# Chapter 1: Born of Gold, Raised by Earth
Hello everyone, it’s me again! How are you all doing? Today I will continue to walk with you and review Chapter 1 of *Honey in The Wound free digital audiobook*. This opening chapter is a haunting, beautiful beginning—part birth song, part survival story, part quiet warning of the storm gathering on the horizon. So take a breath, settle in, and let me guide you through the mountain, the hut, and the lives of the twins whose names mean gold but whose fate is forged in iron.
The chapter opens in 1902, on an unnamed mountain in the Empire of Korea. The twins depart this world with a cry, much in the way they came into it. At birth they cried, lungs chilled by the night air of their first breath. At death they cried, hearts chilled by the bayonets that tore through their kin. That single, chilling sentence casts a shadow over everything that follows. We know, from the very first page, that this is not a simple family story. It is a story of tenderness and violence, of earth and empire, of two children born under a sign their mother never could have read.
Geum-Ja came first. Impatient to escape the womb, she writhed past her brother and pressed against the cervix before her budding eyes could perceive the light of her destination. She kicked her mother’s intestines twice every afternoon to announce her readiness, until one day she kicked herself out into the world. Geum-Jin was less eager to leave the warmth of his origin. He lingered in the space left by his sister, but was coaxed to emerge and relieve his screaming mother.
Their mother, Myoung-Ok, held the glistening newborns against her naked chest, sprawled on the floor of her hut. They were already as large as urns, and she worried that her weakened body could not nourish two. The last hunting season had been sparse. The straw shoes her fingers had reddened to weave were not selling in the village—few had money to spare after the middling harvest. Foraging in the mountain had always been enough for her, but would it be enough to give her children a good life? Myoung-Ok was not accustomed to such thoughts of the distant future and was unsettled by the stab of foreboding. She clutched her babies and wept, despair and joy spilling from her eyes. Despair and joy seeped from her pores, tracing paths of sweat down her tanned skin. Despair and joy flowed from her breasts, swirling out with her milk. Geum-Ja took to the right breast, drinking in the salt of her mother’s despair. Geum-Jin took to the left breast, drinking in the tang of his mother’s joy. Their mewling, hungry mouths drew out the burden of feeling from Myoung-Ok’s body, and she calmed. Drunk with their first emotions, the babies were claimed by slumber, their mother’s tenderness glistening on their lips.
Myoung-Ok came to know what she would name her children only after feeling their weight press into her arms: *geum*, or gold, in hopes they might prosper in a way she never had herself. The sudden provenance of this wish surprised her, as she had always been more concerned with the gold of a fallen ginkgo nut than with the gold of a coin.
Myoung-Ok was a child of the earth. When she was born, she slipped out of the womb and cratered into the rice paddy below, squirming in the mud before her mother could set down her sickle. Myoung-Ok’s spirit was so drawn to the ground that the taller she grew, the lower she crouched to work the land. Her gaze drifted to insects flitting at her feet, or acorns hiding under fallen leaves. Her ears inclined to the dirt, listening to the sounds of roots expanding and animals burrowing into their dens. She was so preoccupied with the life underfoot that most people in her village pitied her as deaf and dimwitted, unable to fathom any other reason for her indifference to them.
Myoung-Ok shrugged off this condescension because she, in turn, believed people were petty and stupid. As many assumed her deaf, they did not cloak their words with grace while she crawled about. Myoung-Ok was thus witness to the judgment and duplicity laced into the daily squabbles of village life. She far preferred the warmth of the earth’s embrace, allowing it to consume the salt in her tears and the iron in her blood to push life out from its depths in tribute. When she was a child, some swore they saw a trail of mountain garlic sprout in her wake as she ran crying from a scolding. Foot-shaped clover patches still grew near the stream where Myoung-Ok once cut her heel on a sharp stone. Her downcast eyes could tell which herbs tasted the sweetest, but those same eyes seldom looked to the stars—the heavens never attracted the earthbound Myoung-Ok’s esteem. Perhaps it was for this snub that she was given no gift for foresight: despite their mother’s aspirational faith in *geum*, gold was not the metal to foretell the twins’ fate.
Iron severed the viscera connecting mother, daughter, son. Dahn wiped his butcher’s knife with a cloth. He was a large man, as tall as the roof of his hut and as broad as an ox. He had never encountered another person who stood taller than his chest, and was more likely to recognize the hair whorl atop a head than a face. But his heft made him no less gentle—he dipped the cloth in heated water and cleansed the weeping Myoung-Ok of her sweat and blood. He would wet, wipe, and wring, wet, wipe, and wring until the bowl was murky with human fluid. Dahn pressed his whiskered lips to his bride’s damp hair and stroked his babies with his broad hands. When Myoung-Ok informed him of their names and her worries, he nodded and fed her the seaweed soup whose ingredients he had sold extra furs in town to acquire. He rose once the soup warmed Myoung-Ok’s body and the sun hazed in through the door.
Dahn ascended into the mountain forest with his bow and arrows slung around his thick shoulder. Despite his enormous build, he softened his footfall so no beast could hear him approaching. Neither fallen branch nor leaf betrayed his location. Deer and boars had rarely ventured near his hut since new tiger tracks emerged in the nearby terrain a few moons ago, but Dahn knew he could not miss his prey today. The new urgency of fatherhood pushed him higher into the mountain forest beyond his usual hunting grounds.
Dahn scanned the forest floor for tracks or half-eaten leaves, though his thoughts lingered on his wife back home. The day he met Myoung-Ok, she had been rustling out of sight behind a tree when Dahn nocked an arrow and waited for what he assumed was a beast to rear its head. In the shock of seeing instead a young woman alone so high up the mountain, he stumbled and let go of the bowstring. The arrow struck the tree not a palm’s breadth from Myoung-Ok’s face. She did not acknowledge her brush with the fatal point and continued to gather mushrooms in her skirt, pawing at a damp bed of dirt. Dahn approached to fetch his arrow and examine her for injuries. When he stood before her, Myoung-Ok paused her harvest and stared at his feet. She whispered something Dahn was too tall to hear and placed some mushrooms before him without once glancing up. She then bunched up her skirt and fled downhill, ears glowing red. Having caught nothing that day, Dahn bit into the pillowy flesh of the mushrooms the strange maiden had left.
The day after he had nearly killed the girl, Dahn set out west. He hoped to find rabbits whose fur he could sell to the hatmaker. He had not walked far when he crossed a spiky chestnut shell on the ground. Dahn thought this peculiar, as there were no chestnut trees in this stretch of the forest, but his hunt for movement in the underbrush remained unbroken by his curiosity. When he stepped over the second and third chestnuts, however, he suspected they had taken passage on the coat of a roaming beast. He quickened his pace in anticipation until he faced a buck that he felled with two shots. He sold its tongue for a rich man’s feast, its antlers and testicles to a traveling medicine seller, its meat and skin to the butcher.
Two days after he had nearly killed the girl, Dahn set out east. In his scramble up a rock formation, he pressed his hands onto something wet. He had crushed a ripe wild berry between his fingers and its dark-red juice dripped down to his wrist. He did not need to look around to know there were no berry brambles nearby. He wiped his sticky hand on his bearskin vest and proceeded to climb. When he rose up another boulder, he saw more berries ahead. As with the chestnuts, Dahn followed the berries until the rocks plateaued into a cluster of bushes housing two large roosting pheasants. He pierced both necks with a single arrow, then traded their meat and feathers for some beef and rice wine.
Three days after he had nearly killed the girl, Dahn woke with eyelids heavy from wine and a belly fuller than it had been in months. He considered resting for the day but remembered he did not know what penury the next season might bring. He set out south and wondered if he might see another trail of displaced fruits. It was not long until he stepped on a single red bean, its gleaming sisters marking a path up to the mountain spring. Dahn readied his bow as he climbed up to the water but lowered it when he saw Myoung-Ok washing her hair with berry-stained fingers, her discarded clothes and a pile of red beans lying on a nearby boulder. He was startled by his own arousal and moved to turn away when she repeated what she said to him the day he nearly killed her: “I feel your footsteps in my chest.”
She beckoned him to her with a glance, as she had with her trails of nuts and berries. Dahn disrobed and joined her in the spring. The friction of their skin washed away the dirt on their bodies and warmed the water until the frogs jumped out in alarm. Her long black hair swirled on his back and his fingers tensed on her hips as they both shook with release.
A crow called out in the distance, bringing Dahn back to the need to provide for his newborns. In the last year, he had gone farther out from his edge of the mountain in search of game. The last time he went into the village to sell his furs, he overheard another hunter speculate that tigers were driving away the boars. Market stalls buzzed about a farmer whose calf was lost to an unknown predator in the night. Dahn reminded himself to check on the traps around his hut when he returned home, though he suspected the tigers were too clever to fall into them. Every week he encountered rotting animal carcasses sprouting thick clouds of flies. Angry claw marks appeared on old pines that could not defend themselves. Despite ample signs of their presence, the tigers had yet to allow Dahn even a fleeting glimpse of a swaying tail. But the heavens were not so cruel as to make all creatures so elusive. Before the sun lifted off the horizon, Dahn spotted a boar sniffing around thirty paces ahead. In a single motion, he shrugged the bow from his shoulder and let fly an arrow into the creature’s eye and brain. He lowered his head over the fallen beast and thanked the mountain for its gift before swinging his catch over his shoulder and journeying into town.
As the smiling village guardian poles in the village outskirts came into view, Dahn raised his chin and let his coarse hair fall over his eyes. He fixed his gaze above the heads of morning marketgoers to avoid the gawking and whispers floating around his elbows, something he had forced himself to do since he was a young boy whose extraordinary size attracted fear or derision. He had learned not to care what they said and let the crowd scurry out of his path. Dahn spoke to no one and no one dared speak to Dahn. Once he reached the butcher, he dropped the boar on the ground and held out his hand until the sufficient weight of coins fell into his palm. No further effort was needed. No one would cheat the mountain giant who was rumored to have crushed the skull of a charging bear with just his hands, the bear whose skin he wore every day as a warning to other bears, and perhaps to humans as well. With the butcher’s coins jangling in his money bag, Dahn walked to purchase rice from the old grain seller who was either too ancient or too blind to cower in his presence.
“You better save up what rice you can, young man. Officials took most of it two nights ago to send off to Japan and there’s only barley left for us,” said the old woman, slapping a sack of grains. “Their soldiers will be in your mountains soon too. I hear they want to hunt down tigers for their emperor.”
Then the chapter shifts forward in time. Unnamed mountain in Chōsen, Empire of Japan, 1915. The world has changed. Myoung-Ok kept her twins within her field of perception at all times. This was no challenge when they could only crawl around with bugs in her herb garden. But as the seasons passed, the twins’ braids grew long and their legs began carrying them from her sight. Myoung-Ok would thus put her ears to the soil to listen for roots groaning as Geum-Ja climbed her favorite trees, or for the staccato of Geum-Jin’s delighted hops when he chased a dragonfly. To ensure she could always hear them, she occupied the twins with earthbound pursuits—finding pinecones that generated seedlings when planted, digging for insects that signaled soil fertility. Myoung-Ok cultivated her children’s love for the earth so that the earth would love them in return. Every day the soil crooned under the twins’ eager attention, relaying to Myoung-Ok what their tender hands achieved through her lessons of the natural world. The pleasure of watching her children learn helped her to forget about the knots of foreign boot prints creeping up the mountain.
Dahn, too, noticed these boot prints, but observed with cautious relief their tendency to stay shallow in the foothills, still some distance from his family’s mountain refuge. Whenever he saw concern groove into Myoung-Ok’s brow, he stroked it away with a callused thumb and left a kiss in its place. He would then turn to whittle bamboo into arrows and weave bowstrings from sinews and hides. He did not wish to be caught lacking should he need to direct his strength toward a manner of beast different from those he was accustomed to having in his sights.
When the twins were old enough to walk in silence, Dahn carved small bows from a mulberry tree and taught them to hunt. The children watched to mimic their father’s soft tread. They saw from his gaze where to aim their arrows. They—
And there the chapter leaves us, on the edge of a lesson that is also a preparation for war.
This is a stunning opening. It moves like a folk tale, but beneath the lyricism is a sharp historical blade. The mother, Myoung-Ok, is unforgettable: strange, stubborn, deeply connected to the land, and fiercely protective in her own quiet way. Dahn is a giant with a gentle heart, but he is also a man who understands that the world will not always let him be gentle. The twins, Geum-Ja and Geum-Jin, are born from gold and despair, joy and milk, and by 1915 they are being trained not just to hunt animals but to survive an empire that is swallowing their mountain whole. The contrast between the intimate family scenes and the encroaching Japanese soldiers is masterfully done. The chapter gives us beauty, but it never lets us forget the bayonets waiting in the future.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.8 / 5 Stars
**Next Chapter Prediction:** The next chapter will likely push the twins into a more dangerous world. The Japanese soldiers will move closer to the mountain, perhaps hunting tigers—or rebels—and Dahn’s preparations will be tested. The twins, now old enough to hunt in silence, may encounter their first human threat, or they may witness the cost of resistance. I suspect Geum-Jin’s perspective will deepen, and the bond between the siblings will be sharpened by fear, survival, and the growing shadow of colonial violence. The mountain may no longer be a refuge; it may become a battlefield.
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