Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

by Yu Young-nan

  The woman had stopped by on her way north. How bizarre that our fate was so intertwined with theirs. But my dominant emotion was irritation. I asked myself heartlessly why she was dropping by, instead of hurrying onward. What were we to them, anyway? Mother, however, took special care over their food and bedding. Early the next morning, she sent them on with a lengthy prayer that they encounter helping hands throughout their journey and arrive in Pyongyang with a minimum of hardship. I was furious. Cuttingly, I said, “Do you think her husband is going to rise to power again? You’re wrong.”

  I thought that she’d be angry, but her expression immediately registered dread and disgust. It was as though I’d defiled her very thoughts.

  “Stop it with that senseless mouth of yours! How can I hope for your brother to find help if I don’t give it myself?”

  I felt very ashamed.

  One day, flames leapt into the sky from downtown, making us wonder if the whole world except our neighborhood had become a sea of fire. Bombs and cannonballs rained on the city without letting up. And of all days, my sister-in-law looked as though she would give birth that very morning. The difficulty of her first delivery made Mother afraid to care for her on her own; she told me to rush and fetch Auntie. I dashed out but had to be so cautious that it took me over an hour to make my way toward her house, on what would ordinarily have been less than a ten-minute journey.

  The streets were deserted. Fierce artillery roared in all directions, descending murderously from above as if intent on reducing mountains to rubble. Machine-gun fire from airplanes strafed anything that moved below, swooping for the attack like hawks spotting chicks. I inched my way forward, taking cover beneath roof eaves and under trees. In the end, though, I had to turn back. I never made it to Auntie’s. Crossing the avenue over the streetcar tracks proved an impossible obstacle.

  Meanwhile, Sister-in-law had had an easy birth. She was crying quietly, her newborn second son at her side, while Mother prepared soup and rice for her. Wrinkles were prominent on the malnourished infant’s face, no bigger than a sweet potato. He was so tiny that he had slipped out from her womb without causing any labor pains.

  A few days later, the political situation flipped upside down again. The ROK Army and United Nations forces gained control of Seoul. For three months, young men seemed to have vanished, but now they spilled out onto the street from wherever it was that they’d hidden themselves so resourcefully. They hugged each other, their hair long and their faces as white as a sheet of paper. Embracing the triumphantly returning ROK Army, they cheered madly and danced. These young men could hardly have survived in hiding so long merely through sheer endurance and the protection of their families. We alone had been the fools.

  That said, the full revelation of how many had been taken away or killed defied our wildest imagination. The scale was too immense, too cruel. Every conscript still alive had had a narrow escape; all owed their survival to fate. Anyone who has had a close scrape with death becomes bolder and overflows with desire to live a meaningful life. Those who’d managed to avoid conscription were filled with bloodthirsty passion for revenge, and we remained at war.

  Nothing is more horrifying than a civil war in which it is kill or be killed. The enemy had neither a different skin color nor a different language; they simply belonged to the Communist Party. We felt deep gratitude to the UN forces, who, along with the ROK Army, had rescued us, but above all we felt thanks for the very existence of our nation, which made it possible for the UN forces to help us in the first place. Everyone, no matter who, was choking on surging patriotism.

  But for us, patriotism and anti-Communism were identical. Neither could exist without the other; they were the palm and the back of the hand. Impatience with mere patriotism led to the creation of groups—youth associations and self-defense corps—whose very existence was predicated on smashing the Reds. Institutions for maintaining public security—government, police, soldiers, MPs—returned, but their main concern was ferreting out Communist elements. We were placed under martial law. Jails were clogged with Reds who’d been arrested for serving the enemy while it was in power. Summary convictions were rampant. The life of a Communist was not equal to a human being’s. A pointed finger and an accusation of being a Red could see a man shot to death on the spot.

  What the Communists had done was so outrageous that a barrage of complaints came forth. Anonymous accusations were frequent. Some denounced others to stave off the same fate befalling themselves. In a sense, the very act of surviving Communist rule could have been seen as an offense. After all, even those who held out in an attic crawl space had to have someone sneak in food for them. Their wives or mothers could have gone out to the Women’s Federation and sung songs of the masses and praised the Leader more passionately than others.

  At some level, everyone who had remained in Seoul could be accused of siding with the enemy, even innocent citizens whose only sin was to accept at face value the government’s pledge to defend Seoul to the death. Individual circumstances weren’t taken into account. If anyone wanted to claim to be completely innocent, it was best to have fled across the Han. Among proud anti-Communists, a privileged class emerged: those who had crossed the river. In their arrogance, they seemed to have forgotten that when they evacuated the government was urging the populace to go calmly about its daily business. Maybe a guilty conscience was prompting them to display their power preemptively. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been possible for the government, which had shown royal magnanimity in considering the situations of Japanese collaborators, to become so stern now.

  A period of excruciating hardship descended on my family, but I bore the brunt of it. Our neighbors still saw us as a high-level Red household. The people living next door nearly fainted when Mother stepped out of our house after Seoul was recovered. That we stayed instead of fleeing north seemed not just a source of amazement to them, but annoyance. No, not just annoyance, but anxiety—fear, as though a time bomb were ticking away next door. We’d done nothing, but our very existence posed a threat to society. We had to be removed.

  Our house was searched after our neighbors reported us. They alleged that Brother, Communist big shot that he was assumed to be, must have been in hiding, considering that we hadn’t fed. Joining the people’s volunteer army itself wasn’t considered a great offense because almost no one had willingly taken part. Many soldiers and policemen had brothers who’d been dragged away as well.

  We pleaded, crying and begging, trying to convince them that Brother had been forcibly conscripted. His wife had just given birth and Mother was too old, so I was led off as representative of the family. I was subjected to all sorts of humiliation, but at least they didn’t arrest me. Even though jails were overflowing with supposed Reds, I was evidently not much of a catch in the eyes of the expert who dealt with Communists. I was lucky to have the interrogator I did. Amateurs are always more frighteningly zealous than professionals, and that much more so when they’re playing vigilante.

  The affair didn’t end there. I was summoned constantly from then on. I never learned if charges were filed against us repeatedly or if I was being dragged around simply to be humiliated. I didn’t even have the energy to be curious about it. All sorts of youth organizations wanted to see me. They called me a Red bitch. Red bastard, Red bitch, it didn’t matter—anyone stained by red was no longer human. And since our humanity had been forfeited, we couldn’t demand our human rights. Presentation of a warrant? Forget it. Institutions were scrambling to smoke out Reds, and as long as our neighbors suspected us, I was prey. They ridiculed me, cursed me, and threatened me. In comparison with the thoughts reflected in their eyes, what they actually did hardly felt like a violation.

  They gazed at me as though I were a beast. Vermin. I became their plaything. Their worm. I crawled for them. They were like children, amusing themselves with a disgusting insect. Thankfully, at least, the body of a Red bitch was too loathsome, too foul to sexually abuse.

&nb
sp; I came to resent my genteel upbringing. By genteel, I don’t mean that I ate well, dressed well, and was treated with utmost respect, but simply that I’d grown up without the opportunity to get used to contempt.

  Every night, I shook my head fiercely and thrashed about, trying to erase the memory of having had to act as a worm in front of them. Then I’d come to my senses and realize that I had to fight off my impulse to forget, seized by fear that if they remembered how they treated me while I alone forgot, I really might turn into a worm.

  Yet I have forgotten more than I recall. The individual humiliations have been reduced to a single lump, and particular incidents come to me only in a vague, abstract way. This strikes me as evidence that I not only literally wriggled on the ground like a worm in front of them, but had mentally submitted to the violence. What could I do? Such are an ordinary person’s limits, the limits that prevent us from going mad and make it possible to endure.

  But what I went through was nothing compared with what happened to Uncle. My interrogator had been relatively benign. Essentially I had encountered the helping hand that Mother continually prayed for, a bowl of pure well water set before her.

  Uncle and Auntie remained unscathed until mid-October. They were busily scrubbing away the smell of horse manure and preparing to open a new business. Their only worry was about us. They said that they couldn’t focus on work whenever we came to mind. They regretted terribly not striking a deal to rescue Brother from being drafted. They had assumed that bribes wouldn’t work with the Korean People’s Army, but after hearing that someone had made the impossible happen, Uncle kept kicking himself over it. Why didn’t they pull a gold ring off Auntie’s finger and bribe the soldiers who’d come to take him away? Uncle bickered with Auntie, criticizing her for not having thought of the idea first—after all, she was a woman.

  Uncle and Auntie’s neighbors passed on a fatal tip to the authorities that the two had been tools of the Political Security Bureau and lived comfortably. They were arrested separately. One of Auntie’s neighborhood friends came and told us that Auntie had received a summary conviction and been dragged off in a group to the hill behind Sŏngshin Girls’ Middle School. A series of gunshots had followed. “Hurry and get her body,” she urged.

  Many went to rummage through the corpses, desperately hoping to find family members who’d been taken away. Some did find the bodies of loved ones.

  We didn’t go, horrible as it sounds. All the chaos—the constant house searches and summonses—held us back. More importantly, we were terrified of what might happen if it came out that we were close relatives of a Red who deserved to be put to death. In those confused, horrible moments, we sent word to Auntie’s mother. She rushed over, absolutely frenzied, and examined one corpse after another, but Auntie’s body was nowhere to be found.

  We eventually learned from Auntie that the officer in charge had lined up the women separately from the men, apparently assuming that no crime of theirs could have merited execution, and handed them over to the police. Auntie was put on trial and released on probation before the January 4 retreat. Her mother thoroughly devoted herself to Auntie while she was in prison. We were powerless to help.

  Uncle was taken to the police from the outset and sentenced to death. We learned this only through a letter delivered to us by a man who’d shared Uncle’s prison cell. Uncle didn’t understand why he had to be executed. “Please save me,” he wrote. “Do whatever is necessary. Hire a lawyer if you have to.” In that period, my family hit rock bottom, and we felt at our most isolated and worthless. With no influential relatives to lean on for support, we tottered like a radish whose roots had been cut.

  So many had served the enemy that waiting in line to send in warm clothes to imprisoned family members took a whole day. As it happened, one of our kinsmen had long been a correctional officer. Mother asked for his help, but he turned a deaf ear. We shuddered at his heartlessness, but we understood perfectly well why a low-ranking civil servant would be reluctant to take up Uncle’s cause. In order to line up at the prison as early as possible, Mother stayed overnight with a family she’d been close to in Hyŏnjŏ-dong. They treated her with warm sympathy. The poor were much more compassionate, Mother said.

  Uncle was put to death. We were unable to offer even the most trifling assistance toward saving him. We never even found out when he was executed. No news arrived after his letter, no death notice, no summons to come and claim his body. Nothing. No evidence of his execution exists, but the January 4 retreat soon followed, and that was that. No trace of Uncle was ever found again. We’d always assumed that he met with a group execution. A Red’s life was no better than that of a fly, and we, his family, were insects.

  Our powerlessness to help Uncle originated in the new system of citizen identification cards. After the recovery of Seoul, civilians had to carry cards certifying their upstanding status in order to move about freely. Later, every citizen of the Republic of Korea was entitled to receive a card, but in the early days, the underlying purpose of the system was to distinguish potential Reds. A person’s record was closely scrutinized before the card was approved.

  In our case, problems arose even before we got to that stage. The neighborhood head pointedly overlooked us when she handed out application forms. This shocked us even more than when we’d been anonymously denounced to the authorities as Reds. The cards were the precondition for a semblance of human life; to slight us was tantamount to telling us to go to hell—literally. Mother had passively accepted all sorts of affliction as if dull-witted, but now she pounded the ground in lament, “This is going too far! We shared rice cakes to ward off spirits. We held each other’s grandkids and let them poo on us no matter what kind of clothes we were wearing. How can they do this?”

  We swallowed our pride and went to see the neighborhood head, saying that if she could just give us a form, we’d see what we could do. She said that she’d skipped us because she’d been one form short and that we should ask for one at the district office. The very woman who’d been head of the local People’s Unit under the Communists was now back as neighborhood head and discriminating against us! We got our preliminary hearing, but had to bow and scrape to an officer before we received an application form. An organization that didn’t know us conducted the more serious examination, so Sister-in-law and Mother got their cards without incident. Since I was a student, though, they told me to go to my university and get my student registration card first.

  I had scaled one mountain, but another loomed before me. It didn’t look like I’d be able to attend university again. I hadn’t even gone near it, because I was afraid of punishment—going to classes under the Communists was taken as a clear sign of support for their cause. I heard that the Student National Defense Corps screened the students at every university, sometimes cruelly. Investigations were the rage, and in the process all sorts of awful things happened. I was petrified, but in the end I went, pledging to put up with any humiliation or harassment, for not having a citizen’s card was equivalent to a death warrant.

  At that stage the UN forces were using the College of Liberal Arts, so college business was being conducted in one of the houses that used to be furnished to professors in Tongsung-dong. I was already on a blacklist; the other students there whispered among themselves when they saw me fill out a registration form. My reputation was such that my card wasn’t forthcoming right away. Several days later, though, the head of the investigation team interrogated me and, after a warning, issued me my card.

  The student card took intense effort, but once I showed it, my citizen’s card came without a hitch. I’m still grateful for the inspection I received at my university not just because it helped me get the card, but because for the first time in ages I was treated as a human being. I was also long thankful that I could be accused of having served the enemy and still be treated with decency, as it kept me from losing complete faith in people. The suspicion I was under made my gratitude all the keener, becaus
e the entire community was on edge. And nothing at the time was more frightening than our fellow citizens.

  Did the victors have to be so ruthless as they pursued the enemy all the way to the Yalu? When ideology is at stake, it seems that conflict has room only for triumph and not for compassion.

  Patriotic organizations sprouted. Every wall on every street was covered with slogans, all belligerent, all urging the denunciation of Communist atrocities, all urging the extermination of every last Red. But what hit me hardest was a shabby poster that simply read “Hurray for Freedom.” I was physically and mentally exhausted, and when I saw it, my knees buckled. Was it freedom that would keep me from trading the humiliation and hardships I was going through for all the glory and riches of the North? What greater freedom existed here, that made me choose to stay, even if prison might be my ultimate reward for stoically enduring humiliation and hardships? Yes, I was free not to blindly follow the head of the state. I laughed bitterly at myself. But that dream of freedom offered a bulwark of hope as massive as a mountain.

  Our forces pushed northward. Reunification lay just around the corner when the Chinese intervened and drove us back on the defensive. This time, instead of lying that we should calmly go about our daily business, the government hinted that strategic retreat might be necessary. Since the summer had proved so terrifying, the rich and the powerful busied themselves preparing to flee, while the poor packed their bundles, albeit not believing that the situation would come to that. Mother prayed constantly before her bowl of water. She and Sister-in-law were inconsolable. Every passing day was a waking nightmare, but they persevered, cherishing a ray of hope that Brother would return.