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Lady in the Water By Hwang Woo-Suk  This is a different version of the sea nymph story my old Korean woman told me. She say there is waterfaalll and rainboow and biirds and tiger with coat as white as morning snow on a honorable mountaintop. This movie take place in an apartment building with a bald stutterer and a brown man. He is so brown, but a golden brown, as brown a honey on a golden dew in the fog of a sunny fall afternoon in Daejeon.
This story so different than the one I heard. My mom never tell me it, she always say “Hwong! You gonna’ be a disgraced Scientist!” and “You have no honor!”. She hated me, but loved my little brother. So, old Korean woman I know tell me. She say beautiful woman come out of water, with hair as long as a golden sea. She can breath underwater and comes out of the blue world in the middle of the night to steal all the little Korean boys’ shoes. Now, next day after she tell me this, my shoes disappear in the middle of the night. I get so scared, I tell my mom, but she say “Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire” – she say I eat my shoes to get new ones. So, all day, my mom shoves her hands down my throat to make me throw I up. I vomit several times, and after she is satisfied that I did not eat my shoes, she lets me go. I then ask the old Korean woman, I say, where did my shoes go? She say sea nymph take them to her pond and turns it into a fish, and that is where fish come from. From Shoes. All you had to do to get them back was take a fish out of the water, and it will return to its shoe form. But, sea nymphs protect their fish and only leave the water at night. So, that night, I wake my little brother and take him to closest pond where the sea nymph would be. He goes with me into the pond and down looking for fish. I find one about the size of my foot and catch it in net. We take it out of the pond, but it doesn’t turn into a shoe. It doesn’t do anything but flap around and die.  But, right as we do this, the sea nymph returned. So, me and my brother hide and wait. The sea nymph got closer, carrying a big bag of shoes.
She then crept up to the pond and set all the shoes on fire. As the fire burned bright, I could see the nymp – it was the old Korean woman. The fire grew bigger and bigger, and eventually the whole forest caught on fire. My brother run out to try and throw water and stop fire. I ran after him, but the old woman claw out his eyes first to stop him. I then stopped – I had a choice. I could save my brother, or I could save old Korean woman. The two of us set my brother on fire and ran for cover as the fire spread and burnt our whole town down. Next day, everyone cry, they say, who would burn shoes and start fire that burn down everyone’s house? They ask me. Old Korean woman teach me valuable lesson. Lie. Always lie and exaggerate. You jump five feet, say you jumped eleven. You think you can clone an embryonic stem cell, say you cloned four. Simple. So, I say nothing. And the mystery of burning town will forever remain that – a mystery.    2 1/2 Out of 5 Stars This Edition's Reviews Lady in the Water - World Trade Center - The Devil Wears Prada - Pirates of the Carribean 2 - Big Momma's House 2 - V For Vendetta - An Inconvenient Truth - Fast & The Furious Tokyo Drift - Superman Returns - A Scanner Darkly - MOVIE REVIEW ARCHIVE 2006 |
