The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea

by Pearl S. Buck

  “You eat them—you eat them,” she had exulted.

  “My stomach is stronger than my will, and that pleases you but it does not please me,” he had retorted.

  He had blamed her in his heart because this was, he thought, another of her wiles to imprison him in a house and home. Only later did he recall that she had said her father was shot, and he was about to inquire of her how it had come about, and did not for fear she might bind him to her through sympathy and her need of comfort. Her father had been some sort of official in the Regent’s court, that he knew, for she had a seal that had belonged to him, a piece of jade carved in Chinese letters giving his name and rank, and she kept this jade with her, tied in a square of silk. She had two brothers, he also knew, for sometimes she spoke of their games together in a large garden somewhere and how she was stronger than they, and this made them angry.

  “I am too tall,” she sighed.

  When he had not replied to this, she looked at him sidewise, her beautiful eyes longing.

  “Do you not think I am too tall?” she had coaxed.

  He denied his own impulse to lie. “I have never thought of it,” he said.

  Now with time and distance between them, he wished that he had told her the truth, that she was not too tall, since he was the taller. And one day, consumed with longing for her, he asked his old friend Choi if marriage was not a hindrance to him, and hoped to hear him say it was.

  “Not only in matter of time that a woman demands,” Yul-chun added, “but in matter of the occupation of a man’s thoughts, the division in him between devotion to his country and to her.”

  Choi laughed. “You spend more time thinking about women than I do, I swear! No, my brother, when you have a woman of your own, you no longer think of women. You do not think even of her. She is simply yourself, in you and with you. She makes you free. Moreover, she shares your work, if she is the right woman. Then, too, it is pleasant to have your clothes clean and your food cooked, and she takes care of your money so that it is not spent foolishly. You are always better off when you have a good wife.”

  Yul-chun put such replies in his heart and slowly his heart changed his mind and he ceased to resist the thought of Hanya. Some day, he even thought, half dreaming, he might go north again and find her and his child. Not yet—not yet, whatever his longing, for he must stay by the revolution until in triumph he and his comrades entered the imperial city of Peking. Then he would return to his own country, for with their help, whom he had helped, his people too could be freed.

  He saw Yak-san grow from a child to a youth, hard and brave and ruthless. The young were always ruthless, and Yul-chun saw himself again in Yak-san. At fifteen Yak-san had a new hero, the terrorist Wu Geng-nin, who led the attempt to kill the Japanese General Tanaka when he came to Shanghai to continue his plans for empire after he had written the memorial of demands upon China. The terrorists had arranged for attack from three directions as Tanaka came down from the ship which brought him from Japan. Wu was to shoot him with a pistol. If he failed, Kim Yak-san was to attack with a bomb. If the bomb did not kill, a third terrorist, He Chun-am, was to hack him with a sword. An American woman passenger, however, came down the gangway before Tanaka and when Wu fired she became afraid and grasped Tanaka. He, seeing what was happening, pretended to fall dead, and Wu, believing he had killed the enemy, turned to escape. He leaped into a taxicab but the driver would not drive him, and Wu threw him into the street and tried to drive himself but not knowing how to drive, was arrested before he went far by British police, who gave him to the French, since he lived with the other exiles in the French concession, and they in turn gave him to the Japanese. He was locked in a tower with several Japanese, one of whom was an anarchist. A Japanese servant girl pitied Wu and brought him a steel knife and he cut the lock from the door and with the anarchist he escaped to the house of an American friend who hid him until he could get to Canton to tell his story.

  The young Yak-san sat at his feet, not only for the sake of Wu himself but because his other hero, Kim Yak-san, had been part of the plot. Wu was kind to the youth, and unknown to Yul-chun, he argued for terrorism to Yak-san, so that Yak-san’s heart was divided between the two men who befriended him.

  In the next year the founder of the Chinese revolution, Sun Yat-sen, died in Peking and all revolutionists were cast into deep sorrow and gloom. Yet what could they do but persist in what had been planned? With Russian advisers an army was built under the headship of a young soldier, Chiang Kai-shek, who came back from military training in Japan and Russia.

  A second revolution was soon in readiness, its armies trained to march north to the Yangtse River and proceed down that river to Nanking where a new capital was to be set in the heart of the ancient city. Yul-chun, now detailed to make translations of Marxist books from the Japanese, began to doubt more and more whether the Chinese revolutionists understood fully the hardships that lay ahead if they were to fulfill this dream of conquering their vast continental country. Their people were still firm in old ways, they were not yet discontented enough for revolt, and family tradition took the place of government. They were poor but they did not know it. Their landlords oppressed them but not to despair, or if to despair, they rose up and murdered the landlord with knives and pitchforks. Yul-chun perceived that his own countrymen understood reforms far better than the Chinese revolutionists did, because of the long oppressions of the Japanese in their own country, forcing Koreans to rebel, and because many young Koreans had been educated in Japan, where they had learned of anarchy and Karl Marx.

  In an early spring the Second Revolution set forth on the journey northward, Kim, the ex-monk, still irrepressibly full of optimism and faith in mankind, among them.

  “We will help our Chinese brothers, and then they will help us,” he told Yul-chun as they packed their knapsacks.

  Yul-chun could only smile. His faith in the Chinese was dim, and he was no longer an optimist even about revolutions. On the last night before they were to leave the city he did not take part in the meeting of celebration. Instead he went to see three foreigners. One was an English labor leader, Thomas Mann by name though he was not related to the German writer. He was an old man, cheerful and in the loneliness of age affectionate with all the revolutionists whatever their group. Now when he saw Yul-chun at his door he took him by the arm and drew him into the small room which was his home.

  “Come and have a cup of tea,” he coaxed. “Good English tea with a bit of sugar and milk. And I’ve some Huntley biscuits from England.”

  Yul-chun sat down on a chair beside the small iron grate of coals. He drank the English tea which reminded him of Tibetan buttered tea he had drunk in Manchuria, and he listened for an hour to the old man’s rambling, casual talk of how the English people had achieved independence under their own kings. “Killing a king only when absolutely necessary, you know,” he said, chuckling. “In an odd sort of English way we rather like them, you know! It was our own government, after all, and we shaped it into a democracy. It wasn’t easy—Have another biscuit!”

  Yul-chun, his school English taught by Americans, was puzzled by the strong English accent, but he could follow, and so he was moved to trust the benign old man, at least to trust his good heart, if not his mind, invincibly hopeful in his old age.

  He was not so sure of the American, Earl Browder, whom he next sought. He had heard him make speeches against American imperialism and while they were clear and easy enough to comprehend, and were much applauded, yet Yul-chun felt an instinctive distrust of a man who accused his own government while he was in a foreign land and among foreigners from many countries. He watched Browder as they sat together in a hotel room. The man had the look of a scholar, but scholar or not, Yul-chun resolved never to trust an American again. As for Borodin, whom he visited last, this man was a short, stocky Russian, middle-aged, slow in speech, practical. He looked like a successful businessman rather than an ardent revolutionist, a man with a mind for organi
zation, a father to the young enthusiastic childlike men whom he led. The youthful Chinese trusted this Russian, but for Yul-chun trust in any Russian was impossible. Too long Russians had been on Korean soil, too many plans they had laid for possession. Yes, the Czar was dead, but did a country change its soul because it changed a ruler?

  He returned to the room he still shared with Kim and found that Yak-san had finished packing his knapsack for him and had gone to bed.

  … What might he have become, Yul-chun sometimes wondered, had he not kept within himself the smoldering fire of his hope that some day he would find Hanya and return with her to his own country? He dreamed how it would be, and he set the dream into words for Yak-san sometimes, when they were encamped before battle. When others slept and he kept himself awake from duty, he would talk to Yak-san thus:

  “When all this weary fighting is over, when the cause is won, then we will go home, you and I, to my father’s house. Somewhere on the way we will find my wife and my son, and together we will all go home. First we will rest a few days, say for a month, and then we will take up war again, but for our own and in our own country.”

  Home was now the word that held the dream, and he would not let himself think of it except at such times or in the night after the day’s bitter warfare. For the year was only one long war. He was proud of his countrymen. They fought with dashing bravery and dauntless leadership. They were eloquent in persuasion of the landfolk and city dwellers among whom they marched and the Chinese generals sent Chinese-speaking Koreans first to prepare the way. The new revolutionary army swept northward, victory upon victory, they reached the Yangtse River in central China, and still victorious, marched on to Nanking.

  Then they were betrayed. Their leader went past the city, leaving it to his second in command, while he went with his own army to Shanghai in secret to set up a counterrevolutionary government. The news came at the very hour of this triumph, when the city gates were battered down after three days of siege, and the city taken.

  It was not to be believed. They looked at one another, unbelieving. They gathered in crowds in captured buildings to talk. It was true, nevertheless, and when they were compelled to believe, the armies retreated up the river to Wuhan, there to set up a government of their own, and with them went every Korean exile, except those who were killed in battle.

  But Yul-chun began to draw apart from the revolution. He knew that sooner or later he must leave the Chinese. Cruelty—cruelty was what drove him away, and hardened though he was, he was not cruel. He saw Chinese killing Chinese, “purges,” they were called, but for him purges were murders, young men, young girls, accused by rightists of being leftists, landfolk and merchants accused by leftists of being rightists. In one day, in one hour, within the space of a few minutes, he made the decision. The day was hot, the air humid and heavy, and the men were as quarrelsome as angry bees in midsummer. A mighty battle was looming, for the great city of Changsha was next to be taken. All were anxious and discouraged as they faced battle for, although the Russian advisers had directed every battle, the revolutionary army had not won a victory since the split in Nanking. Moreover a young revolutionist, Mao Tse-tung, rejected by the Communist Party because he had declared that Russian tactics would not serve in China where the mass of the people were landfolk and where there was no true proletariat, this man now came forward and declared that no battles could be won without the help of the landfolk. Scholar and peasant, according to Chinese history, he declared, could overthrow a dynasty, but separately they could never win a battle. He predicted failure in Changsha, and this frightened the revolutionists while it angered the Russians.

  Alas, the prophecy was fulfilled. The men fought bravely, but they could not prevail against the landfolk who swarmed in from the countryside in all four directions to aid, not the revolutionists who announced themselves as their saviors, but the old magistrate and all his court. Many revolutionists were killed, among them not a few Koreans, but this alone would not have changed Yul-chun’s mind. What compelled him was that in retreat to the northwest the revolutionists in angry despair grew mad with despair and they fell upon any hapless peasant who came into sight.

  Thus Yul-chun saw before his own eyes the monstrous murder of an entire family in their own farmhouse. Innocent and prudent, they had stayed at home and barred their gate. The retreating men paused to rest, and seeing that the farmhouse was larger than most, they beat on the gate. The family within hesitated long enough to draw a few breaths, wondering, doubtless, whether they should pull back the bar. In that instant the irritable anger of the men burst forth. They broke down the gate and swarmed into the house and destroyed it utterly. The old grandparents they hanged from the beams of the roof, the peasant and his wife they shot and butchered, the young daughters were raped by many men and left bleeding and dead, and the sons were cut to pieces in savage joy, except for one small boy, whom Yul-chun saved, and in this fashion.

  He had at first tried to prevent the men by reasonable persuasion, but the soldiers were beyond reason and their ears were deaf. He stood helplessly by, and yet he forced himself to stay, for he must know what these men were with whom he had cast his lot. He must know the worst, for what they did now they might do again and again if ever they came to power. Thus he saw the full horror of what they did and what they could do. Cruelty was in their blood and being. Suffering, perhaps, had made them cruel, but cruel they were, whatever the reason, and as he saw, he changed. No, these too were not to be trusted, and all the fine talk of saving the people could not make him trust them. Whatever the government, it could be measured only by the quality of the men who administered it, and these men could not be good rulers.

  “Come,” he said to Yak-san who had stood near him, taking no part but staring his eyes out while he watched.

  They were about to turn away when a child fell at their feet, an infant boy, naked and bleeding, tossed there on the point of a bayonet by some soldier. Yul-chun stooped and took the child into his arms and ran, Yak-san following, and in the noise and madness none saw them go.

  “What to do with this child!” Yul-chun exclaimed to Yak-san.

  “We must leave him with some farm family,” Yak-san suggested.

  This they did that same evening. They came to a small quiet village beyond the range of battle, and Yul-chun, asking for shelter for the night, told the story of the child to the villagers as they sat on their benches around the village threshing floor in the cool of twilight. When he asked if any one of them would accept the child, a young farmwife came forward.

  “Look at me,” she said, pointing at her bosom. “My breasts are dripping full of milk, for my own child died two days ago of the ten-day fever, and there is no one to drink my milk.”

  Her jacket was wet with the milk overflowing from her bursting breasts, and she took the child and let him suckle.

  Those were the years of a strange imprisonment. Mountains were the walls of the prison, and they, the vanquished, were the prisoners. At first Yul-chun fell into an empty despair. What could be useful to him in this wild region? He was cut off from the mainstream of the revolution, even from life itself, and far beyond the reach of the underground messengers with whom until now he had maintained connection, however infrequent. Nor was the despair only his. The remnant that was left of the revolutionary armies after the long march north sank into a desperate weariness of mind and spirit far beyond the fatigue of body. Weeks and months passed and in the bitter cold of the winter they did little beyond forage and beg for food and fuel. They sheltered themselves in a deserted temple, they built huts of mats and scraps of wood and tin, they lived in caves, they slept by day as by night to preserve their feeble strength.

  So it was until spring came and brought renewal and awakening. They began to stir, they looked at one another in a daze, they went out to find green weeds for vegetables, and to mix with the millet which was their chief food. And Yul-chun was the first to come to himself. By luck he had found shelter wit
h a Chinese farm family, as poor as any; the house had two small rooms shared with the ox, two pigs, and a few hens. Poor as they were, they had a lively interest in Yul-chun because he came from another country and he whiled away the long dark days when snow fell by telling them stories of his people and telling them, too, of all that had taken place here in their own country, of which events they were altogether ignorant, since they could not read, nor, had they been able to read, were there any newspapers.

  Yet Yul-chun was amazed by their wit and intelligence, and it seemed unjust that they were compelled to remain ignorant. He conceived a purpose then to teach them to read. Out of this came a people’s school, for once he taught the one family, many others clamored to learn, men, women and children, until he found himself the head of a school, a lowly one, for there were no books and he wrote his lessons in the dust of a threshing floor. Their eagerness was such that many soon could read simple words. Then he found there was nothing for them to read. He was compelled to write small books for them, a few pages in each, and through these little books he was able to teach them the doctrines of better ways of living, and how to govern themselves according to the revolution.

  The joy of the people when they found they could read and even write a little became the source of new inspiration for Yul-chun and all his companions. New policies were made, new plans, based upon the people and their cooperation with the revolutionary army. And the people were ready and eager.

  “You have opened our eyes,” the elder in a village declared. “Whereas we were blind, now we see. The wisdom in books is now our possession.”

  By this means a strong unifying interest in the villagers took hold and the leaders of the revolution learned how to win the people, who in turn fed and supported them.

  “We help you,” an ardent farmer had shouted. “We help you for you are the only ones who have ever helped us.” Then he cursed and swore against the rulers they had had, and spat into the dust to show how he despised them.