This was Ahn Jong-gil. Jong-gil later introduced me to his close friend Gwang-gil, who was short and so wrinkled that he already looked like an old man. Both of them had been in literary clubs since middle school and wrote poetry that they published in school newsletters and magazines. He asked me why I wasn’t in the Literary Club, and I replied that it looked boring.
Gwang-gil was not only part of the Literary Club but also on the staff of the school English-language newspaper. His older brother was a reporter, one reason why he knew so much about what was going on in the world. He talked about the dictatorship of the Liberal Party administration and their repression of the opposition, the execution of Cho Bong-am, who had once been a presidential candidate, and Dr. Chough Pyung-ok’s Democratic Party.
Their parents, like mine, had been educated in the colonial era, but now they were living in poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of Seoul. I didn’t see Jong-gil or Gwang-gil that often, but when I did, we traded books or went to the library after school to check out books together.
There was a boy I befriended in Hiking Club named Taek. At this club, the upperclassmen trained the new members in rock climbing on Saturday afternoons. The first route they took us on was the rock face on Mount Inwangsan. You went up an incline that kept getting steeper, becoming almost vertical at one point, and then, past a short chimney where two walls split, there was a brief overhang. You had to get over the overhang to reach the relatively easy track that led to the summit.
The freshmen, out on their first training expedition, were often defeated by this part of the course. The upperclassmen put a lot of slack into the belay line on purpose and wouldn’t pull the rope taut until the trembling climbers, arms and legs outstretched on the rock face, became exhausted and started sliding down. If a freshman couldn’t make the summit after three tries, the day would end with a group punishment and they would have to attempt the mountain again the next week.
Taek, who was a year above me, joined me on my way home one day. He was nicknamed “Pig” because his prominent forehead and thick lips made him look like a wild boar. His father worked in construction and stayed many nights outside of Seoul; later a stepmother moved in and gave birth to a little stepsibling. After the first day of training, he took me to a tavern near the shack he lived in with his family by Seoul Station. We drank two kettles of makgeolli together. I picked up on the fact that Taek was interested in literature, too. I had the impression that he wrote poems in his spare time.
“Hey, that story, ‘The day I got out of prison,’ whose experience was that?” he asked.
“I heard it from an older kid in our neighborhood.”
Taek nodded and said, “I’m glad you joined the Hiking Club.”
I didn’t say anything. He added, “Because home and school, it’s all a mess, but the mountains are always good.”
Taek and I were a year apart in school. We didn’t talk much but somehow became good friends. We went rock climbing every weekend in the mountains near Seoul. It was always a relief to get away from school and camp in the mountains with friends. There were nights I couldn’t sleep because of the moonlight glowing through the tent or the pattering of rain on the canvas. The clouds would rise slowly above the trees and wrap themselves around the peaks before scattering when we woke at dawn, shivering with cold, and lit a fire to make breakfast. Once, I woke on a summit to a sea of clouds beneath my feet and almost took a flying leap into them.
My Hiking Club upperclassmen would kill me if they knew this, but there was a winter evening when heavy snow fell as I climbed Suninbong Peak. Like magic, I could see every crack and hold of the rock. The rock never felt cold, even when I was grabbing it with bare hands, and the wind was also warm. The moon hung high above Suninbong. The snow-covered forest looked as if it were under a white blanket. I climbed that rock face without a belay, and if my upperclassmen knew, they would’ve ripped me a new one.
During lunch one day on Oriole Hill, Taek brought another upperclassman to see me. His name was Kim Seong-jin. He made an impression with the dyed, big-pocketed American military pants he wore instead of uniform trousers. As soon as Taek introduced me he said without preamble: “Look at his eyes. He looks like a troublemaker.” I just smiled, and he demanded: “Why are you doing that bullshit mountain climbing? Are you getting something for it?”
Taek and Seong-jin had formed a club of their own. They tracked down books, wrote on the sly, debated, and generally studied things that were not taught in school.
Seong-jin was an artist; his drawing skills were so good that he won many awards around the beginning of his high school career, even ranking in a national competition. He always had a sketchbook with him and would draw whatever he saw, whether person, street, or scenery. He had liked his middle school art teacher, Mr. Choi, a contemporary of the painter Lee Jungseob. Whenever Seong-jin spoke of Mr. Choi, he referred to his style as insaengpa (life movement) instead of insangpa (impressionist movement). One night, Mr. Choi had gotten drunk and was killed by a passing bus as he walked up the hill road outside Jahamun Gate. Seong-jin was quick to embrace the new in most areas, but hated avant-garde artists. He seemed very confident of his skills. His father had left his mother and him a long time ago and was living with another wife somewhere. His mother struggled to make ends meet. His two older brothers worked their way through school by being live-in tutors, and Seong-jin had no choice but to live with his younger sister and irritable, nagging mother.
My friends were mature for their age and given to reflection, but they were far from model students. They weren’t bad kids, but they were delinquent in the eyes of the previous generation. Taek, doubtless due to the neighborhood he lived in, had “graduated” from the local brothels when he was just a middle school student; he said that whenever he spotted a woman he knew on her way to the bathhouse with her plastic basin under one arm, he’d get an itch that wouldn’t go away until he’d gone to her place to wait for her to return, fresh and clean from the bath.
Whenever we visited the foreign bookstores that dotted the path between Gwanghwamun and Jongno, Seong-jin would make a beeline for the Japanese photo books and pocket editions. He liked to shoplift the photo books, which were the most expensive in the shop due to their high-quality paper and color printing. He would take two down at a time, slip one into his bag, and reshelve the other. When the store owner was distracted by another customer, he would sweep into his bag two to three volumes from a display just out of sight. He put books into my bag as well. My heart pounded and I wanted to run out of there as fast as I could, but Seong-jin took his time, leisurely perusing other books on display near the owner and even saying goodbye as he left.
Later, Taek and Seong-jin took turns running away from home with me. My mother never forgot their names, not even in old age, and whenever she happened to see a photograph of them, she would launch into curses. “Those little punks! Are they even making a living these days?”
Compared to hanging out with these upperclassmen, my Literary Club friends Gwang-gil and Jong-gil seemed nice and sedate, to the point of boring. But Gwang-gil frequently sought me out; through him I often saw Jong-gil as well, and we’d discuss books. I was reading the only monthly newsmagazine, Sasanggye, at the time, and we talked about the old critic Ham Sok Hon, who had been arrested for his writings.
~
April 11, 1960. The discovery of the body of the student Kim Ju-yul, found by a fisherman in the waters near Masan with a tear gas canister embedded in his left eye socket, turned the world upside down. He was seventeen years old, a year younger than I was, and had gone missing during the protests in Masan against Rhee Syngman’s rigged election. He’d entered Masan Commercial High School on March 14, the day before he died. Every newspaper talked about this incident, and the entire country, not to mention all middle and high school students, knew about it. The discovery led to more student protests against Rhee’s election and demanding a change in power through democratic means. After Kore
a University student protesters were attacked on April 18 by a group of thugs calling themselves the Korean Anti-communist Youth, 30,000 students took to the streets the next day. They managed to reach the presidential residence, Gyeongmudae, which wasn’t far from our school, marched past the stone walls of Gyeongbokgung Palace, were met with resistance at Jeokseon-dong, and made it to the last stop on the tram line in Hyoja-dong.
That April 19, I had been dozing off all morning, and third period was about to end. Two upperclassmen came into the classroom during the break, their faces grim, and made an announcement. “We’re teaming up with our fellow college students to protest all over the city. They’re at the Central Government Building already and are headed for Gyeongmudae. We need to be there, too. Please join us in front of the school gates after lunch.”
As we sat through fourth-period chemistry, waiting for class to end, we heard gunfire. It was one or two shots at first, no more alarming than a popgun, but soon we heard the tak-taktak-tak of continuous fire. Someone kept yelling, “Let’s go, let’s go,” but the chemistry teacher was a young man in his first semester on the job. He still looked like a college student and kept dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief, disconcerted by the situation. “We have to finish class. No matter what happens in this world, students must study.”
But despite his attempts to stop us, the trickle of students slipping out the back door suddenly turned into a river. Soon, half the class was in the corridor. We weren’t really thinking of joining the protests, but the sound of guns roused our curiosity and the upperclassman’s speech had stirred our hearts.
Outside, a wave of students was surging toward the school gates. But as we came down the hill, we found the steel gates firmly shut and teachers standing in front of them. “Go back, everyone, go back to your classrooms.”
The upperclassmen and alumni, who wore college uniforms, were arguing with the teachers on one side and trying to galvanize us on the other. “Our friends are bleeding to death this very moment in front of Gyeongmudae! The enemy is firing at innocent citizens and students. We can’t just stand by and watch!”
They pleaded and begged the teachers standing guard to open the gates, but the head disciplinarian and his colleagues did not budge. “We have an obligation to protect the students. Just look outside the gates!”
Outside the road was blocked by a barricade of woven steel poles. A jeep and some policemen were standing nearby. Undeterred, a few students had already begun to jump the brick wall some distance from the school gates.
We spent our lunchtime murmuring among ourselves and went back to our classrooms to wait it out. Finally, at around 2 p.m., we were allowed to go home—hours earlier than was normal. The teachers came out to block the streets that led to Hyoja-dong and made us go through Jeokseon-dong toward Gwanghwamun instead. We were in our usual groups of three and five when Gwang-gil spotted me. Jong-gil was by his side. Jong-gil lived near Seodaemun and Gwang-gil probably lived in Mapo.
“We found you! Wanna go see a demonstration?”
I didn’t know if Gwang-gil was serious, but I immediately agreed. “Yeah, let’s see what downtown is like right now.”
“Those assholes, they’re shooting people in broad daylight now …” This was from Jong-gil, normally so quiet and calm, now enraged.
The students who had been pushed toward the train tracks of Jeokseon-dong could be seen in the alleys, and as we came out to Gwanghwamun, we saw that the whole neighborhood had been overrun by protesters. They were ordinary citizens, college and high school students, and even the boys who sold newspapers and shined shoes. The sidewalks and roads were filled with people. To the left of the Central Government Building in what is now the Central Government Complex were police on horseback, standing next to the old Gyeonggi Province administrative offices, not far from the Anti-communist Youth hall. That hall was giving off black smoke as it burned, while overturned jeeps and trucks were on fire in the middle of the road. The old National Assembly building was besieged by protesters, and the Seoul Shinmun newspaper building across the street was aflame.
As we made our way through, the crowd of protesters kept spilling off of the sidewalks and pushing us into the roads. Occasionally, a jeep or army truck commandeered by protesters would streak by with a bloodied Korean flag fluttering from the open windows. There were can-shaped taxis remodeled from jeeps and military trucks standing in for ambulances, transporting medical school students in white gowns. A few of them carried dead bodies, while others bore injured young people wearing bloody bandages and shouting protest slogans.
A sudden roar of the crowd came from the direction of City Hall, and we were swept toward it. Protesters started throwing rocks at a police station near the stone walls of Deoksugung Palace. That station was where the police were posted every time the Liberal Party illegally dismissed the National Assembly. We started hearing gunshots as the protesters advanced. The shooting began that day from two directions in front of City Hall, and random gunfire rained down from the roof of the Seoul office of the Counter Intelligence Corps.
At the sound of gunfire, the protesters ducked and scattered in all directions. We ran as well, and I saw Gwang-gil grab Jonggil’s arm as Jong-gil fell. Suddenly, Jong-gil’s head jerked back and blood splattered across Gwang-gil’s shirt. Gwang-gil tried to staunch the blood with his cap and shouted, “Get a car here!”
I ran into the swiftly emptying street and waved both arms at an approaching jeep. It came to a screeching halt and someone gestured and shouted, “Get the casualty inside the car!”
Gwang-gil and I carried Jong-gil’s limp body to the back of the jeep and got in. One side of my uniform was soaked in blood. The jeep sped to the Severance Hospital near Seoul Station, where a couple of college students, who had been standing by with a military-issue stretcher, quickly carried him in, only to return with him moments later.
“Why isn’t he being treated?” Gwang-gil demanded.
“Can’t you see?” One of them jerked his chin at Jong-gil, whose legs had already gone stiff.
We went with them to the corridor where the dead bodies were laid down in a row and sat on the floor. In the sudden shock and grief of losing a friend, we lacked the words to console each other. All we could do was sit a distance apart and wipe our tears with our fists.
Things moved quickly from that point. Martial rule was declared in Seoul and every other city in the country, protests continued all night in the outskirts, and in some places, citizens fought the riot police with stolen weapons. Politicians resigned in droves because of the rigged election, Vice President Lee Ki-poong among them. When college professors joined the protests, all of Seoul’s citizens took to the streets, night after night. Rhee Syngman finally stepped down as president, and Lee Ki-poong’s entire family, including the son Lee had Rhee adopt as his own, committed suicide. Rhee himself was exiled to Hawaii a month after stepping down. Jong-gil’s death and the citizens’ protest that day in front of City Hall affected me greatly for the rest of my life.
We put together a posthumous poetry collection for Jong-gil during the long break in our studies. It was published under the title “Spring, night, stars.” Seong-jin, the artist, drew the cover, which I still remember to this day. He described it in these terms to me: “This hand, emaciated to the bone, is the poet’s hand. Above it is the crushed moon, symbolizing the world of the ideal, and the hand is outstretched toward it.”
It was summer vacation. College students volunteered at farms, like during the Japanese occupation, but high school students went on “penniless trips.” Because the country was still quite poor, most students couldn’t travel very far and would end up close to where they lived.
When I proposed to Gwang-gil that we take a penniless trip, he upped the ante by suggesting we plan together with some cohorts, upperclassmen, and graduates, which would allow us to travel further.
I told Mother about the trip, and to my great surprise she immediately gave her assent and
even told me to let her know if I needed anything. I was planning on going with or without permission, of course, but I had not expected her to end up giving me some emergency cash for the journey.
Gwang-gil slept over at our house the night before we left. The day had been humid and overcast, and sure enough, monsoon rains began to fall. Even now, I get restless before leaving on distant journeys. I woke at dawn to the sound of rain and tossed and turned for a while before getting up to go to the bathroom. There was a banging sound coming from the kitchen. I opened the door a crack to find my mother sitting on the floor and pounding away at something in the iron mortar. She had risen at dawn to make misutgaru roast grain powder and injeolmi rice cake for our trip.
In the morning, I packed the food she had made and set off with Gwang-gil. Our plan was to ride the train for free by avoiding the rail workers. The whistle-stop that was Noryangjin Station was surrounded by empty streets, making it easy to hitch a ride as long as you avoided the platform. Although transport in those days was obviously better than during the evacuations of the Korean War, when it took several days to get anywhere, trains were still almost the only way to travel outside the city.
We hopped aboard the Gyeongbu Line all-stop train, which indeed stopped at every tiny station and was slow to start. The cars were so crowded that people were stuffed into the passageways, and one person was even perched on an empty luggage rack above the seats. We sat on the steps in the doorway of the train.
There were other college and high school students dressed for penniless trips. We gazed at the passing scenery, wanting to remember every moment. We saw wide fields, steel bridges over rivers, little thatch-roofed villages against faraway mountains, farmers at work, children splashing around in irrigation ditches, the rickety shacks congregating on the outskirts of towns, and the ruins of old factories destroyed during the war.
We still needed a nominal destination, so Gwang-gil and I decided to take a tour of the historic Baekje sights and go down to Jeolla Province to visit Gwang-gil’s country folk in Sunchang. Nearby in Namwon was Seong-jin, who had told us he was staying with his grandmother there. Further down south in Mokpo, we planned to take a boat to Jeju Island, then return to the mainland through Busan, see the historic Silla city of Gyeongju, and take the Gyeongbu Line back to Seoul. A very academic, historical trip.
The Prisoner Page 37