The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  Born and raised in Pyongyang, Mother was one of the “New Women,” having received a higher education in Tokyo. My maternal grandfather joined the Donghak Peasant Revolution as a youth before becoming a Christian and graduating from divinity school to become a pastor. He was imprisoned for helping to organize the 1919 March 1 Movement against Japanese colonialism in Pyongyang, which was followed by another prison sentence for speaking out against compulsory Shinto worship. My mother’s older aunt and younger brother became socialists under his influence, which resulted in their family being divided into North and South.

  It was my mother whose memories of youth were in Pyongyang and Tokyo. She went through hell and back after becoming widowed not long after the war was over, raising and educating her four children. I grew up listening to her say over and over again that our family would thrive only if reunification happened and that we must, someday, return to where we came from. Of all her children she loved me the best, and all her hopes were pinned on me. But I did not meet her expectations. She had not wanted her son to become a novelist.

  The first thing I did in North Korea, of course, was to seek out my North Korean relatives. I was thinking of how difficult my mother and oldest uncle’s final years had been in the South. I also remembered how my younger aunt, who had worked as a teacher in South Korea and died alone, would often sit with my mother and sing the songs they’d learned as schoolgirls in Pyongyang, harmonies and all. I gave my handlers a list and was told that my mother’s youngest sibling, my third aunt, was living in Sariwon. The children of my oldest uncle, my cousins, were living in Myongchon in Hamgyong Province. They had all been born and raised in Pyongyang, but my uncle’s wife wasn’t able to raise the family in the city after my uncle had gone to the South, which is why they ended up as Myongchon people. According to a North Korean escapee who called me on the phone one day in 2000, my oldest and youngest cousin in Myongchon both starved to death during the Arduous March.

  I recognized my youngest aunt immediately when I met her in the reception hall of the Koryo Hotel; she was just like my mother when she was alive. My aunt also recognized me and called out, “Sunam-ah!” My baby name. We hugged and cried for a long time, before going through the introductions to her children and the stories of what had happened to our relatives on both sides of the armistice line.

  When we had settled down a bit, my aunt looked into my face and said, “Your demeanor has changed quite a lot. You used to be so handsome, and smiled easily … Now you seem sharp and frightening.”

  My youngest aunt’s words would stay with me. I had been through so much with the Park dictatorship and the Gwangju struggle that my face could no longer be the carefree one that she remembered.

  My youngest aunt told me that after my grandfather was imprisoned again for agitating against compulsory Shinto worship, my mother brought her to Manchuria and sent her to school. My aunt took care of me when I was little, and after Liberation, when we settled in Pyongyang, she would still carry me on her back when she needed to go out. Before my family fled to Seoul, she married a socialist who had graduated from Japan’s Meiji University.

  When my mother lived with us in Haenam in South Korea’s Jeolla Province, she once told me she had a dream in which my Pyongyang grandmother visited her. My youngest aunt was well off and had taken care of my grandmother. According to her, my grandmother had died in 1978 in Sariwon, around the time that my mother was dreaming about her.

  Not only did the war and the North–South division tear apart many families this way, Korean literary history was split in two as well, and the work and lives of countless writers were destroyed or lost. Writers persecuted by the dictatorships in both North and South were thankfully able to recover their work somewhat with the advent of democratization in the South, which worked as an indirect pressure on the North’s authorities. We can overcome our division, not with prejudice or violent language—calling us “leftie whiners” or telling us to “go live in North Korea”—but by the establishment of a genuine democracy in the South.

  I asked my handlers about the most senior and still-remembered writers who had ended up in the North, namely the novelists Hong Myong-hui, Ri Ki-yong, and Park Taewon, as well as for news of their families. The novelist Choi Seung-chil, who was in the residence with us, also told me stories of the North Korean writers. Camaraderie between writers is inevitable and transcends ideology and writing style. Speaking in euphemisms, Choi Seung-chil told me that poets and novelists were provided with housing and a stipend, but if they did not produce results within a few years, they were cautioned by the Party, and if they still couldn’t produce, they were reassigned jobs. Much later, I heard a little more about what had happened to the poet and translator Jeong Ji-yong, through the critic Cho Jung-ho of the North Korean literary magazine Tongil munhak (Unification Literature), at the August 15 Pyongyang Reunification Festival, which I attended with Do Jong-hwan and Jung Hee Sung in 2001. The North Korean novelist Seok In-hae (who died in 1990) had finished a cultural mission in the South and was returning to North Korea on September 21, 1950, when he met Jeong Ji-yong in Dongducheon. Seok and Jeong crossed over the mountain north of Dongducheon together. When Seok said the mountain was called Soyosan, Jeong joked that the name had a certain elegance to it and laughed. Suddenly, an American fighter plane shot rockets and fired its machine guns at them. After the plane was gone, Seok found Jeong with his chest riddled with bullets. He and his party had to hastily bury him by the road, unable to even mark the grave before they departed. (A similar incident to this is described by the poet Kim Soo-young in his incomplete testimony, Uiyonggun (Conscripts). Writers, actors, and other artists were frequently bombed or machine-gunned on their march up North. Kim Soo-young also described how Grumman fighter planes would follow lines of people walking North to attack them, so this was probably the same time and place.)

  The life of Park Taewon offers one illustration of what writers faced in North Korea. Park Taewon sat on the executive committee of the Korean Writers’ Alliance when it was formed in 1946 and was a literary activist for the Workers’ Party of South Korea. But while living in South Korea in 1948, he attempted to avoid arrest by joining the Bodo League, created by the South Korean government for the “reeducation” of leftists. Its members were being executed when the Korean War broke out, but Park Taewon had already escaped death by then. When I first visited North Korea, Park Taewon had already passed away in 1986, and his widow, Kwon Young-hee, was living alone in a small apartment in the Pothong River region. The floor was inlaid with wood, and the layout was in the open kitchen style of the West, with radiators instead of ondol floor heating. Though he died before my first visit north, I did meet his widow, Kwon, who told me it was a little cold in the winter and that she used a coal stove in the living room for extra warmth. She showed me the bedroom where she had taken down dictation for Park Taewon. There was a bed and a small desk.

  The entire family had gathered for my visit, and as I was there from midday to dusk, we talked of many things. Park Taewon, Yi Sang, and Jeong In-taek had formed a group of “modern boy” dandies in colonial Seoul. “New Woman” Kwon Young-hee went out with Yi Sang at first, but when Jeong In-taek fell in love with her and threatened to commit suicide, their friends intervened and got the pair to marry. The novelist Jeong In-taek was the son of the journalist Jeong Un-bok, who had planned the exile of the Prince Imperial Uihwa. Though born in Seoul, he had been such an ardent collaborationist that, like Choi Jae-suh, he had received the Japanese Government-General’s literary prize in the final years of the occupation. At the mention of her first husband, all Kwon would say was that “he was a reporter,” apparently reluctant to acknowledge his literary works. Jeong In-taek joined the Korean Writers’ Alliance with Lee Tae-jun and Park Taewon right after Liberation, and then the Bodo League, in order to survive before fleeing North during the war. He had immediately been arrested, according to Park Taewon’s “survival legend” told by the Northern writers. E
veryone in the Bodo League had been blacklisted, and Rhee Syngman’s government executed each regional branch as they retreated southward. It is said that the South Korean government was in such a hurry to vacate Seoul that they had not managed to execute the Seoul branch. According to Kwon Young-hee, the North Korean army had quickly taken the prisons in Kaesong and Seoul where many prisoners were saved, Park Taewon among them. Jeong In-taek had also been part of the Bodo League, so to them, escaping North was the last hope of survival. Cho Young-man, an English literature scholar and Park Taewon’s friend, was the last to have seen Park in Seoul. It is assumed that he went North, like many of his literary colleagues before him, with a group of war reporters who were sent into Pyongyang.

  The later life of Park Taewon and Kwon Young-hee played out like a soap opera. In September of 1950, during the Battle of Incheon when Seoul was on the cusp of being retaken, many intellectuals, artists, and noted persons headed to the North with their families following later. Kwon Young-hee and her two daughters tried to hitch a ride in a transport truck during a brief stop in Hwanghae Province, but the eldest, Tae-seon, found herself accidentally left behind. A North Korean soldier carried her on his back up to Pyongyang, where he passed her on to the care of another soldier, who brought her over the Chongchon River to the final gathering place of refugees along the Amlok River. There was a bridge covered in white notes, messages searching for lost family members. This was where she was miraculously reunited with her mother. Kwon Young-hee said that Jeong In-taek had been killed during an aerial bombardment of the road. According to records, Workers’ Party of South Korea writers such as Pak Hon-yong were being purged beginning December of 1952. Up until 1954 there was a wave of “self-criticism” in which writers from the South were interrogated and forced into reeducation. Following the Workers’ Party of South Korea affair, the further purging of the Yan’an and Soviet factions in 1956 affected many more writers, such as Lee Tae-jun. Park Taewon was banished to a communal farm in Kangso, in South Pyongan Province, before working as a principal in a country elementary school in Hamhung and being allowed back to Pyongyang in 1960.

  Park Taewon’s Seoul family had no idea where he was until he arrived in the North. His eldest daughter, Seol-young, from whom he’d been estranged since she was in middle school, went North during the January 4 Retreat in 1951 to look for him, but the most she could do was ask after his whereabouts around Songdo School in Kaesong, where there were many students from the South. She found a job in the city and was finally able to reunite with her father when the war was over and Park Taewon had returned to Pyongyang.

  One fall day in 1956, Park Taewon visited Kwon Young-hee’s house with his eldest daughter in tow. He had been friends with the poet Yi Sang and Kwon’s late husband, Jeong In-taek. They’d known each other since their youth. Park was closer than family to Kwon, who knew no one in Pyongyang. She was teaching at an arts university at the time and lived on campus with her two daughters. He was probably dragged there by his daughter, but he was the one who proposed to Kwon: “What do you think of uniting our two households?” His vision had already narrowed so much by then that he could only see two letters at a time. He was in trouble politically and now his health was also in peril. Their marriage seemed to have been made possible through Park’s daughter, Seol-young, and Kwon’s daughter Tae-seon. They recalled that Park had reasoned, “It’s not as if we were complete strangers to each other.” The evaluation and reeducation of writers from the South were already underway, and Park was desperate to write a new piece of work to exonerate himself. She had been his friend’s wife, he had been her husband’s friend, and now the two were reunited in a strange land where, one by one, their friends were disappearing. Kwon was not entirely confident that she could help a man who was losing his sight to write a novel. A few months after they started living together, he gave her an old Japanese newsletter printed in an archaic style and asked her to read it out loud. When she did, he yelled, “That’s it, that’s it!”

  “This was how our life as a couple, no, as a pair of war buddies began,” she wrote in a letter later on. “On top of everything else, his optical nerves failed and he became blind, then came a mental breakdown, an aneurysm followed by paralysis in half his body, another blood clot leading to full-body paralysis and serious language impairment, with only his hearing remaining intact. The hospital called him a miracle. He continued to work with superhuman strength throughout all these circumstances, and the fact that this most singular invalid’s wife didn’t have to stand before other people’s kitchen doors with an empty bowl in her hands is only thanks to our regime.”

  When they took walks along the Taedong River, he had to hold her arm because he could not see. Mischievous youths unaware of his disability would break them apart and run away laughing. She always prefaced her stories about him with the words “Our comrade Park Taewon …” It was clear from only a few details of her story how difficult it had been for them in his final years. Along with her younger daughter, Tae-eun, she stayed by his side through every banishment and new appointment.

  His eyesight suddenly worsened after he had finished the first volume of Gyemyeongsancheoneun balgaoneunya (Is the Dawn Coming?) and was embarking on the second. The diagnosis was of optic nerve atrophy and retinitis pigmentosa, incurable conditions at the time that he was told would likely lead to blindness. Before losing his eyesight completely, Park Taewon gathered material from all over North Korea, reading old texts from libraries and museums and hand-copying books that he couldn’t easily get. He rushed to write one more, just one more page before his eyesight gave out. He prepared for the worst by acquiring the biggest magnifying glass he could find, but one day in 1965, while reading new material in Pyongyang, his vision went dark and he collapsed. He was nearly at the end of the second volume when he suffered a brain aneurysm and lost function in half of his body. He had a special gridded frame made to fit on top of a sheet of manuscript paper so that he could continue to write legibly. After his second aneurysm in 1976, his Gabo nongmin jeonjaeng (The Peasants’ War of 1894) which had been planned as sixteen parts, was shortened to three while he continued to work on it. Kwon took dictation and managed to complete the second part, but in 1981 Park lost his language functions and could no longer speak. Kwon ghost-wrote the ending by going through Park’s notes and materials, reading aloud to him what he had written, and relying on his gestures and eyes to register approval. He died in July of 1986. Two years later, in 1988, the South Korean ban on works by writers who had gone to North Korea was lifted. Was it really the North Korean Communist Party’s guidance that drove him so strongly to write, or was it the struggle of an artist whose existence is vanishing, to try to overcome the illusion of time? This was the stark reality of Korean literature under division.

  If South Korean literature attained modernity in a global sense by resisting dictatorship and insisting on freedom, North Korean literature leaned more toward state propaganda, closely managed by a dictatorship of the proletariat. After the June Democratic Uprising of 1987 in South Korea, the ban on North Korean writers born in the South was lifted, and North Korean books of literature, history, and other fields became widely available to a previously unimaginable degree thanks to the valiant efforts of publishers. University colleges and public libraries also began stocking North Korean newspapers and materials.

  North Korean literature largely falls into four categories. First, there are the chronicles of the Great Leader’s historic deeds and accomplishments. Second, books propagating the policies of the Party. Third, historic novels that raise nationalistic morale. Fourth, fiction on the daily lives of the people, written to encourage good behavior. It is the third and fourth categories that are interesting. Historic novels and insights into daily life in North Korea are like the escape valves of this literature. In 2004, South Korea’s Manhae Prize was awarded to a North Korean writer for the first time since the division. The prize money was wired to the winner, Hong Sok-jung, and his
books were published in South Korea; one was made into a film. This work was based on the kisaeng artisan and poet Hwang Jin-yi, who lived during the Joseon era. I myself introduced Paek Nam-nyong’s Friend and Nam Dae-hyun’s “Hymn to youth” to our literary world. In 2005, a North–South Korean writers’ convention was held in Pyongyang for the first time since the division, with about 800 participants from South Korea and abroad and about 100 from the North. The hope was that the exchange would help North Korean writers. I have personal knowledge of the real difficulties that they face. This publishing of their work in South Korea and bestowing prizes on it was designed to exert implicit pressure on the North Korean authorities. But all civilian exchanges became once again forbidden with the advent of successive conservative administrations in the South and the freezing of inter-Korean relations.

  ~

  On paper it says that I’m from Sinchon in Oncheon-myeong, Onjeong-ri, Hwanghae Province. That’s where my father is from. I was not born in Sinchon and had never set foot there, until I was guided for another reason to my father’s birthplace where he had lived before leaving for Manchuria. There was a Museum of American War Atrocities in Sinchon (now moved to another location) testifying to a massacre of North Koreans by US soldiers during the Korean War. We drove out of Pyongyang on the Kaesong Expressway, and there the town was in the middle of a wide plain. In addition to Chaeryong and Unryul, the vast fields of Namuri and Eoruri Plains stretched to the west coast and Gyeonggi Province, forming the granary of the northwest. In North Korea, where 80 percent of the land is mountainous, this region was what fed the North Korean people.