The door opened and a woman walked in. I quickly sat up straight and backed toward the wall. She was tall with wide shoulders like a man, short hair, and something like a deep knife wound on her cheek. She reeked of alcohol.
“What’s this, a first-timer?” she said, snorting with laughter, and lay down on the Cashmilon quilt. She flipped up her chemise, under which she wore nothing. “Hurry up. I don’t have a lot of time.”
When I simply sat there hugging my knees, she came over to me, threw her arms around me, and pulled me toward her. “Come here. I’ll teach you.”
“W-wait, let me turn off the light first.” I reached over to turn off the light bulb and heard cackles from the other room.
“Who’s messing with the goddamn light? Hey, Unni, that kid is a virgin!”
“I know, bitch!” The woman on this side cackled as she stripped me of my underwear. “Don’t be nervous. Just get on top.”
I managed to get excited despite myself, and it was over quickly. The woman pushed me aside and left the room without looking back. My breathing gradually returned to normal as I lay there alone in the dark room. What the hell, I thought, that was nothing. I felt like something grand that had been growing and flourishing inside of me was now tumbling down like an avalanche. I felt a weary sense of disgust and self-hatred, reminiscent of a hangover, as images ran through my mind. Smooth foreheads, sly glances, girls’ knees peeking out from beneath the hems of sundresses, tiny white hairs on the cheeks of female students illuminated by the sunbeams shining through bus windows, girlish napes glimpsed between bobbed hair and blinding white collars on the way to school early in the morning, white ankle socks, slim calves … vanishing into the sunlight …
In the valley near Namwon’s Inwolli village lived a distant cousin of Seong-jin’s, who was something of an eccentric. Judging from the handful of old law books on the shelf above his desk, he had obviously studied for the civil service exam for several years before changing his mind. Never marrying, he had built a hut out of bricks and brought in some beehives that eventually multiplied to thirty. He had a hundred chickens, five milking goats, and 2,000 pyeong of farmland, but without any farmhands he struggled to manage even half of the work. He pointed at the foothills behind his house and said that land, too, was his to cultivate as he pleased—about 30,000 pyeong in total. The problem, he claimed, was that no one wanted to put in the work—if he could only turn it into an orchard, he’d have himself a gold mine.
Seong-jin and I were silently unimpressed. We were thinking the same thing: So what? The next day, Seong-jin and I began hoeing the remaining fields that had been left fallow. It was the first time I’d ever tried farm work, and turning over 500 pyeong of soil was no joke. It took us several days just to clear 200 pyeong by hand. The cousin pretended not to have noticed, but soon he leased an ox from some neighbors to plow the remaining land. We planted cabbage and turnip in preparation for the kimchi season. It was only common sense to ready oneself for the coming winter, but I felt strangely resentful at being bound to any future.
I had followed Seong-jin to Namwon, but I couldn’t afford to stick around until the kimchi-making season that would follow the first frost and late-autumn harvest. I returned to Seoul just when the Mount Jiri leaves were at the peak of their fall colors.
Mother, as always, simply bit her tongue and waited for me to make the first move.
Then one evening, in the middle of a blizzard, she knocked on my bedroom door after downing a few shots of soju, which normally she wouldn’t touch.
She was calm at first. “Fine, I won’t interfere with whatever you want to do with your life, whether it’s writing or not. But you can’t even work in a factory these days if you’re a high school dropout. Are you going to go to school or not?”
“I’ll just study on my own.”
That broke her composure, and she burst into tears. “I promised your late father. I promised him that I would do whatever it takes to send you to college and raise you properly. You ungrateful brat, are you just going to live however you want from now on? Then leave and never come back.”
I turned away from her and wept. Her words cut me deeply, but I was already too far outside the normal education system and thought I would never be able to go back. But it was Mother’s next words that really devastated me.
“I live because of you. So many times I lie down to sleep hoping I won’t wake up in the morning. But I live because I might see you in your uniform again, going to school.”
I did go back to school that spring but quit within two months and transferred to another school where I got into a turf war with the other students, prompting me to be transferred again. I went through three different high schools. I wasn’t some kind of back-alley bully, but I simply couldn’t accept mindless rules and corporal punishment, a remnant of the Japanese colonial education system. I had to fight back, and it was inevitable that either my adversaries or I would end up broken and bruised.
Summer vacation put an end to those trials. And if it wasn’t for a certain transition point for my mother and me, my future would have remained as dark and obscure as it seemed at the time. I decided, around then, to finish up the short story “By the dolmen” that I had been working on for a while. I copied what I had so far into another notebook and polished it in places. I was aiming for the most difficult target: the prize for new writers at Sasanggye magazine.
My writing had actually appeared in an established publication during my second year of high school. During my freshman year, when I was sending out story submissions wherever I could, I submitted a short story to a writing competition at school. It was titled “Before rebirth” and depicted the two days before Jesus was crucified, told from the perspective of Judas. I wrote it without knowing that Judas and Peter were both part of the Jewish resistance movement against the Romans, and I argued, very seriously, in favor of free will, using Judas’s voice. A precocious perspective, thinking back on it now. Someone plagiarized my story and won a new writer competition at a local newspaper. A friend from that region who happened to see it alerted the newspaper and the award was canceled, the real author revealed to be a high school student.
By the time I finished revising my work and sent the story to Sasanggye, the hot and tedious summer had passed.
I was sitting at Donghwa with Seong-jin one day when Wu-seok walked in, wearing his old uniform and carrying his school bag. The first thing out of his mouth when he saw me was curses.
“You bastard, you dropped out of school again! Meanwhile Taek’s father doesn’t care about his education and refuses to send him to school. Don’t you feel sorry for your mother?”
Wu-seok had happened to meet my mother once and had never taken my side since. He lectured me for a long time before unzipping his vinyl bag and taking something out. “I borrowed this just for you.”
It was a hair clipper. Nowadays they have the ones that run on electricity, but his were manual.
“What are you going to do with that?” I said as I shrank away from him. Wu-seok gave the clippers a few squeezes and said, “I’m going to cut your hair.”
Seong-jin pushed us both into the kitchen. The café owner, an old lady, opened her eyes wide and broke off her conversation with the cook. “How dare you come in here!”
“He says he wants to go back to school, so we’re going to cut his hair,” said Seong-jin.
The owner lady put on a prim expression and nodded. “Good for him. Cut it all off!”
Wu-seok sat me down on a plastic chair in the corner of the kitchen. Now, high school students would normally ask a barber to “use the second level,” because a completely shorn scalp doesn’t look good, takes ages to grow back, and leaves the skin around your ears feeling strangely bare. The barber would fit a guide onto the blades to leave a little extra length. But Wu-seok had never cut hair before and kept ripping clumps out of my scalp, in addition to leaving me with a buzz cut.
It was a late afternoon in November
, cold enough for the first snow to fall, but there I was sitting in a corner at Donghwa, out of uniform, with a woolen monk’s cap pulled over my stubbly head. It was probably about five in the afternoon. Around the time the evening papers came onto the streets, Sang-deuk, In-sang, and a few others pushed into Donghwa and greeted me with happy faces. I was wondering what had gotten into everyone that day when Sang-deuk, waving a newspaper over his head, said “Have you see this?” There was an article saying that my short story “By the dolmen” had won the new writer’s prize at Sasanggye. Three people were awarded, with Seo Jeong-in’s “Transferred to the rear” winning first and mine earning honorable mention. That evening, Sang-deuk took us to the Chinese restaurant next to Midopa Department Store, where we went up to the second floor and drank kaoliang.
I visited the Sasanggye offices the next day. No one in the editorial department spoke to me for a long time as I stood there, fidgeting. Finally, the man sitting across from where I stood asked, “What do you want?”
“I got a call.” I told him my name.
He stared at me for a while and exclaimed, “Why, you’re just a kid with a buzz cut! Did you really write that story? It’s not something an older brother wrote?”
This man, the novelist Han Nam-cheol, was to become my friend. He told me later that I looked so young, he’d mistaken me for a middle school student. He told me to sit down, asked a few questions, introduced me to the other editors, and took me to Editor-in-Chief Chang Chun ha’s office. Chang wore his hair parted down the middle and kept sweeping it back with his pale fingers. He shook my hand and remarked on how unexpected this was. “The submissions this time around were of the highest quality, so in view of your age it is even more surprising.”
When I got home, I saw my mother with a joyful face for the first time in a long while. She called me to her bedroom after my sisters had gone to bed. “My eyesight isn’t so good. Can you read this to me?”
She, who read the tiny letters of Japanese pocket editions without effort, held out my story printed in the magazine. As I had done in the old days, I sat down facing her and read out my story. It was late into the night when I finished. Mother brought out roasted sweet potatoes she had placed on top of the coal briquette lid, and we ate them while they were still hot, blowing on them to cool them down. Mother would later say, “I never opposed his ambition to be a writer. But the reason I made him keep a diary and bought him books when he was young wasn’t because I wanted him to make a career of it. I just wanted him to be someone who likes books.”
Later, when I was having a hard time making ends meet as a full-time writer, I grandly proclaimed to myself that writing was my calling. But now I think of it in more modest terms, as a job I am well suited for. And it is still my belief that a novelist should not be like the classical scholars of yore, who withdrew from the world, but more like a merchant, like one of the traveling storytellers who used to peddle their tales in the market square.
~
I attended night classes at a vocational high school on the outskirts of Seoul for a few months before graduating and going to college. I was two years behind everyone else. My eldest sister got married, and my new brother-in-law was poor but hardworking and clever. Mother, who’d not had an adult man in the house for a long time, seemed to feel more secure with him around. I did not use the usual honorific for a brother-in-law but called him Eldest Brother, as I still do today. He would come on my mother’s behalf to retrieve me from Donghwa or my friends’ houses, and act as a responsible older brother whenever I was in trouble. Even when I was imprisoned during the dictatorship years, he fearlessly came to visit me at the intelligence offices. He was the one who convinced me to return to school and helped me enter college.
At the time, almost every university save for a prestigious few were more or less the same, and the campuses still bore the scars of war. In some ways, it was better then than it is now to read and study on your own. There were almost no roll calls, and, provided you submitted your papers on time, no one cared if you never attended classes. One student lived far from Seoul, helping out with the family business, and only came up to copy notes and take exams. I had already competed with my friends to read as many books across the arts, humanities, and social sciences as possible, so the content of the classes was nothing new to me. If anything, I found that academic work had narrowed dramatically since the division of the peninsula.
There was about one year of freedom, between the April Revolution and May 16 coup, during which all sorts of books were published; one of them was Listen, Yankee by C. Wright Mills. The poet Kim Soo-young had published a few translated excerpts in a magazine and soon the whole book came out. Mills’s defense of the Cuban Revolution and critique of America’s foreign policy was shocking to us. I felt like a bucket of ice water had been splashed on my face. It was around that time that Sasanggye began sharply criticizing our military regime.
Ever since the contents of a secret memo between Korea’s intel-li gence agency chief, Kim Jong-pil, and Japanese Foreign Minister Ōhira Masayoshi had been disclosed a few years earlier, revealing a plan to normalize South Korean and Japanese diplomatic ties, opposition to Korea–Japan talks had been spreading through the universities and society at large. Reparations for the colonial period—a lump sum that naturally included victims of forced conscription, but was also meant to cover both the government and all individuals harmed by colonization—were set at 300 million USD, half of what the Philippines received. They had been labeled “congratulationson-your-liberation” funds by the Japanese, and “absolution on the cheap” by the Korean side. While done under the guise of normalizing Korea–Japan relations, it was really due to America’s unrelenting attempt to secure the last link in the Cold War chain in Northeast Asia. In light of how South Korea immediately began deploying troops to Vietnam after the reparations were agreed, the involvement of the American government in these proceedings was very clear. In fact, no sooner did Park Chung-hee win the presidency over Yun Posun than US Secretary of State Dean Rusk was sent to Korea to publicly browbeat both parties into signing the agreement. From March onward, a coalition of students and religious groups formed, and national protests were held around the fourth anniversary of the April Revolution against Rhee Syngman. Despite belonging to a university in an anti-communist third-world country, Sang-deuk, In-sang, Wu-seok, and Guk-jeong organized a nationwide cultural movement with their upperclassmen at Seoul National University.
The early cultural movement of the 1960s began with a national crisis in which Japanese colonial influence, through American pressure, was reintroduced to the peninsula and South Korean political power was concentrated in the hands of past collaborationists. I call it a cultural movement because, looking back among the various paths and methods of social engagement, this was the first time since the war that literature was used for political activism. The funeral held for nationalist democracy at SNU Liberal Arts in 1964 was nonviolent but powerful enough to make an impression on any college student. Some began a hunger strike at the end of May, sparking the student protests that would peak in June.
I was among the many protesters camped out on the steps of the City Hall building, which served as the National Assembly at the time. The protesters read out a petition criticizing the government, and with a cry of “To the Blue House!” we began to push toward Gwanghwamun and the presidential residence. Riot police awaited us around the Chosun Ilbo newspaper building and the Gukje Theater, but they were pushed back into the Gwanghwamun crossroads by students and citizens, prompting them to throw tear gas. Gwanghwamun Gate stands there today, but at the time the Central Government Building, which used the old Japanese Government-General Building, stood before us and the street was protected by three layers of barbed wire and barricades, with police standing close together in riot gear, armed with clubs and tear gas dispensers. Behind them, military transport trucks were lined up end to end, forming a wall.
When tear gas canisters came
flying toward us, we would grab them right away and hurl them back. We also threw stones as we tried to break through the front and sides. Once we succeeded, the great mass of people entered the back lot of the Gyeonggi Provincial Office that was to the right of the Central Government Building. The workers inside fled as protesters smashed the windows to enter; meanwhile, a stream of people flowed past the building and pushed on toward the Blue House, where the president lived. The police line began to break down. Once the protesters in front managed to move the barricade out of the way, they flowed in like a tide. The line of police quickly retreated to the neighborhood of Jeokseon-dong, near the Blue House, and tried to hold the crowd in the narrow back streets of Gyeongbokgung Palace. The alleyways filled with tear gas. The crowd pushed and was pushed, but eventually some protesters commandeered military trucks and drove off in different directions; it seemed they were going to spread the protest around the city, just like during the April Revolution. Later we learned that their lack of driving skills caused the vehicles to flip over or crash into houses and storefronts.
We got into one of the trucks, shouted slogans in front of the SNU Liberal Arts building, where they were still on hunger strike, and drove around downtown Seoul. Whenever a fellow protester knocked on the roof near the driver’s seat and clamored to be taken somewhere, we took off in that direction. “Slow down!” “Stop!” we would all shout in unison, and occasionally the driver would get out and shout at the passengers or passersby, “Do any of you have a driver’s license?” One or two would inevitably say that they’d driven in the military, and would change shifts with the driver. Eventually, the jeep ran out of gas or broke down near Yongsan Station. The day had darkened, and everyone was tired and hungry, so we went our separate ways there. Tram services had been suspended, leaving us to cross the Han River on foot.
The Prisoner Page 40