The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  In early November, Cho Seong-wu, the political exile and student activist who I’d met in Japan, came to Berlin. He stayed at our place and sat in on the preparation process with the Korean activists of the Alliance in Europe. After an intensive two-day discussion that ended on November 20, it was decided that representatives from the North, South, and overseas would hold a conference to form a national reunification organization (Joguktongil beomminjok yeonhapche). My role was to bring the conflicting Southern and overseas Koreans into alignment, while the North Koreans sat out the argument, claiming neutrality.

  For the duration of the South Korean military dictatorship, overseas activists suffered all sorts of oppression, as they were seen as anti-governmental or pro-communist. The Korean Democratic Unification Union (Hanmintong) in particular, which started in Japan, was often condemned as an anti-governmental organization. But its members were foreign residents in no danger of being arrested, and this allowed their activism to be more radical. What made activism in Japan more irksome to the South Korean authorities was the presence of Hanmintong in Japan and the fact that the national security incidents of the 1970s and ’80s had mostly occurred with Japan as a backdrop. During South Korea’s two periods of military dictatorship, activists in American and European immigrant communities were organized into the Democratic Koreans United (Hangukmin juminjok tongil haewoe yeonhap). But Yoon Han Bong in exile in the US and the Koreans studying abroad in Europe after the Gwangju Democracy Movement felt greatly disconcerted by the radical turn the older activists were taking and the pressures it exerted on South Korean activism. It had been decades since these older activists had left Korea, which made them out of touch and more ideological. The center of the scene should always be Korea, and it was South Korea’s changes that would decide the direction of North Korea’s metamorphosis.

  The point of contention in the three-way talks in Berlin was that the South Korean side sought to change the name of the Pan-Korea Alliance for Reunification, and modifications in the organization itself, but the overseas Koreans refused to give an inch. In the end the name was retained, which was the name used in the declaration at Panmunjom as well, while the organization would maintain its separate seats in the South, North, and overseas with a general headquarters to coordinate them. The South Korean representatives also requested that I move to the US, specifically New York City, where the UN was. We were to use the general headquarters to check the Northern and overseas branches and to mold the movement’s direction to the advantage of the South.

  The conference was over, and it was time for everyone to leave. Pastor Cho Yong-sul and Lee Hae-hak from South Korea, along with Cho Seong-wu, were to be arrested immediately upon their return. I had a talk with Cho Seong-wu over drinks before he left. “Actually,” he said, “I spoke with Yoon Han Bong before I came here. He said we needed to convince you to leave Berlin. I think so, too.”

  They must have been worried about how much the North was reaching out to me because I happened to be in Berlin. I too was feeling the need to distance myself, and told him I was thinking of going back to Korea anyway, after helping set up the general headquarters.

  “A South Korean has to be the head of the general headquarters no matter what, even if we have to send someone from South Korea,” said Cho Seong-wu. We agreed that if this proved to be impossible, Yoon Han Bong, who was well connected with the South Korean activist sphere, would use the American branch to lead the general headquarters.

  There’s another point I need to mention: all the members of the North Korean branch of the Alliance were Party officials from the United Front Department and the Committee for the Peace ful Reunification of the Fatherland. When we objected to this, the North stubbornly stood their ground, telling us that “the people and the Party are one, there is nothing wrong with what we’re doing.” I told them that if they persisted in this, we would be obliged to concede that the Alliance was indeed being manipulated by the North Korean government, just as the South Korean authorities were saying. After some discussion, the North Korean branch of the Alliance was almost completely re-staffed by artists, intellectuals, religious leaders, journalists, workers, and farmers, and its new chairperson was the writer Baek In-jun, of the Korean Federation of Literature and Arts.

  At the beginning of January 1991, I was washing my face when I felt my back give, sending me to the floor. The pain was so bad that I could not take a single step and I had to spend that day in bed. I thought I’d be better after a couple of days’ rest, but the pain grew worse and I was unable to even bend my knees. The doctors at a university hospital in Berlin took an X-ray and diagnosed a slipped disc. There it was, clear as day on the plate: the cartilage between my vertebrae had protruded and was touching the nerves. My German doctor recommended immediate surgery as the only solution. I was afraid of putting my bones under the knife and said I’d need to think about it first, and came home. Yun I-sang called. He heard me out and replied that he was glad I’d hesitated, for it was better to tackle a slipped disc through physical therapy. He reckoned it would be best if I was treated by North Korean doctors, who had a lot of experience combining Western medicine with alternative therapies like acupuncture. I wasn’t looking forward to sitting in a plane for that long but figured it outweighed the risks of surgery, so I quickly made plans to leave.

  On January 17, 1991, I boarded a plane for Pyongyang via Moscow. The German doctors injected me with something the day before and urged me to find a doctor as soon as I landed. I remember the exact date of the flight because the main headline on an English-language newspaper was about the start of the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and was threatening Saudi Arabia the previous summer, while I was in Pyongyang preparing for the Pan-Korean National Conference. It was the background to this conflict in the Middle East. I was therefore not surprised to find the airport in Moscow emptier than usual. I couldn’t read the Cyrillic alphabet, but I could tell from the photographs and video footage that the media was focused on Iraq.

  My family and I were taken to the visitors’ residence in Cheolbongri. The houses were spaced far apart from each other around the reservoir. I went to Bonghwa Hospital to get examined, but they said it would take much longer if they used non surgical methods. Bonghwa Hospital catered to North Korea’s Party officials and their families; Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il’s private doctors worked there as well.

  I received alternative treatments that included a paraffin heat poultice and cupping. The residence bed was too soft, so I placed a thick sheet of plywood on the mattress and a thin blanket over that. It was uncomfortable at first but helped with the back pain. Two weeks later, we moved to Hwanghae Province. We stayed near Sinchon, and I went to the Samcheon hot springs about half an hour away for physical therapy. It had a military hospital as well, and was near the Dalcheon hot springs, reputed as a vacation spot for the people. Samcheon was where those who had been injured during training would enter the building in wheelchairs and walk out of it on crutches. The baths were in individual cubicles in a large hall, each containing a private tub with physical therapy equipment. For an hour every day, I used a device that applied traction to my ankles as I held on to the bath by my armpits. I soaked in the hot water and slowly had my body pulled until I was stiff as a plank, then slowly relaxed. I had no idea fifteen minutes was such a long time; my face and shoulders were above the water but drenched in sweat. I got out of the bath and rested for a bit before repeating the exercise three more times. Within three weeks the pain had gone and I could walk normally again.

  I had reckoned on a month for the treatment, so I got to spend an extra week with my handlers touring the locations for my novel Jang Gil-san. We went to Paeyop Temple and Woljong Temple on Mount Kuwol. The Buddha statues in Woljong Temple were all gone and only the paintings remained; I was no expert, but even I could tell they were from the Goryeo dynasty. There was, of course, no head monk, and the temple was maintained by the people’s committee in the village below.
The women took turns keeping the place clean. There must have been a lot of humidity because the mold on the walls had spread all the way to the paintings. In Pyongyang, I told the writer Choi Seung-chil that the murals were neglected and in danger of rotting; they needed to be taken away and preserved, perhaps in a museum in Pyongyang. I later heard that he made a phone call to the relevant department.

  I went to Pongsan and Chaeryong nearby as well, but it was difficult to find anyone with knowledge about the talchum mask dance. After that, I went to Jangsan Cape, out past Monggumpo, adjacent to the armistice line. From there, I had a clear view of Baegnyeong Island. It reminded me of my trip to Mount Kumgang, when I’d gone to the end of Haegeum River and could see all of Goseong. Seeing the South from the other side of Panmunjom had been very moving, and now looking down on Baegnyeong Island from Jangsan Cape was like gazing upon another country.

  We were resting at Monggumpo on our way back when something fluttered in the shrubs below the slope. I didn’t know what kind of bird it was, but it was big. Its wings were caught in some branches. The driver and the handler went down to catch it. The driver reached out and tried to grab the bird only to get his hand scratched. The handler threw his jacket over it before extricating it. It turned out to be a hawk. The handler, a Party worker from the Hwanghae Province region, informed us it was a haedongcheong hawk—what the Chinese refer to as a Korean hawk. The handler pointed to the gray feathers and the smudge of blue under its neck and said the name haedongcheong, or “ocean blue,” came from these colorings. My heart was beating fast. My novel Jang Gil-san begins with a preface centered on the legend of the Jangsan Cape hawk.

  Back in 1984, in lieu of a publication launch, we had held a memorial gut with the shaman Kim Keum-hwa to celebrate the release of the ten-volume edition of Jang Gil-san. I received the gongsu, the words of the gods channeled through the shaman during a state of possession. What came out of my mouth at the moment was, “I vow to enter the North Korean land that lies beyond the armistice line.” People joked to me at the afterparty that I’d turned the ritual into a reunification gut.

  The driver put the hawk in a paper box at the visitors’ center. I heard later that he entrusted it to the Pyongyang Zoo. I never visited the zoo myself, but Ho-seop said he had gone to see it with his mother. Apparently, the North Korean authorities had thoughtfully put my name on the plaque, as the donor. I wonder if I should have just let the hawk go.

  I wrote the novel Princess Bari while living in Paris in 2006, and sent the complete manuscript to Changbi Publishers via email. The two chief editors immediately went into the office to work on it, despite the fact that it was a Sunday. The publishing house was in the Paju publishing complex on the northern outskirts of Seoul. A large bird suddenly flew in through the window and smashed against the walls and glass, fluttering on the floor. They assumed it was a pigeon at first but one of them observed that it was a little too big to be a pigeon. It turned out to be a hawk, a creature they had only seen in photographs. On a phone call to me in Paris, they mentioned how they’d had to open all the windows to let the hawk escape. The shamans say hawks are messengers of the gods; perhaps I share some kind of fate with them.

  I still felt a little pain, maybe because I had worked too hard despite my back not having properly healed. The doctors examined me and said that my vertebrae were still a little out of alignment. So I decided to leave my family behind in Pyongyang and go alone to the Kyungsung hot springs for three weeks. I received a mud bath treatment there, which involved sitting in a tub up to my chest in water as black as mudflats. It wasn’t too hot, but my upper body would be soaked with sweat to the point of severe discomfort after just twenty minutes. After I got out of the tub, I’d have cupping done on my back. By the time I returned to Pyongyang and had follow-up X-rays taken at Bonghwa Hospital, the cartilage that had been nudging my nerves was back in its proper place and I was proclaimed completely healed.

  Pyongyang was entering spring. The weather was still chilly and white patches of snow still clung to the mountainsides, but the ginger and the pussy willow were budding and yellow flowers began to bloom. Around this time, the head of North Korea’s Munye Publishing visited the Cheolbongri visitors’ center with publication contracts for Jang Gil-san and The Shadow of Arms. He explained that there was no system for paying royalties in the North, and all intellectual property belonged to the government. Instead, a manuscript fee was paid and you could count on a print run of hundreds of thousands, as there was a printing distribution center in each region. I turned down the manuscript fee and asked them to spend it on food for the laborers at the Tongil Street construction site at the time. Later, in New York, I heard from a North Korean official that Jang Gil-san and The Shadow of Arms had been published. Kim Il-sung had told me on my first visit to North Korea that he had read the first two volumes of a large-print version of Jang Gil-san and had a pair of male and female voice actors record the rest. It was said that he took a keen interest in my descriptions of North Korean geography and its specific traditions.

  Another portion of my visit was spent working with the cultural exchange between the Korean People’s Artists Federation in South Korea and the Korean Federation of Literature and Arts in North Korea. At the time, I was commissioned by the Korean People’s Artists Federation chairs to draw up an agreement with North Korea’s Korean Federation of Literature and Arts poet Choi Young-hwa. South Korea did not manage to keep up the exchange, but Japan and the US staged performances, exhibitions, and film festivals. I proposed that we create a new literary magazine to which both North and South Korean writers could submit work. We titled it Tongil munhak (Unification Literature) and went on to publish many South Korean poets and novelists, including Park Kyung-ni, whose historic saga Land we printed in installments.

  A few days later, I had a goodbye lunch with Chairman Kim Il-sung. I went with my wife; the screenwriter Ri Chun-gu also came with his spouse. When Chairman Kim asked Ri Chun-gu how many children he had, Ri leaped to his feet and shouted, “I have three children, sir!” which made Chairman Kim refrain from talking to him again. It showed how highly North Korean citizens esteemed the Chairman. Kim started talking about his own family, which led to stories about his mother in Manchuria. He must have heard that I was moving to the US, because he asked worriedly, “Why are you going to that den of gangsters?”

  He had some interesting thoughts on Koreans based abroad. “Even after reunification, not all of our countrymen living overseas will be able to come to Korea to live. No one looks for their roots anymore, they want prosperous lives now. Overseas Koreans shouldn’t prioritize reunification activism, they should work to strengthen their rights in the countries they live in. That’s how Japan’s General Association of Korean Residents in Japan moved leftward. They were desperate then.”

  With regard to recent events in Europe, he mused, “The whole world is changing, and as long as our feet are on the ground instead of stepping on clouds, we have to change with it.” He said that, in his time, socialism was the only ideology that could fight against the Japanese for the good of the Korean people. I still clearly recall what he said next. “I believe that even if our Workers’ Party became just another progressive party in the bourgeois-style Western legislature that South Korea has right now, that would be reunification enough for me.” Before we parted, he embraced me and expressed his regret, saying, “Writer Hwang, don’t go anywhere, stay here with us.”

  Strangely, not a single Party officer or any of my handlers, who normally dropped in a few times a day, came to the visitors’ residence after we returned to pack our things that evening. We’d had to give up our passports when we entered North Korea; we couldn’t leave the country if they weren’t returned to us. I had to call for the handler many times until he finally showed up, very late. He said that Deputy Minister Han Si-hae had gone overseas on business and that we must wait to leave until after he’d returned. I had a strange feeling about what was going on. I managed t
o persuade them to send my family on to Germany first, so they could prepare for our move to the States, and I would stay behind for a while. They gave Myoung-su her passport, and she left Pyongyang first with our son. I waited alone for about ten days and remembered how Yasue Ryōsuke in Japan had given me a letter of introduction to Kang Ju-il, first deputy minister of the United Front Department, and asked to meet with him. He had been the student council president when Kim Jong-il was at Kim Il-sung University and was known to have advised the younger Kim. The North Koreans referred to him as “an old friend of our Dear Leader.” Kang was five years older than I was. He gave me the impression of being reasonable and warm. When I asked him why my passport wasn’t being returned, he looked as if he’d never heard of such a thing before.

  I was getting more and more angry as I spoke. Staying in the North was not an option for me. I could not live apart from my South Korean readers, and I had a duty to my fellow activists in the democratization and reunification movement. I was a product of South Korean history and therefore would never be anything more than a houseguest in North Korea. Such houseguests, whether they are in the North or the South, only serve to perpetuate division by being used by the divisionists. I was determined to go back to South Korea after my exile, to receive the punishment that awaited. But ultimately I was determined to win back my freedom and live as a writer who contributes to the good of his own community.

  Kang listened to me calmly, but his eyes grew increasingly moist. Finally, he nodded. “You are right to think that way, little brother. We must live for the good of the nation wherever we end up. Have a farewell drink with me before you go.”

  My passport was returned to me the next day, and I left Pyongyang. This was in May of 1991. I imagine that Chairman Kim’s parting words—“stay here with us”—had been taken rather literally by his overzealous underlings.