Myoung-su had been invited to meet with the German ambassador and consul general a month previous. After checking if she was willing to leave the country, they told her to pack up and be ready to travel by the departure date. The consul general drove her to the airport himself and made sure Lufthansa would take care of them for the whole journey. The German government had done so much for us in so many ways.
A few days later, we moved to an apartment in Berliner Strasse, a stop away from Bundesplatz. It was on the first floor of a corner building right next to a public park; anyone walking down the wide sidewalk could look right in. They probably thought that it was safer for our family to be next to a big road than in a quiet, secluded place. It was a large space with a living room and three bedrooms. Myoung-su had sent our things ahead to my address, most of which were books from my library. The cargo arrived almost a month later, after the start of the new year.
Around Christmas, a call came from the North Korean embassy in East Berlin. Secretary Yun Gi-bok was visiting the city and wondered if I could meet with him. My memory is vague here, but I believe the North Korean embassy was closed after East and West Germany declared reunification in October the following year and North Korea changed its diplomatic mission to united Germany. Looking back, he was probably coming to determine how to respond to Europe’s swiftly changing political climate and to retool their reunification policies.
Berlin had become one city after the Wall fell. I simply crossed town to have lunch with Yun Gi-bok at the North Korean embassy. This was the first time we were seeing each other since the previous spring in Pyongyang, when I was there with Moon Ik-hwan. He mentioned Pastor Moon and Lim Su-kyung, and informed me that there had been other emissaries from the South leading to various ideas for cultural exchange. He first proposed a North Korean edition of my historical novel Jang Gil-san, and I readily accepted, having been among the first to argue for North–South cultural exchanges. Yun Gi-bok then said that General Secretary Kim Jong-il had approved the North Korean production of a movie on the Gwangju Democracy Movement, and wondered if I could help. When I asked how, he explained, “We don’t know the realities of the South very well, and so we need help with the script.” I didn’t think much of it and said I could probably pick out a mistake or two of whatever they sent me.
My next novel, “Stagnant river,” was supposed to begin serialization in February in the pages of the Hankyoreh. The idea for this novel had come to me during a conversation with the co-manager of Pyongyang Department Store when I was in North Korea. The co-manager was a white-haired old man but tall, and his back was straight as an arrow. He spoke in an old-fashioned Seoul cadence that I recognized immediately.
“Where are you from?” I asked. He smiled and said he was from Seoul. “Where in Seoul?” “Yeongdeungpo.” I was so glad to meet someone from home that I mentioned the name of my neighborhood, and his face lit up as he said that he had lived across the street from me. We walked past the display cases as we reminisced about Yeongdeungpo. There had been an elementary school nearby and a wooden building from the Japanese occupation that burned down. The outhouse had burned, and the stench of boiling feces put the whole neighborhood off their food for days. I was nine at the time; he would have been close to thirty. We felt an instant closeness at the fact that our memories were the same and made a promise to meet up again soon.
My schedule had been so tight that it was difficult to find the time, but I managed to convince my handlers at the residence to free up an evening for me. Choi Seung-chil led us to a fish market near the Taedong River. We had seasoned pollack and grilled flatfish as side dishes to our soju while I listened to the old man’s story. He had worked in a railroad factory in Yeongdeungpo. As a teen he was apprenticed to his father—a train conductor on the Seoul–Hsinking line during the Japanese occupation—before becoming a conductor himself. He spoke endlessly of the wildflowers blooming by the small stations of Hwanghae Province past Seoul and Kaesong, of the country folk and familiar itinerant sellers getting on and off the train, the gradually roughening northwestern accent, the sorghum as far as the eye could see, the great plains of Manchuria where the loam was rich and a red sun as big as a washbasin set over the horizon, the flocks of ducks flying over the Amlok River in the winter, and the snowflakes as big as children’s heads crowding down from the sky. After Liberation he joined the National Council of Korean Labor Unions. Then, during the 1946 Daegu October Incident, he left for North Korea with his middle school son. I decided to base my novel “Stagnant river” on these three generations of railway men. The story was all the more significant for me because there were almost no Korean novels about laborers from the era of modernization. Railways and trains were symbols of modernization. I came to the story with the awareness that we had forgotten our memories of being part of a continent, ever since the division turned South Korea into a de facto island. I was going to use that middle school student and first-person narrator to begin the story from right after the war. But when the Hankyoreh sent a reporter to Berlin to discuss the prospect of serialization, I began to have my doubts about the “three generations of railway men” story. I was standing at the center of a wildly changing world. My writerly instincts were telling me that the world was about to be very different, and my own narrative methods would have to change accordingly.
In retrospect, the very title of “Stagnant river” foreshadowed how the work would not be completed. Looking at the title now, I feel a determination to say something meaningful in the face of my North Korea visit and the shock of the Berlin Wall. What a blatant allusion to division my title was! I began to think that it was a bad idea as soon as I started writing the work, I hated the form I had chosen, and I felt as if I had pushed myself too close to reality and got burnt by it in the process. My status as a man in exile did not allow me enough distance to think like a writer. In any case, I was still tied to North and South Korea and felt like they were standing behind me, left and right, looking over my shoulder.
~
I had gone to North Korea again after my first visit, because I’d agreed to attend the Pan-Korean National Conference that was being held simultaneously in North and South Korea in 1990. The overseas representatives who attended the planning conference in Seoul earlier that year officially requested my presence at the events to be held in the North. I had no initial plans to go, as I was certain that some other representative from the South would be there. I was also deep into writing the “Stagnant river” serialization. But I began to feel ashamed about limiting my activities to shutting myself in a room and writing a travelogue when Moon Ik-hwan, Lim Su-kyung, and countless other political activists were in jail. I felt my own responsibility was that much greater if no one else was able to show up on the South Korean side. I had no choice but to accept the invitation. This would take me further from the path of return to South Korea, as I was an exile with an uncertain future, and the personal damage I had to accept was also significant. But once I had decided what to do, I thought I ought to be even more outrageous in my activism, to not only infringe the National Security Act but to render it absurd.
At the end of June, a little before the Pan-Korean National Conference, I received news that my youngest aunt was on her deathbed. She had spinal cancer. She’d already been in the final stages when I met her in 1989. When I told Myoung-su, after some hesitation, that I wanted to visit North Korea again, she threw a fit. Her emotions had been in turmoil ever since she had arrived in Berlin, the unfamiliar surroundings and the constant stream of visitors setting her teeth on edge. It was my fault for bringing her to Berlin, but I was discovering, day by day, just how difficult it was for someone in exile to maintain a happy home.
I called the newspaper and informed them that I was canceling my serialization. Then I hopped on a plane that flew from Berlin to North Korea every Thursday. The novelist Choi Seung-chil and an unfamiliar handler were waiting for me at Pyongyang airport. The handler, a Party worker in his late fi
fties, had a sense of humor and a deep knowledge of Western society. They had prepared my quarters in Seojaegol. Deputy Minister Han Si-hae was waiting for me there. He was a man of the world, as one would expect from a diplomat who had spent seven years in New York as the North Korean envoy to the United Nations. The handler informed me that my youngest aunt had already passed away a week prior at Pyongyang Hospital. She had already been buried in a cemetery in Sariwon. In effect, I had confirmed that the older generation of my dispersed family were all dead. My maternal eldest uncle, mother, and younger aunt had died in the South, and my maternal eldest aunt, younger uncle, and youngest aunt had died in the North. My generation would be next.
I went to my younger cousin’s house in Sariwon the following day, escorted by my handler. I’d heard that my aunt had four children, and that day I met three of them at a family home, where a full meal had been carefully prepared.
One of the eldest took me to the outskirts of the town. We stood before my aunt’s grave, a mound of soil on a hill covered with rocks and stones. Judging from the other mounds nearby, the hill was a graveyard. My aunt’s grave was one of the few that were marked with a tombstone. My cousin said, “Mother bade me to put your name on it as well.”
The gravestone had her immediate family’s names engraved on the back, with mine at the very end. It was a physical marker, left to our blood relatives in the North through me, of my mother’s lifelong yearning to see them again. The handler nodded, adding that the people’s committee was likely to have treated the deceased well because she had once been the manager of a state-run farm. I laid down the flowers I’d brought and did the three deep bows.
My maternal grandmother’s grave was nearby, someone said; it was suggested we visit it. I had never met her but had heard so many stories that I had a clear picture in my head of what she was like. My grandmother’s grave had no tombstone and was almost completely obscured by overgrown weeds. The eldest son, perhaps ashamed of the state of the grave, mumbled that he would come back on a less busy day to do some weeding. We stood for a long time in respectful silence. Whenever my mother was having a rough time, she used to say, “Mother came to me in a dream.” I wonder if my aunt and grandmother’s graves are still there, among the rocks and stones of that hill. The prospect of ever visiting them again seems as remote as ever.
At the Seojaegol visitors’ residence, during a dinner with Yun Gi-bok and Han Si-hae, I abruptly declared that I would attend the upcoming first Pan-Korean National Conference with my family. They understood what I meant by that: I would be actively participating in the reunification movement overseas from now on.
I returned to Berlin and notified the Korean European Council for Democratic Activism that I was going to the Pan-Korean National Conference. Myoung-su was completely against it at first but then decided she would attend with Ho-seop, saying if I was going to do it, we might as well go all the way. As an overseas Korean, she wanted to perform at the event herself. She discussed it with Choi Young-sook, who managed the cultural part of the event, and I came up with some ideas of my own. Yun I-sang’s daughter-in-law also happened to be a North Korean dancer, so Myoung-su added a number to the overseas Koreans’ gut ritual that she choreographed and planned to perform in.
In early August, I headed back to Pyongyang from Berlin with my family. We were assigned to the Seojaegol visitors’ center. Overseas Koreans began to arrive as the date for the Pan-Korean National Conference approached. They were put up at the Koryo Hotel. Roh Tae-woo’s administration in the South proclaimed on July 20 that they were officially allowing the Pan-Korean National Conference to proceed in the South, only later to cancel the tripartite meeting between North, South, and overseas representatives at Panmunjom, in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). The overseas organizers, who had entered the country in anticipation of the talks, managed to pass on the South’s terms, return to the North, and create some semblance of a three-way agreement enabling the opening of the Pan-Korean National Conference.
On the day before the opening ceremony, Chon Kum-chol, the arrangement committee chair of the North, came to visit me in Seojaegol. He asked me whether I expected to get into trouble, now that the South Korean government had officially forbidden South Korean representatives from participating in the meeting at Panmunjom. I answered that it did make it difficult for me to participate if I did not have public backing, and that I was probably making my Southern cohorts uncomfortable because I was wanted for violating the National Security Act. Still, I wasn’t exactly out for glory. Anyone could see that I was only making trouble for myself as an asylee. Chon Kum-chol tried to convince me by pointing out that the North and overseas representatives had already agreed, so we would have a three-party agreement retroactively. I’d decided myself that it would be pointless to go back without having attended the Pan-Korean National Conference, when I’d come determined to see it through despite the dangers to myself, and it would be extremely difficult to hold it again in the future if we failed now. I informed him that I would be a symbolic representative of the South but would not present any opinions, and only act according to what the South had publicly proposed. I took on that role on my own. I had always been one to see things through to the end, and my thinking was that if I was going to be martyred for this, I might as well go all the way. I did not discuss this with Myoung-su beforehand. This would leave a lasting wound on our relationship.
The opening ceremony was to be at the new Kim Il-sung Stadium, built on what used to be the end-of-the-line tram station at the foot of Moranbong. It was attended by hundreds of thousands of Pyongyang citizens. Representatives from the US, Europe, Japan, China, and the Soviet Union had gathered at the entrance and entered the stadium like Olympic athletes, guided by hanbok-clad attendants holding signs with the names of where they were from. Once I had rushed through the welcome of the city of Pyongyang and was about to join the “Parade of Peace,” I was led to a reception area near the entrance where there was a Northern-style café. As I stepped inside, I was surprised to find it filled with old women wearing white hanbok. The handler introduced the women one by one. I don’t remember all of their names, but they were family members of famous people in South Korea. This was where I first learned that Choi Eun-hee, the first female journalist in South Korea, had an identical twin. This twin sister was still alive, as were Seoul National University’s Im Seok-jae’s two older sisters, almost one hundred years old. His two daughters were there too; also Dr. Chang Kee-ryo’s wife; the novelist Park Taewon’s eldest daughter, Park Seol-young; and Lyuh Woon-Hyung’s children—except for his eldest daughter, Lyuh Yeon-gu, as she was an officer of the Party. The old ladies, upon hearing I was from the South, wept as they clasped my hand.
The parade began. The Northern authorities had placed League of Socialist Working Youth propaganda officers left and right on the sidewalks among the masses. The officers, following instructions, leaped out of the crowds and hoisted the representatives, including myself, on their shoulders, shouting “Reunification of the nation! Reunification of the nation!” I hadn’t expected this and was disconcerted at first, but soon I was shouting along with them. The crowd was getting more and more excited. I saw that the old ladies in white had been moved out to the front of the masses, who overflowed the sidewalks and were spilling into the street by the time we reached Kim Il-sung Square. As we moved closer, the crowds pushed the line of old ladies further onto the street. One of them fell down, and I pointed at her from my position atop the shoulders of the young man and cried, “She’s going to get hurt, she’s going to get hurt!” I saw a video later on of that day. In their edit, the North Korean narrator proclaimed that I was “South Korean author Hwang Sok-yong calling to join the struggle.” The South Korean edit featured the most dramatic examples, labeling them as “the megalomania of a leftist pro-communist.” I’m told that this latter edit, which included footage of my visits to the North, was used in military education in corporations and army reserve training to illustra
te the dangers of leftist pro-communists.
The North had never worked with overseas activists or even with South Koreans before, which made for many conflicts from the get-go within the Pan-Korean National Conference. It wasn’t easy to find consensus, despite the shared determination to act as a united coalition.
The South overcame their government’s blockade and went ahead with their half of the first Pan-Korean National Conference, with sixty-six representatives from twelve regions, including Seoul, and 20,000 participants. On August 17, the South’s executive committee successfully voted to form a united reunification campaign group. Following this, the overseas Korean representatives left Pyongyang to form the European branch of the Pan-Korea Alliance for Reunification, grouped into organizations in each of their regions with their delegates assuming leadership roles.
On October 3, 1990, Germany was reunified as the East German states joined the West German Federal Republic. This was the result of East Germany’s consistent democratic reforms since the fall of the Berlin Wall; also, during this period, East Germany abandoned its one-party system and held free elections. West Germany’s democracy and unchanging reconciliation toward the East had finally changed East Germany. The Pan-Korea Alliance for Reunification (“the Alliance”) was a response to the encouragement we received from these developments.
The Prisoner Page 22