The Sinchon Massacre is largely unknown in South Korea, but it was internationally infamous enough that socialist countries, and even Western countries with legalized communist and socialist parties, sent fact-finding missions to learn more about it. It is the incident depicted in Pablo Picasso’s Massacre in Korea, just as his Guernica describes the Nazi and Fascist atrocities of the Spanish Civil War. I saw this painting at the Musée Picasso in Paris. The picture looked like a cubist reinterpretation of Goya’s The Third of May 1808, composed of a machine-like, murderous gang and women and children being slaughtered.
North Korea’s official position, having built this museum of American imperialist genocide, is that the US military slaughtered Koreans in Sinchon in great numbers, with women and children making up more than half of the victims. The museum was formerly a military building that had been the main location of the killings. The guide used a pointer as he read aloud to us from the texts that explained the reason behind the museum’s founding:
During the recent Korean War of Liberation, the US invaders exposed their beastly nature as twentieth-century cannibals by unleashing mass murder on our soil on a scale unprecedented in human history. In accordance with the orders of Harrison, the blood-thirsty commander of the US Army at Sinchon, they carried out a massacre that far surpasses the bloody devastation of Hitler’s Auschwitz in the Second World War. The American imperialist invaders demanded that every living thing in Sinchon be buried under dust and ash, and during those fifty-five days, they butchered 35,383 innocent people, one-fourth of the population, in the cruelest and most savage way, an unforgivable, demonic atrocity.
Most of the exhibits were photographs and were accompanied by posters or foreign news reports from the era. There were also objects on display. I saw a pile of shoes—the first that caught my eye were the white rubber slip-ons that women used to wear. There were two pairs of them, one with the soles broken in half and the other yellowed from age. There were crumpled shoes, shoes with rusty nails sticking out where heels should be, little black slip-ons for children, a single black sneaker with a broken shoelace. There were some telephone lines and wires that had been twisted into bracelets and used to bind someone’s limbs, objects that all the more revealed the absent, vanished body. They had probably been dug up along with the human remains from the pit they’d been tossed in. I could see the seeds of our tragic division in the Sinchon Massacre, and felt strongly that to unearth this seed would be the true purpose of my North Korean travelogue.
When I returned to North Korea to get physical therapy for a slipped disc during my Berlin exile, I stayed long-term at a residence in Sinchon so I could visit the nearby Samcheon hot springs. I never entered the museum again. I did not feel easy in Sinchon, despite its being my official ancestral home. It was a beautiful place, but there was something dark about that town, especially on rainy days, that made me reluctant to go out. After leaving the North, I went to Japan and asked around about the Sinchon Massacre. A few academics told me that the incident was a “tragedy between Christians and Communists” and later sent me some information. I then found out more from two Korean Americans from Sinchon, whom I met when I moved to the US. One lived in New York and the other in Los Angeles, but they had something in common: both insisted that the massacre had been committed “by Koreans against Koreans.”
The province of Hwanghae, where Sinchon is located, boasts the largest plains in the central region. It lies just north of Seoul where once the royal palace was located, and traditionally there were no major landowners there. Of the three great plains of Korea—Honam, Yeonbaek, and Chaeryong—the latter two are both in Hwanghae, which made the province the largest site of arable soil on the peninsula. Its annual rates of both sunshine and precipitation were the optimal for agriculture, its soil quality was excellent, and the temperature conditions ideal, which lent a good terroir to its produce. Consequently, the palace’s own rice was tithed from here. Unlike in the Jeolla region, there was no big landowner because the land was owned by the royal family. The Joseon scholar and politician Jeong Yak-yong observed, while passing through the region at the turn of the nineteenth century, that the compulsory labor of the people in Hwanghae was even more problematic than in Jeolla, where the tyranny of petty officials was rampant.
The province had many poor tenant farmers, as well as thieves, and civil unrest was frequent. Instead of yangban nobility, there was a middle class called mareum that ruled the peasants. This middle class attempted to use the hyangshi civil service exams assigned to these regions to obtain political influence toward the end of the Joseon era. Kim Koo was a regional hyangshi and a leader in the Donghak Neo-Confucianist movement of the later nineteenth century, and the independence activist An Jung-geun’s family joined the Catholic faith and mustered soldiers to crush Donghak followers. Hwanghae Province was where Protestant evangelicals, based in China, built their first churches to begin spreading the Christian message during the Enlightenment era.
The people of the western coast and the northwest had been discriminated against throughout feudal times and were forbidden to occupy any position of administration or government, which is why they were generally indifferent to traditional rules and norms. To them, Christianity and the West’s new concepts were the fruits of an Enlightenment that would raise them above the indignities of feudalism. It was inevitable that during the years when old Korea was being subsumed by Japan, Christianity spread widely in Hwanghae and Pyongan Provinces. When the Japanese invaded the region, they appropriated the palace’s lands in Hwanghae and gave them to the Oriental Development Company and the Industrial Bank of Chosen, their colonial exploitation apparatus. This was where the greatest number of tenant-farmer revolts occurred during the Japanese occupation. Land reform became the first item on the agenda after Liberation, when a socialist government took power in the North. The leadership must have felt that they were pressed for time given that similar reforms in Vietnam and China had occurred with much more violence. The fundamental principle behind their land reform was uncompensated confiscation and free redistribution as part of the transition toward communism.
Around the time of Liberation, Protestants in the North were either landless urban citizens or middle-class, while in the countryside they usually owned some land. The temples and churches also possessed a great deal of land. The North Korean administration clashed with them as it undertook the reform, and many large landowners and business owners moved south before the outbreak of the Korean War. In Sinchon, where there were many small landowners, land reform centered on tenant farmers or day laborers, exacerbating the situation. These lower-class villagers were sent to Pyongyang for a brief training and then sent back home to be at the vanguard of expropriation, making them enemies of the landowning Protestants. In South Korea, which had installed Japanese collaborators in key positions and embraced American rule, youth from the disenfranchised classes gathered to form right-wing organizations. The Korean War broke out just as they went back and forth across the poorly guarded 38th parallel, trying to restore the old order. North Korean forces invaded all the way down to the Nakdong River in June of 1950, and at the end of September, the Americans retook Seoul at the Battle of Incheon and began pushing back north.
The Protestants of the North had been at odds with the North Korean administration in the run-up to war because of their refusal to participate in the March 1 Movement memorials and in the elections, and as the Americans approached, the Christian youth of Sinchon and Chaeryong fought against the right-wing youth. At first, the North Korean army and Party officials executed Christians before retreating. The young right-wingers rose up in Sinchon in retaliation and massacred the communists and their families who had not managed to flee before the Americans arrived. The Americans finally entered the region on October 18, but there was no battle with the Northern army. Some have testified that the Americans provided the right-wing militia and youth groups with captured weapons and gunpowder. It was on the 18th, as th
e Americans were stationed outside of Sinchon, that the massacre began.
According to eyewitnesses, the Americans did not order or oversee the killings, and historians have found no American records showing US forces to be responsible—though North Korea claims that one Lieutenant Harrison was the key figure of the massacre. But a petty officer did file a report mentioning the presence of a Korean right-wing militia and a massacre, revealing that the Americans had known of this incident from the beginning.
It is clear that, if the American forces did not instigate or actively take part in the massacre, they had passively condoned it and also provided weapons and gunpowder. North Korea’s story, that the massacre was wholly the fault and doing of the US, can perhaps be understood in light of the fact that the Americans were in operational command of the region at the time and had already carpet-bombed North Korea, killing 2 million people and devastating the land, in addition to threatening the use of nuclear weapons. While the American forces were not directly responsible for the Sinchon Massacre, they had clearly breached the fundamental rule of war followed in the East and West, past and present, stating that armies, whether friend or foe, have an obligation to protect civilians under siege. This is why the North Koreans are unable to see the Korean War as a civil war, like we do; for them, it is a “war for the liberation of the nation.”
I realized that these contrasts showed how difficult reunification would be for both sides. That’s why I thought we needed a transition into a system of peace, and for that, we needed to begin with cultural exchange, hence my visiting the North. As I counted down the days until the end of my trip, I kept reminding myself of my purpose here and what I could do for the cause as a writer.
I wrote about the Sinchon Massacre in my novel The Guest, completed after I was released from my five years in prison. I began in 2000 on the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War. As soon as it was published, I was alarmed by how fragile peace on the peninsula was despite the end of the Cold War, when North Korea was branded as part of the “axis of evil” after the 9/11 attacks. North Korea, thwarted in its petitions for peace, began concentrating on nuclear development as Northeast Asia returned to the Cold War system. Thus, as I watched the Wall come down in Berlin, my first place of exile, and saw the world change once more, I felt even more determined to craft a deliberately Korean narrative that would depict reality from our point of view. The truth is, that terrible massacre was committed “by Koreans against Koreans,” and the guilt and fear it engendered lies at the root of the manic hate that continues to this day.
I had collected material and witness testimonials, but during my imprisonment, I was not allowed to write. This turned out to be good for the book, as the work had time to ripen in my mind while I sat in my cell. I thought of it as a study of how Christianity and Marxism had been filtered through colonization and division, forms of modernity that we had been saddled with instead of developing our own. I started with the concept of the sonnimgut shamanic ritual, which used to be held in response to outbreaks of smallpox. Smallpox, colloquially referred to as a sonnim or “guest,” was regarded as a Western import. I then depicted Christianity and Marxism as “guests,” that is, the opposite of the owner of the house. My resulting novel, The Guest, borrows for its basic form the twelve scenes of the Hwaghae jinogwigut appeasing ritual. Just as in the ritual, the living and dead appear simultaneously in scenes of the past and present and voice their individual memories and stories. I used “time travel” as the weft and each character’s perspective and experience as the warp to weave multiple narrators into a single, tapestry-like story.
If memories have a way of growing more real the more we try to forget them, then neither the living nor the dead can ever be free from the ghosts of the past. Yet those horrors are not illusions, but the traces of war that we must still resolve. The gut rituals that keep the god of death at bay, allowing the dead to reconcile with the living, are also performed by my novel, dismantling the mindless force of history that has sacrificed human lives to that same god, and returning us to a more human time.
I received news from South Korea every few days in the form of a correspondence packet, stuffed mostly with translations of foreign articles and photocopies of Korean newspapers. The envelope was stamped “For official use only” and marked with the name of whoever was in charge. But we were always about two or three days behind the news. I had gotten advice about how this could be remedied, so I dropped several hints, and one day a handler said: “You’ve been given permission.” From then on, the packet was waiting on my desk every morning when I awoke. Magazines, even women’s magazines, were delivered monthly. I naturally learned how Pastor Moon had been arrested as soon as he touched down, along with what happened to him subsequently, in fairly good detail.
The North–South writers’ conference, scheduled to meet on the border at Panmunjom, on the Northern side, was canceled when the South Korean authorities arrested all of our programmed writers. The North Korean writers had spent the night before in nearby Kaesong and were waiting by Panmunjom, but they gave up, dejected, when they heard the news. It had partly been expected, but now that even the slimmest hopes had been dashed, the specter of what was to come weighed more heavily on me. I knew that the Korean People’s Artists’ Federation had released a statement regarding my North Korean visit. The KPAF affirmed that “Hwang Sok-yong’s visit to North Korea represents the will of every artist in the nation,” adding, “We are outraged that the authorities are criminalizing our representative Hwang by default … If Hwang and others are prosecuted through the National Security Act and other unreasonable regulations, every artist in the nation shall fight against it.” As soon as reports appeared that I was in North Korea, the Democratic Party’s National Assembly member Kim Sang-hyun called a press conference. Here he revealed that I had told the Democratic Justice Party secretary-general, Lee Jong-chan, of my plans and had also informed a handler at ANSP. Lee confirmed this and added, “I assumed he would get permission first. I did not think he would actually go there on his own.” The authorities insisted: “We told him to obtain permission before visiting North Korea.”
Later, in Japan, I met some reporters and reaffirmed that I had told the secretary-general of the ruling party and my ANSP handler of my plans. In fact, Kim Yong-tae, Cho Seong-wu, and others had been arrested because of me, while my ex-wife, Hee-yun, and my second wife, Myoung-su, were interrogated by the ANSP. In the case of Pastor Moon, Lee Bu-young, Kim Geuntae, and Lee Jae-oh were questioned by the authorities. The fact that Pastor Moon had met with Kim Dae-jung—member of the National Association for Democratic Activism executive committee, and then National Assembly member—before leaving was also under scrutiny. The authorities were trying to apply the charge of “non-notification” to all these individuals and organizations, but the political opposition and the activist sphere took my side, emphasizing that I had indeed informed the ruling party’s secretary-general and my ANSP handler of my visit. They further argued that the authorities’ feigned ignorance could only be interpreted as weaponizing the National Security Act, constituting a move toward authoritarian rule.
Before I left Pyongyang, I had a public meeting with North Korean writers at the People’s Palace of Culture and signed an agreement toward the reunification of national and literary arts in the South and the North. It opened with this declaration:
1. Both sides, as our most sacrosanct duty to our nation as literary artists, will actively contribute to the sacred national cause of the reunification of our country under the principles of self-reliance, peace, and national unity through literary and artistic activities, and will oppose all acts that perpetuate division and harm the unity of our nation.
2. The literary artists of North and South shall pursue meetings of groups and individuals toward the realization of a pro-reunification position in our nation’s literary arts.
3. In order to surmount the ignorance of literary artists on each side regardin
g the realities of the other, an ignorance imposed by the division of our nation’s territory and people in the last half century, progressive literary works created in the South and those created in the North are to be gathered and published in both South and North under the title Contemporary Korean Literature, an endeavor to be eventually turned into regular periodicals.
4. Although divided, the two sides shall as one develop creative activities in literature and the arts and contribute in all possible ways to the development of a national literature and arts as one nation.
4
Prison II
The first thing that changed with the advent of the civilian government was the introduction of daily newspaper subscriptions. We were supposed to be allowed television access as well, but the detention center authorities held off on that, saying they didn’t have the resources yet. The regular detainees were entitled to one newspaper subscription per room; I requested two. The morning paper and exercise hour became my great joys. The papers reported endlessly on Kim Il-sung’s death at the time, predicting an inevitable cooling of relations between North and South until his successor was established. South Korean broadcasters showed scenes of mourners at the Kim Il-sung memorial and derided them as brainwashed, but I thought it must have been like mourning a parent for the North Koreans. While the South Korean press mocked the supposed “forced mourning of the people,” every foreign media correspondent in Pyongyang reported that the sorrow seemed genuine. One correspondent wrote that a cashier at a shop was crying too hard to sell him anything. World leaders like the UK’s John Major, France’s François Mitterrand, Japan’s Hosokawa Morihiro, and Russia’s Boris Yeltsin expressed their regrets, while the South Korean government kept its distance. If anything, President Kim Young-sam strongly objected to the American government sending a highly placed official to North Korea to transmit their condolences. It was quite a change in attitude for someone who had agreed to a summit with the deceased a mere two weeks before. The conservative media and politicians threw a fit when Lee Bu-young, of the Democratic Party, suggested on the floor of the National Assembly that the South Korean government pay its respects, considering it was the death of a summit counterpart. The claim by Sogang University president and Catholic priest Park Hong that there were hundreds of thousands of pro–North Korean Juchesasangpa—supporters of North Korea’s political ideology of juche, or self-reliance—living in South Korea became popularly accepted as fact and set off a panic. There were sudden investigations of universities and civic groups, and 120 people were arrested. Park’s statement turned out to be as baseless as the boy who cried wolf, according to a later prosecutorial report, and the matter faded into the background.
The Prisoner Page 17