Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

by Yu Young-nan

  Our cramped veranda soon replicated the festivity on the truck. Mother, Sister-in-law, and I cooked rice, boiled stew, and fried vegetable pancakes in the kitchen. We had an entire crate of tofu and a case of liquor delivered from the neighborhood grocery. The visitors ate and drank, and tirelessly sang revolutionary songs until our roof tiles hummed. Our small house seemed as though it would take off with their racket. Neighbors gathered outside our gate to peer in at the spectacle. Mother was in a daze, half out of her wits. Her legs trembled as she made one blunder after another, breaking dishes and confusing sugar with salt. More than once, she put her hand to her forehead and muttered, “What kind of omen is this?” To her, the arrivals were neither prisoners nor revolutionaries; they were simply an omen.

  Yet even throughout it all, she served the men herself, rather than letting my sister-in-law or me do it. As she brought dishes around, she’d put on an anxious expression and say, “I bet your family is dying to see you!” Evidently taking her hint, all the men finally dispersed late that night.

  The next day, our prospective tenant came to retrieve the money from the first two installments of the contract. We also felt that the contract had become invalid overnight and returned the money readily. Mother went up to the loft and rummaged about for quite a while before coming back down with it. She gave an embarrassed smile: “There were so many things I wanted to do with this money. I’d have been so ashamed if I’d spent any!”

  Suddenly I remembered how her smile had reminded me of a potato flower as she stood in the vegetable patch at Brother’s school. My heart ached. We had been about to move, but with the sudden interruption, our plan now seemed something out of the distant past. I was struck by an antirevolutionary thought: even if an earthly paradise were to be ushered in on this land, I didn’t want it if it meant robbing Mother of her dream of a cozy hundred-p’yŏng vegetable patch. Mother had dreamed of becoming wealthier; she intended to take the lump sum she collected after the final payment of the tenant’s key money, invest it in Uncle’s business, and then receive interest from him. And she wouldn’t have to buy vegetables—she’d just grow them in her own garden.

  After the festivities we’d hosted with the released revolutionaries, our neighbors treated us differently. They bowed deeply and repeatedly, afraid of us, as though apologetic for prior failure to recognize they had someone important in their midst. Although the situation seemed to be running directly opposite to what Mother had pictured, she was more anxious than she would have been if her worries had come to pass. But what was really happening, of course, was not what it appeared. One after another, Brother’s old comrades came to see him. When they saw his indecision, they implied that he was losing an opportunity to make amends to the Workers’ Party. Their tone alternated between cajolery and criticism. He kept excusing himself, saying that returning to school and instilling revolutionary spirit in farmers’ sons was how he could best serve the party.

  The truckload of omens prevented Mother from realizing the future plans she had so carefully laid. She plunged into despair, passing each day as though treading on thin ice. The neighbors who treated us like VIPs filled her with trepidation. Our gates opened into the same alley, and everyone went back and forth regularly, especially older women with grandchildren to look after. They visited one another so often that they could distinguish how the bean paste and soy sauce tasted in each house. Babies tend to adore getting out of the house, and every day grandmothers carried them about on their backs and visited their neighbors. To be excluded from sharing our concerns about food with such intimate acquaintances was very difficult. They didn’t believe that we had to eat gruel or scrape rice from the bottom of the jar, just as they did. When they made a mass excursion to Ttuksŏm to buy fresh summer greens, only we were left out.

  The sense of calamity extended beyond our own immediate family. This time, Uncle’s conviction that chaos was superior to stability for traders proved wrong. His shop soon closed. He’d rented out half the building, as the side facing the avenue and its streetcars had enough space for two shops, but the other store closed too. Now vacant, the building must have looked like an empty storage facility, and so officers from the Korean People’s Army requisitioned it as a stable for the horses that pulled their equipment wagons. Who could dare refuse?

  According to what Auntie told us, these officers ranked high in the security apparatus and wanted not only to quarter their horses, but also to sleep and eat there. Auntie became their cook. At first, Auntie and Uncle hardly believed the disaster that had befallen them, but as food shortages grew worse, they thought it fortunate that at least they didn’t have to worry about rice. They didn’t even have to worry about side dishes. Once a steer was slaughtered and carved up, and although the soldiers shared the meat with another military unit, they feasted on it for two days straight until they got sick of it. They didn’t have any option, really, since this occurred before refrigeration.

  The smell of beef filled the neighborhood. Although Auntie had no choice but to cook it, she said she felt like she was committing a terrible crime. Uncle’s main line of business was liquor wholesale, but the alcohol he’d hoarded as capital for future trading was discovered when the cattle were slaughtered. It disappeared that very day. Compensation for the confiscated booze or Auntie’s labor was a pipe dream, but it remained an incredible stroke of luck that they could fill their bellies three times a day.

  Auntie was ridden with guilt over this luxury she couldn’t share, and said that she couldn’t hold her head high in front of her neighbors. She wanted, at the very least, to distribute the scorched rice from the bottom of the pot, but the strict surveillance over food made it impossible. Although we heard that the soldiers said nothing about visits from relatives, we stopped going to Uncle’s, for Auntie would obviously try to feed us behind their backs, even if just a bowl of rice. We’d had it drilled into us as we were growing up that appearing greedy at the table should be avoided at all costs; the mere thought that people would suspect us of visiting to be fed made my skin crawl. Auntie told us what was going on during her rare visits. And although she positively reeked of food, confined to the kitchen all day, not a grain of scorched rice made the journey with her. We expected no such thing, of course, but she’d excuse herself upon setting foot into our house.

  “I was afraid they’d suspect me of sneaking food away, so I shook out my skirt in front of them before they even asked. Look, like this.”

  She fluttered her skirt so vigorously that her slip came into view. When our hunger grew more extreme, she cut off those infrequent night visits completely.

  Brother was apparently biding his time and watching the situation develop. It didn’t hurt that those in the local government office, which had turned into the People’s Committee, and the head of our neighborhood People’s Unit were observing to see if he was indeed a major figure. But the world was not about to allow him to steer a middle course indefinitely; men, young and middle-aged alike, were being hauled off the street to be sent to the Korean People’s Army, and Brother was losing the opportunity to either go underground or make up to the party for his mistakes.

  Exclusion from our neighbors and a sense of impending crisis left Mother’s eyes vacant, and she didn’t express her opinion. The derailment of her plans had robbed her of her powers of discernment. She grew fearful and taciturn. I don’t know where her strength of character went, but she behaved as though she no longer had views of her own.

  Brother finally returned to school in early August. One of his fellow teachers visited as part of a campaign to encourage others back to work, and that may have swayed him. Even if they couldn’t expect a salary, this teacher said, rice rations might be in the picture. My sister-in-law was due in September, and Mother was desperate to save some rice, if only a few handfuls, so she could cook her a proper meal or two after the baby was born. Mother resorted to taking out the hulled millet used to stuff my nephew’s pillow and making gruel from it along w
ith some leathery vegetable leaves.

  On his next visit, Brother’s colleague brought an official letter confirming Brother’s credentials and granting him right of safe passage. And so Brother reported to work, only to be conscripted for the “people’s volunteer army” three days later. We didn’t even know he’d been taken away. In the middle of the night, a rap came on Uncle’s window. Uncle and Auntie went out and found Brother standing there, with two Korean People’s Army soldiers holding guns behind him.

  Uncle’s house faced the avenue leading to Miari Hill, and they could always hear troop and civilian movements at night. Brother had asked for the understanding of his soldier escorts and stopped by briefly to give word of what was going on. With nothing in mind but the thought that they couldn’t just let him leave a message like that and disappear, Auntie and Uncle followed him all the way to Miari Hill in their pajamas. They were at a loss about what to do and finally lost sight of him when one of the soldiers pushed them away with the barrel of his gun. They stood at the side of the road and took cold comfort from the parade of young men being dragged away under cover of darkness. After watching the procession until it disappeared, Auntie raced over to relay the news. We were stunned and refused to believe it. When day broke, I was all the more certain that Auntie had simply been imagining things and talking nonsense in the middle of the night. Mother immediately made preparations to leave for Kup’abal to find out what had really happened and told me to come along.

  The ferocious bombing along the national highway compelled everyone to move by night. We were confronted with numerous air raids and would leap into fields or rice paddies, lying flat for a long while before picking ourselves up and continuing.

  The news was true. Brother had indeed been conscripted. An order from on high had instigated the intense campaign to encourage teachers back to work. Every school was obligated to send several teachers for “reeducation,” and in the midst of their reeducation, they were forced to “volunteer” for the army then and there. We had no one in particular to blame. The teacher who’d talked Brother into reporting to work had been dragged away as well. He hadn’t deliberately fooled us; he’d been fooled too. If anything was to blame, it was rural innocence. What deceived us all was a much larger, organized force.

  Red dragonflies flitted about in the fields, amid the ceaseless chirr of cicadas in the poplars. Our garden patch, without an owner to look after it, was now covered with purslanes. Maybe it was the effect of extreme hunger, but as we looked out at all this from the faculty lounge, where a sole aged and weary teacher remained, the terror of war seemed so far away as to be surreal. The teacher went out to the storage shed with an even more ancient-looking janitor and scooped some rice from a sack. We accepted it with deep gratitude. Mother carried a bundle on her head, and I carried one on my back. That evening, we ate our fill of rice for dinner. When Brother brought his first salary from school, Mother had lamented that our gullets were gang lords. She’d spoken too soon. She didn’t say anything that evening, but the meal proved that hunger came before all other worries.

  I’d returned to school long before this incident. Unlike Brother, I readily sympathized with the political changes that had occurred, the criticism of the Syngman Rhee government, the pledges made on behalf of workers and farmers. I applauded how the Communists pressed hard on the enemy’s heels and felt a vivid revival of the excitement and fascination I’d experienced when I first came into contact with revolutionary pamphlets, a sensation I’d forgotten. I even wanted to brag about my brief involvement with the Democratic Youth League, as though I had great personal knowledge of leftist struggle. Besides, I had a sense of attachment to the university I had just entered. I wanted to participate in the revolution, and the university was the one institution where I fit.

  I think I reported to school in mid-July. I was eager to attend, but the turmoil at home delayed me. Mother showed no interest in my attending. Her acute, uncontrollable anxiety caused even the jokes she used to crack in any situation to fall by the wayside. I felt that it took courage on my part to return to school. I discovered that the Liberal Arts building had been occupied by the Korean People’s Army and that we were supposed to register at the College of Veterinary Medicine several blocks away. Besides Democratic Youth League cadres, there were just one or two students in each department. Our major task was to encourage others to come back to school. Each of us received several of our fellow students’ dossiers, including the hand-drawn maps to their homes within them. Track down the absentees, we were told. Urge them to return. I learned later that students were frequently rounded up with this tactic and sent to the army, just as Brother had been. But even before I found out the real purpose of the campaign, I ignored the instructions. For one thing, I wasn’t good at locating houses, and for another, it didn’t make sense to me to try to talk anybody into returning to school. The issue wasn’t regard for those who’d been targeted; it was my own self-respect.

  Beyond that, every day we were kept occupied with nothing but stupid assignments. We had to copy down a list of reactionary students in the College of Liberal Arts again and again. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why we had to keep copying the same list. We weren’t even told who authored it.

  We did have something that was supposed to pass for study hours at school, but I never saw a professor. I never saw so much as a professor’s shadow throughout that period, for that matter. The Democratic Youth League ruled the school. Their “democratic” study method was to take turns reading Soviet Communist Party history or a full newspaper page of Leader Kim Il Sung’s teaching, and then treat it with fawning adulation. Nothing is more exhausting than having to offer glowing praise when it doesn’t fow naturally. I had the marked sensation of my vital energy evaporating. Despite reading the same text over and over, we had to maintain the peak of enthusiasm we’d shown the first time. The new lessons sounded no different, but we were expected to add a fresh spark to our fervor. Absurd. Even if that had been possible, it would have been a fraud. I couldn’t carry it off unless I muttered to myself what an idiot this leader was if he was so taken with charade.

  I had a congenital hatred of school preparation. In high school, I had little choice but to review before tests, but I never bothered to look at lessons ahead of time. I was easily distracted too. During subjects I didn’t care about, I’d let the lesson go in one ear and out the other and had the bad habit of reading novels in class. Even in subjects I liked, I preferred to listen to the teacher, letting my thoughts wander once in a while, without going over the material in advance. Only then did fresh knowledge jump out at me in its full glory. I didn’t want to turn the class into a review session by preparing and robbing the subject matter of its freshness, so that it became like a spoiled fish. It may actually be that what I hated was review rather than looking at material ahead of time.

  The Democratic Youth League lessons consisted of endless study of the obvious, things that elementary-school kids would have understood the first time around. I was so drained that I felt that I myself had become a spoiled fsh, a specimen, stuffed and mounted. The sensation was so intense that even though there were surely handsome young men among those Democratic Youth League cadres I called Comrade, I didn’t experience the slightest stir of emotion as I sat with them, shaking hands at every opportunity, our shoulders brushing.

  I’m not talking about romance, but the spark preceding romance that exists only between men and women. The pull is there even if you are talking about brothers and sisters, fathers and daughters, or mothers and sons. Contact between men and women offers a subtle attraction—or whatever you want to call it—that isn’t present in same-sex interaction. Somehow this feeling had simply dried up for me. It wasn’t just in my head; it was a fact.

  During the war, my menstrual cycle stopped. Later I learned that this was true of many women. Most attributed it to a lack of nutrition, and although that may have been the main reason, I suspect that some sort of ps
ychological neutering took place as well. In fact, pondering how men and women increased North Korea’s population became much more amusing for me than contemplating whether it was a true workers’ paradise. The circumstances didn’t change my desire to have fun. I stopped going to classes after Brother was conscripted. I won’t say that it was because of him, but I was exhausted. I withered and fell away, like fruit with unpollinated seed. Even now, with the perspective of distance, that three-month period under the Korean People’s Army seems far longer than it actually was.

  Every evening, Mother set a bowl of pure well water on the condiment-jar platform in the yard and offered her devotion to the spirits. On nights when the moon sent forth beams of silver, or when she spent a particularly long time in prayer, she seemed just like a shaman.

  I should have wanted the victory of the Korean People’s Army, knowing that Brother had become part of it. But when I heard mortars from the south, ceaseless and continually intensifying, my heart raced with the opposite hope. The artillery roar, it turned out, came from ship cannons, as we learned from the wife of the revolutionary who’d been arrested at our house.

  We’d heard nothing from the man himself once he left after the celebration at our house. Brother didn’t tell us about him, but Mother wondered whether he was a big fish or simply a minnow. During his wife’s visit, we learned that he had in fact been the vice chairman of the Inch’ŏn Municipal People’s Committee. A heavyweight, all right. His wife, however, looked wretched. Worn and haggard, accompanied by a frightened son and daughter, she told us that the bombardment had reduced Inch’ŏn almost to ashes. The city itself would fall before long. An order had come for high-level party cadres to send their families north but to stand their ground to the bitter end.