The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea

by Pearl S. Buck

  In this way time passed swiftly for Yul-chun. One year followed another, until one day he knew he must find his way home.

  “We must travel alone,” he told Yak-san that day. They left the friendly village that night and the next day they went on, by foot and by horseback, until they came to a railroad where, by following the tracks, they came to a station and so entrained for Peking.

  The scent of pines hot in the August sun mingled with the scent of incense in the small room where Yul-chun sat at a table, writing. A cicada burst into rasping song, mounted to a crisis of midsummer frenzy and exhausted sank into quiet. From some distant place in the temple the monotonous chanting of Buddhist priests provided an atmosphere of peace in contrast to the statistics which Yul-chun was compiling for record. The Korean exiles, what were left of them, lived here while they waited out the years and watched for the hour when they might return to their own country. This was Yul-chun’s room in which he slept and worked. Yak-san shared a room with three other young men, but Yul-chun, because he was now considered among the elders, had this cell to himself, a pleasant place opening upon a narrow court on the edge of the mountain. Beyond the pine tree tops the mountains rolled down to the plains and in the distance were the walls of Peking.

  He returned to the counting of the dead, their names, the places where they came from in Korea. He counted not only these who had died in China but the many who had been exiled in the long struggle for independence since the Japanese came to Korea: in the Christian year 1907, seventy thousand men of the Korean army scattered and forced into exile; in 1910 more than a million Koreans driven across the Yalu River and wandering to Siberia and China and Manchuria, and countless others in Europe and the Americas; in Korea itself in 1919 after the Mansei Demonstration, fifty thousand prisoners and seven thousand killed; in Japan after the great earthquake of 1923, five thousand Koreans, one thousand of them students, massacred because some had said that the earthquake was punishment on Japan by the gods for the crimes committed in Korea; in Manchuria in 1920 more than six thousand Korean exiles killed by Japanese troops there; and three hundred Korean terrorists killed by Japanese in Shanghai; of the eight hundred young Koreans who joined the Chinese revolutionaries in Canton, almost all were now dead, two hundred in Canton alone, and in 1928 in Korea, the Japanese killed one thousand young men in Korea as Communists, although less than half of them were Communists. Yet who could count or even know how many Korean exiles had been killed in Siberia under the Czars, in China under war lords, in Japan, and even by the French and British in Shanghai! And who could know how many had died in prison cells under torture or with minds deranged! Who knew, who could ever know, the loss Korea had suffered in these, her best and most brilliant young men, who only asked that their country be their own!

  Yul-chun put down his pen. Yak-san was at the door with his noonday meal of vegetables and rice, for in the Buddhist temple no meat was eaten.

  “I have news,” Yak-san said, putting the tray on the table. He leaned to whisper. “The Japanese will seize Manchuria within ten days!”

  Yul-chun dropped the chopsticks he had taken into his right hand.

  “We must leave here tomorrow,” he exclaimed. “We must be out of Manchuria before it belongs to Japan. I must know what will happen to our own country if—”

  He broke off and went to the door and stood gazing across the mountains and the plain.

  “Elder Brother, your food is growing cold,” Yak-san reminded him after a few minutes.

  Yul-chun did not turn. “Take it away,” he said. “I have no appetite. The entire world will be at war once more before long, if the news you have brought is to be trusted.”

  They left as soon as Yul-chun could prepare others to take his place. Kim, the ex-monk, had long been his aide and to Kim he entrusted all that had been his own responsibility. The few Koreans who still remained gathered around him as he prepared to leave. All were homesick and yearned to go with him, but they would not.

  “It would be unthankful if we were all to desert our Chinese comrades now,” Kim said, “before their war is won. Remember that we said we would stay until they entered Peking in triumph. Alas, the world war must be won before we can hope for that victory.”

  “I will go home first,” Yul-chun said, “and I will tell you when you must follow. I will find out how matters are in our country and, if war comes, what we must do.”

  With these words, Yul-chun bade them farewell and took up his knapsack and went down the mountain, Yak-san following.

  On the long journey toward the north, which they made on foot or horseback since Japanese had seized all trains, Yul-chun had many days and nights in which to review these years during which he had lived among Communists, had known them well, had believed in their honesty of purpose and in their devotion, and many he still thought of as friends. He had not regretted leaving the Chinese Communists, but he wished now to distinguish between Communist and Chinese. The Chinese could be very cruel and for that reason he had left them. But need Communists be cruel? In the coming divisions of a world war, Japan and Russia would become even more bitter enemies than in the past, and if Japan were on the losing side, Communists would be on the winning side, and they would become strong in his country. He trusted no one, but must he distrust Communists? Evil men there were among them, yet these were punished and cast out when found. Some were even killed. In Canton he had sat in tribunal more than once to try a comrade who had betrayed them by dishonesty or by personal cruelty and oppressive behavior. He had more than once raised his hand to signify his approval of the death sentence and though he had never fired the last shot, he had stood by to see it done. Nor had he refused to take part in the judgment of greedy landlords and evil magistrates and conniving tax gatherers. These, too, he had judged worthy of death and he had seen them killed and he had remained silent. He had even shouted the slogans of the Party, LAND FOR THE PEASANTS, FOOD FOR THE POOR AND THE WORKERS, PEACE FOR THE SOLDIERS, and he had helped to write the principles agreed upon by the Sixth Congress of the Comintern to establish a government to be called a Workers’ and Peasants’ Democratic Dictatorship.

  He was walking side by side with Yak-san in the even swift stride that had become habit. The scene about them was one of peace. Autumn had come, harvests were gathered and the fields, quiescent in waiting for winter, made an ordered pattern, broken only by the low thatched roofs of villages where the landfolk lived and had lived for thousands of years. The immense land spread of China and Manchuria belonged to these folk. Even the landlords knew in their hearts that the land was not theirs in truth, whatever the purchase price. And landfolk could be cruel. Unless Communism made them gentle, they could be very cruel.

  “The scene is peace,” Yul-chun said to Yak-san, “but there is no peace. I do not speak of the battles among war lords in China but I speak of the war of centuries. Do you remember the young man who was killed in Hailofeng, the one I tried to save?”

  “I remember,” Yak-san said. “We were the same age.”

  They said no more, for they had learned in the dangerous years not to speak if silence were more safe and they had become taciturn by habit. But Yul-chun remembered. The landfolk of the region had that day brought to the revolutionary court of judgment a young man of handsome and frank countenance. He wore the ragged garments of the poor, but the landfolk accused him of disguise.

  “He is not one of us!” they had shouted. “Look at his skin—like a woman’s! He is as white as a foreigner. Surely he is one of our enemies.”

  Yul-chun, who that day sat in the court, had taken pity on the young man. It was not too hard to see old men killed whose faces told the story of their evil lives and he had learned to watch such deaths, impassive and silent. But this man was young and intelligent and one who could perhaps be won to the revolution. The landfolk, however, were implacable.

  “He is our enemy,” they insisted.

  “Do you know his name?” Yul-Chun had inquired.

/>   “His name does not matter,” they had replied. “He is our class enemy.”

  And they clamored for his death.

  When no hope was left, two women, one older, one younger, came from the waiting crowd, also dressed in poor garments. It was easy to see that they too were not landfolk. Each took the young man’s hand, right and left, and side by side the three walked to the wall of execution and there all were shot. Of the many whom he had seen thus killed, Yul-chun could not forget the faces of these three, kindly and intelligent and pure. Now the memory came freshly and he allowed himself to wonder whether the revolutionists had been wise in following the Communist pattern. Alas, it was too late for China to decide but for his own country there was still time. And he remembered what Kim had told him of the retreat to the northwest. Kim and the remaining Koreans had marched with the Chinese Communists until they heard that Yul-chun was in Peking, and they left the Chinese there and gathered in the temple. Days and nights they had talked, telling Yul-chun all that had happened.

  The Chinese Red Army had fought bravely, they had suffered starvation and sickness, but the Nationalist troops had outnumbered them a hundred to one again and again. Only when the landfolk began to help the Red soldiers with food and clothing and new straw sandals were they able to escape from constant defeat. Their great mistake at first had been to meet the enemy in battle. Face to face they had always lost.

  They had lost count of time in days of danger and suffering and hunger, in nights when they halted beside river or brook and washed their wounds and buried their dead. They had been forbidden to rob the landfolk of food as the enemy did, and yet they starved if they did not, or begged. They had eaten sweet potatoes roasted in coals or boiled in soup, they said, until never again would they willingly eat sweet potatoes. And what of the days when they marched through heat and long grass, their blood drained by huge mosquitoes, so that they were weakened for months thereafter by the chills and sweats of malaria, for which they had no remedy! They took off their white summer garments lest they be seen by the enemy and crawled on their hands and knees, and they dared not cough lest the sound betray them to the hovering enemy. They slept by day and walked by night and they learned to sleep as they walked. There were days upon days of which now they could remember nothing except that they waked in the house of some merciful peasant, hidden in a village whose name they did not know, and then they walked again. Sometimes they found fellow Koreans and again each was alone and lost among the Chinese. Many they never saw again and they thought them dead.

  “I thought Kim was dead,” one said, “until once on a city street my hand was clutched and I knew I felt Kim’s hand although I could not recognize the face I saw!”

  Here Kim broke in. “I saved myself by lying under the water of a rice paddy, only my nostrils above water, and thus I hid for several days.”

  The long march was ended, the Chinese Communists were in the far northwest, the Nationalists were in Nanking. But none of this was important now, in Yul-chun’s mind. He had left it all behind. He was going home. Home! The word, so long unused, summoned Hanya again. It was time now to find her, to find their child, and take them with him, home.

  Yet so committed was he that he could not prevent himself from lingering on the way to set up people’s schools here and there. His way was to find one man or boy who could read a little, or if he could not read, possessed a good intelligence, and teach him how to teach others, and so begin a school.

  To the landfolk, he said, “This one is your teacher, but if he is to teach you, then you must find him shelter, and two suits of clothes, one for summer, one for winter.”

  This they were willing to do, and so wherever Yul-chun went, he left behind him centers of hope and enlightenment, small indeed, but each a light in the surrounding dark of ignorance. His journey was lengthened by years beyond what he had planned, and often in the lonely nights he reproached himself for delay. Yet he could not harden his heart against these eager, good landfolk of China, whom none had heeded or helped for a hundred years. And so he lingered and so he stayed, chafing and longing all the while to be on his way.

  It was more, too, than love of his own people and his own country. He was no longer a youth and in the lonely nights he thought of Hanya and their child. In each place Yul-chun made inquiry about her. Few remembered her. Even in Peking where they had lived together, he and she, he had been unable to find any trace of her. It was only when they came to a dust-ridden village in Manchuria where he and Hanya had once lived for a few months that he heard of her. Here he and Yak-san went to the home of a Korean who had known Kim when he was a monk, and after Yul-chun was washed and rested, he went into the streets and to the market, everywhere that he and Hanya once were known. The faces now were strange and people shook their heads, and after six days of such search, unwillingly he began to believe that perhaps she was dead.

  Then, the last night before they were to rise early and begin their walking again, an old woman came to the gate of the Korean’s house.

  “A beggar woman,” he said, “but she pretends she knows you. It is a ruse for begging.”

  Yul-chun rose, nevertheless, and went to the gate and recognized the old woman as one from whom Hanya used to buy cabbages for kimchee. The years had changed her from a buxom countrywoman to a wizened hag. She put out her withered hand and seized Yul-chun by the sleeve.

  “I hear you are looking for your woman,” she said in a hoarse whisper, the spittle flying from her toothless gums.

  Yul-chun drew back. “What have you to tell me?” he asked.

  “She stayed with me after she left you,” the old hag said. “She came to my house on her way to Siberia and she stayed half a moon of days. I sold her cabbages cheap and she sold them again in the markets and got herself some money for her journey north.”

  “How can I believe you?” Yul-chun asked, not believing and yet longing to believe.

  “She gave me this,” the hag said.

  With this she reached into her scraggy bosom and pulled out a filthy string, at the end of which was a small amulet, a little silver Buddha, which he remembered now that Hanya had kept in a box with a few treasures she had saved from her mother—a pair of jade earrings, a thin silver bracelet, a thimble, and two brass hairpins.

  “Now do you believe?” the hag asked.

  “I believe,” he replied. “Only tell me where she went.”

  “She said she went to her brother in Siberia,” the hag replied.

  “She had no brother,” Yul-chun declared.

  The hag showed hideous broken teeth. “That is your misfortune,” she cackled.

  She held out her hand, and poor as Yul-chun was he put into her dry old palm a piece of money.

  Northward again they went and Yul-chun stopped in every place where he found people of his own country and inquired of any one who might remember Hanya. None remembered. She had walked alone and kept to herself, it seemed, and he knew that was her way. Before he reached Mukden he and Yak-san both put on Chinese garments, gray cotton robes, so that they appeared as two scholars who come to visit a city. They put their hands in their sleeves and hunched their shoulders as such scholars do, and the Japanese police thought them men of Peking and let them pass. Koreans they arrested, for they knew Manchuria had many Korean exiles, all of whom were rebels against Japan, unless they were traitors.

  It was not possible, however, for Yul-chun to pass through Manchuria without being known. By this time more than a million landfolk from Korea were exiles here and they worked as farmers for wealthy landlords. Yul-chun delayed, and with him always Yak-san, until he could inquire into their plight. When he found it was hard and that they were poor, he met secretly with leaders of the Chinese peasants, hiding themselves in the fields of tall sorghum as though they were bandits, as many of the Chinese were, and in this way he united both Chinese and Koreans—the Koreans the leaders, for the Chinese peasants had no unity. The new group was called the Korean-Chinese Peasant Assoc
iation. The young Korean scholars had their own secret group which was called the Korean Revolutionary Young Men’s League, in which the leadership was Communist. These Korean Communists were poor and hungry and many of them were ill. They had no homes and they slept under trees and in crevices of the earth, in caves in the mountains, wherever they could, and this in winter as well as in summer, the bitter winters of a northern land. Yul-chun was determined now against Communism, fearing that for his country this would mean exchanging one tyranny for another and he drew aside from the Communist young men, much as he pitied them and praised them, too, for their courage.

  What was his surprise then when one day Yak-san came to him and asked to remain in Manchuria with these young men!

  “You desert me!” Yul-chun exclaimed.

  “Let me remain with these young men,” Yak-san replied.

  “I said I would take you to my own home,” Yul-chun argued.

  “I am an orphan, so destined by fate, and I must avenge my parents,” Yak-san replied.

  “How will you avenge them?” Yul-chun demanded.

  Yak-san looked away. He scraped his bare toes in the dust of the road, for they had stopped in the middle of the day to rest under a date tree and gnaw their dried unleavened bread.

  “I know you do not wish me to say this, Elder Brother,” Yak-san said at last, “but the Communists will help me.”

  Yul-chun tried not to be angry. “You believe in them?”

  “I believe in their ways,” Yak-san said. “I care nothing for their faith in this or that, for or against, but I like their ways. When they meet an enemy—” He drew his finger across his throat.

  “You think this settles everything?” Yul-chun demanded.

  “I have two enemies,” Yak-san replied in the same slow steady voice. “One killed my father, the other killed my mother. My father was crushed to death under the butt of a gun. I know the man who did it. I know his name, I know his face. He is not dead. My mother died from a stab in the belly with a bayonet. She carried a child in her—my brother, ready to be born. I know who stabbed her and who killed my brother before he could draw his first breath. I shall kill that man.”