Short Stories
vol.8The Chili Pepper Sisters（1/5）
It was a beautiful, brilliant day in June. Elder Sister Chili Pepper spoke to her younger, greener sister on the next branch. “Little Sister/auya, what’s the matter with that branch of yours? Too little nutrition? Not enough sun? You aren’t ripening as quickly as you ought to be.”
Little Sister wasn’t going to put up with such remarks. “Elder Sister/ eunni ya, just because you’re red already only means you’ll be full of capsaicin and too hot to eat! You know you won’t have any flavor.We aren’t like the peppers in Japan? they call us kochu, and we’re packed with flavor.It all started in the seventeenth century, when Hideyoshi Toyotomi’s samurai came…”
Elder Sister sighed as she heard the beginning of that same old story,but Little Sister didn’t seem to mind. “Pay attention,” she said. “It was those men who brought us peppers over to Korea in the first place, and then we just evolved. It’s this soil, I’m sure you know.”
Little Sister was referring to the soil in which they were planted?irrigated by the broad river flowing through Iksan City, next to Jeonju. On the ridge next to the field of chili peppers, dead garlic leaves fluttered in the wind. The garlic bulbs were already beginning to bulge out of the soft earth, alongside green onions and ginger stretching out towards the sun. Beyond that, a field of barley made beige-colored waves in the breeze, but because the chili pepper plant was not even a foot-and-a-half tall, neither of the sisters could see the barley?but they could smell it.“Little Sister, let’s forget about that Toyotomi and his ilk. Don’t you just love that delicious dry smell?” “Yes, Elder Sister, I do, and I’m sure Toyotomi’s men did, too.”
She was such a show-off, Elder Sister thought as she did her best to maneuver herself into the sun and ripen some more. What Little Sister totally failed to remember was what Toyotomi had done to the farmers who had lived here back then. She made up in sanitized memory for what she lacked in han. “Back then, you know,” she continued on, “we peppers were used as poison.” “Little Sister, it’s not a good idea to pass on rumors. I’ve heard that Western spices were known as poison, but to be precise, it was most likely something else…” “So, precisely, what was it?” “Well, the Portuguese took our ancestors to Bungo in Japan, and we eventually made our way here” “So what about that Kiyomasa Kato using peppers to put eyes out, eh?” “Can't be sure about that.”
Elder Sister found her sister a trial at times, but listening to her lectures were a good way to kill time, so she ignored the jab.