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The changgo, a drum shaped like a hourglass, makes
even tigers dance. A young man who inherited such a
drum saw a great cat prance out of the forest and do the
tiger trot all around him. (The black gum -the hyen gum
-a melodious stringed crocodile derived from the Chinese
khin, is in fact called hyen back gum, the « gum of the
black cranes. » Its inventor found himself surrounded by
black cranes as he strummed its first chord -and they too
began dancing. It’s enough to make you wonder if all
Korean instruments should not receive the honors of the
Animal Academy of Music).

Is it the change, or are the Koreans truly tireless? At the
factory of Sons (as in all the others, we would later realize),
hardly has the break-whistle sounded but the workers
-after struggling four long hours with ruined Japanese
locomotives that they make sparkling new, like counterfeiters
-gather together in circles and: Ongheya… As though they
could only rest from one effort with another, as though they
somewhere had an hourglass that need only be upturned for
all that accumulated, inert fatigue to become energy again
-an hourglass of which the changgo would be less the
stimulant than the image