The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  My cell had formerly belonged to the poet Park Nohae, detained here before his sentencing for being part of the Socialist Labor League of South Korea. I recognized many of the people I bumped into in the halls: seemingly every politician, university president, and retired general who’d been showing up in the news. According to the jailers, there had been so many political prisoners up until the last administration that sometimes the prisoners would visit each other, and prison reform seemed imminent. But now that we had a civilian government, it was like the end of a party. The guards predicted that life in prison would soon return to normal.

  We usually think of political prisoners as activists, arrested for demanding change or for struggling against the government, but by and large the detention center also treated as political prisoners the ruling-party stalwarts who’d been arrested for corruption. We were all lumped in together, probably for administrative convenience, but the detention center employees looked at it more simply. They joked with me that, left or right, we had all broken the law and were thieves. As political prisoners, we were kept away from the other inmates to avoid “indoctrinating” them, so I had no choice but to share the exercise yard with a bunch of right-wing criminals. And whenever we had a court appearance, or even when we simply had a visitor or our lawyers had come to see us, we were taken out in groups. Whether I liked it or not, I had to cross paths with a politician or a corrupt businessman at least once a day.

  One time, I was sent to the visiting room along with the former defense minister, Lee Sang-hoon. He was a stout man who looked up at me and said:

  —If you like North Korea so much, why did you come back? I knew he wasn’t genuinely curious. I wasn’t angry, and my reply was sincere.

  —I went to North Korea for the sake of South Korea. Because I’m South Korean.

  He had nothing to say to that, but I doubt he understood what I meant. The guards told me his wife came to see him every day. They would return him to his cell along with a stacked lunch box all wrapped up in a cloth, which they referred to as a special care package. That was what we called a “foul” in our prison terminology. I wish there were a more satisfying word to refer to someone that two-faced, but I’ll settle for calling him a yangban, like an arrogant civil-military official from the Joseon dynasty. Another person I thought of as a two-faced yangban was the former head of the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office. He was rude to the guards and antagonized all of them. Whenever he went out to the exercise yard, detainees in the other blocks would start shouting his name and cursing him. The guards would run up to the cells and shout right back, raising quite the ruckus, but when this kept happening, he was given his own special exercise time.

  Among the detainees who made a lasting impression on me was former defense minister Lee Jong-gu, a dyed-in-the-wool soldier. He never slouched or equivocated, but was straight as an arrow all the time. I often rode in the bus with him on the way to court. He once told me:

  —I may be a soldier, but I’m against war. Even The Art of War says it’s best to avoid war.

  For a soldier like him to slip up made it clear to me just how flawed the Korean military was. In fact, a slew of starred generals were thrown in jail after the civilian government took power. Talking to former and current navy and air force chiefs of staff and a commander in the marines left me feeling anxious on their behalf as they awaited their sentence. I remember once, when Lee Jong-gu and I were on our way to court, he lifted his handcuffed wrists and offered me his hand, which I automatically shook.

  —It seems this is where we part ways. I’m pretty sure this is my last day in detention. Please take care of yourself, and I hope to see you on the outside.

  He was released that day on probation.

  Kim Chong-in, unlike most other detainees, wore a traditional hanbok outfit printed with a funny pattern. He spent his exercise hour kicking a volleyball against the wall. If I kicked the ball back to him, he often stumbled, his foot slicing the empty air. I once stroked the tunic of his hanbok and joked:

  —Why, isn’t this silk?

  He answered with mock pride:

  —Only the finest from my family!

  I’d bought a hanbok from the commissary myself. Our normal blue uniforms were fine for spring and summer, but in the winter it was cold even with a sweater on underneath. At least the gray trousers and white tunics of the official prison hanbok were warmly padded with cotton.

  One day, I saw him sitting off to the side while the others were basking in a sunlit patch in the corner. I wondered aloud:

  —Isn’t he kicking his ball today?

  Someone replied that he had just received a five-year sentence. Seeing him there alone with his back turned made me feel bad for him, so I went and sat with him. The prosecution was seeking a life sentence in my case, so I was hardly in a position to try to console someone else, but I carefully suggested to him that his sentence would probably be reduced. Surely by half, I added, judging from what happened to other inmates. Indeed, his sentence was reduced to two and a half years before he was transferred to prison. I went out to the yard one day and was told he was gone.

  Years later, a mere week after I had been released from my own five-year sentence, I bumped into him at a bar in Insa-dong. “Well, look who it is,” said a tipsy Kim, but I didn’t recognize him at first. I wasn’t pretending, either. I honestly didn’t recognize him, which is why I cautiously asked, “How do we know each other?” He just grinned and left the bar. Only later when I came to my senses did I realize it had been Kim Chong-in. I remember Kim and his volleyball to this day, but even I needed some time to readjust to the outside.

  ~

  In the winter I was moved to the southeast block—I think because it got more sunlight. The jurisdiction chief and the middle-management guards all seemed to like me, and while they claimed it was because they’d read my books, I apparently had a reputation for getting along with regular and political prisoners alike, making no fuss, and being good for morale in my block. This was probably thanks to the regular guards who spoke well of me. One of the ways the guards did us favors was to leave our cell doors open so that we could hang out in the hallways, the washroom, or around the guardroom. After being locked up all day in less than a pyeong of space only to learn that your one hour of scheduled exercise had been canceled due to rain, you’d find yourself pacing restlessly in your tiny cell. According to the guards, the lawyer Lee Don-myoung used to get heart palpitations and would kick the door and scream that he couldn’t breathe.

  An even bigger favor from the guards would be when one of them opened the food hole and passed on a lit cigarette before silently disappearing. Smokers used to joke that “smoking after a meal isn’t a matter of digestion, it’s to prevent sudden death,” which was how much we craved a smoke after eating. In prison, we called cigarettes “puppies,” matches “heads,” the striking surface “the floor,” and the flame “a flower.” Penniless detainees were “dog hairs” and rich ones “tiger hairs.” Dog hairs had to use the batteries from the electric shavers sold in the commissary to create a flower, while tiger hairs flagrantly used disposable lighters. These lighters were hidden in a “safe” inside the floor. Once or twice a month, the jurisdiction would designate a cell block for room searches. If an inmate was caught with something, he was moved to a different room. The common prisoners hated to be moved, because hierarchy in their shared cells was determined by how long they’d been there. Moving meant starting over again from the bottom.

  Cigarettes were the most prized commodities in prison. A pack usually cost around 100,000 won, but the price went up to 200,000 whenever a crackdown compromised the supply. A carton easily fetched 1 million or even 2 million won. The next most precious commodity was the “pigeon.” This was a mode of communication in which information too confidential to be shared during attorney visits was passed on afterward to family members or co-conspirators. The guards passed these messages back and forth between the prisoners and people on the o
utside. Since every piece of communication in the detention center was censored, pigeons were invaluable. The price went up to several million won depending on the urgency and importance of the message. These days, guards lending their cell phones to detainees are the new pigeons. Later, when I was in Gongju Correctional Institution, all of the guards, from the officers all the way down to the lowest-ranking, ended up being punished because a mob boss had been using their cell phones to call outside.

  Getting moved to the infirmary wing or even out to a civilian hospital was possible if you had money, making prison a microcosm of capitalist society. The principal of an exclusive Gangnam high school was occupying the cell next to mine. He’d been arrested after he made the airwaves for putting his wife on the board of directors, oppressing the teachers and students, and committing all manner of fraud. I had no interest in him and wouldn’t have known who he was if the guards hadn’t kept talking about how he had stolen pocket money from children. Night after night, he would pound on his door until the night shift guard came running, and then he would shout at him about how he felt like he was having a heart attack.

  One time he saw me receive a visit from a National Assembly member. Using the window of his cell, he called me over and asked how well I knew my visitor. He begged me to introduce him, as the National Assembly member was apparently on the education committee. I answered that while I knew him, I was hardly in a position to introduce him, and asked why he needed his help. He went on and on about how difficult it was to run a school and that his heart condition was very serious and that he was desperate to be under house arrest instead of detention while awaiting trial. I knew he was being disingenuous, but he made such an annoying racket and he just seemed so pathetic that I decided to give him some advice. Unless he was somehow cleared of all charges, the only way he could leave was to be at death’s door. And the fastest way to destroy your health, according to what I’d seen of prison life, was to starve. A week of fasting weakens you and changes the way you look. Do that, I told him, and the center’s doctor would diagnose him with the heart condition he kept yammering on about. He would need that diagnosis to get moved to the infirmary wing. As for making it out of there to a civilian hospital, he’d have to figure that part out himself.

  He listened carefully to my advice and from the next day on I heard nothing more out of him, other than the occasional plea that he was too sick to eat, and sure enough after a week he was moved to the infirmary wing. I don’t know if he managed to get out of there or not, but I did read in the papers long after I was transferred to prison that he was alive and well and suing for control over his school.

  One night, a guard in his twenties pushed one of my short story collections through the food hole and asked me to sign it. I did, including a little note, and after that he dropped by now and then at night to chat with me through the food hole. His home was in Gwangju. He knew that I had lived there and in Haenam. He seemed surprised that I wasn’t from Haenam myself, that I’d been born in Manchuria but had grown up in Seoul since the age of four. The young guard had taken the Level 9 civil service exam after high school and was just two years into his job. He was enrolled in Korea National Open University and told me he was going to change jobs as soon as he graduated. He wanted to become a teacher. Nowadays the Level 9 civil service exam is as competitive as the bar exam, but back then a prison guard did not make much money and was tied to military-style rules and interminable night shifts. He liked my books, so I contacted my publisher and had them send over the ten-volume set of Jang Gil-san, which I signed for him. He was so delighted that he slipped me a full pack of cigarettes. To have an entire pack was, in the parlance of prison, “a light sentence.” But he didn’t have the means to get me a “flower,” so I had no way to light my smokes. Being locked up in a cell is like having no hands or feet.

  Each cell block had a designated soji, whose origins dated to the Japanese occupation era—even the Japanese pronunciation of the term was still in use, rather than the Korean soje. The soji cleaned, distributed meals, and delivered commissary purchases. They tended to be young, jailed for relatively minor offences, with shorter terms. The soji were free to roam up and down the corridors and were not restricted as to the number of cells they could visit, a kind of power in itself, but more than anything, they could tip the guards off about anything going on in their block. The detainees bribed the soji by buying them underwear or food from the commissary. Since the detention centers had more of these goods than prisons did, this was a chance for soji, who were invariably dog hairs, to stock up before transferring.

  Since I was a political prisoner in a private cell, I never needed to curry favor with them; if anything, they had to behave themselves around me. Pro-democracy activists tended to wield more moral power than the warden, which made us unwelcome in any block. Death row inmates were likewise given private cells and kept at arm’s length by everyone else. Each block’s entrance had four private cells side by side where death row inmates, political prisoners, and notorious white-collar offenders were held. There happened to be two death row inmates next door to my own cell.

  I summoned a soji and discreetly asked him how I could obtain a flower. His eyes lit up and he asked if I had a puppy. I said I did, and he said he would tell me how if I gave him half of it. I snapped one in half without hesitation and gave it to him. He gave me something that felt like hairs from a paintbrush. They were fibers from a piece of steel wool used for washing dishes.

  —You know those electric razors? Take out the battery and touch the ends of this to the plus and minus signs. You’ll get a spark. Use that to light it.

  He gave me some extra advice.

  —You can make them last longer if you split up the tobacco and roll it really thinly in pieces of toilet paper. You get four sticks out of one that way.

  He said that it would be hard to light them by holding them directly to a flame and that I should pinch the end of the toilet paper into a wick first and light that. Some of the other detainees bought an English dictionary at the commissary and used its pages to roll cigarettes. When I tried it myself, the spark lit the wick in one try. It had been so long since my last cigarette that the first inhalation immediately plunged my brain into a dreamlike state and my arms and legs went limp. In prison we called that “going to Hong Kong.” Back then, Hong Kong was considered the finest foreign destination among Koreans. The slang used in Seodaemun Prison during the days of martial law under Park Chung-hee had followed us into Seoul Detention Center and was still current.

  In any case, I could make four cigarettes out of one, and smoking them made a whole month fly by. My endless stream of visiting friends brought books for me, and my life in detention grew much calmer as I passed the time reading the classics that I hadn’t got to before. But once I ran out of cigarettes, I became more anxious than I’d ever been outside. Smoking had become my one true happiness by then. At a meeting with my lawyer Park Sung-kwi, my hand automatically reached into his suit pocket and stole his cigarettes. “Hey, if you get caught I’m done for,” he said. Nevertheless, he slipped me a lighter, too, and advised that this was my chance to quit cold turkey. Those cigarettes helped extend my lease on my addiction, and even the soji got a cig or two thanks to me. When they ran out, I kept nagging my soji about finding me some more. One day, he brought me a butt and told me how lucky he’d been to find it. The guards were not allowed to smoke inside the cell block, but I knew that they secretly smoked in their bathroom near the entrance to the corridors. Some of them didn’t throw the butts out the window but dropped them on the floor instead. The one he gave me still had half the tobacco left in it, but he warned it was drenched.

  As he’d instructed, I peeled open the cigarette butt and spread the remaining tobacco on top of a plastic container filled with hot water to dry overnight. In the morning it was crisp and curly, and I wrapped it, lit up, and took a puff. It smelled terrible. I can only assume it had been soaked in piss. I was disgusted with m
yself. I dropped the rest of the cigarette into the toilet and flushed it. I decided then and there to quit smoking, and I managed to stay strong for the rest of my time in prison. I learned later that political detainees’ nicotine cravings were often exploited. It was rumored that clever guards would provide or confiscate cigarettes to manipulate the mood of each block and cell. And once a political detainee became dependent on those cigarettes, he would stop agitating for prisoners’ rights or better treatment.

  There was another infraction that many political detainees were familiar with: moonshine. All you needed was a pack of Yakult, some sliced bread from the commissary, some pills called Wonkiso that were used as digestive aids, and vitamins from the pharmacy. (Back then, you could buy all manner of things from the commissary, but a year after the civilian government took power, the selection was reduced in the name of preventing corruption; we joked that our sentences had “doubled,” as our food became limited to regulation tray food.) First you wet the bread and put it on a sunny windowsill until mold grew. Then you placed that mold in an empty plastic bottle, filled it the rest of the way with the Yakult, and threw in a couple of Wonkiso pills. Then you corked the bottle loosely with tissue paper and left it by the toilet for about five days until it fermented into a sweet-and-sour brew. An incarcerated student I talked to through our windows by our toilets advised me not to throw away the dregs in the bottom but to use it as a starter to make more, a method that saves much time and effort. If you put some in a can of grape juice, you eventually end up with actual wine.