The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  I had already predicted as much. Ri was a major liability on either side of the 38th parallel. Under lurid headlines like “Taedong River Royal Family,” the newspapers ran stories about his plastic surgery and name change and how he had been kidnapped into South Korea. Ri was later killed by two operatives in his home in Bundang, in the suburbs of Seoul. A witness stated that, before dying of gunshot wounds to the head and chest, Ri held up two fingers and said, “Spies.” He fell into a coma and was declared dead a few days later. The spies were strangely sloppy. They had found his current address by contacting the Seoul Detention Center and giving his prisoner number and name, leaving a clear trail for investigators to follow. His address in Bundang was actually just a room in his sister-in-law’s apartment. The Bundang Police had clear jurisdiction over the case, but the ANSP immediately took over the investigation. All the head of the Bundang Police could do was to lodge a formal complaint. There was also a news report quoting a coroner who complained that the ANSP had reported only one bullet casing on the scene, but another had been discovered in the pocket of the victim during the autopsy. A few months later, the ANSP claimed to have arrested a husband-and-wife spy team. According to their statements, Ri’s killing had been carried out by North Korean operatives who had already returned to North Korea. For the longest time, I could not shake the thought of this young man’s death. It made me wonder how many things had happened because of that dark and ominous border over our long, long years of division.

  Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter had visited North Korea and proposed to Kim Il-sung in person that he meet with President Kim Young-sam, and Kim Il-sung immediately accepted. For a month afterward, the South Korean media was abuzz with the upcoming North–South summit. It was reported that Kim Il-sung personally examined all the preparations in the visitors’ residence that Kim Young-sam was to stay at.

  In July there was an unprecedented heat wave, and I had no way of battling the heat bouncing off the concrete walls except to sit on the toilet in my underpants with a wet towel over my face. Then, one day, the ballooning expectations surrounding the North–South summit burst at the news that Kim Il-sung had passed away. The cause of death was a heart attack. The news reported it a day after it happened. I spent that day in an unsettled state of mind, stripped down and tossing and turning on a bed of wet towels that I’d spread out on the floor. It looked like I was going to be in for the long haul, and our state of division would continue indefinitely, dark thoughts that left me sleepless from anxiety and suffering.

  3

  Visit to the North

  1986–89

  After returning from Japan and splitting from my wife, I began a new life with Kim Myoung-su. We had been living in an apartment in Seoul, but we decided to build a house on the outskirts so that I could have a better writing environment. The painter Yeo Un, who had helped me find my house in Haenam, also happened to find my next abode. Our families were picnicking together in a scenic part of Gyeonggi Province’s Gwangju (not to be confused with Jeolla Province’s Gwangju, of the Gwangju Democracy Movement) when we came across an abandoned house on a hill overlooking a wide stream. It was pure coincidence that I came to live in a new town also called Gwangju. Yeo Un connected me to a contractor, and I cobbled together some advances from publishers to build a house. I was planning to write a twenty-volume narrative history of Korea, to be published in serial form at first.

  It took about six months of living with Kim Myoung-su to realize that our marriage was a mistake. She didn’t seem to understand what I was trying to do or what I was trying to say with my work or how it related to the difficulties of our age. She knew what it meant to be an artist: her father had been one, she had been a dancer all her life, and now she was a choreographer. But her values were also typical of Seoul’s middle class, and while intelligent, she possessed little patience. Her sense of victimhood, of sacrificing her own artistic path for her husband’s writing, took the form of constant complaints. A part of me was already subsumed with the guilt I felt toward my ex-wife and children, and I was struggling under a debtor’s pressure to write because I’d already spent my large advances on building the house. The extent of my selfishness and egocentricity was laid bare every time I blamed her during our arguments.

  Even as I sat writing in my room, my mind felt like it was treading water at the thought of my children left behind in Jeolla Province’s Gwangju. Sometimes I’d write long letters to Ho-jun and Yeo-jeong in the middle of the night, only to hide them in my desk from Myoung-su, and later destroy them. At one point someone passed me a message telling me to call the Jeolla house. My ex-wife picked up and said that the children kept asking for me. Ho-jun had tried not to make a fuss, but Yeo-jeong kept nagging her, saying she wanted to see me. My son and ex-wife must have wanted to hide the fact of the divorce from Yeo-jeong, who was still in elementary school. I decided to take the children out to see The Goonies, which was being shown in film theaters in Seoul. Ho-jun seemed to have grown up a lot in the past few months. When we went to dinner after the film, Yeo-jeong kept saying we shouldn’t eat anything expensive—her way of being considerate to her poor father who had to live away from them for the sake of his writing. At the bus terminal, I wanted to hop on the bus after them and follow them back to Jeolla Province.

  On May 3, a mass demonstration of students, labor, and democracy protestors was staged in Incheon against the dictator Chun Doo-hwan, leading to a charge of sedition against the organizers. This incident continued to reverberate into the next year, as college student Park Jong-chul died during his interrogation at ANSP headquarters. There had been numerous suspicious deaths before, which the military dictatorship had managed to gloss over in the past. But this time it was different, and the people continued to demand to know the truth. The sexual torture of a female college student, Kwon In-suk, by the Bucheon Police Department was also exposed around that time, while the Catholic Priests’ Association for Justice revealed that the officials had tried to cover up the fact that Park Jong-chul had died under water torture. As these incidents fueled more protests, another college student named Lee Han-yeol was hit by a tear gas canister during a protest and declared brain-dead. President Chun Doo-hwan informed the nation that the next president would be determined not by a democratic vote but through a National Conference for Unification, in the style of Park Chung-hee’s administration, just as his own presidency had been decided. It signaled his lack of interest in constitutional, democratic reform.

  A nationwide protest began on June 10 with the participation of activists, students, and ordinary citizens, continuing until June 29. The slogan of the protests was “Down with the Constitution, down with the dictatorship.” Activists set up a National Headquarters for Protecting Democratic Constitutional Rights, and students and citizens held a sit-in at Myeong-dong Cathedral. The “March for Peace” that the headquarters proposed was attended by over a million people; the police were unable to disperse the crowds. President Chun Doo-hwan was ready to mobilize the military but had to back down in the face of strong American opposition. I marched, as well, because the Association of Writers for National Literature and the People’s Cultural Movement Association was of course affiliated with the headquarters. We were given daily updates on where and how to protest, leaving early in the morning and returning late or spending the night in Seoul. My clothes stank of tear gas all the time. Naturally, my newspaper serialization had to be suspended.

  The June Democratic Uprising did not end with the fall of the dictatorship but with the June 29 Declaration by the ruling Democratic Justice Party’s successor-in-waiting, Roh Tae-woo. In essence, it was about changing the presidential election into a national vote. This was the compromise between the people in power who wanted to keep something of the old rules and the progressives who yearned for any semblance of democracy, and optimistically expected that the old system would inevitably be overcome.

  The national crisis quickly shifted into presidential-election mode as Kim
Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam split ways and created separate parties with their respective followers. The activist space and the People’s Cultural Movement Association that I had organized were also in danger of fragmenting. Having received a call from the human rights lawyer Cho Young-rae, I was all up for a unified candidate: it was obvious to anyone that the “two Kims” together could just barely win the election, but we had no chance at all with them apart.

  In my old home of Jeolla Gwangju, unresolved despair over the Gwangju Democracy Movement ran deep. The local people had pinned all their hopes on Kim Dae-jung. My phone rang off the hook with calls from there, ranging from accusing me of being a Kim Young-sam supporter because of my support for a unified candidate, to outright cursing. The calls all amounted to demands for the People’s Cultural Movement Association to do something. Kim Yong-tae and about half of our executive committee were pushing Paek Ki-wan as “the people’s presidential candidate.” This was another way of unifying the field, but it also showed the political limits of the two Kims. If support for Kim Young-sam symbolized unity, and support for Kim Dae-jung signified reluctance, you could say most of the young people of the Association of Writers for National Literature were reluctant. I half-jokingly dubbed Paek Ki-wan supporters a “purist sect.” Ten days before negotiations for a unified candidacy fell apart, I gave up my stance and supported Kim Dae-jung as a reluctant supporter, making a speech on television to that effect. The presidential election ended in thorough defeat, with the opposition vote split and Roh Tae-woo elected with little more than a third of the popular vote, unleashing a sense of disgust and disappointment with politics that swept the nation. We had just barely managed to win a democratic system, and then spoiled it with division. The democracy movement would be deeply wounded by this division between the two Kims for years to come.

  After the election, the poet Kim Jeong-hwan and his followers demanded that the leadership take responsibility as they vowed to bring the People’s Cultural Movement Association back to the center of on-the-ground activism. They had a point, so Kim Yong-tae and I created an arts organization that was truly centered on artists and experts. Almost every day for about a year, we went around meeting artists from different fields. People from the fields of literature, fine art, architecture, photography, Eastern calligraphy, theater, and film gathered to hold discussions and fill leadership roles, resulting in the Korean People’s Artists Federation that launched on November 23, 1988. Each division was led by an elder artist, with Kim Yongtae as secretary and me as spokesperson.

  Democratization activists, having failed to bring about a transition of power with the past election, organized themselves into a national movement to work against further divisions. My work in the Korean People’s Artists Federation and the Association of Writers for National Literature brought me closer to the new National Association for Democratic Activism, which covered the activist, religious, and political worlds under one wide umbrella.

  As the 1988 Seoul Olympics approached, each group pressured the government to improve relations with North Korea and allow exchanges between the two countries. The Roh Tae-woo administration took power, a democratically elected government in form but the same old system of military dictatorship in content, while the country was swept up in preparing for the Olympics to be held in September.

  PEN International decided to hold their conference in Seoul that year in honor of the Olympics. PEN America’s president Susan Sontag and vice president Arthur Miller sent a joint statement to the South Korean leader, saying that they had accepted the poet Kim Nam-ju and journalist Kim Hyon-jang as honorary members of PEN America, respectfully requesting their release, as well as that of the publisher Lee Tae-bok. I’ve mentioned this before, but since joining PEN in 1955 during the Rhee Syngman administration, the Korean branch of PEN had been no more than a propaganda arm for the South Korean government during two dictatorships. It made no effort to even talk to the various writers whose freedoms had been curtailed since the 1970s, a state of affairs that continues to this day. I visited PEN America’s headquarters in 1985 and corresponded with them through Young Koreans United in New York. That summer, the Association of Writers for National Literature called up, saying that a guest from PEN America was looking for me.

  It turned out to be Karen Kennerly, sent to Korea by Susan Sontag. She had lived in Japan for years and knew quite a lot about Northeast Asian politics. Kennerly told me that PEN America’s aim in Korea, more than anything else, was to express its deep concern over the incarceration of Korean writers and the restraints on freedom of expression. She was on a reconnaissance mission to meet writers who were fighting for democracy outside of the literary mainstream, quite a contrast to the PEN Korea propaganda machine. The Association of Writers for National Literature promised to hold a parallel literary event with world writers during the same period that the PEN International congress was being held.

  The visiting writers came to Korea for the conference and visited the Association of Writers for National Literature, with Ko Un, Paik Nak-chung, and I attending. Susan Sontag was there, along with twenty writers from the US, UK, Germany, and France, all crowded around a table in a Korean restaurant in the Sinchon neighborhood. They informed me that they were at the Seoul conference for the express purpose of passing a resolution for the release of imprisoned Korean writers.

  Sontag had been translated several times into Korean and was well known among Korean literati for her writings on a wide range of aesthetic topics, as well as for her social activism. She was in her midfifties and had just survived a bout with cancer when we met in Seoul, but she was as passionate and curious as ever. Whenever a foreign writer spoke, she leaned toward me and introduced them in a low voice, informing me of how good they were. I understood her a little but could only answer in single words, my English being, then as now, the jury-rigged kind learned during my Vietnam War days. But Sontag was patient and took care to speak slowly, in easy sentences. She listened to Paik Nak-chung’s opinions on literature and realism for several minutes before giving me a thumbs-up: his thoughts had met with her approval.

  My memory is hazy on which Korean writers they were supporting, but I do remember they were especially interested in the poet Kim Nam-ju and asked many questions when someone mentioned I had worked alongside him for many years. I gave them a brief summary of his life and work. Sontag immediately understood Kim Nam-ju’s reasons for participating in the South Korean National Liberation Front when I mentioned that he had translated Heinrich Heine, Pablo Neruda, Bertolt Brecht, and Frantz Fanon. She seemed on the verge of tears when I explained how he was forbidden from writing in his cell and had secretly sent out poems written on milk cartons and the silver foil in cigarette packets. The Korean People’s Artists Federation and the other mainstream arts organizations that acted like propaganda outlets would put out a declaration of support for the government every time there was some political prompting under the military dictatorship: when Kim Nam-ju was imprisoned, they proclaimed him a “leftist communist” who should never be released. Then as now, any criticism of the government got you labeled as a communist. The PEN International congress held in Seoul’s Grand Walkerhill hotel descended into farce, as the foreign delegates tried to pass a resolution for the release of political writers while PEN Korea tried to block it. Nevertheless, Susan Sontag and the Western writers went back into the conference hall to inform and try to persuade the Russian writers and other delegates who were unaware of the situation.

  The day before the conference, Ko Un, Paik Nak-chung, Susan Sontag, and other writers from PEN along with myself held a press conference in Myeong-dong. Sontag had spoken for the foreign writers, and the Korean writers were speaking in turn, when suddenly a young man started reading aloud from a letter he claimed had been sent from prison. The gist of it was that this prisoner objected to the Seoul Olympics because it was a foreign powers’ showcase for the success of Korea’s division; he likewise rejected PEN America’s liberalis
t, human-rights approach to imprisoned Korean writers. He had a point in a way, but the argument left no room for rebuttal with its emphasis on “self-reliance,” a concept in vogue among young people at the time. In any case, it was my position to regard the citizenry of Western powers like the US, UK, and France separately from their imperialist governments, and to stand in solidarity with their people even as we fought their policies.

  Ko Un pulled at the young man’s arm, trying to get him to stop, but he kept on reading the letter as the foreign writers caught on to the awkward mood. Years later, when I met Sontag in New York, she told me she still found the situation utterly baffling and their efforts at the Seoul PEN conference a complete failure.

  After the press conference, I joined the foreign writers at a bar in Myeong-dong, where we ordered a dish of sannakji, or live octopus. Sontag let out a playful yelp at the sight of the writhing tentacles, her face full of curiosity and amusement, but couldn’t bring herself to take a bite. Perhaps because of the bar’s cover fee, the bill was much higher than expected. Later in New York, Sontag told me she had been surprised first by the chopped-off, still-writhing octopus tentacles, and then again by how much that dinner cost.

  I was able to read a fairly objective account of what happened at the PEN International congress held at the Walkerhill thanks to the Hankyoreh, a brand-new independent newspaper that was established with the help of funds from activists and ordinary citizens. The resolution failed to garner enough votes despite the valiant efforts of the previous evening’s group of writers. Sontag and the other writers shed tears of anger. The reporter from the Hankyoreh wrote: “I was profoundly confused by the Korean writers at the conference, overjoyed at defeating a resolution that would have called for the release of their fellow writers.” Despite this setback, the foreign writers announced the resolution outside of the conference hall at the Association of Writers for National Literature and the ’88 Seoul National Literature Festival in Yeouido.