by Yu Young-nan
I took pity on my friend and respected her for staying positive and cheerful. She went to the kitchen, took a spoon with a short stem, and began vigorously peeling potatoes with it. Then she steamed them and fed me. I was touched by her artlessness and felt I’d finally found a friend. I don’t mean that I hadn’t had any playmates until then, but Poksun was the first to satisfy my longing for real friendship.
I told Mother that going to the library was part of my homework, so she gave her permission straight away. The unfamiliar road from Pok-sun’s house to the library on that holiday morning seemed long. Pok-sun herself had never visited the library. But we weren’t shy about asking people for directions and eventually arrived at a red brick building enveloped in authoritarian silence. It didn’t look like it would welcome children cheerfully, and we could not bring ourselves to enter.
Afraid to peer into the building’s hushed, cold darkness, we nervously moved from one open door to the next, stealing glimpses in, until a uniformed guard ran toward us. I froze, as though caught red-handed doing something I shouldn’t, but Pok-sun simply declared that we’d come to practice using a library, as our textbook taught us to. The guard had rushed over, his eyes bulging, to shoo us away, but her composure impressed him: “Ho, you young ones are something . . .” He told us to go to another library because the one we stood before didn’t have a reading room for children.
The library the guard sent us to lay close by, right across from what is now the main entrance of the Chosun Hotel. This building underwent several incarnations after Liberation—at one point, it housed the Seoul National University Dental School—but at the time it was the Seoul City Library, the second largest after the Library of the Government-General. Its imposing solemnity hardly inspired confidence that hick kids like us would be allowed in either, but beside it sat a detached one-story building, the size of a schoolroom, that served as the children’s reading room.
There was no special procedure to enter. A man sat at a desk in front, as teachers did at school, and bookcases stood in rows behind him. The stacks were open, and anyone could enter and pick out books. We could take them off the shelves as we pleased, just like at home, and if they didn’t interest us, we returned them to their place and chose others. Some kids simply browsed without reading. The man sat facing the children, but didn’t order us around. He also spent the whole day reading. It was a world whose existence I’d never dreamed of.
The book I chose that day was Ah, Cruelty, a simplified version of Les Misérables for young readers. Of course, it was in Japanese, and its beautiful illustrations made reading that much more delightful. It was abridged but nonetheless quite thick, and I couldn’t finish it before closing time despite trying to read as fast as I could. We weren’t allowed to take books out, and in leaving the book unfinished, I had the sense that I was leaving half of myself behind. The feeling was similar to when Uncle had snatched the comic book from me, but my heart was incomparably emptier this time around. Pok-sun had read and finished Little Princess. Bubbling with excitement, we chattered about what we read and agreed to go straight back the next Sunday.
Mother highly approved of my going to the library every holiday and asked no further questions. Although Brother knew that I wasn’t studying but reading storybooks, he didn’t discourage me, for he trusted the books available there. Reading stories on days off from school brightened my childhood, and Pok-sun and I became inseparable.
I read the tale of the happy beggar who in his dreams became king every night and the unhappy king who likewise turned into a beggar. I also followed Pok-sun in reading Little Princess, of course. In this story, Little Princess Sara becomes a servant, but she suddenly finds hot, delicious food and a warm stove waiting for her when she returns to her room at night, like a dream. To me, entering the children’s reading room was just like entering this world of dreams.
Outside the windows of this dream world grew poplar trees taller than the one-story building. In summer their leaves gleamed, as though silver coins dangled from them, and in winter their sturdy branches stretched straight up to the cold sky, suggesting a great will worthy of our emulation. In some ways, the joy in reading lay not within the books, but outside them. If I tilted my head from the book I was reading and looked up at the sky or the greenery outside the window, ordinary items I’d seen over and over again took on a completely different cast. The strangeness of things enchanted me.
The teacher put in charge of our class in sixth grade was quite strict. Preparation for middle-school entrance exams wasn’t as rigorous as it is today, but after the day’s classes were over, we’d stay late to study and take practice tests. Nonetheless, Pok-sun and I kept going to the library on Sundays, hurrying through our piles of homework together on Saturdays. Since we were inseparable, the teacher and our classmates treated us as a pair. Pok-sun was an excellent student, and after she and I became close, my grades improved. Fear of losing my best friend motivated me to keep up with her, I think.
Back then, from fourth grade on, school picnics were turned into study tours. The destinations were the same for every school: Inch’ŏn in fourth grade, Suwon in fifth, and Kaesŏng in sixth. Despite the name “study tour,” we didn’t stay overnight; we’d just take a train in the morning and return home that evening. I hated the idea of a trip to my hometown. It gnawed at me. It certainly wasn’t that I knew everything about Kaesŏng and thought the trip would be dull. In fact, Kaesŏng was just a place we passed through on the way home, and I’d never really had the time to go sightseeing there. What worried me was the possibility that Grandmother or Auntie might come to meet me, since Mother had already written to them about the trip.
Our family regarded sending off and welcoming our own at train stations as a quasi-moral duty. When I went to the countryside during vacations, Mother always accompanied me, leaving my brother with my uncle, but my aunts and uncles saw us off and met us in Seoul and Kaesŏng, shouting at the top of their lungs. The older I grew, the more I hated it. I didn’t like that our lives were so intertwined with theirs, and I detested having Mother and Grandmother treat me like a baby.
To buy a ticket to Kaesŏng, we had to stand in the line for Mukden, modern-day Shenyang, which lay on the continuation of the Seoul–Shinŭiju line. Ditto for when the tickets were punched. I don’t think the departure times for both destinations were similar, but we took it for granted that we had to arrive hours early at the station and wait and wait, regardless of when our train left, as though such were our sad destiny. A close look at the passengers for Mukden revealed that they were very different from domestic travelers. They had lots of luggage, such as rolls of bedding. The elderly among them dozed off, leaning on bundles that had large gourds dangling from them, while the children devoured roughly shaped mugwort cakes and cooked millet that had been spread out for them on the floor. Many groups of passengers consisted of entire families and so were noisy. They gave off an air of poverty.
Mukden wasn’t on maps of our country. I heard that it was in Manchuria and took more than a full day and night to reach—of all the foreign names I knew, it was the only one that I could have reached easily. A sidestep into the next line is all it would have taken. My heart raced when the boarding call for Mukden was made. “Hōten, hōten yuki,” came the announcement in Japanese. Murmurs rose from the queue. The temptation to slip into the disorderly line and out of the clutches of my family wasn’t a longing for the unknown, but a dream of escape. I was fed up with my family’s meddlesomeness, and this drove my friendship with Pok-sun to become all the more exclusive.
On the day of our trip to Kaesŏng, Mother accompanied me all the way to the station and said to have fun and not to be too disappointed if no one came to meet me. What wouldn’t I have given for just that? But my heart remained heavy with foreboding that someone was sure to be waiting for me when the train pulled into Kaesŏng.
My sixth grade had five classes, and we’d been instructed to line up on arrival in the station pl
aza for a roll call. At that point, I heard a loud voice calling my name, “Wansuh, Wan-suh!”
Grandmother. Screeching at the top of her lungs. Weaving recklessly among the kids, oblivious to any rules we might have had. Grandmother, not even Auntie! I wanted to vanish.
She was dressed in a coarse cotton blouse and skirt, heavily starched and paddled smooth. On her head she carried a large bundle wrapped in hemp cloth. I made up my mind to ignore her. I turned my face away, burning with fury and shame, and held fast to Pok-sun’s hand. I figured no one else but her would know my name pronounced in Korean. I felt slightly sorry for Grandmother, but I intended to wait out the crisis by shutting my eyes and acting deaf.
But no. When it proved futile to shout my name and ask one kid after another where I was, Grandmother began to call out my name in Japanese, wherever she had learned it. She mangled it so terribly that no one would have recognized it, but I could stand it no longer. I hated myself for driving her to call out something she’d find such a tongue twister. Bursting into tears was the only trick up my sleeve. “Grandma!” I buried myself in her stiff dress and began to wail mournfully. She kept patting me on the back, saying in a weepy voice, “Aigo, my baby. Aigo, my baby.”
We staged an emotional reunion as though we lived thousands of miles apart and hadn’t seen each other in years. The kids surrounded us to watch this spectacle. Grandmother unwrapped the hemp cloth, revealing three small bundles of crescent-shaped rice cakes. The cakes were soft to the touch and gave off a whiff of pine needles and sesame oil. I was sure she’d nagged my aunt to spend all night molding them and to steam them at dawn.
My primary sensation in having this scene play out in front of other kids was of humiliation. I wanted to escape this torture. When the teacher’s whistle to straighten the lines rang out, Grandmother explained that she’d brought three bundles of cakes—one for my teacher, a second to take to Seoul for my uncle’s family, and a third to share with my friends. Only then did she express her regret about saying goodbye to me.
Fortunately, my own teacher had sprained her ankle and couldn’t come, so a teacher in charge of another class was guiding us. I blurted out this information to Grandmother in a whisper and pushed her away, saying she should go now, afraid that she might want to greet my teacher. I was gripped by misery, conscious of Grandmother watching us from a distance as we filed out of the plaza, one orderly line after another. Thankfully, Pok-sun, without a word, helped me carry the bundles I’d been laden with.
I was dejected during our sightseeing tour as we moved about from Manwŏl Palace to Sŏnjuk Bridge. I didn’t share the rice cakes with anyone at lunch. That I didn’t give the teacher her bundle goes without saying. I was old enough to feel a touch of shame at my own shame over Grandmother, but it wouldn’t be accurate to say that this was the only reason for my dejection. Half of it was indeed self-reproach, wondering why I was the way I was, but the other half was resentment about why my family had to be the way they were. My family’s suffocating clinginess made me crabby and impatient.
Brother was waiting for me at Seoul Station when we arrived that night. I hadn’t offered Pok-sun a single bite of rice cake, but she fathomed my warped thoughts and faithfully toted the bundles along with me until we handed them over to him. Brother and I stopped in at my uncle’s house near Namdaemun. As my aunt and uncle unwrapped the bundles and carefully divided up the cakes, I was subjected to gushing praise over how hard Auntie must have worked and what a wonderful cook she was. On this depressing note ended my final elementary-school excursion.
7. Mother and Brother
JAPAN’S WOES DEEPENED. OUR LIVES GREW harder. At first, Korean youth were simply encouraged to volunteer, but now they were conscripted. Brother was by then too old to be considered a youth, but a separate labor mobilization system was in place, and the possibility remained that he could be called up at any time. Mother fretted. She lamented that if he’d kept working with the Government-General, he could have had his name taken off the mobilization list. Brother reassured her that she had no need to worry. After all, the Watanabe Ironworks had become a munitions factory. But he didn’t seem especially relieved himself.
At the time, a corporal named Yi In-sŏk, the first Korean volunteer for the Japanese army to die in battle, was being celebrated as a hero, and his story became the subject of a naniwabushi, or a traditional Japanese ballad. As Japan desperately stepped up efforts to send Korean youth to battle, the song aired on the radio daily. Brother would bark in nervous disgust to turn it off when it came on.
From the second semester, I had to concentrate on middle-school entrance exams. Our teacher had sprained her ankle badly, but as she rested at home, she kept in close contact with our class monitor, sending us tests, marking them, and instructing the monitor how to punish us. Mother was delighted by our teacher, a married Korean woman with a baby. Some Korean teachers used interpreters when they met with parents who didn’t speak Japanese. For my teacher to dispense with this formality and sit face to face with Mother was enough to win her over.
The punishment our teacher subjected us to, however, was cruel, unusual, and thoroughly repugnant. Two of the five sixth-grade classes were composed of girls. My teacher encouraged competition between us to raise our marks. If our overall test scores were even slightly lower than those of the other class, we were all punished, no matter what our individual grades were. Our teacher knew how to punish us viciously without so much as lifting a finger: she had pairs of students face each other and smack the other’s cheek until she told them to stop.
You might think we slapped our partners lightly. Not at all. If the teacher sensed we were only pretending to hit each other hard, she’d threaten to keep us at it as long as we tricked her, a mocking smile on her lips.
But the real reason our blows grew fierce was that it was difficult not to feel that your partner was getting the better of you. This made us lash out even harder, determined to give as good as we got. It’s a hellish picture. Imagine prepubescent girls forced to slap each other until their rosy cheeks swell crimson, their mutual hatred accelerating all the while.
Pok-sun and I were roughly the same height and got similar grades, so we often wound up together, regardless of whether we were seated by height or marks. We’d end up slapping each other more and more violently, gripped by barbaric hate. After a certain point, it didn’t matter who was hitting harder; we just felt a merciless whip on our backs, preventing us from stopping. When the teacher yelled “Stop!” our malice instantly turned to mortification, and we were unable to look each other in the eye. The cruelty of it all is a painful memory. Mother commented that she liked our teacher the best of any she’d met because she was sweet. I still find it incomprehensible that such a person could have tortured us so at our tender age.
Mother wanted to send me to Kyunggi Girls’ High School. The trouble started when my teacher remarked that I might as well apply if I was interested. I’d never been on the honor roll in those six long years of elementary school, and even I knew that my grades didn’t come close to those of the kids whom the teacher had pointed to as Kyunggi material from the start. I’m sure Mother realized this. Ambitious though she was, she wasn’t foolhardy enough to take major risks. And so she needed a pretext to lower her sights. She began to express silly resentments, telling Brother that she had a hunch that keeping our Korean name would come back to bite us, and that, if we’d only changed our name, she could send me to Kyunggi. The issue of our name, which had been relegated to the back burner, came up once more.
Mother went to the teacher to confirm her suspicion, but the teacher sidestepped a definitive answer. She simply said that since Kyunggi was a public school, it was conceivable that I could be at a disadvantage if other children had the same score I did, but that there was no written rule giving preference to those with Japanese names. This remark became excuse enough for Mother. I didn’t like her giving Brother a hard time, knowing full well that she was being unreason
able. I respected him for putting up with her nagging so stoically and felt it was my duty to help him, even if no one else came to his support. He had principles that Mother and I couldn’t fathom.
I talked Mother into letting me try for Sookmyung Girls’ High School. At the time, there was essentially free choice in application. Student preference and family situation were taken into account, and teachers used grades as a reference point in their recommendations. One reason I wanted to avoid Kyunggi was that Pok-sun was shooting for it. Maybe being so inseparable wore me out, or maybe I wanted to say goodbye because I loved her, as people put it these days. She felt the same. We were infected by the sentimentality of novels for girls and had the brashness to plot a farewell, promising we’d share more about ourselves in letters.
Mother kept agonizing about our Korean name after I sent in my application forms to Sookmyung. Then she started worrying that I’d fail the physical exam. I could tell she was preparing her excuses in case I didn’t make it. Never in a million years would she have been able to say I’d failed because I wasn’t smart enough. I have no idea where she heard the rumor that students were rejected if their weight fell below a certain limit, but she started doing everything in her power to fatten me up, and fast.