Black Serge Red Serge

“They met 57 years ago,” mom says. My mom’s doing what she’s been doing in the morning on most days since she moved in with us five years ago. She gets up every early, around five am or even earlier. She makes herself coffee and keeps her own company. She tries to be as quiet as possible She debriefs what she saw on her laptop early in the morning. These three male friends were telling their story about how they met. There was a call for theatre actors and the producer was looking for people who could play the roles of a servant and a coal miner. The three were among the aspirants who gathered there. All these years later, in their seventies, they are still friends.

That was a long time ago, just before you were born, mom points out. When the friends first the city people in Seoul, they couldn’t believe how white their skins looked. It must be something in the water in Seoul, they said.

That made mom chuckle and reminisce her own years of youth. She remembers seeing young men in Saeru when she visited the capital city of Pyongyang. She was in middle school, which would have been just before the Korean War broke out in 1950. She saw the young men in uniform looking sharp with fair skin. She thought they looked very handsome.

I ask her what searu is. She said that’s what they called the black uniform only worn by rich students back then. Regular poor students were uniforms made of linen. I ask her what language that was in because some Korean words are Koreanized version of foreign languages like Japanese, English, French, Italian etc. I look up searu on the translation app on my iPhone on Korean to English mode. No such Korean word. I try some others in Korean on web. Nothing.

A little while later she brings me her well worn Korean English dictionary. It says saeru is a fabric made of wool. Mom says it’s high quality wool. I say it doesn’t sound like Korean to me, I’d need to know the root foreign word. Then she points out ~serge in tiny writing which is how these types of dictionary are written.

There it is. The word ~serge. Then I suddenly remember red serge, the internationally known uniform of Canadian Royal Mounted Police. So mom was describing black serge uniform worn by the fancy city boys.

Imagine how dashing they would have looked in black serge. How coveted the material would have been in poverty-stricken Korea at the time, though mom tells me there was a good amount of wealth and way of life in North Korea before the war.