We had almost reached the other side of the bridge when we saw a barricade, with a small gap for the cars being individually inspected by both civilian and military police. They asked me for my ID. When I said I was a student, they commanded me to stand to the side where there was a group. They repeatedly made us do punitive sit-to-stand exercises before taking us to a nearby police station. They inspected our bags and possessions and discovered fliers printed with the petition protesting our “diplomacy of humiliation.”
“You’re on your way back from the protests, correct?”
We defiantly declared that we were. Normally, any conversation with the police would begin with a slap to the face, even for an offense as lowly as breaking curfew, but they were very calm this time. A car came for the three of us from Noryangjin headquarters, and that’s when we learned that martial law had been declared. After being interrogated late into the night and stamping our thumbprints on written statements, we were held in lockup for two days before being transferred to detention for twenty.
This is where I met the Captain. In the first lockup, I was with two boys brought in for pickpocketing and an old drunk who looked almost like a beggar. The old man was released the next day and I was alone with the two boys when, in the evening, I heard someone arguing loudly with the police officer in charge of registering prisoners.
“Hand over your belongings.”
“I’ve got nothing but my dick. What do you want from me?”
“Then what’s this?”
“What are you, stupid? Cigarettes and matches.”
As the officer reached into the man’s pocket, the man grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back. “I bought all that with my own money!”
“Let go!”
The other policemen swarmed, pushing him and drowning out his voice, until presently I saw the man approach the lockup with a lit cigarette in his mouth, talking wearily to the policemen.
“You want me to plead with you for my own smokes? Then there’s nothing I can do.” The cage opened and shut. He shot me a look and said to the boys, “Hey kids, spread out a blanket for me.”
The boys were quick to do his bidding as they grabbed a blanket from the stack and spread it out opposite the toilet. I thought the spot nearest the bars was the best place, but that was only true for people like me who wanted to read by the light. The man had chosen a spot where he was invisible to the guard.
He sucked with relish on his cigarette, lay down on one elbow, and said to me: “Let’s introduce ourselves. It’s not like there’s a crowd here, so why not be democratic about it? I’m Jang.”
I bowed my head, and he continued: “You look like a student. What landed you in here?”
“I was demonstrating—”
“And those fuckers threw you in for that! It’s like the Japanese bastards never left. Hey, have a drag of this.” Jang handed me his cigarette. In truth, I’d been craving it ever since I’d caught a whiff.
That first delicious hit of nicotine had me “going to Hong Kong.” I asked Jang how he’d wound up here.
“The foreman was messing around with our chits, so I beat him up.”
He was a day laborer at the construction site for the second Han River Bridge that had just broken ground. The public works construction projects at the time were handled through hired subcontractors who bribed their way into the work, just as construction projects had been during the Japanese occupation. I discovered from my reportage in the mines during the 1970s that this was still going on. Jang didn’t talk too much about this depressing state of affairs and went on to tell the story of his life, dropping jokes in where he could.
He had been honorably discharged from the military as a marine sergeant. In fact he had only three rank insignias, but, owing to his enthusiasm and know-how at the construction sites his fellow workers had promoted him to “Captain.” At the time there were few major projects underway, which meant technicians across the country either knew, or knew of, the others. Captain handled his work expertly and had built a good reputation for himself at the hamba, the temporary on-site lodgings and canteens for construction workers. The other workers looked up to him as an old hand. He was thirty-three, broad-shouldered and fit, but so tall he actually looked skinny. His hair was curly and his face sunburned, and his unshaven grin recalled the face of Burt Lancaster in a western, riding into town after a long journey.
Captain Jang and I slept side by side for the twenty days in that cage where petty thieves came and went, and shared my lunch box bought with the money Eldest Brother had put in for me. We grew as close as brothers. On sleepless nights, he lay on his stomach and told me all about how he got by in this world.
He had a family, of course: parents, siblings, a wife, and children. Like most independent farming families at the time, his parents had just enough land to cultivate so they would not starve to death. He managed to graduate middle school and left home because he had heard the military would clothe him, feed him, and teach him some skills. His older brother was about to marry, his younger sister had found a job at a hairdresser’s, and he didn’t want to be a burden to his family. The marines were said to be tough, but it suited his personality to throw himself completely into what was right and absolutely reject what was wrong.
I asked him why he didn’t go for first sergeant, chief warrant officer, or actual captain while he was there, and he suddenly turned glum and silent before giving the bars a kick and shouting, “Guard! Hey, whoever’s in charge! Get over here.”
A drowsy guard approached, rubbing his eyes. “In charge, my ass.”
“Now who have we here? Officer Park, serene as the Buddha …”
“Stop farting around and get to the point. What do you want?”
“You got my wallet and my cigarettes? Light me one.”
The guard grumbled as he complied but, having scrapped with each other before, they seemed to have reached a kind of understanding. In other words, the Captain had become our captain. The guard took out two cigarettes from his shirt pocket, put them between his lips and lit them at the same time, and handed them over.
“Hey, I said get me my wallet, too.”
The guard was annoyed. “You give this bastard an inch and he takes a mile.”
“What, you little pip-squeak? What are you saying to this elder brother of yours?”
“What do you want with your wallet, anyway? That’s against regulations!”
The Captain switched to a serious tone of voice, which I had never heard before. “Officer Park, my wallet contains a photograph of my old flame. This kid wants to see it. And I keep thinking of her.”
“Fine.” The guard came back with his wallet. “Push it outside the bars when you’re done with it. I have to put it back.”
As the guard went away, muttering, the Captain drew out a photo from deep within the wallet’s folds. We puffed away on our cigarettes as we stared at the photo. There was a moon floating in the sky like a prop from one of those old variety shows, and on a landing or a stairway with overhanging branches stood a young woman wearing a hanbok top, a mid-length skirt that was the fashion at the time, and white ankle socks, her hair in braids and a big smile on her face. At the bottom of the photo were white handwritten letters that read, “Memories are forever!” The photo was a bit yellowed and faded.
“Wow, she’s pretty. This is your old flame? What happened to her?”
“What kind of a novel do you plan to write like that, rushing straight to the ending? And what do you mean by what happened to her?”
“Well, they say first love ends in tragedy …”
“She’s not my first love. And what happened was, she became my wife. And that screwed up my life.”
That prosaic conclusion took the wind out of my sails. He’d quit the military for her. She owned some rice paddies in the countryside back home, and her older brother had taken on the family poultry farm, where she had suggested they help out for a bit before striking out on their own wit
h some borrowed land and starter chicks.
Around then, the schools were being provided with sacks of wheat flour, baby formula, and corn flour, emblazoned with logos of a handshake, thanks to the UN Korean Reconstruction Agency and US Agency for International Development. Some argued that such measures were undermining the resilience of Korea’s agriculture. But the hundreds-of-years-old tradition of planting rice and barley was no longer seeing us through, and now people were trying out all sorts of more profitable farming ventures. Quail was a medicinal fad that ended up crashing the market. Black goats were another, though it lasted a little longer. There was a breed of white chicken called Leghorn that came in through foreign aid; its speedy growth and ability to produce plentiful eggs made it so popular that Korean chicken breeds were pushed out. The Captain left the marines to join his wife at his brother-in-law’s poultry farm and got his own Leghorns to set up a business. But a poultry disease soon laid waste to both his brother-in-law’s and his own chickens, leaving them in financial ruin.
In the three years since, the Captain had wandered the land alone. The Han River Bridge construction was well underway, allowing him to find work and extend his stay in the city, otherwise he would gladly have left as soon as the azaleas bloomed in the spring. Beyond Seoul there were always municipal infrastructure projects going on, mostly land reclamation or reservoirs or irrigation, sometimes government buildings. When the work was good, he would stay put there until the fall, but usually he left before the midsummer monsoon. Sometimes there would be a good barley harvest, which didn’t pay well but afforded him free meals and lodgings at a farmer’s house. At the peak of summer, he went to the beach. An easy moneymaker there was to rent a lung-capacity machine as a kind of carnival attraction, enticing people to pay to blow into it to see who had the biggest lung capacity. He went swimming when it was hot and slept in a tent on the beach. Once the currents shifted and cold winds began to blow, schools of cuttlefish would start to make their way down the east coast, from Sokcho to warmer southern waters. That was when Captain Jang would head for the eastern shore, where he would put on a raincoat and rubber boots and rent some fishing equipment and a place on a boat. A cut of his catch went to the captain and the boat owner, and the rest was his.
The work was done at night. The bright light of the fishermen’s lamps drew crowds of cuttlefish. The boats headed way out, making the watery horizon glow and dimly illuminating the sky. A turn of the spinning wheel brought up the snagged cuttlefish, sparkling whitely in the artificial light. The fisherman would rip off a flapping cuttlefish with one hand, toss it into a basket, and give the wheel another turn with the other. When dawn broke, a crack of light formed on the faraway horizon, splitting it into above and below. Bands of red and yellow unfurled across the sky.
By the time he had followed the cuttlefish down to Gangneung, Samcheok, and Ulsan, it would be deep into fall. That’s when he returned to the countryside to help with the harvest. Eating lunch by rippling fields of gold and napping after a bowl of makgeolli was, he said, the best feeling in the world. He returned to the city in the winter. There, he rented a small room and an oven fashioned from an old oil barrel, which he would set up at a bus stop or market to sell roasted sweet potatoes. If he had extra to spend, he could get a covered food cart to sell soju or find another decent construction site and pass the winter nights in the hamba.
The Captain’s stories made my heart race. His life seemed as free as that of birds migrating with the changing seasons. I imagined that he had no fear of living, that his hardship wasn’t so bad. To live, that in itself was a vivid joy. Even suffering is, in the end, a part of this living.
I decided to follow the Captain. I was released about four days before him. When I stepped outside, I saw how the new leaves were now a lush green and the city was basking in high summer. The schools had been ordered to shut down, but the summer break had already started.
By then, even my younger sister had married and left home, so our household consisted of only my mother, my younger brother, and me. Mother had liquidated all of her family property to buy a shop in a market in Heukseok-dong and was selling packaged foodstuffs. My brother and I moved in the merchandise and closed the store when my mother was too tired at the end of the day, which was late at night. The two of them slept in the tiny room attached to the store, and I went up the ladder next to the kitchenette to the attic under the roof.
One night, my brother caught me packing my bags and alerted my mother. She had become so used to it by now that she seemed unfazed. “Going somewhere?”
“Yes. I’m going to stay at a temple to read and write a bit.”
Mother scarcely reacted. We didn’t have a single quiet moment all day, living as we did in the middle of a market. While I was busy running away from home again, narrowly escaping disaster, and getting shipped off to Vietnam, my brother remained stuck, being raised by a mother who fretted constantly about her other son. Whenever we got into arguments later in life, he would bring up the same thing: that he had suffered because of me, that my needs had overshadowed his, that Mother had no wherewithal to take care of him because she was always concerned about me, that his teenage years had been difficult, that I knew nothing. He resented Mother, because all she could think about, despite his loneliness, was me.
When I set off with my backpack for the first tram, striding out of the shuttered store, Mother saw me to the corner of the market. “Wherever you end up, don’t forget to write,” she said, and handed me some cash.
I boarded the now-familiar all-stop train with the Captain. Nowadays it takes about an hour to get to Cheonan, but it took so long then that we arrived around four or five in the afternoon. We walked into downtown from Cheonan Station. I saw a butcher at a market close to his neighborhood and bought a geun of pork. He bought a bag of sweets from a stand that had piles of senbei crackers and striped candies—a modest homecoming.
His house was an old Japanese-style building, where the door on the alley side seemed to be for the landlord while the gate on the main road was for the tenants. Just like the tree of heaven in front of our Yeongdeungpo house, there were a couple of out-of-place plane trees standing guard close to the front gate. Even before we stepped inside, a little girl in a tank top, perhaps a second or third grader, carrying a toddler on her back, hesitated before shouting “Daddy!” and running toward the Captain.
“How have you been? Where’s your mother?” The Captain took the sleeping child from the girl’s back and held him.
“Mom took the wheelbarrow out to do her selling.”
“Look at this runny nose,” said the Captain, and deftly swiped away the child’s snot and flicked it to the ground before wiping his hand on one of the trees.
His wife appeared around seven, just as the shadows grew long on the ground. The little girl’s face brightened at the creaking of the barrow. “It’s Mom!”
The woman called her daughter’s name as she entered the gate. The Captain, still holding the younger child, was stepping outside just then. They collided in front of the swing doors.
“Oh! When did you get here?” The woman took the child from him and the Captain took the wheelbarrow from her. He unloaded the leftover vegetables and empty bowls and leaned the wheelbarrow against a wall. I fidgeted a bit and bowed. The Captain’s wife made no sign of annoyance at finding an unexpected guest as she quickly prepared dinner for us.
The Captain’s wife did not go out to sell vegetables the next day. She began cooking early in the morning and went out to buy some mackerel, saying we needed something fatty for the meal. The Captain and I went to a nearby municipal office to see where the biggest public works construction site was, in order to find some work; it happened to be a cigarette factory in Sintanjin.
The next day, the Captain’s wife skipped work again so she could accompany us to the station. If she wanted to work, she needed to leave for the fields at dawn to buy vegetables, or hit the big market near the station to buy fish, but
she had decided to take two whole days off instead, in order to welcome her husband. At least the Captain had given her some money he had made at construction sites in the city, I thought. She left her daughter with the little one and followed the Captain to the train station. Who knew when he would return again?
“You should go back. We have to get on the train now.”
I stood a distance away, watching them try to part. The Captain was consoling his wife as she wiped her eyes with the hem of her skirt. Inside the station, the Captain lit a cigarette and sighed deeply.
~
At the construction site in the town of Sintanjin, the bones of a building were beginning to go up in the empty field, with the site’s hamba—company store and offices—below. The hamba office was a military-issue tent set up in front of cement-block buildings that looked slapped together. There was a mess hall outfitted with tables and long benches made of particleboard, and a convenience store stocked with soju, snacks, cigarettes, soap, and other essentials.
A desk and comfortable-looking office chair were set up in front of the store. An overweight man sitting in the chair greeted us first. “Hey, Captain, what are you doing here?”
“Well, if it isn’t Brother Toad. Is the bridge construction done? Did you make some good money?”
“What money? That job ended before we could finish it. Some other bastard became National Assembly member, and it was curtains for that project. Where are you coming from?”
“The second Han River Bridge. I didn’t want to spend the summer in the city, so I came here for the scenery. Anyway, it’s good to see you again! I’m ready to earn a few coins.”
“Hate to break it to you, but we’re full up. There won’t be any more paydays between now and autumn.”
The Captain chuckled and poked me in the back. “Hey, say hello. He’s our older brother. This kid here is an uncle to my kids.”
The Prisoner Page 41