The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  The whole family lay down in a row, side by side, and soon I heard the snoring of the adults. I slept at the end of the row next to the son. In his sleep he occasionally dropped an arm on my head or a leg on my stomach, waking me up. I can say that as I slept for the first time with someone else’s family, in someone else’s house, I realized that my family and home were not the whole world.

  The next day, the fish peddler took me to the station and bought us both train tickets. She sighed as I stammered about my family. “You silly child. Your mother must be sick with worry right now. I bet she didn’t sleep a wink last night.”

  The journey back was so short and quick that we were in Yeongdeungpo before I knew it. My heart began to race. It was nice to see those familiar streets, but I oddly resented it a little that everything seemed to be business as usual despite my absence.

  Mother didn’t scold me once that day. Instead, she took the fish peddler out for lunch. All she had to say about it was, “I think I’ve made a lovely friend.” Mother and Father visited them in Incheon later. Every spring, during the croaker drying season, the fish peddler would send us a whole box of Yellow Sea croakers. Mother only gave me one punishment. She ordered me to write down everything that had happened, from the moment I left home to the moment I came back.

  My grades kept slipping. As spring finals for fifth grade approached, Mother forbade me from going out and playing with my friends after school. I did all right on my exams, but math was still a disaster. Mother knew this was because my extended sojourn in Chuncheon the year before had made me miss some fundamentals, but she still decreed that I was to have no vacations from then on. She even got my eldest sister to tutor me in math. My mother and sister took turns sitting next to me at the desk as I pored over my textbooks and workbooks, testing me. They beat me mercilessly if I dozed off or daydreamed out of boredom.

  It was summer, but I lost track of how many days had passed since I’d last been outside. Our neighborhood was by a stream, and we children loved the water and ran to it as soon as the chill broke. Once we became wet, the slightest breeze felt so cold that we crouched on the sandy banks clutching our balls and warming ourselves in the sun. The fishing net I had begged my parents for never went three days without being dipped in the river. Yeong-shik and Guk-weon each held a side of the net while someone else chased the fish into it. We caught carp, mandarin fish, minnows, and once a catfish that had lost his way. We imitated the adults by cooking these trophies in a pot with red chili paste, soybean paste, green onions, and garlic. I had been longing to join them again, but that damn report card had dashed all my hopes.

  I heard a low voice calling me by my childhood name. “Sunam-ah! Sunam-ah!”

  Mother happened to be out, and my eldest sister, having assigned a math problem, was in another room chatting with my other sister. I crept into the backyard, leaned against a tree of heaven and peered over the fence. Guk-weon stood there, holding a pail.

  “Let’s go fishing.”

  I listlessly shook my head. “Can’t. I’m stuck here.”

  “How stupid of you not to grab your report card before your mother saw it. Lend me the fishing net, then. We’re going camping.”

  Guk-weon’s eager face was burning a hole in my stomach. I grabbed the rolled-up net, two military-issue ponchos that Father used in the shop, a blanket and a raincoat, and set off. Guk-weon, seeing me outside the house, was beside himself with joy.

  Jeong-sam and Ho-shik were waiting for us in front of the school. Jeong-sam was the junkyard owner’s son, and Ho-shik lived in the back rooms of the barbershop next door. Ho-shik had followed his brother to the South and was a couple of years older than us, but two years below in school. The children in his class were still babies, but Ho-shik was taller than us by a whole handspan, and the skin above his top lip was darkening. His voice was the first of ours to change.

  We pooled what we’d brought: three blankets, two military-issue raincoats, the fishing net, a pail, pots, dishes, a pocketknife, red chili paste, soybean paste, and spices. We were set for adventure. We followed the tributary where the water level had shrunk to a trickle between occasional isolated pools, walking on the sands with Yangmal Mountain in sight. The Yeouido flight strip’s barbed wire fence followed us on the right. The fence cut through the middle of a wide grassy field, and at the end of the weeds was a long peanut patch. We walked across the field until we could see the shore of the Mapo district.

  Guk-weon suggested the water level might rise if it rained that night, so we set up our tent where the grass ended and the sand began. We cut poplar branches, stuck them in the grass as poles, and hung the raincoat over them to make an excellent tent. Inside we put down another raincoat and a blanket over that. There was plenty of space for four children to sleep under the remaining two blankets.

  We went down to the water and splashed around, prodding the sand and bringing up clams with our feet. Fishermen gathered every weekend at a wide pond under a hill with a pagoda, so we knew there were many fish. In the rainy season, the Han River overflowed to the foot of Yangmal Mountain and left behind a pond the size of a sports field when it receded. This made that spot as good as a fish farm.

  Guk-weon and I held the net on either side as Ho-shik and Jeong-sam herded fish into it. The little pools where waterweeds floated among the pebbles were obviously good places to fish. We moved slowly through the waterweeds, bowing over the surface, while Ho-shik and Jeong-sam splashed around and made a ruckus on the other side. At the right moment, Guk-weon and I locked eyes and spread the net at the same time. A couple of carps the size of our palms came up flapping against the net. We tossed them into the pail.

  We gathered large stones on the sand to make two stoves, put rice on in the small pot, and the cleaned fish and spices in the big pot. Ho-shik, in the meantime, snuck into a nearby field and grabbed some zucchini, peppers, and even a couple of ears of corn.

  “When the tears fall from the rice, it’s almost done,” said Guk-weon, pretending to be wise. The rice turned out well, and the fish stew was even tastier than it was at home.

  Dusk slowly fell on the riverbank. The peaceful silence right before a summer sunset was somehow sad and beautiful at the same time. The cries of the birds bedding down for the night in the reeds of Yeouido sounded as plaintive as babies settling down to sleep. The sudden moon hung low in the still blue sky, and a few vagabond stars followed in its wake. The insects in the grass began their throaty songs, and darkness descended rapidly. We made a fire on the sand with some branches we’d gathered. Just when we were feeling hungry again, Guk-weon and Ho-shik came back from a raid with an undershirt full of peanuts. We roasted them in the ashes near the fire.

  Guk-weon used the bugle mouthpiece he wore around his neck to play a sad lights-out tune. The stars looked ripe for the picking, as if they would all shimmer to the ground if you shook the sky. There was a rustling sound as Ho-shik took out a cigarette, lit it, and very calmly inhaled and exhaled. He must have filched it from his brother’s barber gown. Guk-weon held out a hand and Ho-shik handed the cigarette to him. It was my turn after that, but one inhalation left me coughing and teary for a long time. I don’t think anyone was thinking of home that night.

  My eyes opened of their own accord the next morning as light slanted into the tent. The fog over the water was evaporating in the sunlight. We joked around as we woke each other and dug holes in the sand to do our business. Then, still naked, we jumped into the river and swam out to the middle before flipping over on our backs to swim back to shore. The fish we caught were still moving their gills inside the pail while the more hotheaded ones were already belly-up.

  Time flew by so quickly that once we’d had our light breakfast of turnip pickles, the sun was already high in the sky and the river water was lukewarm. We ran back into the river and gathered clams and got our fishing net out again when we saw a school of freshwater shrimp. Guk-weon and I had sunburned noses, and Ho-shik, who was on the pale side, wa
s red all over.

  As evening fell, Ho-shik and Jeong-sam began to get anxious. They said in despondent voices that they hadn’t told their families they were going camping, and now they’d be in trouble if they went back. I too had been dreading this moment. Guk-weon shook his head. He said that if we went back now, we’d get thrashed and sent to bed without dinner, followed by days of having to endure everyone’s contempt, so it was better if we went home the next evening. By then the family would have grown too worried to be anything other than relieved to see us, and all we’d have to do was beg for forgiveness. And if that didn’t work, we could strike back with the declaration that we would only run away again. It seemed like a good plan.

  We spent another night camping, and at dusk the following day we headed back to the neighborhood and split up. I carried my blanket, fishing net, and raincoat under my arms and slowly walked home. Ho-shik would probably be beaten to within an inch of his life by his older brother. More than once, over the fence, I’d heard his sister-in-law egging his brother on during these beatings. That was why he had wanted to stay with Guk-weon a little longer and creep back in after his brother was asleep.

  I leaned against the plank fence outside our backyard and listened for the sounds of the household. My sister seemed to be cooking in the kitchen, and no one was out. I screwed up my courage and walked in the front door. My middle sister, who was sitting in her room next to the door, looked wide-eyed at my appearance and called for Mother. Thankfully, Father was away. Mother gave me the once-over and said, “Put those things down. You’re coming with me.”

  She didn’t ask where I had been or who with, but only took my hand and led me out of the gate. “You hate school and you hate studying and you hate home, am I right?”

  I didn’t answer. Mother walked me over the dike and past the wooden bridge built by the American military engineers, all the way to “Ghost Rock” by the hill with a brick house. It wasn’t completely dark yet, because a remnant of the sunset still lingered on the horizon and the stars were beginning to shine. Mother began dragging me by the hand into the river. “You and me, we’re better off drowning here together!”

  Ghost Rock had once been a sand quarry, and there were many pits concealed under the water. Even children who were good at swimming avoided that spot. There were a lot of waterweeds, and a number of people drowned there every year. As the water came up to our waists, I kept fearing that something would grab my ankle and pull me under. When I stopped in my tracks, Mother jerked my arm. “I’m going to die and take you with me. Only then will our family be at peace!”

  I strained against her grasp and kept saying that I would stop misbehaving. My sisters later reported that, according to Mother, I’d begged for my life, but that’s an exaggeration. Mother told me herself, when I became an adult, that she had read a scene like this in a short story in the Japanese magazine Bungeishunjū. Whenever she went downtown to Myeong-dong, Mother would visit “Dollar Alley” and buy a copy of Bungeishunjū or Shufu no tomo (The Housewife’s Friend). In any case, this extremely literary and melodramatic scene was the source of much chaffing from my sisters for years to come.

  Middle schools were selective at the time, condemning my generation to suffer “entrance exam hell” in elementary school. My fourth and fifth grades were spent moving between temporary schools, which made me largely self-taught during those years. The long stays with my father in Chuncheon did not help, resulting in spotty attendance and a poor grasp of the fundamentals—a calamity that immediately revealed itself in the sixth grade. My reading comprehension and rote memorization skills were fine, but my math and science scores were so bad that even I could not understand how things had come to this. I had to buy textbooks from lower grades to catch up. Mother and I stayed up almost every night, making up for lost time. I soon crept into the top ten in my class and, by the end of sixth grade, had finally retaken the top spot.

  The last winter vacation of my elementary school days ended, and I turned thirteen. By then my father’s health had been irrevocably damaged. I went with my parents to the middle school entrance exam results announcement, on the school sports field, where posters were already up with our test numbers. My father found my name first and shouted out, “Aigu, you’re in!”

  I looked up at my father and was surprised by how old he looked, his eyes filled with tears and his sideburns and temples so gray. On the way back we stopped at a grill in Jongno and had tonkatsu, but Father only drank some soup and gave me all his meat.

  “Are you feeling all right?” Mother asked, but Father merely said that his breakfast wasn’t sitting well. Looking back, I suspect that Father had been to the hospital a few days before and knew why he felt so weak and exhausted on the day of my entrance announcement. He did not live for more than six months after that day, and the summer of the year I entered middle school, he suddenly passed away.

  8

  Prison IV

  It seems like South Korea celebrates a national holiday or memorial day every month: March 1 Movement Memorial Day; April 19, the April / Revolution; May Day on the first; Buddha’s birthday in April or May; May 18, Gwangju Democracy Movement Memorial Day; June 10, Democratic Uprising Memorial Day; July 17, Constitution Day; August 18, Liberation Day; November 3, Student Independence Movement Memorial Day; and Christmas Day in December. These days had extra significance for political prisoners, as they gave us a mandate for protest. We ended up agitating every month of the year except January and February. The reasons for our agitations were different each time, but the point was to commemorate the dates with some kind of struggle.

  In March came the spring labor protests and the March 1 pardons, just in time for the universities reopening for spring term. Next, the student inmates who had been arrested for protesting would never let April 19 go past without a fight. Political prisoners had an obligation to teach the regular prisoners the meaning behind May Day and May 18. The commemoration of the June Uprising and the beginning of the Korean War on June 25 were also essential as educational opportunities, reaffirming why we were fighting for democracy. Constitution Day was to remind ourselves of the spirit of our Constitution as we battled against tyrannical laws, and Liberation Day was for demanding fairer pardons and remembering how we had lost our country to foreign forces. On Chuseok, the Korean harvest festival, we rested as we meditated on our gratitude toward our ancestors. And by the time we had finished our preparations for winter, it was already November 3; there was no way the student activist prisoners could overlook a day commemorating the student independence movement. Lastly, Christmas marked the point where we would rally to campaign for better pardons.

  Resistance in prison almost always began with hunger strikes, because there was basically no other way to resist. (I undertook nineteen hunger strikes during my five-year sentence.) The prison authorities were obligated to report to the Ministry of Justice any political prisoners on hunger strike for over four days, and the prison wardens, whatever the specific circumstances, would face reprimand for negligent management. But you really had to hunger strike for at least a week, because in practice four days were not enough to get a response.

  You notify the fact of your strike to the prison authorities, read out your petition, lean out of your bathroom window and shout a two-line, four-syllable slogan, and sing songs of struggle. When your throat closes and your mouth gets dry, you bang your utensils against the window frame to let the other political prisoners know what you are doing, and finally, you begin kicking the door to your cell. If your heel begins to hurt or you become exhausted, you slam the door with a broom or pail. A decorous public figure like me would desist when he heard the pounding of guards’ shoe soles on the cement floor, but the student protesters would throw feces at them, shove a mattress against the door to keep it from opening, or hold up their chopsticks and threaten to stab the guards in the eye. Eventually, five or six guards would enter the cell, drag the political prisoner to the hall, handcuff their hands behind
their backs, tie up their arms with rope, and fasten a leather-strapped muzzle with a bit made of wood. The bit fills your mouth and presses down on your tongue, making you drool, and you’re thrown into punitive confinement in one of the sensory deprivation cells. Regular prisoners are thrown in six or seven at a time into that space less than a pyeong wide, where they can barely move, but political prisoners were normally confined alone.

  They dared not put a muzzle on me, but I could not avoid the sensory deprivation cell. The thought of the young inmates thrown into the cells next to mine along that dark hall made me determined to persist in my hunger strike. There was a tap, a defecation hole, cement everywhere, and a vent about two palms wide at the very top of the tall cell wall. Handcuffed and bound with rope, I could only tell the time of day and how long I’d been in there by the angle and intensity of the light seeping through the vent.

  It would take at least two hours for a youth with a bit in his mouth to realize how his situation had changed and to become aware of the cell, the hall outside, and the space next to the cell block that was outside the window. His tunic would be drenched with saliva from the bit, driving him to the brink of insanity. One young man told me that words would boil like porridge cooking in his chest and throat, bursting to get out. No matter how hard he tried to scream, all he could manage were uh, ee, uh, ee, sounds that barely reached the tip of his tongue before collapsing in his throat. After a day, the inspection slit on the steel door would slide open with a clang, and the eyes of the punishment cell guard would appear. The slit would mercilessly slide shut if the prisoner’s eyes were still hostile, but by the time the guard looked in, the prisoner would usually be lying on his side, spent of fury. The door would then open and the free air of the corridor would blow in.

  The guard would state, in a businesslike tone: