by Yu Young-nan
We constantly heard that we were defeating the chinks, so they didn’t seem worthy opponents. Subtly, without even realizing it, our expectations swelled in anticipation of a greater foe. In addition to Shō Kaiseki, Rūzuberuto and Chāchiru—Roosevelt and Churchill—were added to the list of leaders of evil we had to smash. News of victories arrived every day. A famous Korean soprano sang, “Say so long to Singapore. Back off, Britain.” It became a hit overnight. Torchlit processions threaded their way through downtown Seoul to gloat in celebration over the fall of each South Sea island. Every schoolchild in the country got a free rubber ball to welcome these isles, with their limitless rubber, into the fold of Japanese territories.
“A braggart’s barn burns first,” says a proverb: not long after, rice began to be rationed, as were sneakers and even rubber shoes. Each family received a ration card for rice, depending on its size. Rubber shoes, however, were issued to local divisions of the Patriot Association and distributed by lot. My mother would come up empty-handed at every neighborhood meeting and sigh at her lack of talent at lotteries. Necessities grew more expensive with each passing day.
The order to adopt Japanese names had come before rationing was introduced, but as the economy deteriorated, this policy grew more coercive and made life more difficult. My family didn’t change its name. Grandfather was adamant that it would happen only over his dead body: “Not until my eye sockets are filled with dirt.” Household heads had absolute authority in such matters. Uncle resented Grandfather for the decision, and implied that his business was going downhill as a result. My mother was also afraid that it could affect Brother’s career and the way I was treated at school. She hoped Grandfather would have a change of heart.
My homeroom teacher in fourth and fifth grade was Japanese. Mother often asked me if he said anything about my name. When I answered that he didn’t care, she said that I was just oblivious. She couldn’t believe that he didn’t discriminate against me. She tossed me leading questions, and then answered them herself to get the response she was looking for. Maybe I was lucky, but I have no memory of my teacher mistreating or putting any silent pressure on those of us who kept a Korean name, even when it had dwindled to just three or four.
Had our families been branded as troublemakers, things might have been different, but I think the situation of ordinary households like mine was similar. I may be relying too much on my own experience, but I still find it hard to fathom how the name changes took root so rapidly. In my village, only the two Pak families remained steadfast, while all the Hongs took the name Tokuyama very early on. My uncle, as a township clerk, really should have been the one to worry about the disadvantages of a Korean name, but Grandfather, even with his belief that Uncle’s lowly government position meant a rise in status, remained oddly principled on this point.
The other villagers were just as inconsistent. They changed their name with little prompting, but clung to the lunar New Year, despite all the difficulties it presented, on the grounds that it was Korean. My mother was another good example of how people could succumb without much pressure.
I myself longed desperately for the change, albeit for a very different reason. My name, pronounced in Japanese, was Poku Ensho. This sounded a lot like bōkū enshū , or “air-defense drill.” We practiced drills daily as the wartime emergency progressed, and I was teased each time. After the name changes, Chinese characters were read with their meanings rather than their sound in mind, and I envied girls with Japanese names like Hanako and Harue.
Some kids bragged about using Japanese at home. In most cases, their mothers were young and fashionable. I couldn’t dream of such a thing. These tales made Mother furious. “Spineless good-for-nothings,” she’d say.
Mother attended parents’ meetings without fail. If the homeroom teacher was Japanese and the parents couldn’t speak the language, the class monitor translated. My mother carried herself proudly, a black horn hairpin securing her bun. I found it torture to watch her in her starched, coarse cotton garb, sitting before the teacher and speaking her mind solemnly, completely ignoring the young translator.
Mother acted the way she did out of her own self-respect. I doubt nationalist pride had a thing to do with it. She was petrified that clinging to Korean names might disadvantage my brother and me, but she was thoroughly unprepared to help us cope with any inconvenience or persecution that might have resulted. Her hopes for us to rise in the world were, of course, confined to the possibilities available under Japanese imperial rule. Mother was an ordinary woman. Envisioning a sovereign destiny for Korea lay far beyond her.
* The Protectorate Treaty of 1905, or Ŭlsa Poho Choyak, was signed by Foreign Minister Pak Che-sun.
6. Grandmother and Grandfather
AS IF IT WEREN’T EMBARRASSING ENOUGH TO put up with Mother attending every single parents’ meeting, one day she burst in during the middle of class, rattling the door open. She hadn’t even taken off her rubber shoes. Oblivious to the fact that my teacher wouldn’t understand a word, she began explaining in difficult, ornate Korean why she’d come: she’d received a telegram that my grandfather was in critical condition and was taking me back to our village.
The teacher at least understood that something serious was up. He called me forward to interpret instead of the class monitor, but I bungled the job. My inability to convey Mother’s elaborate and solemn way of speaking left me flustered. Somehow, though, I managed to get the basic meaning across, and the teacher gave me permission to leave immediately.
Even so, Mother had me double-check that I wouldn’t be marked absent if I missed school for my grandfather’s funeral. Only after her understanding of the rules had been confirmed did she take me by the hand and lead me out of the classroom. Mother had already made all the preparations for our departure before she stopped into school to fetch me. Strapping my schoolbag to my back, I headed with her straight to the train station, where Brother, Uncle, and Auntie were waiting for us.
On trips home during school vacations, we’d take the local train to T’osŏng, but that day, for the first time, we took the express bound for Shinŭiju. The train ran straight on until its brief stop in Kaesŏng. Although it was already pitch dark, our party of five hurried along the twenty-ri trek home without a break.
The outer quarters of our house were ablaze with lanterns. Folk milled about, speaking in hushed tones. Grandfather, we learned, was in a coma but still alive. This was his third stroke, and everyone was bracing for the inevitable. Those gathered in the outer quarters didn’t let me in, saying that I was too young. I was just as afraid of seeing him on his deathbed and hurried away.
The inner quarters were also brightly lit, and everyone was keeping vigil. I fell into a deep slumber, only to awake at dawn to the sound of wailing. Grandfather had passed away, but tears refused to well in my eyes. In keeping with the custom of the time, not a moment of the five-day wake passed without wails of lamentation. Still, the atmosphere wasn’t gloomy, as was fitting when the deceased had lived to a ripe old age.
Not only residents of Pakchŏk Hamlet, but people from surrounding villages arrived as well, accompanied by their children, and slept and ate in the bereaved household. Everyone envied the deceased’s good fortune, because we were able to carry out the funeral rites generously despite being in the throes of a national crisis. This was all thanks to Elder Uncle, who cared for Grandfather until his death and at the time was the township’s director of general affairs. Although Younger Uncle and Brother were known to have been successful in Seoul, when it came to hosting a funeral, it was the authority of a local civil servant that shone through.
The one who took Grandfather’s death hardest was Brother. When Father died, his grief had been so extreme that it threatened his health, which caused Mother a lot of anxiety. Once again, Brother acted as chief mourner and dressed in the hat and coat the role called for. By this point, he’d grown into a dashing young man. It was heartbreaking to think of him as a boy of nine, in mou
rner’s garb, weeping with abandon, but all this seemed to me to be his fate and to have nothing to do with me. I pitied Brother. He was a fragile youth. I fretted recalling the elders’ concern when he could not bring himself to eat the slaughtered pig.
On the day of burial, a long line of people with mourning flags snaked after the bier from our house to the hill where Grandfather would be laid to rest. The large turnout was in part because our ancestral tombs were not far away. Both the bier itself and the entire scene struck me as an exquisite spectacle, the likes of which you almost never got to see in Seoul.
Although the women of the family wailed as they held the bars of the funeral carriage, they slipped away almost imperceptibly before the procession left for the burial ground. I don’t know if that was the general custom back then or unique to my family.
Grandfather’s death summoned even more people to pay their respects. For five days, every hour was dominated by complex procedural formalities involving the disposition of his body. They seemed to go on forever. Once Grandfather was finally taken away, a sense of emptiness and loss came over the women of the house, although much continued to demand their attention. This void pressed on my young self as terror. I was already on the point of bursting into tears, but Mother lashed out at me nonetheless.
“You usually bawl over the tiniest little thing. Why haven’t you cried a single tear for your own grandfather?” She then muttered, “And he adored her so much, the useless creature. Even a dog that was loved as much would starve itself for days out of respect. Daughters, granddaughters—what’s the point in raising them?”
It wasn’t just the cruelty of what she said but the disdain in her cold, scornful gaze that pried open the floodgates of my tears at that moment. I wept and wept, flailing about until I almost fainted from exhaustion. Grandmother and my aunts, thinking my grief was now erupting, comforted me and rebuked my mother for speaking so thoughtlessly.
It remains clear to me, however, that I wept out of humiliation, not grief. That’s not to say that Mother understood my feelings exactly. I may not have cried during Grandfather’s funeral rites, but I felt his loss keenly and held on to trifling memories about him longer than anyone else. Even after I grew up and got married, I could recall in detail how he looked (he didn’t leave any photographs behind), his foibles, and anecdotes about him that everyone else had forgotten. My relatives said I had a good memory, but I think it was rather my great affection for him that spurred my recall.
A tightly woven hemp cord, about as thick as a straw rope, hung from the rafters in the outer quarters for people to grab as they climbed up to and down from the veranda platform. Eventually, Grandfather recovered enough from his first stroke to go to the outhouse or the yard by himself, but he no longer swung on the cord as nimbly as he once did. On several occasions, I saw him clinging to it, his legs shaking violently.
The rope continued to hang there after his death; every time I returned home and caught sight of that cord from a distance, I was overcome by pangs of grief and would run toward it, as though running to someone who had kept a lengthy vigil for me, and stroke it. The cord had become sticky with the sweat from Grandfather’s palms, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I clasped the rope at every opportunity, feeling the same emotions I had when Grandfather embraced me. I did all of this in secret, though, embarrassed that someone might sense my thoughts.
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As Japan’s situation deteriorated, air-raid drills became increasingly frequent. We were now told to wear roomy pants that were comfortable to work in, instead of our school uniforms. To Mother, violating school instructions spelled calamity. She bought a length of coarse black-dyed cotton and made me a pair with her own hands, but couldn’t restrain a sigh after I tried them on.
“The Japs’ loincloths are disgusting enough, but to let a girl’s crotch be that exposed? Heaven only knows what I’ll live to see.”
Mother looked down on Japanese customs generally, but her greatest contempt was reserved for their clothing. She told me, as if recounting historical fact, that in ancient times the Japanese had lived barefoot, wearing nothing but a diaper of sorts to cover their midsection, so they came to Korea and begged to be taught how to make suitable garments and shoes. Koreans, she said, showed them how to turn our mourning robes into their national costume and our kitchen cutting boards into clogs. And thus were born the haori and geta of today’s Japan.
Mother was absolutely convinced of this, just as she was convinced that King Sejong had created the Korean alphabet overnight after being inspired by the shapes on a door frame. No one could persuade her otherwise. She would point to the Japanese men who ambled about Namdaemun or on Seoul’s central avenue in loincloths late at night in midsummer. To her, they offered concrete evidence of the remnants of their customs before we taught them how to make clothes, even if it was nothing more elaborate than our simple mourning garb.
You could never be sure what form Mother’s anti-Japanese sentiments would take. As soon as we got back to Seoul after Grandfather’s funeral, she urged Brother and Uncle to take a Japanese surname for the family. I’d secretly expected this and assumed it would happen as a matter of course. This time, however, it was Brother who opposed the idea. He said that since we’d endured everything up to that point, we could hold the fort a little longer. His words unnerved me a bit because it sounded as though he expected an end to the wartime emergency.
On the issue of our name, Brother’s usual lack of resolution gave way to a quasi-heroic determination. Being young, I accepted at face value that Japan’s end would mean our own demise. Mother held fast to the same belief, despite her contempt for Japan and her own considerable smarts. She’d apparently never dreamed that Japan’s end could open a new path for us.
Brother’s firmness astonished Younger Uncle even more than Mother. He complained that it would grow increasingly difficult to do business in a heavily Japanese district without a name change and that he’d become more and more conspicuous, like a husk among grains of rice. Brother said that if that were the case, Uncle was welcome to break off from the rest of the clan and change his name. Brother had succeeded Grandfather as head of the household and inherited the immense authority the role brought with it. Brother’s unexpected suggestion angered and saddened Uncle: “I never felt bad about not having kids because I thought of you two as my own. And now you’re humiliating me by telling me to take our name off the family register?” Mother was at an utter loss, caught in the middle. She tried to apologize to Uncle and reconcile the two.
Our family name must have created even bigger problems for Elder Uncle because of his job, but Brother thwarted him as well. Mother was very concerned. Why was Brother, who’d never given his elders any problem at all, suddenly so obstinate? The three branches of the family had never disagreed before, but they now squabbled. Given that tacit agreement was reached to follow Brother’s decision, my uncles must have considered his insistence more than pigheaded rashness.
For the first time in my life, I had a sense of Brother as different from the common herd. Although my understanding was imprecise, it gave me an odd sense of pride. I had the illusion that I was unexpectedly glimpsing a soul that towered over a world awash with philistines. This impudence of mine was probably related to my reading, which was becoming ever more voracious.
In the fifth grade, I came to have a close friend for the first time. She had transferred to our school, and our teacher had her sit next to me. Teachers would usually seat transfer students with good-natured kids until they could adapt to their new environment. I was a nobody in class and never chosen for anything else, yet this was a duty that regularly fell to me. I felt insulted but couldn’t openly show my annoyance. I knew that I was neither good-natured nor kind, but had no choice but to pretend to be otherwise. I didn’t have the heart to betray the one expectation the teacher had of me. My new classmate now had a Japanese surname, but she kept her unsophisticated first name, Pok-sun. He
r features also gave the impression of a country girl, and her clothes were on the shabby side.
In our first Japanese class after we began to sit together, the lesson was about libraries. The teacher described in detail how to borrow books and return them, and then told us where the library was, saying it would be a good experience if we went and used it. The teacher gave us advice frequently. He’d tell the story of a diligent person who became successful and urge us to follow his example. If a tale about honesty came up, he’d emphasize it as the most precious virtue. We were free to just let it all in one ear and straight out the other.
Rustic little Pok-sun, however, began to talk me into going to the library the following Sunday. She’d paid attention to the teacher’s directions and thought she could find her way there. How fun it would be to go and borrow all the books we could read, she said, just like in our textbook. She knew more about books and their pleasures than I did. In contrast, for me this was all virgin territory. The library the teacher told us about stood where the Lotte Department Store is now. At the time, it was known as either the Public Library or the Government-General Library—the very building that became the National Library after Liberation. We agreed to go together on Sunday and that I’d stop in at her house first.
Pok-sun lived in Nusang-dong. I was stunned to see a house like hers within the city gates. The eaves of the thatched roof almost touched the ground. They were so low that you practically had to crawl in and out. Except for a water tap made possible because the house sat on level ground, it was much worse than ours. The six members of her family—parents, grandmother, and three children—lived in two teensy rooms the size of mouse holes. It was genuinely pathetic. On top of that, Pok-sun’s younger brother, the only son, was retarded. He drooled and barked out incomprehensible syllables. Their mother, her face vacant, chain-smoked in front of her mother-in-law. I wonder if deep resentment drove her to become that rude.