《Where the Light Touches》

Cheongram Kim Wang-sik — Novel

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Cheongram Kim Wang-sik — Novel



《Where the Light Touches》
— The Light of God Blossoming at the Edge of Despair



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Book I — The Stair of Darkness

He entered the world crying in darkness. The midwife’s rough palm smacked his back twice; damp air rushed into a chest the size of a gourd, and the wail broke out, yet the eyelids did not open. From the kitchen drifted the steam of seaweed soup; the soap-scent of a wet quilt hovered low; outside, the earthen crocks breathed a heavy, fermented note. The midwife straightened and exhaled. “The child… cannot see.” That single line cooled the room at once. His mother pressed her palms to her brow. “There must be God’s will in this,” she said, and even she could hear the tremor riding the tail of her words.

His name was Han-gyeol. When his mother called him, she dragged the last syllable just slightly—“Han—gyeol”—as if length itself could stand in for steadfastness. Sightless, his ears grew preternaturally keen. On nights before rain, from the air’s damp weight alone he could imagine the shape of the droplets that would cling under the eaves by dawn. He mapped the world by sound, scent, and warmth: the thin whistle where the wind slipped through floorboard seams; the fine scraping that rose from worn utensils; the rubber-hot breath of the first morning bus as it nosed around the alley corner. On his map, light did not exist—only textures did: rough, sleek, beaded, aching textures.

After his mother died, a single old radio remained. Its wooden body had split to show its grain; the frequency dial had loosened, and metals rasped each time he hunted for a station. When he switched it on, the moldy wallpaper smell shivered faintly, and the rusted antenna, touching the window frame, told him where each broadcast lived by the feel of its hum. When a hymn came through, he bowed his head. At those moments, not-seeing weighed less.

In his early twenties he opened a shoe-repair stand in a market corner—where the air was stitched with rancid frying oil and wet cardboard. The sign read in hand-painted Hangul: Han-gyeol Repair. The student who painted it pressed extra ink into the syllable for “gyeol,” “grain; integrity”—as if to underline his craft. Reading leather by fingertip was his kind of literacy. Real calfskin, gently scratched, raised no powder; synthetics left a faint, oily heat on the palm. When the hammer met a nail square, the shop rang a clear ding; hit slanted, the tone came out dull and kinked. Between ding and dunk he judged the day’s honesty.

At night he handled a frayed Bible until the spine felt like skin. He had never learned braille formally. Instead he traced the page margins, flicked off the sawdust-like grit that settled on the corners, and recited by memory the verses his mother had once read aloud. “Lord, since You have not given me light, grant me instead the heart that can see another.” The prayer cooled in the air and settled on the slick, old floor like glass. No answer came—or perhaps he did not yet know how to recognize one.

Around that time a woman named Su-nae sold rice cakes in the market. Her left leg was slightly shorter. Even on off-market days she cut through the morning air, pulling her handcart. The cart’s metal rattle skipped and echoed along the brick alley; from that tremor alone, Han-gyeol knew it was her. She always tucked a dishcloth at her waist. A callus bulged at her right wrist from kneading; in winter the callus cracked and bled, yet her voice stayed bright. “Mr. Han-gyeol, the sunlight is so lovely today.” He translated her sentence to his own idiom: The air out there is lighter. He smiled. “Just your saying so—I can feel the light.” She laughed, short and warm, and at the very end a tiny groan sounded deep in her throat—the signature of a day when her leg hurt.

One day she asked, “Does the world never feel dark to you?” The question was firm as a stone, yet the throw was careful. He lifted his head to listen. A wind skimmed the alley with a paper-thin tear. “The world isn’t bright,” he said, “but the people inside it are. Like you.” At that, the bridge of her nose quivered; he felt the tremor as a subtle ripple in the air.

They married in winter in a shabby church. The ondol heating left patches of floor sinking here and there, so the pew rows tilted; the neon cross flickered—poor contact in the circuit—losing the beat of its light. The pastor’s voice trembled from the back of his throat: “God makes one from two who are lacking.” As his hands hovered and met, the crosslight wavered. It was warm, and strangely sad—as if someone who had finally reached the end of a long road were tidying his last breath.

They set up in a one-room flat. The window frame’s wood showed worm-eaten seams; rain-blurred wallpaper stained itself into heart shapes. In winter, coal smoke settled into the blankets; in summer, an aluminum kettle’s metallic breath crowded the room when water boiled. By day he burnished shoes; by night he warmed her stiff calf under his palm. Her hands were dusted white with flour. Their prayers were short and exact: “Lord, grant us one small miracle.” Two children arrived as that miracle—Eun-ji and Tae-su. When Eun-ji cried, every muscle of her face joined; when Tae-su cried, his jaw and the notch below his ear moved first. Han-gyeol could distinguish their sobs by touch alone.

Then the summer the rains broke, when the sky turned spotless: ten-year-old Eun-ji stumbled hard over the kitchen threshold. Her rubber shoe caught the lip of the sill. “Mom, it’s like the lights are going out,” she whispered, as if someone else were listening. The doctor was sparing with words. “Genetic. The father’s condition continuing.” The fluorescent lamp hissed a zz inside their ears, saying more than the doctor did. That night Su-nae stood by the yard pump and wept for a long time. Even then, her left foot pivoted outward, instinctively balancing her weight. The weeping ran its course; at dawn she tucked the dishcloth at her waist and went to market. Her limp testified: life does not stop for tears.

Tae-su was a big-handed boy. By middle school small scars already mapped his knuckles; oil soaked into half-healed cuts and dried into another texture. Straight out of high school he took a job at a garage. The torque-wrench’s handle bit his palm, and he grinned so hard his teeth ached. He carried his mother’s scent—the sweet, heavy steam of glutinous rice from the cake steamer—inside his nose even while he worked.

One winter dawn, as always, Su-nae set out with the Bible pressed to her chest. The alley had iced into glass; her left foot slid forward in a delicate sideways arc. Far off, a truck’s brakes groaned with a deep, drunken wobble. A burnt-rubber tang flooded the lane; a thick thud flattened the air. As she fell, her right hand hauled the Bible tight. The book lay open on asphalt; the wind flipped pages and stopped at Psalm 23. Around the verse, a dark stain widened, slowly.

The funeral was modest. The white of the mourning clothes looked cleaner than white usually does; the chrysanthemums’ scent grew stronger in cold air. The pastor read slowly. Han-gyeol listened without listening. A hand on his forearm sent him an inch backward each time. The one sentence that did leave his mouth rumbled like low thunder: “Where is God.”

At night he found the crease where her body had once pressed the blanket and traced it. The Bible’s letters felt like a glassy plane—no dots, no texture. The radio, when he turned it on, released, “When peace, like a river…” He cupped his ears and wept. Water did not come—darkness ran down his throat instead. Eun-ji mapped the veins on the back of his hand with her fingertips. “Dad, Mom’s in heaven.” He said, “What if heaven has no light?” She hugged the Bible. That night, by the yard pump, Tae-su twisted rusted wire with oil-blackened fingers and made a cross. His fingertips split and bled; he struck a small candle and coaxed it to stand. The flame trembled as if short of breath, then lifted its head. That light was all they had left.

It looked about to die and then lived again, as if some prayer had yet to finish. Han-gyeol swallowed a cry he could not name—grief, maybe; a last shout to God; or a secret vow to go on. He could not tell. He knew only this: he was still here. And the light had not, not entirely, gone.

“At the edge of darkness, the light hides itself.
Yet inside the heart that has lost its faith
the light burns at its quietest.”





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Book II — The Vanished Dawn

Time moved quietly, and mercilessly. Three years since Su-nae’s passing. The dawn bells no longer translated to prayer in that house. The wall clock still ran, but the second hand made no sound—as if time, out of courtesy, walked on tiptoe past their door. Dust lay on the Bible like one night’s snow; the spine’s split seam kept the sour trace of old hands. The loudest sound in the rooms was silence.

By day Han-gyeol brushed shoes—the soft rasp was the one clear rhythm left. At night he leaned forward in his chair, ears always open, eyes replaced by listening as he traced the room’s outline. “Lord, why this old, old darkness for me?” The question met a ceiling of plywood and went no further. God answered only with silence, and that silence was heavier than noise.

Eun-ji worked at the disability center. She set paper on a braille slate; with a stylus she pushed dots up from the back. When her fingers returned to read the constellation they had made, she looked like a child studying a map of stars she herself had drawn. At lunch she slipped the rubber bands from her tin. The soy of egg-jangjorim called forth a ghost of the lye-sweet scent from her mother’s winter cakes. She still went to church and still closed her eyes during worship—not to shut sight but to switch memory on. Perhaps faith is the habit belonging to the wounded, she thought; and the thought was nearly a prayer.

Tae-su spent twelve hours a day in machine-noise. As the compressor came to pressure, the air hose took great gasps. Tools chimed when steel met steel; diesel hung in the lungs; oil soaked through his calluses. After work he smoked before his mother’s photo. When the smoke rose he tapped the ashtray thrice—his ritual. “Mom, where is the God you believed?” Habit set in, and habit is often faith’s opposite.

Each in their own way, they were losing God. A coal of belief remained, buried deep in ash, and no one stirred the ash first. What broke the seal was an old guitar sounding from the alley late one afternoon: “A—ma—zing— Gra—ce…” The frets were worn; the notes wobbled, human-warm. Each pluck made a dry tuk between callus and string. For the first time in a long time, Han-gyeol’s heart divided the beat into parts.

A knock came the next day—two regular taps, a pause, then one more. The door opened on a courteous foreign accent: “Mr. Han-gyeol?” The voice was low; the ends tilted upward, gently. John Miller, known to some as a street angel, stepped in with a cotton jacket frayed at the cuffs; threads lifted and trembled in the draft. A small Bible and a pen sat in the breast pocket. A pale, old scar crossed the corner of his right eye. The guitar was mahogany, scratched to a coin-sized wound at center, patched with clear tape.

“You don’t know me,” he said in careful Korean, “but I heard… at the church your wife prayed.” His words were not smooth, but his face and hands filled the gaps. He spoke with a palm to his chest, and a small bow. “Are you still… in darkness?” Han-gyeol turned away instead of answering. John knew how to accept silence. “Your wife did not die. Her faith lives still. Now—through you.” The words altered the room like a new gas in the mix. The hard shell in Han-gyeol’s chest made a tiny cracking sound. “Her faith? What do you know…” His anger burned hot and brief. John waited with a smile. Waiting can be the most convincing testimony.

That night the guitar circled in his ear like a metronome. I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see… He did not catch each English word, but the pulse made the meaning plain: lost and found; blind and seeing. He knelt, hands shaking so that he could not lace his fingers. “God… now… I don’t know.” Not surrender; rather, the dusk before surrender.

The next week before sunrise—before the alley’s cold let go—John returned with a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk. The bread still held the oven’s brown warmth. “Your wife’s last gift of prayer—to share bread with neighbors,” he said, choosing words like stones for a careful crossing. Han-gyeol was silent a long time, then broke the loaf. The wheat smelled warm; it smelled like the kitchen where Su-nae had opened the steamer and let sweet, heavy air roll out. On his tongue salt and tears were almost the same.

John came each week, same hour. The strings still wobbled; the wobble felt like a slit to the world. At first, Eun-ji shut her door; when the chorus came round the second time she put her ear to the crack. Tae-su, hands black with oil, gripped the threshold and listened. The hymn was simple: “Lord, help me. Lord, raise me up.” In that simplicity, a blade reached the deepest part. Heat moved in the ash.

“Have you ever actually seen God?” The question flew arrow-straight. John closed his eyes; opened them; shook his head. “No. I never saw… But He has always… seen me.” Broken grammar, whole meaning. The sentence did not need time to find its seat in Han-gyeol’s chest.

That night he knelt and wept—sound hotter than tears. “Lord, one more time… let me believe.” What ran down his cheek might have been water; might have been light. He learned: faith is not a lightning strike but a long breath of waiting. God had not left; he had simply turned his back too long.

In the morning he opened the Bible. His hand rotated once around the cover, pausing at a tiny tear in the paper’s edge. John, chapter nine: “I am the light of the world.” He whispered, “Lord, I am still in darkness. But this darkness—no longer am I afraid.” A skinny thread of air slid through the window: wet iron from the sash, cold milk from a delivery crate. Inside that scent he heard her again. “Dear, prayer isn’t an answer—it’s love.” He reached into the air and stretched out his hand. The light did not appear. Dawn did—inside him.

“God’s silence is not absence.
It is love’s longest time,
in which a human being learns to stand.”





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Book III — Where the Light Touches

Dawn air kept its chill; yet the floor’s old linoleum held a shy warmth underfoot. Where John had leaned the guitar by the window, the wall kept a thin smell of wood and prayer. He no longer blamed the dark. Darkness had taught him thirst for light and the shape love leaves in a body when light is taken away.

At daybreak he walked the path Su-nae had once walked to church. The rubber tip of his cane sounded lower or higher depending on the stone’s wetness; the rubber testified to the ground’s character. At each corner her breath returned in the air. “Mind the puddle on your right.” He smiled. Not seeing made her more vivid. She was no longer deceased; she lived as the grammar of his faith.

The church door was old; when it swung, dry wood cried out. Inside, disinfectant tangled with the smell that comes from the places knees wear into pews. Above, the little lamp on the cross flickered where corrosion had chewed the contact. Its irregularity felt alive. He sat in the third seat from the left in the front row—the place where she had last knelt. “Lord, I still see nothing. But I am not afraid. I know there is love in Your silence.” Sweat beaded between his palms. The tremor was not grief leftover; it was gratitude arriving.

Small changes moved through the house. Eun-ji transcribed the Psalms into braille. The stylus nudged the paper up—tuk—tuk——making a rhythm. Pressing out, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path,” she did not cry. After work, Tae-su swept the church yard. The broom’s bristles hissed over gravel—sakh—sakh—. “Mom always swept here at dawn.” His voice was plain, and steadier. Dust lifted; the old smell of prayer rose again.

At night he set the radio aside and picked up John’s mahogany. A shallow groove at the third fret had the gloss of years. He practiced the simplest progression, G–C–D, until a new callus stood up on his fingertip. The song was clumsy and honest: “Where the light touches, love abides. Where love abides, God is.” After the last note he smoothed the air. “At last, I am Your instrument.” An instrument does not make sound by itself; it empties and lets resonance through. He knew now what filled that emptiness.

That night a thin current slipped through the window, carrying a reed-bank smell from the river, but warmer—like her winter coat. Half-asleep, Eun-ji named it Mother in her mind. Then a voice, low and bright: “Eun-ji, do not be sad. Your eyes cannot see the world, but the world sees you.” She drew the blanket up, folded both hands on her chest. Darkness became a pair of arms—deep, warm, and wordlessly resolute.

Days later John came to say goodbye. His tour in Korea had ended. A faint trace of frostbite still grazed his neck from the last winter. “Your faith—now more strong,” he said, leaving the words uncorrected. He handed over the guitar and smiled. “This is yours now. Keep the sound going. Your song will light another’s dark.” Han-gyeol bowed deep. “The Lord raised me again—through you.” They shook hands a long time. Callus met callus—the texture of labor, and that day it felt like benediction.

After John left, a hymn rose before the church: “When peace, like a river…” It was his voice. His face held light; sightless eyes, yet the creases at their corners brightened in time with the melody. The strings flashed like thin knives in the sun, and between the flashes, Su-nae’s smile showed through.

That evening he called the family together, set an envelope on the table—part of the week’s earnings from the little stand. “Let’s give now. May someone’s dawn… come back.” Before he finished, both children nodded, in the same rhythm. That night they sang. The lyric was simple; the harmony uneven; the air in the room grew warm by one beat at a time. Unseen, unheard—light was already within them.

Years turned again. Eun-ji taught braille to blind children. Each time a child read a first sentence, the small Ah! leapt out, and her heart answered. Tae-su opened a tiny garage; for an old man whose car was more rust than steel, he took only the cost of oil. “She still runs,” he grinned. A paper taped to the wall read in clumsy script: If money is tight—talk to me. The hand was rough; the meaning, clean.

Han-gyeol’s hair whitened like frost. His hands slowed and stiffened, but his fingers remembered the basic shapes. Each dawn he stood at the center of the church yard; as the east turned crimson, the guitar deepened its voice. “Lord, let light not be far from me all my days.” He set the guitar on his knee and raised both hands, opening his palms to the sky. A rooster cried from far off. In the thin seam where night and morning touched and patted each other’s shoulders, he curled his fingers gently, as if to take someone’s hand.

“Su-nae.” The name went out into the air. The wind answered: “Dear, I can hear your prayer now.” He closed his eyes. Light filled the front of them. It did not stab; it warmed. He walked not away from darkness, but with it, toward the place where the light touches. The light did not swallow him; it held him.

The funeral was small, and the church was full. Children clutched tactile Bibles in the front rows; customers from the garage—still wearing the scent of oil—took the benches behind. Someone, passing, touched the guitar string once. It sounded—a sound wood makes when a hand has just left it. The pastor’s last homily said: “He never saw with his eyes, yet his soul shone brighter than most. Through him, God showed us that love itself is light.” When the words ended, a strip of sun came through the colored pane high in the window and laid a tiny rainbow on the floor.

Eun-ji hugged the guitar close; the grain was warm against her sternum. Tae-su opened the Bible and read aloud: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” The verse eased the dust to the ground. A single line of sunlight reached in, the way a hand does, and brushed their cheeks.

The light had been there from the beginning. We had only closed our eyes.

“God was not far away.
He breathed, as love,
inside the heart of the blind.”

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The Brightest Light
— A Critique of Where the Light Touches by Cheongram Kim Wang-sik



Kim Giryang (Literary Critic) — Overall Appraisal




Cheongram Kim Wang-sik’s Where the Light Touches braids the Korean lexicon of tragedy—disability, poverty, death, and silence—into a weave of lyrical realism and mythic symbolism, arriving at a rare achievement that sidesteps the stale didacticism of conventional faith narratives. The novel redefines light not as the negation of lack, but as the vessel that receives and houses it. A blind husband, Han-gyeol; his limping wife, Su-nae; a daughter, Eun-ji, who re-constellates the world in braille; and a son, Tae-su, whose oil-scented hands practice giving—this family attains redemption not through a “miraculous event,” but through “the habit of persistence.” Salvation here is not the lightning of transcendence but the breath of waiting, and the author records that breath in sentences saturated with sound, smell, and touch. The day’s integrity, measured by the ding and tunk of a hammer on nails; the coal and mildew; the Bible’s dry, vinegary odor—this tactilely rendered world transplants the blind protagonist’s cognitive schema onto the reader’s skin.

The tripartite structure forms a clean theological arch: Book I narrates the birth of privation and the story of loss; Book II advances a dialectic that discovers the efficacy of silence; Book III concludes in the vernacularization of faith—its translation into a communal ethic. Notably, John Miller, the “street angel,” is crafted not as an overbearing savior but as a mediator who resists messianic surplus. A battered mahogany guitar, bread and milk, a flickering fluorescent tube—these minor objects return theological concepts to the register of the senses, letting symbol come to rest in materiality. Biblical citations avoid homiletic bluntness; John 9 and Psalm 23 are absorbed into the rhythms of breath and labor. The proposition “God’s silence is not absence” resolves not as a Joban protest exhausted, but as an Augustinian interiorization—not rapture, but audition.

The prose’s virtue is restraint. It rejects inflated rhetoric and secures the weight of thought through the precise naming of material things. At the same time, the concreteness of Korean lifeworlds—market stall, one-room flat, dawn church—opens onto a door of universal ethics. In the ending, Han-gyeol’s death is not a triumphal climax but a sign of reconciliation: he “crosses with the darkness into the light.” Light here is inscribed not as the violence of erasure but as an ethics of accompaniment; the novel remains less a curative tale than a ledger of contemplation.

If a reservation is to be offered, it lies in moments where symbolic recurrence risks formula—when motifs of candle, cross, or guitar function too readily as cues for scene transitions, threatening to flatten the long-breathed variations of the work. Even so, the overall rhythm does not falter. The author chooses “the description of continuance” over “the narration of miracle,” and that choice elevates today’s faith narrative to the intersection of ethics and aesthetics. Where the Light Touches does not set out to prove God. Instead, it shows—in sentences of labor and giving—how humans bear God’s silence. Those sentences are, in the end, the book’s brightest light.■