The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  Monk Gwang-deok listened to all of this without a word and nodded at the part where she said I had run away. He said to her in a low voice, “Then this is what you must do. Meet him. If you meet him and he follows you, he is your child. If he does not and returns to the temple, he is Buddha’s child, and you must never search for him again.”

  I learned of all this later on, of course, and I did sometimes regret following her and not returning to the temple. But perhaps it was my fate that I would return to the outside world and become a writer.

  The first thing Mother did was take me to Gukje Market to get me some street clothes. I think she was worried that if she let me keep my robes on, I’d go back into the temple. We went into a nice restaurant in front of Busanjin Station; when I ordered bibimbap, Mother insisted she needed to thank Oong for his efforts and ordered the more expensive bulgogi instead. When I was at the temple, the smell of meat would turn my stomach, but that day, the meat broth flowing into the reservoir of the domed grill was so delicious, I fought with Oong for every bite.

  The sight of Mother’s face as she fell asleep on the train from Busan to Seoul broke my heart because it had changed so much. I went out to the vestibule and smoked, accompanied by the rhythmic takada ta takada ta sound of the steel wheels running over the seams of the rails. When the train passed over a bridge, the open air below us made it sound like walgurang tang walgurang tang. My ears ached as the crisscrossed steel beams flew by outside. The bridge soon came to an end and we were rolling over the ground again. Walgurang tang, walgurang tang, walgurang tang … takada ta, takada ta, takada ta …

  The clear change in sound was like the death that would have met me if I’d jumped off the train then, or like the division between my life as it had been and what was to come.

  ~

  I returned to the attic room in Heukseok-dong Market. I slept like the dead for a long time and then started to write again. Whether I was acting the novice at a mountain temple or undergoing an existential crisis in the attic room of a Heukseokdong shop and doing nothing but writing all day, the world continued to turn in a hurry. Despite the continuous protests against the Korea–Japan diplomatic talks, the agreement went ahead, a measure passed for the deployment of Korean soldiers to Vietnam, and the first wave of the Fierce Tiger Division was sent to Southeast Asia.

  While I was living in the attic above the kitchenette behind my mother’s store, I traversed the border between life and death more than once. A furnace for coal briquettes was right next to the attic ladder; if I wasn’t careful, the occasional gas leak would seep into my room. That winter, I nearly died of carbon monoxide poisoning. I wasn’t conscious but somehow managed to open the door to the attic and urinate below; I think someone had told me that if you urinated after being exposed, you survived. The sound woke my mother, who managed to drag me down. For two days I was barely conscious, but slowly recovered with the help of various remedies and by drinking kimchi brine.

  For some reason, after that incident, whenever I went down to the Han River, I was possessed by the urge to join the flowing water disappearing into the distance. The cars and people on the street looked like surreal scenery from a silent movie. The sound of cars seemed to come from very far away.

  One night, on my way home from downtown, I felt this urge again. I think I got off the bus near Namyeong-dong. I went to a nearby pharmacy and bought some Seconal, then traveled a few more stations and bought some more. I kept doing this all the way to Yongsan Station until I’d acquired a considerable number of pills. I knew that right across the Han River bridge in Noryangjin there were plenty of bars frequented by people heading home from work. I must have drunk two bottles. In truth, the amount of alcohol I drank then was what saved me. I stumbled home and ignored my mother complaining about how much I had drunk and went up to the attic to collapse on my bed. I was so drunk that I’d forgotten to take the pills.

  I was woken around two in the morning by a desperate scream. I knew who was screaming. There was a crazy woman who wandered the market alone; she slept in the public toilet inside the market.

  Her scream brought back the memory of the pills I had bought. The fluorescent light buzzed; it had been on all night. I sat at my desk, wrote my mother a farewell letter, and rummaged through the closet for a pair of clean underwear. Then I got dressed as if I were going out. Yes, I was off on a long journey. I stuffed over thirty pills in my mouth and swallowed them with some water. I turned off the light and lay down, but I didn’t really feel like I was about to die.

  In the morning my brother came up to the attic to get his books and schoolbag, which is what saved my life one more time.

  “Mother, there’s something wrong with hyeong.”

  I was taken in an ambulance to the emergency room at Yeongdeungpo Municipal Hospital. The doctor examined my pupils and wordlessly began emergency measures, bringing out an oxygen tank and placing the mask on my face. My eldest sister flipped through the clinical chart and saw how every category was “Undetermined” except for the heart, which was labeled “Possible.” According to the doctor, I was fortunate to have been found in time.

  For four days I lay unconscious until I finally began to stir. They said I had seizures so powerful that the entire family had to hold me down on the bed. I woke up on the afternoon of the fifth day. The doctor decided it was safe enough to discharge me, and Mother moved me to my eldest sister’s rented place in a quiet residential neighborhood.

  Eldest Brother and my sister were both schoolteachers and were out for most of the day. Mother waited until I was sleeping peacefully and decided to slip out, too, to buy some groceries. I was lying close to the wall; when I opened my eyes, I couldn’t see anything except for a blurry light to the right. I instinctively wanted to go to it. The light looked like a wide, open space. I stood up slowly, holding onto the wall for support, and felt my way around the room. Even when I was standing in front of the blurry light, I still couldn’t see anything at first; it was like standing inside a dense fog.

  I started to discern lines within the fog. The light turned a weak yellow, then deepened. I was standing in front of a large window. The lines of houses, land, bare winter branches, all started to emerge from the yellow they’d been buried in. For a long time, I stared at the world-changing colors. It was only when that color divided itself and turned into multiple other shades that I could see that snow had fallen the previous night and the sky was clear and blue. That deep yellow had not been a real color.

  Things went back to normal as if nothing had happened. I met up now and again with friends, who were still voracious readers, and bluffed my way through those conversations. I said nothing of my wanderings or of nearly dying.

  Now and then I heard from my artist friend Mu, or bumped into him in a tea house. I don’t remember if it was right after I came back from wandering the southern peninsula or after I came back from my suicide attempt, but I did receive a postcard that left an impression on me.

  I was idling my life away and had nothing to really look forward to, spending all my time loitering around the city or sleeping in my attic room until late in the afternoon. Like a submarine hatch, the only exit from the room was the trapdoor; my mother’s head would pop up from time to time.

  “Look, someone sent you a lovely postcard a while back.”

  One side showed a watercolor painting of a blue ocean, pine forests, and clouds on the horizon. Above it was written: “In keeping with the song ‘Gaudeamus igitur,’ I am commemorating my springlike youth. From the beautiful beaches of Gapo … Mu.”

  A year earlier, Mu had gone to the Catholic hospital in Mallidong for his tuberculosis. When Seong-jin and I went to visit, the first thing Mu did, skinny as a rake in his hospital gown, was ask for a cigarette. He seemed so normal that we thought he would be discharged soon, but instead his condition worsened, and he was transferred to another hospital for further treatment in Masan.

  I have a portrait of myself done by Mu. He drew it
in profile on a sketchbook page the size of a paperback, with the emphasis on strong cheekbones and chin. I pinned the page on the particle-board wall of the attic room.

  I was going to write a belated reply to his postcard when I remembered that his place wasn’t that far from mine. I decided to make a day of it and visit him in person at his house, which was next to a quilt shop, a place that looked like a good location for a restaurant. The front of it was all glass doors, but that day the doors were covered with wooden planks and only the side door was open. I called out “hello” and knocked for a long time until I heard footsteps and a woman who resembled my mother came out.

  “I’m a friend of Mu’s. He sent me a postcard … I just wanted to see how he was doing.”

  The woman’s irritated expression vanished, and she covered her mouth as she murmured, “He passed away …”

  “Oh … I see …” I backed away, bowed, and was about to leave when Mu’s mother called out to me.

  “If you still have that postcard … Might I see it?”

  I took the postcard from my pocket and showed it to her. Her hand didn’t leave her mouth as she stared at it.

  “Please take it,” I said, but she quickly waved no and handed it back to me.

  “No, you should keep it.”

  I knew that Mu’s mother was a widow as well. She was so similar to my own mother in appearance that I wondered if she, too, had once been part of the enlightened class of Pyongyang. She probably had not been happy with Mu being a painter, either. Like my mother, she must have spent every last coin she had to acquire the shop she owned now.

  I trudged back home with the postcard in my hand. In the battlefields of Vietnam, I often thought of the sentence Mu had written on it, in which he bade farewell to his springlike youth.

  My mother gave up her business at the market and moved to a small rental in Daebang-dong. Just as she did right after Liberation in North Korea, Mother turned to making clothes, one of her many talents. She hired some women and opened a hanbok store.

  I returned home one day to learn from my brother, now in middle school, that a policeman had come looking for me to deliver a military conscription notice. The notice said that I had failed to respond to two notices for physicals and would have to report to the police station, on pain of arrest—very threatening stuff. I had apparently missed the notices during my lost months of wandering.

  I’d heard somewhere that not showing up for physicals after three notices would land you in jail for six months, after which you would immediately serve out your conscription. I happened to pass a marines poster on the street that said they took in several applicants every month, and so I applied. I swiftly passed the IQ test and physical exam, and the very next month was served my conscription orders.

  In August of 1966, I rode the all-stop train from Yongsan to the south once more. The emergency money Mother had given me as I left the house that dawn was hidden in my underwear. Just as she had done when I had a school picnic, she made kimbap, rice rolls, late into the night and packed them for me to eat later, and never showed any tears. No one saw me off at the still-dark Yongsan Station at dawn, of course. And that was how I bade farewell to the first half of my youth.

  10

  Prison V

  As the summer of 1995 approached, a number of writers and other concerned citizens signed a “Petition for the release of Hwang Sok-yong” and sent it to the Kim Young-sam administration. The petition proposed that the first civilian administration to come to power after the military dictatorships should use this fiftieth anniversary of Liberation as an opportunity to promote harmony and work toward reunification and democratization by pardoning political prisoners. Around this time, it was reported that there were 454 prisoners of conscience and North Korean POWs still behind bars, and that since Liberation, around 10,000 people were still incarcerated under the Anti-communism Law, the National Security Act, and restrictive labor laws. The Kim Young-sam administration released a number of prisoners, including corporation heads but not labor activists, stating that these pardons were for the purposes of national unity and were restricted to persons who showed a clear intent to rehabilitate themselves. At this, political prisoners in all thirty-two prisons nationwide launched a hunger strike on August 7, demanding “the release of all conscientious prisoners and the repeal of the National Security Act.” The hunger strike continued for ten days but, of course, no additional prisoners were released.

  I had been in prison for two and a half years already. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. When I thought back on what my life was like before becoming a writer, it seemed that I’d always been starting something new or living in a state of anxiety. First I had opposed the military dictatorship with my literary allies when I became famous as a novelist, and had struggled to depict reality in my writing while simultaneously fighting for my right to express myself. Jang Gil-san is a ten-volume historical novel that took me a decade to complete, because I had to write and do my activism at the same time. It was inevitable that things I experienced in life would appear in my fiction, or that a scene from fiction would be recreated in real life; my writing and my activism had become one.

  The past few decades had been a series of crises interspersed with periods of recovering from those crises. I relearned the lessons of my past in my own way, using them to survive my forced reformation in jail.

  The reason I was trying to retool my prison life as it entered a third year was that I was afraid of losing my health, and, more than anything else, I was intent on preserving my identity as a writer. As a National Security Act violator, I was imprisoned apart from the regular inmates, and my repeated hunger strikes and complaints added to my isolation. I also believed I should fight censorship and read as much as possible—this was what “democracy activists” were supposed to do in prison. But what I ended up doing was completely different, since daily life inside a prison was much harsher than life as an ordinary civilian. For example, I needed a knife to eat fruit and vegetables, but such things weren’t allowed for prisoners. I needed to put in a request if I wanted to use a knife, use it only under observation, and return it immediately after I was done with it. This was such an inconvenience that it became easier to just fashion my own crude blade instead. During exercise hour, I went around looking for cans or pieces of chimney caps. Or I would ask the working prisoners for an exchange of goods. Once I had a can, I cut a piece from the side, hid it under the sole of my shoe, and snuck it into my private cell. Avoiding the gaze of the guards, I sharpened it for days against the cement wall and hid it under the floor boards or between the pages of my Bible in case of inspections. This would make ten days go by like a shot.

  There was no one to talk to in the private cell, and I never exchanged more than a few words with the guards. I began to forget how to speak; proper nouns were the first to go. I once spent a week trying to remember the name Antigone. I developed a habit of talking to myself. I’d fart and mumble, Good for you! I’d talk to myself when I got up in the morning. Hey, you should clean up today. Look at how dirty the floor is! Such a mess. I muttered to myself all day long. I borrowed a Korean dictionary from the library and read each word out loud, following along with my finger. But I soon realized that reading in prison was not proper reading. Books needed to be read with others and communicated with others in order to be properly understood. The content of the books I read alone in my private cell became like a pillar blocking the wall. I stopped reading altogether. I forgot about my identity as a political prisoner or an intellectual and befriended the regular criminals, laughing at their jokes, breaking the rules, and behaving like one of them. I had the notion that my survival as a writer was more dependent on the details of real life as I lived it with the regular prisoners. These efforts helped me adjust to life outside prison after just a month, whereas others spent years after their release suffering from the side effects of solitary confinement.

  Gongju was a fair distance from Seoul, and t
he prison wasn’t near any train stations, but my ex-wife, Hong Hee-yun, brought my eldest son, Ho-jun, with her once a month to visit me, and I got the occasional drop-in visits from various writers and activist friends.

  My visits were held not in the regular visiting room but in the office of the division in charge of reforming political prisoners, and sometimes in the special reception area of the national security division. Visits from PEN International, the UN Human Rights Committee, Amnesty International, foreign presses, and other foreign dignitaries and Korean politicians were mainly conducted in the special reception area, but when it came to friends and family, we usually met in the aforementioned office. These were all, in a sense, “special visits,” because the Ministry of Justice had forbidden me from having any visitors other than immediate family once a month; if any of my literary friends wanted to see me, they had to contact the prison beforehand and have a National Assembly member accompany them.

  The persons authorized to visit me as family were my eldest son, Ho-jun; daughter, Yeo-jeong; their mother, Hee-yun; my in-laws representing my then wife, Kim Myoung-su, in the US; and my eldest sister and her husband. Hee-yun and Ho-jun lived in Gwangju and visited once a month with one or two Gwangju people in tow. My father-in-law also visited once every two or three months, always smuggling in a snack he discreetly slipped to me.