sleeping “neighbors”.

Her neighbors are merely an egg, a chestnut, a needle, a carrier, a straw mat, a millstone, a mortar, a terrapin, a garden spade, a fly, watery poop… just filthy and insignificant ‘things.’ They either wait in the corner to be used or are considered useless excess that couldn’t even prove its usefulness. They are barely called ‘things,’ let alone treated as well as human beings.

All these ‘things’ have are their bodies. They speak with their bodies. The words of their bodies are rough and crude. They are as annoying as a fly, sharp as an awl, double-faced as a mortar barrel, incapable and treated with as much discomfort as dog poop. There are even those reckless movements that risk self-destruction like suicide bombers, like those of the egg and the chestnut. The carrier that cannot even stand on its own but carries loads of stuff as heavy as a mountain, the straw mat that spends its life setting the stage for others’ lives—it is hard to tell whether such things have a mind of their own…

None of these ‘things’ know how to comfort someone with affection. They just ask for some red bean porridge that’s already been made. They say they’ll take care of the tiger in return but it’s hard to take their words seriously. With what power can a fly or some poop confront a ferocious and powerful tiger? Maybe they were just empty words to get some red bean porridge. But the woman generously scoops the red bean porridge for them. Anyhow, she did boil so much porridge in her huge iron pot that she wouldn’t even be able to finish it alone. She probably intended to share with everyone before her death anyway. On a cold winter night, those ‘things’ that warmed their frozen bodies with some hot red bean porridge went back to their squalid corners and waited for the tiger.

Isn’t this what’s called solidarity? No one pitied her or poured out questions in the name of sympathy. No one meddled as if they were to live the victim’s life for her or tried to teach her a lesson. These ‘things’ contributed with the single movement that each could offer. The tiger was destroyed by these insignificant things.

And the red bean granny? She probably lived happily ever after. If Jesus had his twelve holy disciples, the woman who could not be destroyed—even when all she had was just her body—had her twelve neighbors. Her homemade final supper turned into a festival to celebrate the promise of spring after holding a memorial service for the tiger. The crimson-colored red bean porridge became the burning symbol of sharing and promise. On the winter solstice when the winter reaches its peak, the crimson-colored red beans boil in the women’s black iron pot.