The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  After breakfast, another monk came to me and told me to bring my things outside. He didn’t say anything as he walked briskly along. I followed with my bag. We went down some stone steps and to a path through a thick pine forest. Here he said: “Wait here, another monk will come and fetch you.”

  I waited for a long time, crouched on those stone steps. The birds twittered noisily as they flew from treetop to tall treetop. Somewhere close by I heard the sound of young people on an outing and a woman’s laughter. A young man started to sing in a tenor voice:

  Standing on the old hill where I played,

  this unchanging scene is just a poet’s dream.

  The great pine tree of old is felled and gone.

  The lyrics, which had always sounded trite to me before, pierced my heart. A middle-aged monk with a beggar’s sack on his back and a straw hat on his head came down the stone steps and stopped to look down at me.

  “Are you the one Monk Gwang-deok told me about?”

  I said yes.

  “Follow me.”

  I awkwardly stood and gathered my bag.

  “I don’t know what they were thinking when they put you in my care, though. They told me to come get you since you have nowhere else to go. But my hermitage is very small. We can’t afford to keep you with us long.”

  The bus shook for hours as it drove toward Ulsan. We got off, followed a path that ran alongside a beach, and after many miles reached a hermitage that had a main hall, a kitchen attached, and one room that served as living quarters. Despite its small size, it had its own Buddha statue inside. There were straw mats on the floor—who knew how old they were? It had been built very close to the cliffs; the sound of powerful waves striking the rocks made my ears ring at first.

  The monk who brought me said the temple had been left empty for a long time and needed to be cleaned out. He put me to work with a rag. Helped by my memory of cleaning the classrooms in elementary school, I ran the rag in lines along the floor. The monk then instructed me to light the stove and make rice. When it was done, he took a pair of aluminum lunch boxes from his sack. Inside were sweet potato shoots, greens, kimchi, preserved turnip, and other side dishes that he must have obtained from the Beomeosa kitchen. We ate by candlelight with a bowl of rice each, and it tasted like heaven.

  I had thought there was only the one room, but past the hall that housed the Buddha statue lay another, longer, narrower room with earthen walls. The floor was dirt, with a straw mat so old that it, too, was coated in dirt. I hardly slept due to the noise of the waves. Suddenly the door burst open and the monk shouted: “You little parasite, you say you want to dedicate your life to the Buddha but you’re just lying here asleep because you don’t even know it’s prayer time!” Saying I deserved a beating, he began to kick me where I lay. I jumped up and fended him off, running away to the yard past the main hall.

  “Look at that bastard go! Leave, then!” He mercilessly tossed my things into the yard. I rushed to put on my shoes and grab my belongings, only to realize that I had no idea where to go at that time of night. The monk ignored me and began knocking on his moktak and chanting.

  After standing there for a long time, I made my way back down the dark mountain path. Day began to break as I stumbled along. Tears ran down my face. “That son of a bitch, that bastard of a monk …”

  There’s an old story about a young monk who complained to an elder monk after being beaten at a temple where he had been sent on an errand. In answer, the old monk scolded him. “Don’t you see they were doing you a favor?” Later, when the young monk became a novice himself, he learned that it was a kind of rite of passage for initiates.

  It was evening, dinner long ended, by the time I managed to reach Beomeosa. I sat at the store near the gate of the temple, appeased my hunger with bread and a drink, and entered through the gate, exhausted. No one paid me any attention. There was not a soul in the empty courtyard of the main hall, but then I noticed a familiar youth sitting on the porch of the living annex. It was the handsome boy monk I’d spoken to on my first visit there. In the outside world he would have been a high school freshman. I wonder if he’s a great monk now.

  I sat down next to him. He didn’t seem to know I’d just been somewhere far away. When I described how I had been cast out by a fierce monk, he smiled and said, “Have you noticed that to reach the inner temple you must first pass through three gates?”

  I immediately understood what he meant. “And how did you decide to become a monk?”

  He answered as if it were nothing: “Nowhere else would feed me.”

  That night, I went back to the guest room. The monk in charge of guests entered early in the morning, grumbling as he looked around the room, and told me to wait by the stone steps again after breakfast. With no choice in the matter, I waited just like the previous day. There were many monks going in and out of the temple that day. I stared at them and they stared back but passed me without a word. It wasn’t as if I could ask, “Are you looking for me?”

  I couldn’t have lunch and was starving by the time dusk rolled around. But no one came for me, and none of the monks going in and out talked to me. Though it was early summer, night was already falling. Finally an old monk walked down the stone steps, looked surprised, and cleared his throat. “Huh, you gave me a fright just now. Who are you?”

  I bowed without a word, and he stood for a moment before saying, “Aren’t you the boy they asked me to teach the ways of the temple? Come with me.”

  We walked the long path to the paved road and rode the night bus to downtown Busan. The old monk wordlessly cut through the crowds. He moved so fast that I could barely keep his robes in sight and didn’t realize I was in Busanjin Station at first. It was only when we reached a waiting room that I saw it was a station. I kept looking around us.

  The monk sat down heavily and gestured for me to join him. As I sat, the hunger and thirst of the entire day nearly overwhelmed me.

  “Go buy some drinks from that shop over there. You have money, right?” Ah, yes, I mumbled as I ran over and got two bottles of soda. I gave him one and drank the other, feeling a burn in my empty stomach as I did so. The monk took a few hearty swigs and paused to catch his breath. “Why are you trying to be a monk? Look at how many monks there are. Everyone has their own path to walk.”

  I knew that making any kind of response to this would be my loss, so I continued staring at the floor.

  “Forget the whole thing and go home.” He drank half the bottle, stood, and placed it on the table. “I’m getting tickets. Don’t go anywhere.” His robes swirled into the crowd.

  He never came back. I waited a full hour before suddenly becoming suspicious. I jumped up and scanned the lines of people waiting for tickets, trying to catch a glimpse of monkish gray fabric. But all I saw were scores of soldiers on leave. I went to the other waiting areas, but the monk was nowhere to be found.

  I was like a gourd bottle with a snapped string, sitting in that waiting room chair. I began watching the people running to catch their trains, or smiling as they saw familiar faces. Everyone had someone waiting for them or a place to go to. Where was I to go? How was I to find this monk? Who would come looking for me at Beomeosa, where they wouldn’t even feed me anymore? Should I give up and go back home?

  I had to eat something first. I crossed the plaza and ordered a stew filled with rice in a restaurant across the street. As I scraped the bowl clean, my eyelids began to droop.

  I came back out to the station plaza and wandered without a goal. Thinking about how that old raccoon of a monk had schemed to get rid of me from the start, my resentment reached all the way to Monk Gwang-deok. Those bullshit monks really had it in for me.

  Someone came right up to my face and whispered, “Do you want to have some fun?” An old, heavily wrinkled woman stood there smiling.

  “Forget fun, I’m dying of sleep. Take me to a room where I can spend the night.”

  “There’s a clean, quiet room nearby.�
� It wasn’t too far from the red-light district. I saw drunken people and soldiers in uniform in the maze of alleys. The women were practically in their underwear. The madam brought me to an empty room and asked for money upfront. “Bring your shoes indoors.”

  An acrylic blanket and a dirty pillow were spread out on the linoleum floor. I latched the door and lay down. Judging from the cackling and moaning coming from the rooms on either side, business was brisk. I tossed and turned but could not fall asleep. It was not until the curfew lifted at 4 a.m. that the hellish neighborhood quieted down enough for me to sleep, only to be awakened around nine by the sound of loud radio music.

  I left the alleys and walked the main street without knowing where I was going. When I reached Gukje Market, I bought a bowl of blood sausage stew and glimpsed a barber’s sign, which gave me an idea. It was so early that there wasn’t a single customer, and the barber was pretending to read the paper as he stared at the young woman in charge of shaving.

  I sat down in one of the chairs.

  “How do you want it?”

  “Shave it all off.”

  “All of it … with a razor?”

  “Or clippers or whatever. Take it all off.”

  “You’ll regret it … Wait, are you going into the army?”

  I didn’t feel like explaining, so I nodded.

  “Ah, then you have the right idea. It’ll get you into the right mindset, too.” He talked about how the soldiers would rip out new conscripts’ hair with their clippers, just to haze them. My hair had grown quite long by then; as he lifted it up at the crown to shave it off, the ends fell across my face. With my scalp as bald as a monk’s and my face clean-shaven as well, I felt much cooler in the heat.

  I took the bus, walked the long path back to Beomeosa’s main gate, and entered the inner temple. Just as on the first day, I went to the reception room, and the monk who had been there the first time saw me and came out.

  “I would like to meet with Monk Gwang-deok today.”

  “Didn’t you leave with that monk the other day?”

  “He abandoned me at the station.”

  I could sense him closing ranks. “That can’t be right. Well, Monk Gwang-deok is not here. In any case, you should have a long talk with him this time.” There was, apparently, a meeting scheduled between the Beomeosa’s affiliated temples and their abbots, and his advice was for me to latch on to one of them and follow.

  I didn’t wait by the stone stairs this time. I sat in the reception room instead. The abbots had been arriving in the morning one by one, and it wasn’t until well after lunch that their meeting finally drew to a close. Taking pity on me, or perhaps it was another of Monk Gwang-deok’s schemes, the reception room monk took me to a tall monk. He had just put his shoes on and was getting up from the stone step in front of the porch.

  “Monk, please take this man. The housekeeping monk’s request.”

  “What? This is the first I’ve heard of this.”

  They continued to whisper between themselves awhile, until the reception room monk beckoned me and said in a low voice, “Go with him. And stay with him, even if he tries to cast you out.”

  I was wearing a shirt and worsted trousers, but my shaven head probably made a better impression on the monks than before. I followed two steps behind him. He looked back a few times but didn’t say a word.

  We reached Haeundae’s Geumgangwon Temple, rumored to have strict training and rules. The monks were young and full of righteousness. I was a little nervous about its proximity to Beomeosa and how quiet and regimented it seemed. The abbot made me wait in a courtyard while he called a monk to say, “Give him a change of clothes. He’s a new novice.” That was the moment when my place was finally decided.

  I went into the novice room in the living annex and changed into gray robes. From that day on, my task was to clean the temple with the other novices. The monk in charge of keeping the novices in line and managing their daily lives interviewed me. He informed me of the rules and asked for my name and my ID. I gave him my legal name. He wrote some things down and then announced: “We’ll call you Novice Suyoung. Su meaning ‘to train,’ young meaning ‘path.’” All he did was change the Chinese characters in my existing name, but I liked it.

  Now that the magnolia, forsythia, azalea, guelder roses, and wisteria had bloomed and withered in turn, it was early summer. I began to enjoy tending the vegetable patch. I learned the monastic style of mindful eating and of keeping the physical body alive. I woke at the break of dawn, wiped the temple floors, and swept the courtyards all the way to the main gate as daylight brightened. The sweeping was hardest in autumn, when leaves fell, and in winter, when snow fell. Still, clearing the path in the softly fallen snow so that others could walk unimpeded calmed and humbled my heart. On my own, I gathered the robes of monks who had gone into winter practices and washed them.

  All the monks kept their wooden eating implements stored in a wrapping cloth on a shelf in the large hall. During meals they spread it out and sat with their backs against the wall. First, they rinsed their bowls with water and took only as much rice, stew, and garnish as they could eat in one sitting. The stew was always vegetable soybean paste stew, and the side dishes two kinds of greens and kimchi. On special days or events, we might get fried side dishes that smelled of sesame oil. We had to eat everything in our bowl; at the end of the meal, we filled the bowl with water and drank every drop. Then we filled it again, drank, wiped everything down with a dry towel, and packed it all back up in the wrapping cloth.

  My tasks consisted of cleaning and small errands. After a few months the monks sent me into town on various errands, such as posting mail, exchanging messages with congregants, or buying things for prayers and services. Whenever I set out, the monks gave me a bit of spending money on top of what I needed to complete the errand.

  One day, about six months into this life, I had an errand to run and went into downtown Busan for a change. I finished around noon, with plenty of time before I had to return in the evening. I went into an old Chinese restaurant and ordered jjajangmyeon, black bean noodles. I was only a novice but I sat there in my monk’s robes, and after finishing off a bowl of noodles, there was still time, so I checked out the movie posters on the telegraph poles and walls and picked one. A black-and-white film called One Hundred Men and a Girl, it was about an unemployed trombone player who gets an orchestra together and convinces the famous Leopold Stokowski to conduct them in order to help his daughter, an aspiring singer with a pure soprano voice. I remember the last scene where the girl sings and the conductor passionately waves his baton, hair tossing this way and that.

  I was being swept out with the rest of the crowd when someone grabbed my shoulder and stopped me. “Aren’t you Sok-yong?” I turned and was dismayed to see it was a friend of Eldest Brother. He had studied commerce and worked at a bank, and occasionally visited our house. I gave him a quick bow and tried to run away, but he grabbed my wrist and demanded, “Where have you been? Do you have any idea how hard your mother and brother-in-law have been looking for you?”

  I lied and said, “I’ve been in Jinju.”

  “Jinju?”

  I broke out of his grasp and escaped into the crowd. He didn’t follow. I thought of my mother for a moment and sighed deeply and tried to shake the thought off. I was glad I’d said Jinju. I’d named it at random, but in fact I had sent my mother a postcard from Jinju last Chuseok.

  One morning, nearly a month later, I was sweeping the courtyard of early fall leaves when a monk came up to me and said, “There’s someone here to see you. They say they know you well.”

  I wondered who it might be as I reluctantly made my way out of the temple. On either side of the path were tall pine trees and past the main gate through the forest was a souvenir store selling handcrafted wooden bells, walking canes, fans, and towels embroidered with the temple’s name. Standing across the road from the store was a familiar person. It was the kind of blurry familiarity yo
u might feel from looking at someone through a heat shimmer, or glancing out the window on a day of misty rain and seeing the indistinct outline of someone you know. Mother wore a hanbok made from worsted fabric with a cardigan thrown over her shoulders. I paused for a moment, and then my footsteps quickened. I came to a stop when we stood facing each other. We did not hug, like in the movies, but she came to me and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “Let’s go home!”

  My mother led me past the store and down the wide road.

  “I roamed all of South Gyeongsang Province looking for you. You’re coming home with me, right?”

  My eyes flooded with tears, and I said, “Yes, Mom, let’s go home.”

  We were on our way to the bus stop when I sensed someone following us. I looked back and was surprised to see Oong.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, but Oong only smiled.

  Mother said, “If it wasn’t for that boy, I never would have found you.”

  Eldest Brother’s friend had told Mother that he’d met me in Busan and that I was somewhere near Jinju, which reminded her of the postcard I’d sent. I hadn’t written the address properly, only the street number, but Mother had managed to find Joongang Bakery all on her own.

  The owner lady hadn’t forgotten me. She’d heard from her husband that I’d joined a Buddhist order, and felt sorry for my mother. She told Mother about the Eastern medicine doctor’s son and went to see the doctor herself, to get the name of the temple where Oong was staying in Haman.

  Mother went to Jangchunsa and found Oong, who in turn told her I was at a temple in Busan and went with her to look for me. She had Oong go up to the temple alone, but the monks rebuffed him and wouldn’t tell him where I was. They merely said I had come wanting to be a monk and had stayed for a brief while, but they didn’t know which monk I had followed or which temple I had gone to.

  Oong and Mother went searching through the temples around Busan. A monk advised them, “If he’s a novice, he’s probably still somewhere near Beomeosa.” Mother made up her mind and went to the reception room at Beomeosa and cried floods of tears, begging them to tell her where I was. Monk Gwang-deok presently appeared. The first thing he said was, “He has already given himself as a child of Buddha, why do you search for him still?” Mother wept again as she reasoned with him, saying she was a widow who had lost her husband at a young age, that I was all she had left, that I was Christian from birth, that Christ’s and Buddha’s teachings were a little different but the fundamental sympathy with the world was the same, that her son had run away and never asked her permission to enter the order.