Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

by Yu Young-nan

  But now I faced uncomfortable obligations. When I disembarked in Kaesŏng, I had to stop in at the house of Uncle’s concubine. So Grandmother wished, and although Mother’s pride took a beating simply in acknowledging the presence of a concubine in the family, she said I had no other choice. It was the only way I could see Uncle. Even Auntie sharply distinguished between jealousy and a sense of duty and sent her children to visit their father.

  Uncle’s concubine was extremely kind to our family. She won over Grandmother, stickler for propriety though she was. When I went to visit, she’d rush out in stocking feet to welcome me, as though she’d spotted a flower in midwinter. She fawned over me, showing off her tremendous skill as a cook. But the more she fussed, the more I swore to myself that I owed it to Auntie to snub her, if for no other reason than to maintain loyalty to Auntie, who did not have a smidgen of guile in her soul.

  But I couldn’t suppress a strange curiosity about her. When they were together, Uncle was completely different from the stern man I had known. His eyes sparkled, and he was talkative and full of jokes. Instead of being embarrassed about the relaxed picture he presented, he appeared to revel in it. What wiles had she used to tame him? The affectionate way they acted stoked lewd, disturbing thoughts in someone like me, who’d grown up without seeing husband and wife in harmony. Even after I left their house, I’d be caught up in self-loathing, as if I’d been contaminated.

  During my third or fourth year of high school, there was a long delay on one train trip home. Disruptions had begun to occur immediately after Liberation, and several years later problems still remained. Trains now habitually ran late. In winter, passengers had to tremble in unheated cars whose windows, more often than not, were broken and sit on the skeletons of seats whose covering had been stripped. On that particular day, the delay was extreme, and I didn’t arrive until dusk. Traveling the twenty ri home by myself was out of the question. Having a potential refuge in Kaesŏng was reassuring, but I dropped in at the woman’s house, taking it for granted that Uncle would accompany me to Pakchŏk Hamlet. However, Uncle showed no intention of setting off after our hearty dinner, and his concubine took it equally for granted that I’d stay the night. I had little choice but to keep my mouth shut.

  Although her daughter slept by herself in a room in the back, the woman insisted that I stay in the main room, clearly considering it the best hospitality she could provide. While I didn’t like the idea of sharing with her daughter, the prospect of sleeping in the same room with Uncle and his concubine terrified me. This terror likely reflected my burning curiosity, but since I felt ashamed of my curiosity, I acted as nonchalant as I could.

  They spread bedding out for me on the warmest part of the floor and lay down nearby. After the light was turned off, I pulled the covers over my head and pretended to be sound asleep. Nonetheless, every single fiber of my nerves was on alert. I had no doubt that, for the first time in my life, I’d witness something physical occur between a man and a woman. I wanted that knowledge, although I feared being sullied by it. But all the two did was chat, tittering over nothing, with Uncle doing most of the listening.

  Their talk was of a prosperous country household that had come to ruin. I was bored at first, as I was waiting for something else, but gradually I was drawn into the story. The family had a daughter-in-law, a young widow of outstanding beauty, known for her haughtiness. The gist of the tale was that she had an affair with a servant and became pregnant, blackening the family name. The concubine related the complex story with strokes of detail that kept me riveted. At the end she mused, “Now, just what would make an icy lady like that cuddle up with such a lowlife brute?” Then she giggled and giggled. Her lewdly suggestive tone made me shudder.

  Nothing happened between Uncle and his concubine that night. An adolescent girl’s imagination can be a lot dirtier than a middle-aged couple’s sex life. Long after they fell asleep, I had trouble drifting off. Tingles ran down my spine as I pondered the inexplicable power that had drawn together a haughty beauty and a lowlife brute. I suspect this was my first whiff of lust, from a world still dark to me. The story I overheard that night stayed with me for a long time. Several decades later, it became a key subplot in my longest novel, The Unforgettable.

  Those days were difficult for me, not only because of my family, but because of the political situation. Words like “freedom” and “democracy” were surging everywhere, but only recently had our eyes opened to take an unflinching look at such dazzling objects, objects we’d never expected to encounter.

  Confrontations between the right and the left were intensifying all around us. Rallies and sloganeering were constant. “We Unconditionally Support So-and-So. “We Absolutely Oppose So-and-So.” A student council was established at school, and we’d hold meetings for the slightest reason. In keeping with the overall environment, we decided that some teachers should be kicked out as collaborators, while resignations from others should not be accepted.

  I think we had the illusion that freedom and democracy meant unlimited rights for students. We frequently boycotted classes, and the entire student body would gather in the auditorium for heated discussions. The foundations that supported schools were located mainly in the North, and so now many institutions were struggling financially, but we didn’t care in the least. In our immaturity, we just added to the confusion. But that period was important for us.

  We engaged in passionate debates and then put issues to a vote. There was one senior whose logical way of expressing herself stood out, and I remember a girl in my class whose opinions carried a lot of weight. We held a meeting when our new principal was due to arrive. For no special reason, the sentiment was that we should reject him and support the former principal. But the matter was hardly ours to decide, and the newcomer took office as planned. We rebelled to the end, staying in our classrooms instead of going to the auditorium for his inauguration. In retrospect, our actions strike me as similar to the university demonstrations of recent years.

  But the new principal more than proved us wrong to have opposed him. He curbed the chaos by revamping the school in expert fashion. He brought in excellent teachers and gave us the chance to take fascinating classes, completely different from the ones we’d had under the Japanese.

  This tumultuous period at school ended relatively quickly. I never spoke out during the meetings; all I would do was clap or raise my hand to side with the majority. Nonetheless, I think of those days as the end of my childhood, the time when I began to look with some awareness at what was happening in the world around me. In reality, our strident opinions were about school administration matters we likely had no business to meddle in. You might say that we were simply suffering an inevitable stomach upset as we tried to digest the freedom and democracy that the U.S. Military Government regaled us with as bountifully as their flour and candy.

  But I was trying to use ideology to understand it all and looking at the turmoil through the lens of confrontation between progressives and reactionaries. I had a firm conviction that my personal allegiance lay with the left and that it was the left I should applaud. As you might guess from the way absolutes were inserted into every slogan back then, people felt uneasy if they didn’t have an ideology to cling to. Brother’s influence was decisive in aligning my sympathy with the left.

  This is not to say that Brother actively worked to raise my consciousness. He’d had a reputation for being smart since he was young. He was also handsome, careful in his words, and loving, and, as eldest grandson, would carry on the family name. Naturally we thought the world of him. He was a tremendous source of support to me, an idol. My desire to imitate him was unquestioning. That I hoped to fall in love with a consumptive because of Brother’s own tragedy tells you everything you need to know.

  After Brother’s wife died, he became more reserved. Even in this, he seemed admirable to me, however. He came across as the only high-minded member of my otherwise vulgar family, and I included my uncles in that. M
y heart pushed me to believe that only I could fathom the loftiness of Brother’s thoughts. I longed to comprehend him fully and to emulate him. And so my eagerness made it easy to ferret out his political leanings—or, to be more precise, easy to see that every book he bought had a leftist tinge. I chose only the simpler ones to read, but those thin pamphlets were enough to infuence me, since they were easy to follow and stirring.

  I still remember one story about a longshoreman in France who became a Communist activist. One day, he was told to dump sacks of flour into the sea rather than offload it. Despite receiving the same pay, he was torn: How could this happen when so many of the poor went hungry? He learned that it was a plot to keep prices high by reducing the grain supply, because capitalists feared that wheat prices would fall as a result of that year’s bumper crop. Realizing that those driven by the profit motive did not care if the masses starved, he began to hate capitalists and became a top revolutionary. The story dazzled me, as though opening my eyes to the world afresh. I wanted to use my enlightenment from these clear, straightforward truths as a yardstick to measure everything against. And it was reasonable to think that Brother would not be satisfied with just reading those agitating pamphlets.

  Our family left him alone, afraid to aggravate his pain over his loss, but he became harder and harder to understand. He would invite a roomful of strangers over and sit whispering with them. Sometimes they trooped out en masse to head who knows where. At other times, they wrote crude, fierce slogans denouncing the mayor of Seoul, the chief of police, and Syngman Rhee. Then, under the cover of darkness, they would paste them on fences and telegraph poles. Once I’d discovered Brother’s handwriting on seditious flyers on my way to school, I knew for certain that his political beliefs mirrored my own. But that gave me little pleasure. Brother deserved to be a bigwig; it hurt my pride to imagine him skulking around at night to paste up slander.

  But not long after, Brother wound up on the run when a genuine bigwig was arrested. Mother sobbed and begged for Younger Uncle’s help. Uncle, in turn, requested a favor from a connection. The reply came that it was safe for Brother to return home, but from this point on persistent conflict broke out between Mother and Brother.

  Mother tended to adopt our tastes and beliefs without questioning them. If I spoke favorably about teachers or school friends, she would take an immediate liking to them and remember their names. Conversely, instead of scolding me when I bad-mouthed or showed dislike toward others, she hated them more passionately than I did. I’m sure that she would have preferred to agree with Brother in all that he did.

  But she was unwavering in her belief that a Red’s actions would ruin himself and his family. As she understood it, a Red’s primary goal was to oppose Syngman Rhee, and she always emphasized that she had that much sympathy with the cause: “I don’t like the man either. But shouldn’t we give him a chance to be president? After all, he’s an elder who’s fought for independence all his life. It’s no wonder Reds are so disloyal. They don’t even respect their own parents properly. I hear they call them Comrade Mother and Comrade Father.”

  Mother’s cajoling just provoked a bitter smile from Brother, who didn’t respond either way. She sighed: “Fine. Go ahead and call me Comrade. Just tell me what you’re thinking.”

  It was taken for granted that those arrested for leftist activity would be tortured until they were broken. Mother had never even spanked Brother. She was plagued by the nightmare that he’d be tossed in jail and beaten half dead. She detested having suspicious characters murmuring conspiratorially at our house. She blamed everything on them and seemed to think that Brother would come to his senses if she could just shield him from them.

  A police investigator came to our house on Shinmunno looking for one of Brother’s friends. That was it. Mother suddenly made up her mind to sell it.

  We moved to a smaller house in Tonam-dong. Brother no longer had an income, and we were relying on Uncle to make ends meet. By then, Uncle had brokered all sorts of deals, and, as the situation stabilized, he’d begun to think about starting a business that would be a safe bet. A building with a large storefront and living space came up for sale along an avenue with tram tracks, and Uncle wanted to buy it. Mother’s idea, then, had been to move to that smaller home, volunteer the remainder from our house sale to Uncle, and in return receive money to live on from him with a clear conscience.

  As the saying goes, “You don’t stretch your legs unless there’s room for them.” Only when it looked certain that money would be available did Brother apply to enter the night program at Kukhak College—the college of “National Learning.” But Mother and Uncle regretted not giving him a college education, and they urged him to attend a better school during the day instead. Uncle tried to talk Brother into attending a prestigious private university. I’m not sure whether to believe it, but Uncle implied he’d paid to finagle a spot for Brother. Maybe he had. It was all the rage to go to university at that point, and quite a few students from my high school attended, long before their official graduation. Mother and Uncle eagerly welcomed Brother’s entry into college. But they were more interested in the opportunity for him to get himself out of the leftist movement than in academic credentials.

  Brother’s motives were not at all what Mother and Uncle wished, however. He had no intention of pulling away from the leftists; he wanted a general education, buoyed by the wave of enthusiasm to learn more about Korea, which was cresting in the wake of Liberation. In fact, leftist organizations in colleges were much stronger than their counterparts in society at large. Mother pinned a strand of hope on sending Brother to college only because she was clueless about what actually went on.

  In the end, we never had a chance to settle in comfortably in Tonam-dong and wound up moving almost yearly until the Korean War broke out in 1950. As soon as Mother judged that our home had become a den for subversives, she would pull up stakes in near hysterics. Once we absconded in the middle of the night, leaving behind our furniture and kitchenware, and went to stay with Uncle. If Brother ever wrote an account of his revolutionary struggle, the way those types like to, and been honest about it, he’d have had to admit that its most heroic feature was his struggle with Mother. I was caught in the middle and unavoidably torn: I supported and cheered Brother, but pitied Mother.

  When the academic system changed, secondary education was lengthened from four to six years. Because attending secondary school for up to six years could get boring, some students dropped out and married, while others, as I just mentioned, went to university. It was considered acceptable to pull strings to get in, either because we were in a transitional period or because we’d been admitted under the older four-year system.

  In my third year, I learned that our school had a Democratic Youth League. I don’t know how I came to its attention, but when a student I wasn’t friendly with invited me to join a reading group, I immediately understood what she meant. I accepted without hesitation, even though I was slightly nervous. Being given instructions on how to find our secret meeting place certainly satisfied my desire for intrigue, but the texts and discussions we shared weren’t up to the insight I obtained from the pamphlets I’d already read. I was very disappointed but content: I had become Brother’s comrade-in-arms.

  May Day arrived. Leftists held an event at Namsan, and right-wingers gathered at Seoul Stadium. The members of our group were ordered to skip school and go to Namsan. I had trouble making up my mind whether to participate. Thoughts of Mother held me back, but rallies, demonstrations, and chanted slogans held no appeal for me, regardless of political views. My individualist streak regularly came in for harsh criticism at our reading-group meetings. I recognized it as a weak point that I’d eventually have to overcome.

  Finally I made up my mind. I skipped school and went to Namsan. The grand rally aimed at mobilizing as many workers and students as possible. We shouted out violent slogans in response to the leaders’ cries, and endlessly sang along with songs of t
he masses. I returned home that evening, thoroughly drained. Unable to hold out against Mother’s probing questions, I confessed what I’d been up to. Mother was mortified. She dredged up all sorts of frightening scenarios, gleaned from who knows what source: Did I have any idea what happens to girls who are sent to prison? She persisted. She discouraged me from going to school the next day—she’d phone to say that I’d been sick and would have to miss the next few days as well. I was being a coward and I knew it, but I succumbed to her pleading.

  I asked around while I was absent and found out that the students who’d missed school on May Day were called to the teachers’ lounge and interrogated. If it came out that they’d gone to Namsan, they were harshly reprimanded. Their parents were summoned and had to appeal to the school for forgiveness. Other schools handed over students who’d attended the rally to the police, but thankfully ours was more moderate and treated it as an internal issue. No one tipped off my attendance, so nothing happened when I finally returned to school several days later. I escaped both questioning and punishment.

  For a long time to come, I was ashamed of myself. I’m sure I must have looked completely spineless to my friends. The thought drove me into deep self-loathing. Not only did the teacher not suspect me, but no one in my class imagined that I’d participated in a leftist rally. Did their obliviousness come from seeing me as some straight-arrow, model student? I felt like a hypocrite. No more contact came my way, although to this day I’m not sure why. Did the Democratic Youth League collapse, or was I ostracized?

  Whether all the upheavals for my family affected me or not, I became half-hearted about school. I wasn’t interested in friends, the major concern of adolescent girls, their primary cause of joy and sorrow. I don’t even remember who my friends were at that point, for that matter, or what I did with them. My only comfort came in reading. I weaned myself off political works and gravitated toward Korean literature. I never bought any of these stories, but simply picked them out from Brother’s bookcase. I was still under his influence. The one literary journal he read was entitled, plainly enough, Literature and published by the leftist Literary Writers’ Union, since Brother’s standard for deciding what books to buy was ideology.