A few days later, I agreed to a suggestion by a guard to have a talk with Kim Ki-hwan. I informed the soji that we would have jjajangmyeon, or black bean noodles. The food that was served rotated between pork, beef, curry, and jjajang, and that day it was jjajang. Normally we were just given the sauce with barley and rice, but the jjajangmyeon I ordered was a special treat made with ramen noodles. I went to Kim Ki-hwan’s group cell entrance and asked for him. He jumped to his feet. He said the guard had told him I was coming. I invited him to eat lunch with me. The guard said I could take Kim Ki-hwan and a soji to have lunch in the shower room, but that he was not authorized to unshackle Kim. We didn’t have much to say while waiting for the soji to finish serving the other prisoners and join us to cook the noodles over a portable gas burner. I did not forget that, unlike Hur or Choi, so recently executed for crimes committed on impulse, this was someone who had organized a gang and planned his killings. He eagerly ate the noodles that the soji fed him with chopsticks. The awkwardness between us relaxed a bit as I helped myself to the delicious noodles I hadn’t tasted in a long time. I spoke first.
—So, how are you doing in here? Been making an effort to get along with the others?
—I’ve been in prison before, I know the drill. I just want to go as soon as possible and not make any more trouble for anyone.
He said this so decisively that I couldn’t think of what to say next. He suddenly spoke up again.
—Those kids who were with me, they were really hard up.
—If only they hadn’t harmed anyone …
I spoke cautiously but he answered as if talking about someone else.
—Me, them, we’re all the same, we lost hope a long time ago. We don’t care when we die.
—But that Kim Hyun-yang, why must he speak so harshly? That he ate a human body and regrets not killing his mother. It was horrifying.
—He’s doing that on purpose. He hates the world so he’s trying to scare everyone, trying to look like a tough guy. I really am sorry for the dead people. Hyun-yang, he wasn’t always so bad, he used to go to church and was a hard worker.
I told him about my old neighbors Hur and Choi, and how they had been executed not long ago.
—We all die, young man. Me, you, everyone. But it’s better not to die with such hate in your heart. You have to let it go.
—Better for whom?
—For yourself, who else?
After that, whenever he had to go to court or went out for exercise, he would open the food hole to my cell and say hello. As my transfer date approached, the detention center authorities moved me to a south-facing cell block with lots of sunlight and a view of the hills, and I never saw him again.
In November of 1995, exactly a year after I was transferred to Gongju Correctional Institution, I read in the news that the Chijon gang had been executed. Kim Ki-hwan smiled cynically when asked for his final words and said, “Shouldn’t a man keep his word to the last?” He probably thought the manly thing to do was to show that he wasn’t afraid of death. Couldn’t anyone have taught him better? While the outside world knew him as the devil incarnate, up close he only seemed like another poor boy caught in the snare of fate. I had seen many kinds of people in that place and was depressed by the pity I felt for them. Thankfully, time keeps passing for the living. To the outside world I was confined, as if trapped in a freeze-frame. But life goes on no matter where a person is, and gradually I was learning how to endure the monotony of our days.
5
Exile
1989–93
I left Pyongyang on April 24, 1989, and landed in Beijing. I had to go through Japan again, retracing my entry route in reverse, because there were no direct flights between Seoul and Beijing. China and South Korea had not yet normalized diplomatic relations. I was going to apply for a Japanese visa once I dropped off my bags at the hotel. But as soon as I got to my room, a South Korean reporter—who knows how he found me—telephoned to ask for an interview, which I reluctantly agreed to on condition that it would be just the two of us. He wrote for the Dong-a Ilbo’s sports page but scented an exclusive when he heard I was staying at the hotel while he was on assignment for a feature on next year’s Beijing Asian Games. I only agreed to the interview because I felt I owed them for stopping the serialization of a novel in the magazine Shindonga, the newspaper’s sister publication, and also because my friend Seo Joong-seok, who later became a historian, was a reporter there. I also had the idea of publishing my North Korea travelogue in Shindonga. I knew the editor-in-chief, and he seemed like a reasonable gentleman. I use reasonable here to refer to the ability to deal with one another despite fundamental differences; it’s a more reliable word in Korean than conscientious. Too many unreasonable things kept happening in South Korea for conscientiousness to survive. While the Dong-a Ilbo was one of South Korea’s most notoriously right-wing publications, Shindonga magazine was somewhat more moderate. They would publish me provided I maintained a neutral stance. A progressive publication like the Quarterly Changbi or the Hankyoreh might have been easier to deal with, but my thinking was that the reunification problem, more than any other issue, needed to be discussed in the mainstream if it was to go anywhere.
The next morning, I came down from my room with the North Korean handler who had accompanied me from Pyongyang and met the North Korean embassy worker who had guided me from the airport the last time I was there. He said the plan had been to let me rest for a day and take me to the Japanese embassy the following day, but the mood in Beijing was becoming agitated. Students and workers had been protesting for the past two days, mourning the moderate politician Hu Yaobang, who had passed away on April 15, with thousands gathering at the Monument to the People’s Heroes and Tiananmen Square. At Hu’s funeral in Xi’an two days before my arrival in Beijing, protesters charged at local authorities, with workers and farmers demanding the fall of tyranny as they set scores of cars on fire. Deng Xiaoping ordered a violent crackdown, and the People’s Daily declared the incident a riot. I had no idea what the story behind it all was, but my two North Korean handlers were adamant that we were looking at capitalist fallout from China’s liberalization policies. I learned later that 150,000 students from eighty Chinese universities had showed up at the protests demanding democratization and freedom.
On April 26, I requested a month-long visa from the Japanese embassy in Beijing but received a fifteen-day visa instead. There was an endless procession of young people holding banners and picket signs on the road from the hotel to the airport, all headed for Tiananmen Square. I got the North Korean handlers to drive me there as well; the square was already filled with people. I learned later in Japan that the protest had been organized by a student government coalition of twenty-one Beijing universities. The situation worsened during the two weeks I was in Japan, the protests continuing even through June, when I was about to leave for Germany. When the Tiananmen massacre finally broke out, I thought of Gwangju in May of 1980, the beginning of my long journey to where I was now. The implementation—or otherwise—of democracy was a question being asked all over the world. But the world would change very slowly, and in a very different way from what we’d imagined. Such is life.
On my commercial flight from Beijing to Japan, a Shindonga reporter took a seat on the plane next to me, under orders from his editor. Lee Ju-ik and a representative of the publishing house Iwanami Shoten, Okamoto Atsushi, were waiting for me at the airport. They whisked me off before any other reporters could approach and drove me into downtown Tokyo. I ended up at the Yamanoue Hotel, which Yasue Ryōsuke had booked for me, on the hill of an obscure residential neighborhood that not even many Japanese people knew about.
I dined with Ryōsuke and Professor Itō Narihiko as we discussed what I was to do in Japan. They knew I was going to write up my North Korea travelogue, and that I’d gone so far as delaying my return to South Korea with Pastor Moon’s party in order to do so. The most urgent matter was the extension of my Japanese visa. A
lawyer managed to open a case, effectively delaying deportation proceedings for the time being. Second on the agenda was to give a press conference, a rite of passage I had to undertake if I didn’t want to be constantly hounded by foreign correspondents. The Japanese government had used the Kim Dae-jung kidnapping incident as a pretext for putting me under surveillance, not to mention the Korean government also keeping tabs on my every move, which made the current hotel unsafe; we needed to find better long-term accommodation. I decided to hold my press conference just before I left the hotel. The authorities also had people come spend time with me in shifts, saying it was dangerous for me to be alone.
Itō met with Harada Shigeo about my housing problem and together they decided to lend me an apartment with a large office and a private bathroom not far from Harada’s realtor office. Lee Ju-ik, who was working on his PhD at the University of Tokyo under Wada Haruki and reporting for the Hankyoreh as a foreign correspondent, alternated morning and afternoon shifts with Seo Dong-man to watch over me.
The morning I checked out of the hotel, Seo Dong-man moved my bags while I held a brief press conference in the lobby with Professor Itō. A Japanese police officer had greeted me with his business card on my first day there, informing me that I was under surveillance and that his team was taking shifts to make sure I was protected. The Japanese police made it clear that they had an obligation to ensure my safety as long as I followed Japanese domestic law, and that any problems I had with the South Korean authorities were none of their concern.
The Tokyo-based South Korean correspondents, who had come running at the call, were waiting for me in the lobby. What interested them most, besides my impressions of North Korea and Chairman Kim Il-sung, was whether it was true I had notified the secretary-general of the leading party Lee Jong-chan, the opposition party’s Kim Sang-hyun, and my ANSP handler before visiting North Korea. I stated that I was well aware that no politicians of either party were in any position to authorize my North Korea visit, but as long as the crime of “non-notification” existed in the National Security Act, I thought it would be better if the responsibility were shouldered by the politicians who represented us and not just the Korean People’s Artists Federation, the Association of Writers for National Literature, or the other ordinary people in my life.
I informed the reporters that I had risked violating the National Security Act in order to write a North Korea travelogue, to be titled “They’re just like us,” and that I had every intention of returning to South Korea once I was done. I added that as it would take a month to write up, I needed an extension on my fifteen-day visa and would finish it in another country if the extension were denied. The South Korean police had interrogated my family and acquaintances, who had nothing to do with my visit, and seemed to have expressed their consternation to them. To my relief, the next day, the reporters printed my words exactly as I had spoken them.
I came across an interesting story in a magazine once, a sort of modern folk tale from somewhere, maybe the Philippines or a country in South America, I don’t remember exactly. There was a village of indigenous people living in a jungle. A taboo had been passed down for generations forbidding them from climbing the “big mountain” behind the village. There was purportedly a scary demon king living on the summit, and a great disaster would befall the village if any of the villagers looked upon him. A curious little boy from the village secretly went up the mountain. He scrambled through the jungle, climbed up the rock face, and after much difficulty reached the summit where there were strange machines and foreigners about. It was a missile launch site. The boy was shocked and overwhelmed by what he saw, came down the mountain in a fright, and told his discovery to only one friend when he could no longer hold the secret in. But the rumor of his transgression spread, and the boy was summoned before the village elders. He stammered out his story, but nobody believed him. The villagers disputed his claim that there was no demon king but only machines and foreigners at the summit, and insisted that he must have seen the wrong thing. He had broken the village’s taboo and needed to be punished. Then one elder shook his head. “None of us have ever climbed that mountain,” he said. “Therefore, none of us have ever seen what the boy saw. We don’t know if a demon king lives up there or not and have no way of knowing whether the taboo is right or wrong. Therefore, we cannot punish this child.”
While I was living in exile after my visit to the North, I thought about this story every time I came across other Koreans, especially reporters. If there is any oppressive taboo about the unknown, a writer will violate it if only to confirm its truth. Anyone who has seen migrating birds fly over borders, walls, and steel fences will have realized the fundamental nature of life and questioned the meaning behind the hodgepodge of rules humanity has come up with. My exile schooled me into distrusting the notions of “nation and country” and seeded my ambition to become a citizen of the world. By that I mean that I would share my problems with the people of the world, and consider the world’s problems my own.
I had parted from Professor Itō and was following Seo Dongman’s directions on the subway back to the apartment when a strange feeling came over me. I looked back to see a Japanese man following me. He looked familiar; thinking he might be a plainclothes detective, I slipped into the crowd and hopped on whatever train had just arrived. At the next station, I jumped off at the last second and leaped onto the train on the other side of the platform as a young Japanese man, panting, just managed to get on the train himself. This was a different detective from the one I first spotted. He said in broken English: “We are protecting you. You are a VIP. Please cooperate.” I bowed and thanked him. His teammates must have missed the train because of me. I figured they would sort it out amongst themselves, but still felt sorry about it. I joked later that I had just taken part in a scene from a spy movie.
The apartment Harada Shigeo was loaning me wasn’t ready, so I had to stay for a couple of days at a hotel in Takadanobaba. Harada welcomed me warmly when I went to see him and told me to stay as long as I needed to finish my North Korea travelogue.
While I was there, the two of us often went out drinking. Among our many topics of conversation, Harada mentioned his hometown and family, how his grandmother would make kimchi and perilla leaves preserved in soy sauce. He was ten years older than me, so those were probably memories from the Japanese colonial era. Harada’s grandmother was Korean. He smiled as he spoke of a quarter of his blood being Korean, but his eyes were tearing up. Later, when I left Japan and lived in exile in Berlin, Harada’s son spent a night in my apartment at the Bundesplatz. I took him to the just-fallen Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie, which had demarcated the border between East and West Berlin, all of which he studiously captured on camera. His father had instructed him to meet me in Berlin and to take as many photos as possible of the fallen barrier. Years later, as I lay staring at the walls of my prison cell, I thought of what Harada had said about a quarter of his blood being Korean. Many people had left an impression on me in Japan, but thinking of Harada and his son made me realize how important it was to form true connections with people in this world.
Once I was alone in my hotel room, the tension of the past days drained away and I couldn’t be bothered to do anything anymore. While unpacking, I took out a long box that had been handed to me just as I was leaving the Visitors’ Residence in North Korea. I was told it was a gift from Chairman Kim himself. I opened it to find wild ginseng from Paektu Mountain and a pair of deer antlers—used in traditional herbal medicine—for Pastor Moon and me, but Moon said they would end up confiscated under the National Security Act’s “reception of goods” statute and that I should just leave them in Japan. Later, when I was in Germany, Chung Kyung-mo, worried about Pastor Moon’s health in prison, discussed with me how to turn wild ginseng and antlers into pills, but I don’t know if Moon’s family succeeded in getting him the medicine.
I opened the box, removed the lining of moss, and stared at the three fresh w
ild ginseng roots. They still had green leaves and their stalks were thin, but the roots were long. Each branch of the root was secured with tape. When I snipped off a bit at the end and chewed it, the fragrance filled my mouth and the soft texture was easy to chew. I had assumed until then that I would simply return to South Korea when my transfer visa period was over. But now that I thought about it, I would be dragged directly from the airport to the ANSP basement and all my belongings would be confiscated. The head of the ANSP would probably eat one of the wild ginseng roots, and the remaining two would be delightedly consumed by the South Korean president and the first lady. There was no point in letting something good go to waste on someone else when it was me who was facing the gauntlet. And wasn’t “finders keepers” the first rule of wild ginseng? I picked up one of the roots and slowly began chewing it raw. It tasted like, well, any other kind of ginseng. I finished one root in a few bites, picked up another, and ate that one, too. I picked up the last one and thought, Oh, what the hell, and finished it off. Most people go their entire lives without ever tasting wild ginseng; there I sat, having scarfed down three Paektu Mountain wild ginseng, washed down with some water. I waited for something magical to happen, but nothing did.
About an hour later, I began feeling drowsy and a kind of chill went through my body, like I was about to catch a cold. I crept into bed and decided to sleep until the afternoon. I didn’t know how many hours had passed when I woke up thirsty and drank half a bottle of water from the fridge. I had just come out of the bathroom after using the toilet when someone banged on the door. Lee Ju-ik stood outside.
“Everyone is frantic because you’re not answering your phone! How could you have slept so deeply?”
I was nonplussed. I asked him what time it was; he said it was after 8 p.m. I said I’d lain down at three and taken a five-hour nap, but he shook his head.
The Prisoner Page 19