The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  Fewer trains were running as the Chinese forces pushed the Northern front lines toward the 38th parallel. What Father had managed to negotiate was for us to join a military family on their train. Since the trains were filled with supplies, refugees had to sit on the roofs of the carriages. But occasionally there were open freight cars in between the other carriages, with sometimes two linked end to end to carry artillery or tanks. To ride inside an open-air freight car was a special privilege at that point. It was safer than riding on the high, narrow roof of the carriages, and there was plenty of space for a family to lie down.

  There weren’t many refugees when we arrived at the station, and the railway itself was fairly empty. Someone in charge of seating designated a spot on the train for us, and we put down thick quilts and canvas to sit on. The day began to break once the people who had seating had finished boarding, and evacuees began crowding in. They crawled up to the roof of the carriages and perched there like birds on a wire, bundled together in layers of blankets. This was during the second taking of Seoul by the Northern forces, the so-called January 4 Retreat, in other words; but fleeing had already begun in the middle of December.

  It was a train that normally delivered munitions instead of people, so it was slower than what we were used to, and it would pause for half a day whenever it came to a stop. By the time we saw the sign for Osan, we were having cold kimbap for dinner. All we had to eat were kimbap and rice balls. It must have taken over a day to get through Gyeonggi Province and reach Cheonan.

  The train sometimes left late at night. Whenever that happened, the people on the carriage roofs would shout the names of their family members who had gotten off. Some ran after the train as fast as they could, only to be left behind. They might eventually be reunited after a long struggle or be parted for a long time. It took ten days to go from Seoul to Busan. Among those who grew exhausted from the journey, sleeping on the roofs of the carriages, some fell to their deaths.

  A friend of mine was one who missed his train. At the time, people in Seoul were going to Yongsan Station to catch the trains going south or paying for seats in military transport. My friend had lost his family in the station among the crowds of refugees when he went to relieve himself, jumping over a few tracks to squat next to a fence; by the time he came back, the train had left. This child who was no older than me cried as he went around the empty tracks and had no choice but to return to the house his family had abandoned.

  My friend’s chronically ill grandmother was at home, lying in the master bedroom. She had insisted on staying behind, preferring to die at home than on the road. It enraged him that his family would leave both him and his grandmother, and he never forgave them for the rest of his life.

  Seoul was almost empty. Winter that year of 1950–51 was especially cold. The country was split into North and South, and the children who had been left behind by their parents joined forces with each other. My friend’s mission was to keep the fire that heated the floor burning for himself and his grandmother. He went around the empty houses, gathering what kindling he could, and struggling to obtain the least morsel of food.

  The children like him who were left behind fell into an age hierarchy like they had when playing soldiers. They divided into groups and went foraging in the empty houses for scraps. The cities in both North and South were mostly piles of ash by then. The grandmother did not survive that winter. He called together the children when she died, and they dug up the frozen earth of the yard and buried her wrapped in a blanket, like they would a jar of preserves.

  It was a cruel time for adults, but on the outside at least, the children did not seem to have felt too frightened or sad. If anything, the gangs of youngsters in the middle of a war zone seemed almost happy with their laughter and games. As long as they had something to do and didn’t starve, there were many things more fun than going to school. All you needed was a good cry in those brief moments of hunger or sickness or sadness, and that was that. Once you wiped your tears and got up again, the mere fact of survival was enough to electrify you. But was it really that easy? Just as frostbite returns without one noticing, I’ve seen how such children later grow up floundering in pain, unable to handle the scars of war. My friend was like that. He has passed away, but to the end of his life he was distant from his family and unable to adjust well to society.

  The brief winter sun had set by the time we finally pulled into Daegu Station. We didn’t go all the way to Busan, because of my mother’s reasoning: she was sure that the southernmost port city would soon overflow with refugees from all over the peninsula. Finding a place to sleep would be difficult and the struggle to survive would be brutal. And people were saying that the Northern forces would surely not make it over the Chupungnyeong mountain pass easily—not this time, anyway.

  At the station we moved away from the flow of the crowds and sat with our luggage against the window of the cargo handling offices, waiting for Father. He had left us at the station to find a room. An endless river of soldiers and refugees passed before us.

  Father came back with news late in the night. The main street that started at Daegu Station was lined with Japanese-style houses and modern buildings, but each alleyway contained many thatched cottages. We found a room in an old house in Deoksan-dong, near the Central Market and past the Red Cross Hospital. There was a well in the middle of the cramped courtyard and an empty pigpen in the corner. A widow lived there with a son and daughter who went to middle school; her older daughter had married but lived nearby and visited often. She was constantly getting into screaming fights with her brother, and the mother would have to intervene. We started off renting the big room in the house, and once my younger brother was born, we rented one more room in the annex next to the gate.

  Father disappeared without a word a few days after we’d settled in. I learned later that he had taken a train back to Seoul. He seemed to have forgotten something at home. My older sister reckoned it was to gather some means to open a business in Daegu, as we had no idea how long the war would keep us there.

  I slept by my mother’s side while my father was gone. I would wake in the night to the sound of her mumbling prayers. Father returned home safely, but he’d had to change trains three or four times and walk quite a bit of the way, risking his life several times. He sold goods off a truck he drove between Daegu, Busan, and Masan, spending the other half of the month in South Jeolla Province. Sometimes he made a profit, sometimes he didn’t, but he managed to keep our heads above water.

  Mother thankfully gave birth when Father was home. It was Daeboreum, the first full moon of the lunar year, so he had probably rushed back to be with the family. The new baby was already sleeping in my mother’s arms when I woke in the morning. Nowadays people act as if both mother and child would surely die if the baby wasn’t delivered in a hospital, but back then it was common for babies to be born at home and for husbands to pitch in during childbirth. Not to mention we were lucky that we could welcome the baby into a warm room despite being at war.

  Even in wartime, Mother managed to find a big bookstore in the marketplace where she bought me books. I read things like Pauvre Blaise, Bang Jeong-hwan’s “Stories for boys and girls,” The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Count of Monte Cristo, the works of Plutarch and Hans Christian Andersen, and so many others in the midst of all that turbulence.

  On the streets of Daegu everyone was being rounded up, including refugees and students, for interrogation and conscription, but despite the war they opened the schools in the spring and admitted refugee children as well. I enrolled at Jungang Elementary School near our home, but the building had already been appropriated for use by American forces and classes were held in a makeshift schoolhouse instead—namely, a Japanese-style house whose inside walls had been knocked down to turn the small rooms into one big classroom. There were, of course, no desks or chairs. I only got to sit at a desk after the war, mere months before I graduated from sixth grade.

  Each student had
to bring a mini chalkboard, a bag for their shoes, and a cushion. We went to class with our chalkboards slung on our shoulders by the strings we’d tied on them and rested them on our knees as we wrote our letters. The best place to sit was on the patch of wooden flooring; everywhere else was either cement or bare dirt. In the rainy season, our cushions would turn damp from the water seeping up through the ground or cement, and the roof leaked.

  We ran into my old teacher from Yeongdeungpo at the school’s entrance ceremony. She burst into tears as she greeted me, and my mother clasped her hands as they sobbed together. Just the fact that we had made it alive through so much chaos was reason enough for gratitude.

  I was bored with what they taught at school, having already conquered books at the middle school level. My mother always said to me, “No one can match our family in learning and teaching. That will serve you well later.”

  Boys and girls had to sit on opposite sides of the classroom from each other, but at least I finally got to meet girls my age to whom I wasn’t related. It was fun to be able to call out their names and talk to them. The front lines ran red with blood, but we carried our chalkboards to the orchard hill and drew trees and flowers with our crayons. Meanwhile my father wasn’t home for half the month, running around in other parts of the country, trying to make ends meet.

  Every time I walked down the main street that started from Daegu Station, my heart pounded and I squirmed with longing. That was because of all the huge, painted movie billboards hanging in front of Munhwa Cinema. My memories of going to see operettas and movies in Yeongdeungpo with my mother only added to my excitement. In Daegu they were advertising a Tarzan movie and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Of course, I knew better than to pester my parents for movie tickets, since most children at the time couldn’t even afford to go to school and had to shine shoes or sell loose cigarettes. But every time I passed the theater, my throat ached from the effort of keeping quiet.

  One day, on that very street, my father and I ran into my oldest uncle on my mother’s side, who had fled from the North alone. There were many vendors as well as shops on that street, stands where they displayed lighters and timepieces in glass boxes and refilled lighter fluid or fixed watches, not to mention stores selling military gloves, sweaters, army jackets, red bean pastries, fried rice cakes, and sweet potatoes, all of which I was gazing at greedily as we walked, when suddenly my father came to a halt. The tall man about to pass us also stopped in his tracks. The two men stood there for a moment, before loudly whooping in unison and embracing each other.

  “My brother, when did you come down?”

  “The January Fourth Retreat … And Gyeongdo, where are you now?”

  “We have a house here, in Daegu!”

  They spoke rapidly to each other. People stopped in the street and formed a circle around them, smiling broadly as if it were something happening to themselves as they watched and listened to the conversation. My uncle was very stylish. He was tall like my mother and had long, wavy hair, slicked back, with the occasional unruly strand that he would smooth away. He wore a long black coat with wide lapels and underneath it an olive-green sweater from the American army. My uncle immediately hurried with us to our wartime refuge in Deoksan-dong, and I heard, for the first time, my mother crying out over and over again, “Brother, oh my brother!”

  Uncle was a doctor who had studied in Japan and had been a medical school professor in the North. He was well read, could answer any question, and was a gifted storyteller who could utterly beguile us with a tale. This was how our aunt and uncle became our only relatives from the North who made it to the South, and my mother got to have her older brother and next younger sister live close by. My aunt had divorced after she lost her only child, the little girl In-ok, and never remarried. It turned out that her husband had had a son with another woman.

  My uncle withered away as he fought for survival in the 1950s. A fake doctor hired him for his medical license and then falsely accused him of treason over a few words spoken at a drinking session with old school friends, which led to torture under what was aptly nicknamed the “Makgeolli Anti-communism Law.” Then he was accused of something else, and sent to prison, after which he lost all zest for life and turned to alcohol. He remarried twice and in his later years had only his daughter to take care of him. My aunt and uncle were of the first generation of Korea’s divided families. They both passed away as the world entered the 1980s.

  I wrote a novella, Hanssi yeondaegi (Mr. Han’s Chronicle), based on my mother’s memories of the dark despair and relentlessly dispassionate survival of that time. It was my uncle who provided many of the stories in it—the stories he’d told me as a child.

  Seoul had been retaken, but by then many of the refugees who had managed to settle in southern areas were reluctant to uproot themselves again. My own family left Daegu to return to the capital. But the blood sausage stew in hot earthenware bowls, the taste of black-market chocolate and the colorful gumdrops, the milk porridge my sisters and I stood in line for at the Red Cross Hospital, my classmates and the temporary schoolroom to which I carried my cushion every day—how could I forget any of it?

  My aunt, who’d gone alone to Busan, joined us on our journey back to Seoul. Father rented a truck that would take us up to Daejeon. He said we could hitch a ride with a military truck from there to Suwon. I don’t remember how long it took for us to get back to Seoul. I only remember how there were places to eat that appeared along the way, where we ate wedged in among a crowd of other people. Whenever a military convoy loomed, we had to move off the road to let them pass. As the dust of the paved roads settled, we would hum along with the military songs that faded into the distance. Walk over the bodies of our fallen friends, to the front, to the front, goodbye Nakdong River, we’re going to the front …

  We weren’t allowed on military transport without a permit past Suwon, so it was decided that Father would drive our luggage home to Yeongdeungpo and the rest of us would walk. It can’t have taken more than a day, but it feels to me like it took longer. My mother and aunt sang hymns, and my sisters sang along. After I heard them a few times, I was able to sing along, too.

  We had come to a tunnel underneath a railway track when an American soldier in his undershirt, riding the train above, tossed something toward me. I picked it up; it was a can of food. I looked back up to see the soldier waving as he disappeared into the distance.

  ~

  School was held in Yeongdeungpo’s abandoned factories or houses that had been gutted of all but their roofs and walls. Most of the floors we sat on were of course dirt with a mat thrown over. We were vaccinated several times a year, and the American military’s civil volunteer services sent trucks to spray DDT. A rubber tube was put into our sleeves or down the backs of our clothes, and a white powder was sprinkled on our skin. We giggled because it tickled. A long time later we learned that this was a very toxic chemical, but the children seemed to have survived all right, on the outside at least. On the other hand, I was oddly sensitive to vaccines, and I’d lie in bed for a few days after each one. Back then we got shots for typhoid, smallpox, and tuberculosis, and I was particularly weak against the typhoid shot. I got chills all over, and at night the fever made me feel like my body was growing as long as a telegraph pole, then shrinking to the size of a bean, then falling off a high cliff before bouncing on the ground below.

  Walking to school, I’d sometimes see hanging from the doors of hastily built shacks a rope with bits of red paper twisted into it. This meant a patient was quarantined inside. Outbreaks tended to hit certain parts of the country first and peak there before spreading to the rest. I assume that our neighborhood had had a typhus outbreak—though the term adults used back then could refer generally to any infectious disease. Later, cases of encephalitis began to go around as well.

  Thinking back on it now, it’s surprising how, despite the disarray of the times, we had more or less continuous running water and electricity. Of course, the e
lectricity went down for a few days in the fall when war swept over the country, but there still was running water. Once the front lines moved on, electricity miraculously returned, although the lights automatically blacked out at ten to conserve power. All the family, except for my father, sat under our single light bulb for a certain nightly task: taking off our long underwear and spreading them over newspapers to catch lice. We’d find their nits lain along the seams. Mother used a special comb to get the nits out of my sisters’ hair. This was a common scene right after the war. I don’t know if there’s a connection, but once coal briquettes became the most popular source of heat, we no longer had to deal with lice. Perhaps it had more to do with the general improvement in our standards of living.

  The people who had fled were coming home. The ones from the North tended to settle in Seoul rather than the countryside. There were also many from the countryside who, having survived the conflict of left against right, were looking for new ways of life in the city.

  The market began to revive. So many vendors appeared that a little guy like me could barely push his way through the crowds. They brought with them foods we’d never heard of. Whenever my sisters and I bugged our mother for snacks, she would give us a big sack of grain and send us off to the market to see the puffed rice man. He popped corn, rice, and barley for us. The grain popper he used was round like a bomb and had a pressure gauge with a face like a watch. He’d place the popper on top of a brazier and rotate it until the pressure had built up nice and high. Then he would assume a safe position and use an iron rod to open the mouth of the popper and release all the pressure at once. When we saw him take that position, we would plug our ears and take a step back, and all the people passing by would plug their ears, too. Bang! With that sound, steam billowed out, and the popped grains spilled into a finely woven metal net. We carried sacks of the stuff home over our shoulders, proud as farmers returning from harvest.