The Prisoner

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by Hwang Sok-Yong


  I knew my trial would be affected by the panic, but more than that, I was disappointed because I had thought that the summit was the best opportunity since the start of the Cold War to declare the end of the Korean War and inaugurate a regime of peace. Kim Young-sam was a conservative, but I hoped against hope that the man who had worked with Kim Dae-jung to fight dictatorship for the sake of liberal democracy would advance North–South relations in a peaceful direction. If only Kim Il-sung had managed, with Kim Young-sam, to turn the de facto state of war into a state of peace before he died! Then he would have been remembered primarily as “a nationalist and a socialist revolutionary and ruler who had been part of the armed resistance against the Japanese,” and the Korean peninsula would have a very different place in international society today.

  One day I heard a cricket chirping outside my cell window, and then every night after, a cool breeze blew in. I’d been in the detention center for over a year and a half. People had left one by one as their sentences were handed down. There weren’t many political prisoners left save for the occasional late-caught youth involved in the Socialist Labor League of South Korea incident, whom I bumped into during exercise hour.

  The Norwegian Author’s Union (NAU) announced that they would send a fact-finding mission to further the release of five of the “seven oppressed writers” designated by PEN International. NAU President Thorvald Steen reiterated this intent, declaring in his keynote speech at the Stavanger International Festival of Literature and Freedom of Expression that NAU and PEN International “shall endeavor to never let the world forget the people who have been arrested or threatened for expressing their views,” and that they would “send fact-finding missions and establish a managing committee for cases in South Korea, Nigeria, Cuba, Turkey, and Yemen.”

  At the appeal hearing, my sentence was amended to six years. Then, after the Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower court, the judge in my final trial, held on September 27, 1994, sentenced me to seven years’ imprisonment with seven years suspension of qualifications, declaring that the charge of leaking state intelligence could be applied to me according to the precedent that “public knowledge can still be considered secret.” I had made my sentence worse by appealing. The ruling stated that “while the court acknowledges the defendant’s literary achievements and that the intention of his visit was to help end the state of division and bring about a swifter reunification, we find him guilty based on the Supreme Court’s jurisprudential ruling of the crime of leaking intelligence.”

  Now that my sentence was confirmed, all that remained was to wait to be transported to prison. Around this time, Ōe Kenzaburō won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I read that Ōe and Yasue Ryōsuke, of the Japanese publishing house Iwanami Shoten, had visited Kim Young-sam on their tour of Korea to appeal for my release. Ōe wrote me a letter that he sent in a hotel envelope. He consoled me, saying he was sorry he couldn’t be of more help and that we should work together for a peaceful Asian community in the new century. I heard later that Ōe had written many times to international writers’ organizations and notables calling for my release.

  Soon after I changed cells again, a new rule was created for single-cell prisoners like me to exercise individually in a special facility, not in the yard with the regular prisoners. This facility was like nothing I’d ever seen; it was Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon made reality. I’d experienced a half-circle cell when I was imprisoned by the military for violation of martial rule in Gwangju a few years before, but this new structure was an almost perfect panopticon. Bentham’s idea was inspired by the zoo at Versailles, cages where each occupant can be seen while they themselves cannot see anyone. The precinct was surrounded by a long, tall circular wall, and the inside was divided like cake or pizza slices. Each section had its own door; when it closed behind you, you were left alone inside a wedge of concrete walls. There was a two-story circular tower in the middle. From the top, the guards could look out in all directions. I never actually saw anyone watching us from above, though. The guards were probably sitting somewhere comfortable, chatting or having a smoke. But they could look out at any time to see which prisoner was doing what. In any case, the windows of the watchtower were tinted so the prisoners could not see the watchers. It was truly a symbol of some kind. The prisoners walking around their cells must have looked like rats in a lab.

  One prisoner kept kicking a ball against a wall and muttering to himself. Another walked in circles in the narrow space, counting as he went. Still another stood still and stared out at the mountains or the sky. I mostly looked back and forth between the sky and the ground. Clouds drifted by, and sometimes birds flew past. Passenger planes plied their routes. I could tell which were headed south and which were headed southeast, and guessed at whether they were international or domestic by their shapes and sizes. I pictured the people inside those planes. A passenger with their seat reclined, taking a nap, a passenger rustling through a bag of snacks, another soothing a child, another reading a magazine or a newspaper, still another listening to music, the flight attendants going up and down the aisles. Someone using the lavatory. Someone turning their head to kiss their lover. All the carefree individuals of the world … And here was I, an animal trapped between concrete walls.

  I had a game I liked to play back then: taking care of plants and ants. Little weeds grew resiliently, from spring to summer, along the light and shade of the concrete walls. The most common plants were dandelions, sseumbagwi, and violets. I watered the prettiest ones. I brought the water in an empty milk carton, carrying it all the way there to quench their thirst with it.

  I would rip out a handful of other weeds to write on the cement wall, words that faded after a day. Their whitened traces nevertheless persisted through rain. Students and laborers who were detained for political reasons wrote slogans and objectives or messages for each other. I once found a message that said: “Be brave, Mr. Hwang Sok-yong!” Down with the fascists, power to the workers, hooray for democracy, hooray for reunification. The guards washed these off whenever there was a Ministry of Justice inspection and weeded the sections bare—not just with their hands but with hoe-wielding groundsmen, no less. Alas, even my preciously kept flowers were pulled out by the roots and left to shrivel. The flowers were so delicate that nothing of their form remained.

  Many kinds of ants lived within the panopticon: small, black ants; ants with black thoraxes and thick red abdomens; slightly larger, quick-moving ones; and the rare, truly big ones. I liked the small black ants the best for their facility at digging tunnels and their passion for work. It was the insects flying in from the outside that made me an avid ant-watcher. Many of these insects flew into the panopticon cell by mistake and died as they struck the walls again and again, unable to fly high enough to escape. There were grasshoppers, locusts, a variety of beetles, and once, oddly enough, a perfectly healthy dragonfly. Like most of the other prisoners, I felt sympathy for these poor creatures. I would carefully pick them up and help them fly away over the wall.

  Sometimes I’d suck on some candy and drop it by an ant hole. From time to time, the guard at the watchtower would see me crouching for a long time and ask what I was doing down there. I’d look up and show him my beaming face. They already knew what single detainees did inside the panopticon. The ants would discover the candy and suck on it for hours, melting it down, or cover it with dirt before digging a tunnel underneath to break it apart from there. Their little jaws would clamp down on a speck of sugar as they carried the candy away piece by piece. In the fall, I saw the young queen ants fly up into the air to start their own colonies. The beauty of nature shone even in the cement boxes of the panopticon, while I felt myself growing stronger inside.

  I experienced the beauty of life in the earth’s smallest and commonest creatures and imagined the freedom of a different world through the sky above the panopticon where airplanes flew past. That was where I thought up my novel The Old Garden. It was a paradoxical take on utopia.
I took the title from an old Eastern legend of a hidden world with a beautiful garden in a valley. I had gazed upon the changing world in my place of exile in Berlin and whispered to myself, The revolution is over. And: This is a new beginning.

  After the breakdown of the Cold War system, a sense of bitter disillusion swept over the world. Environmental destruction worsened, there were brushfire wars and strife between religions and races, and a fight for world domination in the name of terrorism and anti-terrorism plagued the world. The so-called peripheral countries still experienced dictatorship, resistance, and disappointment in turn, suffering once more from war, poverty, and hunger. The capitalist world order ran rampant with the fall of socialism; anyone with common sense could see this could only lead to a terrible ending. All we could pin our hopes on was the fact that the future was not set in stone. The democracy movements of the 1970s and 1980s under national division successfully brought down the dictatorship, but as we entered the 1990s the major players of those movements found themselves torn between their passion of the past and the realities of the present. This crisis worsened with the dissolution of ideologies after the breakdown of socialism, and the realization of how much we had lost in the process.

  My plan was to write The Old Garden as a love story. I thought that the lives of a man and a woman separated from each other during this period of crisis would be an appropriate frame for what I wanted to express. The two would narrate the years gone by through their own internal monologues. Their internal lives, which would serve to disrupt the organic flow of narrative, would offer differing visions of reality. Two narratives that ought to succeed one another chronologically would instead run parallel until the end, never leaving the confines of the first-person perspective of each. The purpose was to express the severance of time and space and the isolation that comes from the man being in prison during the eighteen years that the woman is living her life. He will only be able to reconnect with her through letters and diaries discovered after her death. But this rupture is overcome with the participation of the reader, who reads the text from a third perspective, and the characters’ thwarted love and time are thus given back to them in the here and now.

  Around the Chuseok holiday of that year, the world was set aflame by the Chijon gang horror. In July of 1993, six youths ganged up to murder five people in an organized serial spree lasting a year. They were day laborers at construction sites who had all been born in poor farming villages and dropped out of middle or high school. Kim Ki-hwan, who at twenty-six was the oldest, had lost his father when he was only three years old, and later dropped out of middle school. His mother was bedridden after a stroke, while he went from site to site for work. They observed the following gang rules, which the media took from the police report: 1) Kidnap wealthy people and take their money. 2) Always kill the victim. 3) Don’t stop until each member has amassed a billion won (equal to $1,250,000 at the time). 4) Whoever quits the gang must be pursued to the ends of the earth and killed. 5) Trust no women, not even your mother.

  They kidnapped, raped, and murdered a woman in her twenties for practice and buried her body on a mountain. They hunted down and murdered the youngest member of their gang, a teenager who had felt guilty about what they’d done and fled with 3 million won stolen from their collected funds. Under their plan to rob and kill the rich, they obtained a list of 1,200 Gangnam Hyundai Department Store customers. Kim Ki-hwan, who had experience in construction, dug up the basement in an empty house his mother used to live in and created a death factory by installing a cage and crematorium. The gang said they went on taking their orders from Kim Ki-hwan, after he’d been locked up for rape, by visiting him in prison. They kidnapped a young couple who had gone for a drive in the countryside in an expensive car, but it turned out that the man was a nightclub musician and the woman a café waitress, and the car just a used one. They forced the man to drink a lot of alcohol, killed him and made it look like a drunk-driving accident, raped the woman, and told her she had to join the gang if she wanted to live.

  The gang had swords, axes, steel pipes, tear gas guns, shotguns, and dynamite. Around Chuseok, hoping to raise more funds for their crime spree, they kidnapped a middle-aged couple who were weeding their family burial plots deep in the hills. This couple was also not rich; the man was a small business owner who had only graduated from a trade high school and previously worked in a factory. They locked the wife in the basement and took the husband outside to receive the tens of millions of won one of his employees had brought for him. As soon as they returned, they made the kidnapped waitress, surnamed Lee, kill the man with a shotgun. Before the man died, he begged them to spare his wife, but the one named Kim Hyun-yang later testified that they killed her with knives and axes and added defiantly that he had cut some flesh from her corpse and eaten it. He went on to tell reporters that his only regret was not murdering more people, and that he should have killed his own mother as well. The gang went so far as to hold a barbecue as a literal smokescreen when they cremated the bodies of the couple.

  A few days later, some of their dynamite accidentally exploded while they were experimenting with it, and Kim Hyun-yang was taken to hospital by the kidnapped waitress, Lee. Lee managed to escape in a taxi, reach Seoul, and report the gang to the police, who then arrested the members near their hideout. All the newspapers reported the sordid details, which sounded like something out of a crime novel, and the TV news played clips of the crime reenactments on a loop. The gang blamed their cruel serial killing on society, raging against people who drove expensive cars, spent large sums of money in department stores, and bribed colleges into accepting their children. But they had never even come close to hurting any upper-class people, despite their claims. All those they harmed had been as disadvantaged as they were: a helpless young woman, their own gang member, and three ordinary, hardworking people. Under South Korean capitalism, the gap between rich and poor increased during the dictatorships from the 1960s to the 1980s, and the corruption and cheating that ran rampant during those two back-to-back military dictatorships enabled the rich to disproportionately succeed. The South Korean middle class that emerged from this period had obtained material wealth under those dictatorships, but they were far from being “citizens” in the modern sense. The press mockingly referred to it as “pariah capitalism.” The Chijon gang members all had criminal records dating back to their teenage years and were human garbage from the perspective of South Korea’s cliquish, competition-heavy society. But we were the ones, living in this era, who had turned them into “garbage,” and their terrible crimes were ultimately the waste products of our society. Their crimes were, in the end, evidence that it was our society that was diseased.

  One day, I heard a sudden noise in the corridor. The special red-cap team came in with a handcuffed prisoner further restrained by ropes. Though the one-person cell next to mine was empty, they put him in with the regular prisoners. The soji were quick to pick up the rumors: the new inmate was the Chijon gang boss, Kim Ki-hwan. He had been in the Gwangju Correctional Institution for the past few months for rape but was transferred to Seoul when murder and creation of a criminal organization were added to the charge sheet. We could all see that he was headed for a death sentence.

  Death row inmates, or “max sentence” as we called them, were normally put in one-person cells if they were well behaved, but if they were thought to be at risk of self-harm, they were put in group cells and kept shackled around the clock. The regular prisoners would complain that they were being punished unfairly when they had death row inmates housed with them. These inmates automatically took the highest place in the cell hierarchy, and the former top dog would find himself relegated to silently sulking in second place. There was nothing to be gained from provoking a death row inmate, as that would only get you punished or transferred to another cell. If you messed with him, you might end up with a chopstick in your eye—he was going to be executed anyway, so he had nothing to lose. That’s why there was no
thing scarier than a dead man walking. And if the prison authorities did not permit him to remove his shackles at mealtimes, that only meant the other inmates had to feed him by hand. Even when there was already a guard in the office at the cell block entrance, a young conscript guard was stationed separately in front of the cell where Kim Ki-hwan was. I thought this young guard would shout his “Chungseong!” military greeting only during shift changes, but he shouted it every time someone of higher rank came down the hall—even in the dead of night, which made sleep difficult. When I complained to the head guard, he said he would ask the younger man to not shout so loudly at night. But he added that we had probably lucked out by having the boss in our cell block, while the accomplices were scattered through the rest of the prison, because at least the boss would have no need to shout.

 

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