by Yu Young-nan
Of the books I read from Brother’s collection, a piece by Kim Tong-sŏk stands out for me, although I’m not sure if it was a work of criticism or an essay. His prose was clear and easy to understand. At that point, I still struggled with Korean texts, because my sensibilities had been cultivated with Japanese novels. One particular passage of Kim’s that spurred my interest and agreement was about the Tale of Ch’unhyang. He refutes an interpretation that the work’s vitality lies in Ch’unhyang’s chastity and argues that the true power of the story—the source of its wide audience—instead resides in the poem that Yi Mong-nyong writes before revealing himself as a secret royal emissary at Pyŏn Hak-do’s feast: “The fine wine in gold goblets is the blood of the people / the flavorsome food on jade plates is their fat.”
Considering Brother’s books, it must have been a work that analyzed class struggle. I never saw the name Kim Tong-sŏk once he was blacklisted after the war. With the recent thaw between North and South, however, most banned writers have been reinstated and their books are available once more. I’ve looked carefully for Kim’s name but still haven’t found it. Maybe he wasn’t the great critic I’d thought.
Before the war, we moved three times within Tonamdong itself. I assume that Brother’s deepest plunge into leftist activity occurred when we lived near Samsŏn’gyo, but that’s only a guess on my part. The South Korean Workers’ Party was then at its most dynamic in directing an underground movement. Brother was a man possessed. He had changed so completely that he no longer seemed part of our family. He even prepared an escape route in case he was caught by surprise at night.
The kitchen of our house near Samsŏn’gyo had a back door that led to a narrow passageway between our fence and our neighbors’. The passageway was just wide enough for a person to squeeze through and ended in one direction at a high brick wall facing the street. If you went in the opposite direction, a labyrinth of an alley passed backyards all the way to another neighborhood. To reach that neighborhood by the usual route took much longer. If Brother ever had to fee quickly, he’d obviously use this shortcut, so sometimes Mother went out to look for obstacles in this dark maze. She patted herself on the back, saying, “We’d be in a real pickle without this escape route.” But in spite of the advantages the house offered Brother, we suddenly up and left, less than a year after we’d moved in. Fortunately, I suppose, Brother wasn’t the sole reason for our departure.
The house had four rooms. We each took our own bedroom, and Mother rented out the room closest to the gate since we needed the money. Her concern for Brother made her scrutinize prospective tenants closely. Nonetheless, despite her pains, the family that moved in turned out to be quite like Brother. Although they didn’t seem badly off, the father didn’t have a job. Soon enough, it dawned on us that suspicious people were gathering in their room. Mother immediately realized that we had a Red in our midst. Brother had stopped offering our house as a hideout, so naturally Mother was dumbfounded when the tenants’ room became a plotters’ den. Brother had nothing to do with it. Mother blamed it on an evil spirit that was lurking about the house. She was inconsolable.
But Mother never thought of sending the family packing. She even worried about them, the way she might have sympathy for fellow sufferers of a disease. Not long after, the police surrounded our house and led the man away. Mother quickly abandoned the house in a state of shock and joined Uncle. She reacted like country folk who burn down a house in which everyone has died during an epidemic. Nonetheless, she was happy to allow the man’s family—his wife, son, and daughter—to stay on until the house was sold.
11. The Eve Before the Storm
UNCLE’S PROPERTY LAY NEAR TONAM BRIDGE AND faced an avenue where streetcars ran. It had space for a shop and large inner quarters as well, so all five of us could live together without too much discomfort. I even got to have a room of my own. During our stay there, talk of a second marriage for Brother went into full swing. Our relatives often grumbled that Mother wasn’t hurrying to arrange another wedding or, at the very least, make him stop his activity with the underground. I’m sure Mother would have liked nothing better than to do both, but she also wasn’t prepared to take on projects doomed to failure. After all, she knew her son better than anyone.
Brother turned a deaf ear to arranged meetings with prospective marriage partners. But one day in a relative’s house, he happened to set eyes on a young woman who was kin to a distant cousin. When someone asked in passing how she would do as a bride, Brother perked up. He asked me to look her over, but discreetly, so she wouldn’t realize that she was being checked out. Although spying compromised my dignity, I was thrilled that Brother had come to me first. Fueled with a sense of mission, I hid near her house when I expected she’d be coming in and out and caught a glimpse of her. While she wasn’t pretty as such, she projected intelligence, radiating strength and confidence rather than femininity. My impressions thoroughly satisfied Brother.
We were getting anxious because our Samsŏn’gyo house was slow in selling. After our tenant’s arrest, his wife took the children to his family’s home in the countryside and the room by the gate remained empty. Still, there was enough time between when our house was sold and when we moved to our own house again for Brother and his new bridal prospect to get to know each other. And so by the time we moved out of Uncle’s, we’d welcomed a new family member into our household.
In my fifth year of secondary school, our class was divided into three streams: liberal arts, science, and home economics. We’d already been split into three homerooms when we were admitted, but now we were also divided evenly by major. I picked liberal arts without giving it serious thought. This track felt most congenial to me because I liked reading so much. It was hardly because I had literary ambitions at that point. Several girls in our class thought they had potential as writers and poets, and others agreed. Under the previous academic system, we’d have already graduated and gone to college, so now was the time for talent to bud. But I wasn’t one of the talented ones. Girls with a conspicuously literary sensibility struck me as belonging to a world I’d never be part of.
The teacher in charge of the liberal arts stream was a novelist named Pak No-gap. He had just joined our school, and, as it happened, at that very moment his work was being serialized in the newspaper my family subscribed to. Although I’d read many novels, it was the first time I’d ever seen an author in the flesh. I was excited to have a genuine writer as a teacher. I searched Brother’s bookcase and came upon a short story Mr. Pak had published in Literature. Discovering my teacher’s work in this left-wing journal gave me a sense of affinity with, and sympathy for, him. I owed those feelings to the way Brother set himself apart from the mainstream.
Back then, special preparation for university entrance exams didn’t exist. In the liberal arts stream, we spent several hours a week on literature and creative writing. Mr. Pak took charge of those classes, in addition to Korean. While he was my homeroom teacher, he published a novel called Forty Years. I made it a point to seek out and read his works, but they didn’t influence me much. They were no fun, and I had to force myself through them. However, he was very strict in teaching writing style. What he hated most was passages overladen with emotion and strewn with exclamation marks—“Ahh!” “Ohh!” He abhorred them. You could almost sense gooseflesh rising on his skin as he tore into them. And, of course, he despised cliché. Until I met him, the only view I’d encountered was that literary flair meant knowing how to trot out flowery, sentimental language, and the girls who were deemed “literary types” had the knack for these turns of phrase. The usual attitude made Mr. Pak’s tutoring stand out.
He gave me the wherewithal to conquer my inferiority complex toward “literary types” and to believe in myself as a writer. For the first time, I had a teacher I liked. Although his large, clear eyes conveyed the impression that he was strict, when he smiled this austerity vanished and his expression was like a child’s. In winter, he usually wor
e a turumagi, a traditional long coat, but the fabric was inferior—stiff, coarse cotton, dyed black. Nonetheless, Mr. Pak taught Chinese characters as well, and when he got carried away by his own emotions as he recited classical poetry in his sonorous voice, that black turumagi suited him brilliantly.
Our liberal arts course turned out to be fun and freewheeling. Some of my classmates hoped to major in literature or art at university, but the rest were more interested in having a good time than studying hard. Our desks were arranged so that two students sat together in the central rows, while a single desk lined the windows on either side. I was assigned a window desk that faced the school field. I sat alone but became friendly with the girls in front of and behind me. In front of me sat Han Mal-suk, who made her literary debut and became well known long before I did, and Yi Kyŏng-suk, who grew up to become a professor at Seoul National University College of Music. Behind me sat Kim Chong-suk, later a novelist and prolific translator. The four of us got to be good friends, and we’d fool around together during class.
When any of us brought an interesting novel, it would make the rounds among us. We’d hide it inside our textbooks and read it during class. If the teacher called on us, we’d wind up answering with some non sequitur that made the others laugh. From time to time, we passed notes among ourselves about fresh ideas we’d had. Days like that flew right by. Han Mal-suk brought in collections of stories by the Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa one by one, and we took turns reading them, entranced. At this point, though, I don’t have the foggiest idea why we were so taken with them.
Kim Chong-suk’s family ran Chongno Bookstore, the forerunner of Chongno Books. From her I borrowed Literary Arts, a serious journal, and, sometimes, new books. Back then, books weren’t published anywhere near as frequently as they are today. I was filled with envy whenever I stopped by the store, for all those books seemed to be hers. Although it was Korea’s biggest bookstore, it was family run, with all the members pitching in at the cash register, doing bookkeeping and minding the customers. Her grandfather always stood watch in the middle of the store during my visits. He made me nervous. Looking back, I can see I may well have been hoping for a chance to make off with a book or two.
I did have other talents besides being able to read a novel while pretending to pay attention in class. I was also good at sneaking into theaters and watching movies that were off-limits to students. Tongdo Cinema sat kitty-corner from Uncle’s shop. They gave him free tickets in return for putting up posters on his shop windows and walls. He’d then hand them over to me or tempt me into accompanying him. I became a regular there and saw every new film.
I kept my patronage of Tongdo Cinema hidden from Mother and my classmates, but I visited other movie theaters with my friends often enough. Even in the dark, our white uniform collars stood out, so we’d tuck them inside our jackets and pretend that we weren’t students. No one who bothered to look closely would have been fooled for a moment, but we still felt the thrill of thinking we’d gotten away with something.
Once Chong-suk and I went off during the day to the movie theater in the Hwashin Department Store. When a teacher was absent or had other business to attend to, class was canceled. That day, we had no class for two hours back to back, so we decided to skip out on school and go to a movie we’d been eager to see. My pulse raced every time I snuck, collar stealthily tucked away, into the mysterious darkness and its expectant murmurs. Skipping class made it all that much more exciting.
Immediately after Liberation, the power supply from the North had been cut off. Although the situation improved slightly afterward, electricity still went out frequently. That day was especially bad. Every time the film got interesting, the screen went blank and whistles of protest rang out. The management did its best to placate the audience, quickly bringing in a singer to perform an operetta of some sort on the candlelit stage. We patiently waited, leaving only after the movie had completed a cycle and reached the point when we’d entered. Neither of us had a watch, and so we were unaware how much time had passed. We certainly had no inkling that it would already be dusk.
We raced back to school. It was barely a stone’s throw from the cinema, but by the time we arrived we were panting, our hearts pounding. The classroom had already been cleaned and was empty, of course, save for the two book bags atop our desks. The blackboard held a stern order for us from Mr. Pak: go immediately to the teachers’ lounge. We rushed down, but all the teachers had left for the day. The nerve that led us to the theater had evaporated. If I didn’t see Mr. Pak that very evening, I thought, I wouldn’t be able to sleep. Chong-suk shared my naïve anxiety. There was always a teacher on night duty to keep an eye on the school property, so we went to see him. We were so desperate to find out where Mr. Pak lived that he took out a stack of faculty dossiers and showed them to us. The information included not only our teacher’s address, but a handdrawn map to his house.
I discovered that Mr. Pak lived in my old neighborhood of Hyŏnjŏ-dong. A lump rose in my throat, and my affection for him surged. The teacher on night duty seemed to know the area and said that it wasn’t one where we’d find a house readily from a map. I thought, though, from studying it that I had a general idea where it was. I was confident I could find it, but I didn’t explain to Chong-suk why. I just said, “Let’s go.” It wasn’t entirely a sense of shame that kept me from admitting I knew Hyŏnjŏ-dong. I was also worried that locating the house might not prove as easy as I hoped.
The streetcars were still running, so we made it as far as Yŏngch’ŏn at the bottom of the hill. But finding the house did indeed take a long time. The neighborhood had changed a lot since I’d lived there, and at night the convoluted alleys seemed to twist more than ever. I pretended that the area was new to me, afraid that Chong-suk might make some disparaging remark about it.
Finally we found Mr. Pak’s home. It had a tiny singledoor gate, and from the outside, the impoverished household was in full view. His wife told us that he hadn’t returned yet. As we explained why we were there, my respect for him became more intense. Mother scolded me for coming home late, but the next morning when we went to see Mr. Pak in the teachers’ lounge, he didn’t make an issue of what had happened. He graciously said that we shouldn’t have troubled ourselves to come to his house over something so trivial. Afterward, I felt as though a special bond had been forged between the two of us, a solidarity based on Hyŏnjŏ-dong.
Around this time, Brother had a son. The arrival of my nephew was just about the most blessed event possible for a family like ours with few male offspring. My uncle could scarcely contain his joy. The baby might as well have been his own grandson. My family was full of praise for Brother’s wife. Her arrival was now seen as a stroke of great fortune, and not simply because she’d given birth to a son to carry on the family name. The anxiety that had haunted our family eased once she joined us. Brother hadn’t pulled out from the underground, but everyone could see that she coped sensibly, neither fussing nor reacting frantically like Mother.
She supported Brother fully but had no qualms about reminding him that as head of the household he had duties that he tended to neglect. Just as you could know how precious rice was only when you’d gone hungry, she’d say, you could struggle for the proletariat only if you’d eked out a living. My sister-in-law had a unique way with words; she made Mother and me feel as though she were speaking on our behalf, but in a compelling way that gave no sting to Brother’s pride. I suspect that Brother felt immediately attracted to her because he’d sensed her intuitive skill in dealing with men. He badly needed advice and comfort in those days.
Brother kept his distance from the underground. What was more, he had apparently joined the National Guidance Alliance, a government-sponsored group for reformed Communist sympathizers. He then got a job as a Korean teacher at Koyang Middle School in Shindo in Koyang County, not far from Kup’abal. It’s never been clear to me whether he joined the National Guidance Alliance to land a job or he b
ecame a member once he started working, but I believe there was a psychological and material relation between the two.
Almost a year had passed since the South-only election that established the Republic of Korea. The most fundamental policy of the fledgling state was not merely to crack down on leftists, but to eradicate them. Staunch Communists faced heading north across the thirty-eighth parallel or going to prison. At least the alliance had been set up as a way out for idealistic, innocent sympathizers. Brother made his decision to join, whether coaxed or coerced, without consulting the family. We learned about it only when he got himself into an inebriated stupor one day like some kind of ruffian.
Brother threw a ridiculous temper tantrum. He wasn’t himself at all. Of course, in his defense, he was dead drunk. He bawled, blaming Mother, as if he’d deserted the leftists and joined the alliance all for her. After his tirade, he passed out. Mother just gazed at him sadly and muttered, “What’s with you, getting all liquored up and maudlin? This isn’t like you.” This was the biggest insult she could fling at her son; she’d never even violated the superstition not to walk around his head as he lay sleeping. Nonetheless, she seemed to fear the consequences of Brother’s ideological about-face more than he did himself.
Afterward, out of Brother’s earshot, Mother let on how anxious she was. She’d made a nuisance of herself trying to get Brother out of the clutches of the left, but now she had tinges of regret. She even displayed a lingering attachment to the cause. I’m still not sure why. Was it one of her usual contradictions—fear of an outlawed ideology and concern for Brother’s safety, but a desire to believe in the importance of a cause he’d risk himself for? Or was it an ominous premonition that sparked her loyalty?