by Yu Young-nan
I had a hardy constitution, but was a twig. Pok-sun, though, was round-faced and chubby. She’d been nicknamed Ōtafuku, or Many Fortunes, after a popular figurine of the time, since fuku is the Japanese pronunciation of bok, or “fortune.” Because we shared everything, the teacher joked to Pok-sun that she should give me some of her flesh. But I couldn’t suddenly gain weight just because Mother was anxious. My metabolism wasn’t cut out for it. On the day of the physical exam, Mother slipped dense little items like silver rings into my underwear so I’d weigh more. Thankfully, she didn’t bother with the popular customs that were supposed to bring luck in the entrance exam itself, like making me eat taffy or sticky rice. Just picturing what might have happened if Mother had followed those superstitions with the same determination makes me laugh.
We took our entrance exams before graduation. Both Pok-sun and I passed with ease, and continued attending school. Our teacher went through the motions in class, talking about modern-style plays she’d seen and what I suppose could be construed as sex education. She urged those of us who had passed to pay our respects at the Shinto shrine where we’d gone as a group before the exams to pray for success.
One day, Pok-sun suggested that we follow up on the teacher’s advice. We were hardly goody-goody students who thought we had to do whatever the teacher told us, and I doubt we had any curiosity about the shrine, unlike the library, but I thought Pok-sun’s idea was terrific and readily agreed.
Only a handful of days were left until graduation. We never talked about how we felt, but we both knew that each of us regretted applying to different schools. No ordinary goodbye would suffice. We needed a farewell ritual, but didn’t know where to go or what to do. Neither of us had rooms of our own, where we could mimic adults and wallow in sentimentality. The shrine was the only place we managed to come up with.
But the March day we chose wound up being cold and windy, almost like a typical winter day nowadays. Sleet escorted our journey. Not a soul was visible on the high steps leading to the main shrine. We tackled them huffing and puffing, as though in anger, paying no heed to the way our sneakers sank into the slush, soaking our socks and freezing our toes. Untrodden snow made the gravel path upward look almost level. We gave a quick glance at the main shrine and instead made the gentle descent toward Keijo Shinto Shrine. This area was well known as a place for young couples to stroll in good weather, which may have been why it came to mind as having the right atmosphere for our farewell.
The weather was so foul that we didn’t meet anyone all day. We couldn’t resolve the unspoken tension between us even after we reached Namsanjŏng, an exclusively Japanese district, and gazed off in the distance at the lights that came on one after another in the houses on the other side of Seoul’s central avenue.
Our miserable trek of penance brought me to the verge of tears. Pok-sun and I would prattle on endlessly whenever we got together. Even after hours of talking, we still felt we had more to say, but on that day words barely passed between us. We were conscious that we were drifting from each other and tried to recover our original closeness, but in vain. Our goodbyes were awkward, distant. I caught a cold that day and missed school until graduation. Pok-sun never visited me.
Brother offered me an extravagant treat to celebrate getting into middle school. He took me to Hwashin Department Store to dine at a Western restaurant, for the first time in my life. We had to stand in line all day long to get in. The queue began on the ground floor and slowly climbed to the restaurant, four or five stories up.
Those days were the hardest of all for civilians, whom the Japanese had coined “The Rear Artillery.” When Brother took me out, Mother commented that I was rolling in luxury. But that’s not at all how I felt. I don’t even remember the main dish. What comes to me is minimal: even at a restaurant like that, people were cutting in line to get in. There were clean tablecloths. Our soup was served in a shallow dish, rather than a Korean-style bowl. And it was accompanied by two fist-size rolls.
Not only Mother and Brother, but Auntie and Uncle also came to my graduation. Pok-sun received awards for her grades and perfect attendance. I didn’t receive any, but no one in the family had regrets. Mother’s unshakable theories explained it all easily. Of course I didn’t receive an award because I wasn’t any good at singing and gymnastics. But I was also obviously a good student, since I’d been accepted into “that fine school,” even though we didn’t change our name. Mother had given up reluctantly on Kyunggi, which she’d branded “that fine school.” But once we settled on Sookmyung and I made it in, Sookmyung became “that fine school.” I felt depressed, embarrassed, and angry that so much of my family attended my graduation. I envied Pok-sun for having just her father there.
After the ceremony, we were told that we’d go pay homage at the shrine en masse before parting. Pok-sun and I exchanged a look of dismay. I could tell that she also felt as though this were a desecration of our own rite. Only a handful of days had passed since our excursion, but beautiful spring weather was now upon us. Nary a trace of the sleet we’d struggled through.
Pok-sun and I were expected to stand next to each other until graduation, and so we had no choice but to walk up to the shrine, hand in hand. We’d become even more awkward and distant by that point. My misery deepened because I realized that I was jealous and felt inferior.
And thus Pok-sun and I parted. Only after Liberation did we see each other again, by which time she’d dropped out of Kyunggi to become an elementary-school teacher in the countryside. We’d never even exchanged a single letter. This episode puts me to shame, for it highlights my insecurities all too clearly.
I no longer had to skirt Mount Inwang once I began middle school; now I could take the streetcar. Initially I’d felt no affection for Seoul’s bare hills, but I’d taken that mountain path regularly for six years, and I began to miss the cherry blossoms of April, the acacias of May, and the snowy landscape of winter. It dawned on me that I’d enjoyed a rare privilege for a Seoul child. Walking to school alone for six long years had a significant effect on my character. For one thing, I learned how to entertain myself. Even now I prefer to go about by myself unless I’m with those so close to me that I don’t have to be conscious of their presence.
The other girls invariably traveled back and forth from school in pairs. Most considered walking on their own a hardship and would wait if their partner had to stay longer at school—for example, when it was her friend’s turn to clean the classroom. But I avoided a companion, not because I always preferred to be alone, but because I savored those moments of solitude. In elementary school, I’d come to enjoy the comfort of not having to worry about making conversation. I’d turn my attention to unimportant things, letting my ideas run free, and sink into idle fancies or just observe my surroundings.
I entered middle school during the waning hours of Japanese imperialism. Regular classes lasted for only a few days; almost immediately, we were mobilized to help with the war effort. After two hours of study in the morning, our classroom became a workshop. We sewed buttons on soldiers’ uniforms, but our major project involved taking mica and scaling its surface with sharp knives. Pieces came to us by the boxful. They were translucent and in shapes like hexagons, pentagons, or rectangles that made them easier to peel.
No one told us how the mica was used, but we weren’t curious. According to one rumor, the mica was intended for airplane windows. Maybe if such a thing as glass airplanes had existed, our work might have had a purpose, but I doubt there was enough material around to manufacture the bodies of aircraft. Nonetheless, the pile of mica in front of us never seemed to dwindle.
Hardship reached a zenith. Brass bowls were collected from every house, supposedly to make cannonballs. One bitterly cold day, we were sent out to gather pinecones. I remember wandering a hill in Shinch’on, eating frozen rice and shivering with cold. We couldn’t find any cones. Everywhere stood dead pines stripped of their bark. The denuded land was more impoverished than its inhabitants.
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Air-raid drills were frequent. Our school’s shelter lay in the dormitory basement, which also housed a furnace and a coal heap. As we filed out, we’d find that our nostrils had turned black. When real air-raid warnings sounded, we were sent home. I would run back to Hyŏnjŏ-dong, terrified of being killed on the way. Even on days when we were allowed to go to school without our book bags, we still had to bring a first-aid kit with our name, address, and blood type written on it. We’d keep some very rudimentary emergency medicine in it and triangular bandages to stanch blood. We often practiced tying them, but none of us thought they would make any difference with a real wound.
Although newspapers carried stories of the devastation that Tokyo and Okinawa suffered in air raids, more colorful rumors flew about. The Japanese authorities attempted to control them by prosecuting people who spread false information. Mother, relying on who knows what source, confidently declared that America wouldn’t bomb Korea.
One day I returned home to find Mother blanched with fear. Brother’s draft warrant had arrived at long last. His assurances that he wouldn’t be targeted because Watanabe Ironworks was manufacturing munitions had come to naught. Mother was beside herself. She talked of having Brother run away, and then stealing off with me in the dead of night. She had put her confidence in Brother’s job and not made a contingency plan. But things had become so harsh that without a ration book even a meal was impossible. The first hiding place to occur to her was Pakchŏk Hamlet, but given that all our papers recorded it as our permanent residence, it was hardly an ideal refuge. In later years, we could have phoned Brother and discussed what to do, but we had no choice but to wait for his return. Each minute dragged on.
Brother did not return until nearly midnight. The factory kept him working late almost every evening. Mother did an admirable job of concealing her anxiety, presenting him with the draft notice only after he had finished supper. He simply said there was nothing to worry about and went off to bed as though everything were normal. We couldn’t tell whether he was really confident or just, as usual, being careful not to worry his elders. Mother surely must have been frightened, but she didn’t breathe a word all night about Brother going into hiding.
The next day, Brother announced that everything was taken care of: his company had issued a draft exemption certificate for him. Apparently the matter had been officially settled. He’d been ordered to respond to the draft notice within three days, but he continued to go to work as usual without incident. Mother repeatedly expressed her amazement at Watanabe Ironworks and its clout. She found it hard to believe. Just what did the Japanese boss see in my brother, who stubbornly refused to change his name?
Mother’s thoughts jumped all around. The violence of her remarks as we sat idly in the dark during blackouts made me nervous; I was afraid that someone might overhear her say, for example, how she wished she could see the Jap bastards collapse even if it meant we all had to die in an air raid. At the same time, she could hardly have been prouder of the esteem Brother was held in by his Japanese employer. I’m sure she wanted to brag, but the situation meant that she had to keep it all to herself.
I first heard the names Syngman Rhee and Kim Il Sung from Mother. On nights when we went to bed early amid air-raid drills or actual alerts, she’d relate tall tales about them as though she were telling me tales of old. She spoke of Kim Il Sung as a general leading the resistance in the vast fields of Manchuria. He was endowed with superhuman strength and had the magical ability to make space shrink, enabling him to travel a thousand ri over rough mountain paths in a single night. And Syngman Rhee was a most learned scholar struggling for our independence in America. She explained that he had come on the radio and told us not to worry, because Korea would not be bombed, and that flyers with the same message were being dropped from American planes. She said that the Japs hurried us into shelters whenever a plane appeared, not because they were concerned about our safety, but to keep us from seeing the flyers. She would then laugh mischievously. She seemed less like my parent than a younger, unsophisticated playmate, as she gleefully contemplated just how hopping mad those flyers must have made the Japs. Despite the gravity of it all, her tone was far from serious. Having Mother speak so jokingly comforted me in the darkness of that single room of ours, but ultimately, her power was limited. She could not offer me the light of courage.
Brother, however, was different. He was very troubled. But we dismissed his concern; it impressed us no end that his company had protected him from the draft.
Brother had used his influence to help a lathe operator find a job at the ironworks. He was older than Brother and married with children, but the company refused to issue him a similar exemption certificate. Brother quarreled with his boss over it, pressing him and demanding to know why, when the company needed a technician like him more than Brother.
We learned all this later when the lathe operator visited us to express his thanks for Brother’s efforts, even though they had been unsuccessful. Naturally, Mother was flabbergasted, as was I, that Brother had put another’s welfare ahead of his own, oblivious to the potential consequences of sticking his neck out. Brother struck me as pathetically naïve. One anxious day followed another. Every morning that he left for work, we felt we were letting a child go play unsupervised by the edge of a river.
The food ration decreased further. The grain we now received was mixed with soy bean dregs that tasted awful. Mother began going back home more frequently to get rice. As a township clerk, Uncle could elude unreasonable exploitation, as long as he donated a fixed portion of his crop. Clerks like him were generally leading the grain confiscations, and evidently Uncle himself was the target of resentment. That Brother tormented himself over the small show of favoritism he’d received at work was laughable, all the more so since he escaped hunger through riding on the coattails of Uncle’s far more shameful privileges.
A disturbing atmosphere had settled over Pakchŏk Hamlet by the time we went home during winter vacation in 1944. Police and clerks had joined forces to search for food, turning the entire village upside down in the process. They carried horrible contraptions that were more terrifying than outright weapons. One was an iron spike strapped to a long pole. They shoved it anywhere—into ceilings, furnaces, bundles of rice husk, and piles of leaves. A rumor circulated that a girl in a neighboring village had been stabbed with such a pick while hiding among leaves. The story was nightmarish. A few days earlier, her parents had heard of a girl being seized for the comfort women corps by a Japanese policeman as she was drawing water. And so when the girl’s parents caught sight of strangers in Western suits near the village entrance, they grew frightened and hid their daughter amid the leaves. To have loved ones abducted was far more horrific than having food confiscated. A world in which both could be stolen was undoubtedly spiraling to its end.
Apocalyptic signs were cropping up all over. A childhood friend was married off to a faraway family. Her mother held my hands and wept. Getting married at my age! I was only thirteen. It was common enough in the countryside to marry daughters off young in order to have one less mouth to feed, but the comfort women issue made matters worse. Families with sons wanted grandchildren before the boys were taken into the army.
Uncle had avoided extremes of exploitation thanks to his position, paltry though it may have been, but when all is said and done, it still was disgraceful. As director of general affairs, he didn’t personally search for grain, but the grain collectors consisted of low-level clerks and local police, who turned a blind eye at his house. Not that they skipped it. In fact, they drove their instruments into every nook and cranny, poking and prodding more vigorously than they did in other households, but ignoring the rice jars. They were simply putting on a show. The villagers weren’t unaware of our privilege. Before these bandits burst upon them, some neighbors handed rice bags over our fence. They would then make excuses when they took them back, saying the rice had been specially set aside for a coming ancestral rite
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Uncle and his family didn’t exactly have rice to spare. Nonetheless, supporting us was his top priority, and we grew up thinking that everything in the country home was ours as well. Yes, Brother was heir to the family paddies, moderate as those holdings may have been, but more importantly, Uncle felt a deep responsibility to act as a father to us. What I received from Younger Uncle, who never had children of his own, was fatherly affection. What I got from Elder Uncle, who eventually had four children, was paternal authority and obligation.
“The salt on the stove is useless if you don’t put it in the food,” goes an old saying. Even if rice had been available for us, it had to be delivered before it could go into our mouths, and that was no mean feat. Police searches on trains were even more thoroughgoing than in farmhouses. Patrols to pry out black market traders often descended on the carriages, jabbing and searching suspicious bundles. Exposure meant humiliation and, of course, confiscation of the contraband. But the inspectors were only human, and since they were nominally looking for smugglers, they didn’t make trouble over a handful of rice if those carrying it pleaded that it was for their families. Mother brought a little at a time. Although her travel costs were mounting, we never had enough. She grew bolder. In addition to stashing rice in bundles of clothes, she took to strapping it around her stomach. Every time she went to Pakchŏk Hamlet, I’d be nervous until she returned home safe and sound. Blackmarket trading was taken as an assault on the economy of the home front and strictly curbed. Control over underground rice transactions was especially tight. But the stricter the controls, the more cunning smugglers became. Tales began to circulate of smugglers who carried several bags of rice in the padding of their clothes.
Our countryside relatives urged us to just apply to transport rice legally instead of going to such trouble, but Brother would have none of it. He jumped in horror at the thought. Landholders were given a card for the right to bring a certain amount of rice to Seoul, but were then ineligible for rations. Brother insisted that we weren’t real landowners and that there was no reason for us to refuse government grain and use up rice from Pakchŏk Hamlet. Brother was right, but then again, thanks to Mother, he’d never eaten rice mixed with bean dregs.