The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  And so many medicine sellers! Beneath the weeping willow near the rotary or in the station plaza, these peddlers with their monkeys or little girls or trained dogs would be surrounded by onlookers watching their antics. One played “Yangsando” and “The old walls of hwangseong” on violin, another did magic tricks, another played “Nights in Shilla” on accordion, and another beat a large drum on his back by pulling a string tied to his foot as he played the harmonica. Their gimmicks were one thing, but their storytelling was quite another and pedestrians would forget where they were headed and join in the laughter.

  “And who am I, you ask? My surname is The, my given name is Real Thing, I am The Real Thing! Of the Tokyo Imperial University pharmacology department, which I didn’t get into but I did brush past its back gate once. And does The Real Thing come to this alley every day? Look for me tomorrow, and I’ll be gone! But maybe I’ll be in the next alley over. And what have we here, ladies and gentlemen? This is from a tiger shark.”

  It was perhaps thanks to my fascination with these “snake-oil salesmen” that I later became known as quite the comedian among my friends.

  The war left many people mentally shattered. I wrote about them in Moraenmal aideul (The Children of Moraenmal), but one memory that has never left me is of the singing homeless couple dubbed the Gombaes. The man’s hand curved in toward his wrist, so we called him a gombaepal (bear claw), which was shortened to Gombae. For about two years, alone, he came to our neighborhood every morning and begged for food as he sang and danced. He never begged in front of the same house or neighborhood twice in a row and instead skipped a house every time, following some kind of order. Naturally, when they heard him singing, people thought: “That Gombae has come to our house, it must be our turn,” and they would come out with food for him, as if paying their taxes.

  His real job was snake-catching, for which purpose he carried around a military-issue lunch tin and a stick with a hook. One day he showed up with a female partner, and instead of coming to each house and begging, he claimed a space for them both on the sidewalk by the vegetable market and collected money as the fat woman sang. In contrast to her size, her voice was so delicate that people said she sang “The Tears of Mokpo” better than the original performer. She was said to be a Hamgyeong Province refugee who had lost her entire family in a bombing and had met Gombae on the road. I saw her once standing in a corner of the market in her wide military jacket dyed black and her tattered, loose trousers, her hands gathered gently before her as she sang. The song was “Be strong, Geumsoon.” Gombae provided percussion by drumming his chopsticks against his metal lunchbox.

  Gombae built a dugout against a dike. I was familiar with dugouts because I’d made them with other children; we called them our headquarters. They were easy to build and easy to conceal. You dug out a ditch, crisscrossed some branches over it, and covered it with straw. Inside you put down some sand and straw sacking for a carpet. You had to bend low to crawl in, but once you were inside, it was cozy and warm even on the coldest days of winter.

  Gombae’s partner became pregnant, but she died before the baby was born. The neighborhood children had set a nearby reed field on fire while playing jwibulnori, imitating the farmers who would scorch their fields by lighting a fire inside a container and spinning it around on a cord. The blaze spread and torched their dugout. All through that night the village nearby heard Gombae’s tearful cries. “You bastards! Are we not human, too? Are we not human?”

  Alone again, the devastated Gombae lingered for a time around the burned dugout. Then one day he built a wooden bridge over the stream near his old home and disappeared. The stepping-stones the villagers had put down tended to disappear under the water as soon as there was any rain, and people had to take their shoes off before crossing the river. Who was the first to call the new construction “Gombae Bridge’? The name persisted even when another wooden bridge was built for military use, until finally some American army engineers replaced it with a strong, concrete structure.

  The only large, modern buildings at the time were schools. Across the street from our neighborhood was an elementary school built after Liberation, but an American regiment had commandeered it. The same was true of the school buildings near Mullae-dong, which I attended.

  The Chinese restaurant Twin Star Pagoda was a two-story brick building large enough to be used, later, as a wedding hall. The Americans turned the second floor into a dance hall, and the prostitutes who catered to them—called yangsaekshi, “western brides”—moved into houses across from us and in the back of our neighborhood. In essence, the area turned into a red-light district. The children bragged about what they’d seen. Someone said they’d witnessed an American soldier doing the deed with a yangsaekshi, naked on a sheet of tent canvas spread beside a military jeep in the school playground surrounded by a wire fence. Someone saw another pair kissing on a porch and doing it standing up; someone else would rush to a peephole whenever an American soldier entered a certain house, affording a good view of what would turn out to be as good as a movie. The adults were too busy trying to survive to worry about the children looking or not looking. No wonder we all grew up so fast.

  Mother had two sewing machines in the spare room and made dresses for the yangsaekshi. She obtained parachute fabric from somewhere, which was perfect for party dresses. The fabric was high-tech, light and smooth, and never wrinkled. You could dye the white parachute fabric all sorts of fancy colors. Haeju Aunt and my younger aunt helped Mother with the sewing for a while.

  The boogie-woogie and the swing were in fashion, with men and women dancing with their hands clasped as they spun and rocked their hips and legs. The second floor of the Twin Star Pagoda was a nightly racket of band music and lights. Mother used to say that our nanny Tae-geum became loose under that influence. Carrying my baby brother she would dance with him to the music that flowed out of the Twin Star Pagoda, jiggling him up and down, chanting “One-two-three, one-two-three” in time with the beat as my brother giggled.

  I should have suspected it when I caught Tae-geum surreptitiously putting on my mother’s face cream: she had fallen in love with a policeman who worked across the street and one day said goodbye to us, awash in tears. Only when my mother told me did I realize that whenever I saw her lean against the wooden fence by the trees of heaven and stare over, she had been looking toward the police station every time.

  I can’t forget to mention Pomade and the Advisor, two characters who appeared in our neighborhood after the war. I don’t remember Pomade’s original name. He always had his hair slicked back, stuck to his scalp, with long sideburns. He must have been nineteen or twenty at the time. He always had a comb and mirror on him, and kept combing his already combed-back hair.

  He knew the lines to a lot of melodramas and was always reciting them, imitating the cadences of silent-film interpreters. One time, he gathered the neighborhood children to put on a play that he’d written himself. The location was a house with a water pump in one of the back alleys. All of the houses flanking the main street had glass fronts like stores but were built like traditional hanok in the back. The house with a pump also had a large backyard and porch. People sat in the courtyard, and the porch served as a stage. Pomade lived with an older sister who was a yangsaekshi, one of several occupying the shacks built on the edge of the courtyard.

  The Advisor had a lisp that made everyone laugh, no matter what he was saying, even when he was angry. This made people disrespect him despite the medal he kept bragging about. He imitated a battalion commander shouting commands or giving a speech before going out to battle, but despite his solemn words, everyone just collapsed into laughter at his lisp. He’d received his commendation after being hit by shrapnel during combat and being honorably discharged. He once proudly explained the rank system when we were playing soldiers and taught us the correct way to salute.

  Someone sneered, “So what if he was in the war? He was just an advisor, judging by the way he talks.”
An advisor was what bureaucratic American liaison officers stationed with Korean troops were called, and the term came to refer to stupid soldiers who failed to understand instructions and harmed more than they helped. The term was passed down to my generation and was still in use around the time my son was conscripted. Pomade was particularly quick to make fun of the Advisor’s war stories. It was he, in the end, who made the nickname stick.

  The Advisor lived with his older sister and her boyfriend, an American petty officer. The original people of our neighborhood tended to despise or ignore the incomers, and treated the yangsaekshi and their families especially badly, despite extorting high rent from them every month. The adults didn’t bother using the polite form of address with the Advisor as they mocked him for being a parasite who lay around all day, to the point that his sister was forced to sell herself to make ends meet. The children had already agreed among themselves that he’d been a nothing in the military, too.

  But an unexpected incident made us admit that he had some merit. Across from the Twin Star Pagoda were two neighborhoods divided by a big road; they sat on slightly higher ground than us. Haeju Aunt lived on that side, so I was pretty familiar with its ins and outs. They had a kindergarten, a church, and also a rice mill, which we had too, only ours was smaller. To those who grew up in the country, rice mill conjures up a pestle and mortar attached to a water wheel, but this one was all cogwheels and belts, more of a factory.

  The street across from the Twin Star Pagoda also had a small barbershop and a cotton gin, and the yard of the rice mill was ruled by a courageous pair of geese. If we ever dared to go into the yard, the geese charged at us with their long necks darting like snakes, their honks sounding more like barks. They were indeed as scary as guard dogs, and no kid ventured in there twice. One day, my friend Guk-weon, whose family ran the dye shop, rushed into our house and said something was going on in the big rice mill. A child had gone up on the roof to fetch a stray ball and had been electrocuted by a loose wire.

  There was already a crowd gathered when we reached the barbershop. A policeman blew his whistle and struggled to keep the gawkers at bay. There were people with loaded bicycles craning their necks, people sitting in a row on the wall opposite, and children squeezing in between the adults, trying to get a better view. Guk-weon and I decided to go up to the roof of the Twin Star Pagoda. We detoured around the crowd through the carpenter’s and went up a pile of planks, climbed the fire escape, and reached the roof. But we were immediately disappointed by what we found.

  “Why are you guyth doing up here?” lisped the Advisor. He had thought of the place first and was already occupying it. We said we wanted to see what was happening on the rice mill roof, and to our surprise, he allowed it. “But don’t you dare call me ‘advithor’ again. Come, take a look.”

  Guk-weon and I ran over like little mice and crouched next to him. We could see directly down to the rice mill roof. There was a thick cable wound around a child who had fallen unconscious, with smoke coming off his burnt clothes. A rubber ball hung from a downspout. A few rice mill workers were trying to untangle the cable with a long stick but every time the split wires scraped something, there was a flash of blue light.

  An old man managed to make it to the roof despite people’s efforts to hold him back. His hands were wrapped in torn car tire tubes. He grabbed the cable and yanked, but it wouldn’t release its victim. The child twitched with each shake of the cable. The old man gave the cable another strong pull, but it writhed like a living snake and wrapped itself around his left arm. The old man stumbled left and fell, and the cable coiled around his leg. He trembled as he worked to extricate his leg, and succeeded, but now it was bleeding. The old man pounded the slate roof with his fist and shouted, “Did anyone call the electric company? Two people are dying up here!” The policeman only looked at his watch, his expression tense.

  The Advisor jumped to his feet. We stared up at him.

  “You bathtards … you’re juth going to watch? Inthtead of thaluting a thuperior offither when heeth going into battle?”

  We sensed that he was not joking, so we stood up and saluted him.

  In an instant, the Advisor reached the roof of the rice mill accompanied by the murmur of the crowd. He was completely barehanded. First, he went up to the old man and began pulling the cable off of him. His body shook violently, his muscles swelled, and his eyes bulged like those of a dead fish as he was wracked by the electric current. The places where the cable whipped him bled, and soon his entire body was bleeding. The Advisor finally succeeded in extricating the old man, who was carried down carefully from the roof by some onlookers.

  Next, the Advisor began to free the boy. Blood and sweat poured down his face. Guk-weon and I could hardly bear to see the Advisor in such agony. He managed to get the cable off the child’s back and legs, but as soon as he did, he toppled backwards. The cable snaked around the Advisor’s body as he flapped around with the rubber tube in his hand. The child was pulled down from the roof, and the crowd cheered. But the Advisor was still wrapped in the cable like Tarzan caught by a carnivorous plant, his body writhing. He rolled, and his legs slipped over the edge of the roof. The crowd roared in unified concern. He was still hanging there when an old truck chugged down the street. The policeman seemed to have come to his senses as he ordered everyone to make way. The truck had been sent by the electric company. They climbed the telegraph pole where the cable was coming from, but then the Advisor’s legs flailed again and he fell all the way down to the ground, the cable breaking his fall. He rolled off of it, all the way to the front of the barbershop.

  Guk-weon swallowed and murmured, “He’s dead!”

  As the people gathered to carry him away, he suddenly shook them all off and jumped to his feet. He then raised both of his bloody arms and waved to show everyone he was fine.

  I remembered that incident with awe for a long time. It was only later I realized that people who don’t have anything don’t have any choice, either, except to survive using desperate means. In any case, heroes like him would appear in difficult times, only to fade away as the years passed.

  Once the war reached a stalemate and armistice was declared, the American forces moved north of Seoul along with the people who followed them like migrating birds, and peace returned to the neighborhood. The adults were relieved and regretful at the same time. We had quiet now, but it was also the end of our war economy.

  The bustle of the Yeongdeungpo Market made us forget that we’d been at war for the past few years. At first, a few used book vendors appeared with their wheeled carts only at night, but then someone got the idea to set up shelves and lend out books for a fee. You paid a deposit, which was about the cost of a new book, and a small fee was deducted each time you borrowed a book. These vendors also bought old books; they probably became bookstore owners later on. The books were mostly from private collections that were broken up for sale after the war. They were likely once owned by people who disappeared or died in the conflict, volumes pawned by family members who needed to eat. There were all sorts of genres, from classics collections published during the Japanese occupation to ideological tracts and mainstream novels. There were even socialist or North Korean books, the kind that later South Korean military dictatorships would have more time and resources to persecute readers for owning. In fact, this proliferation of books published during the post–World War II era into Liberation space was still selling in dusty bookstores in the Insa-dong and Cheonggyecheon neighborhoods of Seoul, as late as the 1970s.

  My eldest sister loved books as much as I did, and we fought over them regardless of their age-appropriateness. We read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Tolstoy’s Resurrection, not to mention mainstream novels for adults.

  I used to read lying on my stomach in the living room, but I grew so annoyed by my family’s interruptions that I got an army flashlight, climbed up to the cramped attic, and read in there. Thanks to my mother’s influence, as an eleme
ntary school student I was reading the kind of classics people usually didn’t encounter until their teens.

  ~

  In the summer of 1953, after three years, millions of casualties, and 10 million people separated from their families, the war reached an uncertain armistice. A fourth grader at the time, I continued to take my classes in an abandoned factory with a leaky roof. The surrounding grounds, however, had beautiful fields and streams where, except for the winters, the children could freely enjoy themselves in nature’s classroom. We had what the children from the countryside called kongseori, where we snapped off beans and barley from the vines as they ripened and cooked them over a fire in a dry irrigation ditch. We tied up grasshoppers in foxtails to roast or cooked them in empty soda bottles, and roasted frog legs as a snack. We learned to catch fish using a bowl covered in cloth with soybean paste as bait, and caught sparrows by disturbing their roosts under eaves.

  I met my friend Yeong-shik when we were in Daegu; we began going to elementary school together when his family came to Seoul and moved into a Japanese-style house next to the police station across the street. He was the youngest, with three older sisters. The whole family was a very devout Protestant household that went to dawn prayers every day.

  Yeong-shik’s mother spoke with a Hwanghae accent in a high, thin voice. His father was a detective. At the time, we used the Japanese term “surveillance” to describe his division, but now he’d be called an “intelligence” officer. He had wide, deepset eyes that made him look like a Westerner.

  One time at his house, Yeong-shik showed off a bunch of things that he’d taken out from their built-in cabinets. Along with some photographs, there was a katana sword with its handle wrapped in gauze. I remember being awed by the shining silvery blade of the katana when it was unsheathed, coveting it for myself. He said it had beheaded many people. His father had been a policeman in Hwanghae Province during the occupation and had killed countless rebels during the Jeju Island “anti-operatives” campaign. The photos showed Mount Halla in Jeju, some military officers posing with guns and scores of prisoners in hanbok tied up in front of them. I still remember the haggard face of a young female captive in the front row with a baby on her back.