The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  I bowed, and Brother Toad looked me up and down. “So, your brother-in-law?”

  “Just give us a couple of hamba rooms.”

  Brother Toad tilted his head. “Well, you’re an old hand so I know you can do anything. But this kid … It’s your first time, right?”

  I answered yes before I could stop myself.

  “I can’t give him a full day’s worth of chits. He’s got to accept a half day.”

  “Hey, don’t do that. Look at how big he is. He’s not a child or a woman. Stick him on a battlefield and he’ll come home with medals.”

  “Fine, let’s do it this way. Our teams change every two weeks, so we’ll pay him half-wages for the first shift. And we’ll see how he does before paying him in full the next. If you don’t like that, we’ll take just you.”

  The Captain looked at me and nodded. “We accept. We start this evening.”

  “And don’t be late for meals. There won’t be any stew left if you are. You’re both in Room 3.”

  It was a single room with holes in the cement wall and plastered with sack paper. Some occupants used military-issue blankets for bedding, or spread open a box and taped it up with electrical tape. There were seven people including us in Room 3, and the laborers who were washing after work immediately began complaining. “Why do they have to put you in our room? Room 8 has just five people, too.”

  “Why don’t we all try to get along? We’re all visitors here. I’m called the Captain in these circles. Family name of Jang. Nice to meet you all.”

  An older laborer by the window said, “You look like a pro. Let’s all rub along. There are lots of farmers who come fresh off the fields these days. They don’t know anything about the world and they’re a pain. You can sleep here.” The old laborer had a spot beneath the window where the air was fresh; he pushed away the unattended bedding next to his to make room for the Captain.

  I hesitated, unsure of what to do, until the Captain gave the unattended bedding another push farther away from the window and said to me, “Put your things down here.”

  We sat down and as everyone introduced each other, the man who had been in my spot came in with his laundry. His eyes grew wide when he saw me. “What’s this? The rolling stone takes out the seated stone? Don’t you have any sense of rank?”

  “Why don’t you cool it with the big words and work on not snoring instead,” said the old laborer, making it clear why he’d given away the man’s spot.

  The Captain handled it with practiced ease. “Hey, I’ve spent the last ten years living in hamba. Since when does anyone make a stink about who sleeps where? If you want to change rooms, I’ll have a word with Brother Toad.”

  The young man immediately gave in. Just like in prison, changing rooms meant you had to start all over again from the bottom in terms of social rank. And the Captain had implied that he was friends with the foreman. Grumbling, the young man moved his things toward a spot near the wall.

  Dinner was a large serving of rice, radish soup, tofu, fried squash, and bright-red kimchi. After, the Captain and I hung our towels around our necks, got our soap and toothbrushes, and went to wash at a nearby river under a steel bridge. The Captain said, “You’ve got to come on strong at first here. You’ll see they’re all decent fellows after the first few days. Think about it: what bad person would think to make a living from their own strength? All the bad folks are inside those fancy buildings in Seoul.”

  Work began the next day after breakfast as soon as the sun rose. There wasn’t much equipment in those days; everything was done through sheer manpower. The vehicles were decommissioned military junk. Excavators and cranes were nonexistent, bulldozers a rarity. Instead of today’s steel tubes, scaffolding was made from wooden poles about a palm thick and lashed with rope. Planks were fitted between the poles to serve as ramps and catwalks.

  Newbies were immediately put to work mixing cement and hauling bricks. As I carried heavy buckets across the shaky planks, I would picture my spine snapping or the catwalk giving away beneath me. I cushioned my shoulders with rags, wore suspenders made of military cartridge belts, and pulled the rope tied to the pail with one hand as I desperately made my way up and down. I could never pause for a second, as there were other workers in front or behind. The plasterer would egg me on for more bricks while from below I was bombarded with complaints about my cement mix hardening. But this was the easier task; the steel-rod-carrying job that came later was even more dangerous and difficult. My hands, feet, and back became riddled with blisters and wounds.

  The Captain was so good at his work that he was moved to the better-paying carpentry team. About two weeks after I got my work card, the Captain took me along to carpentry too and assigned me as an apprentice. This was a huge privilege for a newbie. My work now involved minor chores like carrying planks and cutting them as instructed.

  Then the rainy season began, and we exchanged our chits for meals as we killed time in the lodgings. When it rained all day, our mouths would be the first to get bored, so we bought noodles, and sometimes we bet on games of hwatu cards for alcohol.

  The high summer heat began right after the rains ended. Sometimes we ran out of construction materials, and, given the weather, we weren’t as productive as we would be in the spring or fall. We accrued debts at the company store. We had to eat to live, and the things we ate became debt that dogged us no matter how hard we tried to outrun it.

  The river in Sintanjin was beautiful this time of year. We went there every evening to wash. Sometimes we first contemplated the fish jumping from the mirrorlike surface and the rings that formed in their wake, as the nearby forest darkened. It was almost a shame to disturb the scene by jumping in.

  One day after lunch, the Captain, in the middle of a smoke, playfully jabbed me in the ribs and said, “Hey, let’s split.”

  He meant we should just up and leave work. To be honest, despite two months of backbreaking labor, the monsoon and delays in construction had left me with only enough to cover my debts and buy a one-way train ticket out of there. “I’m fine with that, but what about you? Your reputation will be ruined.”

  He waved away my worries. “I’ve already talked to the Toad foreman. He’ll cover for us by making it look like a construction material loss instead.”

  According to him, the foremen liked to squirrel away construction material, like cement or rods, and would make a mental note of which workers they could trust. Then they would write off the material as being stolen by workers that had left. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement, especially for workers with hamba debts.

  During the afternoon break, the Captain and I telegraphed our exit timing through glances and left the work site to collect our things from our room. We left only the blankets and tossed everything else into the tall grass behind the hamba. But we had to have dinner before we left, of course, and were sitting in the mess hall tent before everyone else when the Toad called the Captain over. The two whispered on about something for a long time.

  We had a great dinner of hot rice mixed with cold water and salty mackerel and radish kimchi, topped off with a cigarette. The plan was to grab our blankets and leave, but the Captain suggested we go to the riverside for some soju. He looked like he was waiting for something.

  The lights in the farmers’ village across the river were beginning to go out one by one. The Captain took me a short distance from the hamba to the material warehouse behind a wide empty space. The guard standing there trained a flashlight on us and opened the door. We went inside and loaded a cart with cement sacks, pushed and pulled it to the hill behind the hamba, and tossed in our bags. I went into the rooms alone and fetched our blankets. Everyone was fast asleep in a cacophony of snores and gnashing teeth.

  The cart was so heavy it may as well have been loaded with rocks. The Captain pulled while I pushed, and we passed the sandy fields to the road by the river where a truck stood waiting, the Toad perched atop it and smoking. We moved the sacks to the cargo com
partment.

  The Captain said, “Let’s ditch the cart here.”

  The Toad nodded and stuffed some bills into the Captain’s back pocket. “Consider this train fare.”

  The Captain and I began walking in the dark along the river. At first, the air was loud with frogs, but then it began to rain. This path along the Miho River to Cheongju later became the background for my short story published much later in the 1970s, “The Road to Sampo.” It’s a desolate story about how dreaming of the past and imagining village life became lost to those displaced by modernization. The migrant laborer Young-dal, the ex-prisoner and itinerant construction worker Jeong, and the debtor fleeing back home from her barmaid life, Baek-hwa, experience a brief moment of solidarity before realizing there is no place for any of them to call home. They become disillusioned, and at the end each heads off into an uncertain darkness.

  It was a starless night. The Captain and I crossed a steel bridge and walked the road that followed the river from Seopyeongri. My army boots were drenched with rainwater, and my socks were sticking to my feet. In the distance the occasional goods train passed by, blowing its horn. There were no lights from the villages and no birds calling in the night. We could hear only the babble of the streams nearby. I still remember the pretty names of the villages around there: Seomddeum, Dalyeowool, Darakgol, Gangnaemyun, Saemgol …

  Our road curved north, and we leapt from rock to rock to make our way across the river. Further inland on the river’s other bank was a village, but its lights were out and all we could hear was frogs. It looked almost abandoned. We found a shed, and inside all sorts of farming tools and food stores, sacks rolled up and stacked against a wall, and a ripped bag of fertilizer. The Captain and I each took an empty sack and spread it on a dry spot. The roof was just thatch spread over rafters, and the rain occasionally seeped through and landed on our faces. We listened to the rain for a while, unable to fall asleep at once.

  “Is someone in there?” a man shouted as he entered the shack. I quickly stood up. Apparently it had turned light outside a while ago. The farmer, who had come to fetch something, looked around.

  “We were just passing by and it began to rain,” I mumbled.

  The Captain got up and bowed to the farmer, who appeared much older than either of us. “We are sorry for disturbing the neighborhood. It was too late at night to risk bothering anyone at home, so we ducked in here to rest.”

  “Oh no, it’s fine.” The farmer got some things from the shed and said, “But what about breakfast? You’ve got to eat, haven’t you?”

  The Captain scratched the back of his head and laughed.

  “Well,” said the farmer, “there’s no tavern in these parts. Better follow me.”

  The farmer led us up the village road to a house where a willow tree stood next to a well. The courtyard was wide, and the house had a nice, long porch that connected all of the rooms.

  “Sit down here.” He said something to his wife in the kitchen and asked us about ourselves. The Captain said we were itinerant construction workers and asked if there were any building sites around.

  We had breakfast there. The soybean paste stew made from greens and freshwater snails netted from the clear waters of the Miho River was so delicious that I shamelessly helped myself to seconds. The farmer’s wife had also put great care into preparing dishes of gochujang stew, eggplants, and squash. A middle school boy politely knelt across from us as he ate.

  After breakfast, the Captain planned to visit the North Chungcheong Provincial Office to find out about construction projects. If this had been the fall, I would have stayed for a season at this house and eaten that freshwater snail stew to my heart’s content while helping out with the harvest. There was a train that led to Cheongju operating at the time, but we tramped the dozens of miles on foot instead. The Captain visited the office and said there was nothing to be had nearby, but North Jeolla Province was running a big land reclamation project.

  We found a good tavern in the market and went in for lunch. A woman was boiling freshwater shrimp stew over coal briquettes. We ordered a kettle of makgeolli and some of the shrimp stew and proceeded to get daytime drunk. The tavern was typical of those in smaller cities, with long tables and benches and a glass door to the street. Behind us a door opened and a woman in a chemise rushed outside, her rubber shoes scuffing as she went, and threw up in the gutter.

  “Stupid bitch, I told her to go easy on the booze.” The woman of the tavern grumbled loudly, as if she wanted us to hear. “I can’t wait to get her out of here and replace her with something younger. I can’t stand her stupid face, just can’t stand it.”

  The vomiting woman turned around and glanced at us from the corner of her eye but seemed to judge that we weren’t worth knowing. Perhaps she guessed that we were vagabond laborers. My memories and impressions of the villages near Pohang later fed into “The Road to Sampo,” with its character Baek-hwa.

  Land reclamation had already begun a year ago in Buan, a county of North Jeolla Province. Back when the Buan project began, Korean farmers were regularly experiencing springtime famines, colloquially known as “barley hill,” when food was in short supply. The plan to dam the mouths of rivers to create more fertile land for farming sounded like a good idea.

  The Captain and I took the train to Gimje, switched to a bus, and reached the place where there was supposed to be an office for the Dongjin River and Gyehwa Island reclamation project. There was, indeed, construction afoot. My experiences here were used in my novella Gaekji (A Strange Land). There weren’t any collective struggles or labor protests like in that story, but in these rural construction sites gangsters were often contracted as managers, and there were many conflicts between them and the laborers.

  It was such a big project that the hamba, too, was bigger and the food much better than in Sintanjin. The work was very hard, but thanks to my experience in Sintanjin, I never got too exhausted and woke up ready for more every morning. We started the day with simple tasks, like carrying soil and rocks, and ended when the stars came out.

  I was a city kid, having grown up mostly in Seoul. My parents were also urbanites who had received modern educations. My mother had tried hard to differentiate me from the children of laborers when I was growing up in Yeongdeungpo, because she had certain prejudices stemming from her lifelong distance from such people, as well as a desire to shake off the feeling of rootlessness or lowered class status. I was twenty-two now, and it was a good age to learn the vividness of life through hard labor. I was able to discover the natural beauty of our country and find my true self, far away from any city or village.

  Flocks of migratory birds filled the air over the tidelands and the reeds along the Dongjin River, soaring over sky and sea and fields before returning to earth. Autumn was in full swing. During the day shift, I would hike out to the end of the embankment with a pack on my back or pause in the middle of shoveling and look up to discover the sun already setting, the twilight glow dividing the air and water as seagulls and migratory birds flew toward me from a distant sky, calling as they came. I embraced in my heart those who had once been strangers to me.

  One day, the Captain and I went downtown, where we had first arrived months ago. We were planning to leave soon. For the first time, I wrote a postcard to my mother and dropped it in a mailbox.

  We left the reclamation project before the Chuseok holiday. As we paid off our debt and found ourselves with some money left over, the Captain hesitantly suggested stopping by his house in Cheonan before heading back out to look for more work. In the lockup he had spoken grandly, as if he’d roamed the land without a care in the world, but it turned out that he returned home whenever he had money to give to his family. I boarded the night train with him from Jeonju to Daejeon. The next day, we had an early breakfast of seollongtang at Daejeon Station and parted ways. The Captain offered me a night’s rest at his house, but I felt I might as well go home, and told him I would continue down toward the south.


  ~

  After the Captain left for Cheonan, I frittered away some time in Daejeon until I could board the all-stop night train for free, just as I had done during my “penniless trips.” I had hopped on one without checking, and it turned out to be the Gyeongbu Line. I hunkered down in the connecting corridor and fell asleep. We were in Daegu by the time the sun rose, but it was such a big city that I decided to stay on board all the way to Samryangjin.

  I was thinking of going to Masan after changing to the Gyeongjeon Line, mostly because of the Captain’s stories and his moving descriptions of the scenery that had greeted him with each new change of season and job. I figured, too, that there would be lots to eat in the countryside around this time and that people would be more generous.

  I recalled that one of my high school classmates lived in a farming village near Haman. My plan was to visit, and if he wasn’t there, I’d go back to Masan. I got off at Masan and took a bus north toward the Nakdong River. At an elementary school near the village administrative office, an elderly-looking female teacher kindly told me the way. By the time I trudged along and reached his front gate, the sun was setting. As I expected, he still hadn’t begun his military service and was helping his father on the farm. I found my friend preparing firewood in the courtyard, crept up behind him, and tapped his shoulder.

  “Look who’s here!” he shouted in surprise. He was shorter and skinnier than me, but looked tanned and healthy. We hadn’t been that close at school and had only spoken a few times. But he seemed glad that I was visiting him in the countryside. I told him I was traveling around, as was the fad for young people, and he scolded me for being so free-spirited when times were tough for everyone.

  His father, whom I met at their dinner table, was genuinely happy to see me. “I was about to hire a farmhand!” The Chuseok holiday had fallen right in the middle of the rice harvest, making it hard for him to keep up with his work. He said it wasn’t necessary to bring in the entire harvest and that his plan was to maybe get a third in and leave the rest to dry nicely in the autumn sun. Normally it would be considered impolite to enlist your son’s friend’s help with the farmwork, but as I was a surprise guest at their table, it seemed only fair that I should pull my weight. I suppose, too, you could say that having followed the Captain into the world of manual labor, I had done a lot of growing up and understood something about making my own way. After all, they say that back in the old days even wealthy families would send their teenage children away from home on far-flung journeys to see the world for just this reason.