I wrote “A Dream of Good Fortune,” based on what I saw in the factories at the Guro Industrial Complex, the next day. Hee-yun had talked the landlord into letting me use a bigger room in another wing. I hung a heavy blanket over the paper-screen door to block the noise of people bustling around outside, but that left the room airless and so hot that I had to strip down to my underwear. My sweat fell on the paper as I worked, but I was too absorbed in the story to care.
Poor Hee-yun didn’t have a day’s peace, thanks to her struggling-writer husband with his passion for social justice. Ho-jun was affected, too, as Hee-yun had to leave him with a string of babysitters while she worked. One time, he accidentally spilled some water; despite no one scolding him, he immediately went and sat with his face to the wall. One of his babysitters must have punished him that way. Hee-yun and I sat for a moment in silence before deciding together that I would return to writing full-time and give up on labor organizing, for the good of our family. We moved back to Ui-dong.
I met the poet Cho Tae-il on the day I published “A strange land” and got my writer’s fee. Han Nam-cheol had taken me to a bar on the corner near Gwanghwamun, where the Kyobo Book Centre is now. The late dramaturge Park Young-hee was also there with us.
It was the day opposition candidate Kim Dae-jung had lost the election to Park Chung-hee’s military dictatorship. The bars were full of melancholy people. Writers had participated in a national election-observer movement, sending people across the country. Cho Tae-il had just come up from Gwangju. He gulped his makgeolli like he might swallow the bowl as well. He got drunk quickly. Normally quiet, he showed himself to be a true poet as his emotions turned violent when he drank. On upswings, he would sing a song: “I’d dearly like to see that face again …” His friends would urge him to go on, to sing again “That face again.”
Cho Tae-il was once imprisoned, around the end of the dictatorship era. He had been on his way home after a long night’s carousing. But for some reason, upon arrival, he stepped up onto a cement platform outside his house and started railing against Park Chung-hee’s militant dictatorship. He shouted, “Down with the dictatorship!” over and over, waking his peacefully sleeping neighbors. The neighborhood dogs began to bark, lights turned on one after the other, and people poked their heads out of their houses. His wife, a teacher, begged him to stop as she ushered him down from the platform. He shouted all the way to his bed, whereupon he fell fast asleep. Before his wife left for work the next day, the police paid them a visit. He was arrested for a violation of martial law. He learned later that a busybody local barber had ratted on him.
He had benefited from our normally troublesome literary group. The authorities were already under international scrutiny after locking up our friend Kim Chi-ha for his dissident poetry. During this period, reporters were often thrown in jail for ranting about the same things in a taxi or on the street, and many city dwellers and even country farmers were arrested for the mistake of ranting while drunk. The authorities would have been reluctant to toss the name of another poet into the fray. That was how we met.
And so, just like in Water Margin and The Chronicles of the Eastern Zhou Kingdoms, people of different talents began gathering in Lee Mun-ku’s Cheongjin-dong office, literary types who could not stand their frustration and hunger. Changbi Publishers and Moonji Publishing had already moved into the neighborhood, but Lee Mun-ku’s office was the best place for these misfits to gather. The writers would play baduk, betting on drinks, and any time one of us got paid, we’d bet that money, too, since it was never enough to cover our bills anyway.
In the fall of 1972, the Yushin Constitution was passed by Park’s dictatorship, and every form of expression, not only political but also artistic, was banned—to be replaced by the advent of “youth culture.” We had hardly managed to drag ourselves into the modern world, but already the first signs of consumerism were appearing in Seoul’s hot spots and around its college campuses.
There were three major symbols of youth culture, as declared by the commercial press: draft beer, acoustic guitars, and blue jeans. Around the late 1960s and early 1970s, American culture remained on the margins, while important changes were occurring in Europe. It was a radical movement, declaring that all thought and material reality within any systemic framework, left or right, must change. In America, this attitude was expressed through the peace movement in opposition to the Vietnam War. From the establishment’s point of view, all of this—from the hippie subculture to pacifist, counterculture folk songs, to draft-dodging and anti-establishment community activism—was pathetic and destabilizing. And so, the establishment’s response to the restless stirrings of disenchanted young people was to slap it all with the label of “youth culture.”
Around the same time, the “military look” came into vogue, featuring clothes that looked like uniforms, complete with rank insignias, when Vietnam vets went to college with their army jackets thrown over their shoulders. The fad soon crossed the Pacific, but it ditched any ideological implications halfway across the ocean and haunted Korea as an empty shell of its former political self. What did youth culture even mean, when criticism of the Yushin Constitution could land a young person in jail?
1972, in a Cheongjin-dong pork rib joint. Kim Jun-tae was back from Vietnam and writing poetry, and Cho Tae-il, who had bought him drinks and was also a regular at that place, was shouting at him as they ate. Han Nam-cheol, Yeom Mu-ung, and I were having a drink when Han said, “Hwang, my friend, I met this historian guy and he said something pretty interesting. You know how Hong Gil-dong and Im Kkeokjeong are about the only bandits we know from the Joseon Dynasty? Well, apparently, there was another bandit that could’ve had both their asses on a plate for dinner.”
I didn’t think anything of it at first. This historian, according to Yeom, was a junior scholar named Jeong Seokjong. His essay on the Hong Gyeong-nae rebellion that was to appear in Quarterly Changbi was supposed to be quite interesting, but I hadn’t paid much attention to it.
“But you know, the really interesting thing about that bandit is, he used to be a jester or something.”
I woke at dawn one morning in the Ui-dong house, my mind suddenly filled with a spine-chilling tale I’d heard once from Paek Ki-wan. It had to do with the Hwanghae Province folktale about the Jangsan Cape hawk. I gulped some water I’d placed near my pillow the night before, shook off my hangover, got up, and lit a cigarette.
I once held a training session for on-site activists at a Christian association in Busan. Paek Ki-wan, me, and Chae Hee-wan, who practiced talchum dance in college, set out as instructors. After the session, we were on our way back on the Gyeongbu Line train when Paek Ki-wan, excited about something, delivered a long inspirational speech. Chae Hee-wan and I listened open-mouthed to his Hwanghae Province–inflected thoughts.
“Culture, you know, it’s all connected. It’s all bundled up with the life that we live. The jing that you play, that’s not a jing. What’s the difference between that and the noise of hitting a can? Jang, jang, jang, it’s the same. There are good villages down below Guwol Mountain in Hwanghae, they have landowners who have so much land. There are wells and a fence around it. Inside one well is a large chamber pot, hidden deep inside. The landowner’s wife’s ass is as large as a rice sack. She lifts one cheek and thunders out a fart, and one piss is like a squall in June. Every morning, a maid has to collect that chamber pot, rinse it out, polish it until it shines, fill it with water, and hide it behind the fence. The male servants are always looking for it. They want to put a rope through it and use it as a jing, because one hit with it makes a nice jiiiiing sound. You’re not supposed to just hit the thing. You have to hit it with the hundreds of years of sorrow of the lower caste, hit it like you would the face of that landowner bitch. Jing, jing, jing, that’s the deep sound of the jing. They’re harvesting early barley and beating it, and the muscly servant takes his top off and strikes at the barley, he automatically begins to sing, ong-heya, ong-
heya, ong-heya. That’s not just a man hitting something but the servant hitting the landowner’s head over and over again. He’s sweating like he’s in the rain and the barley hulls stick to his skin.
“They wash themselves in the stream and have a bowl of cold makgeolli. They catch a dog and cook it over a fire. They decide who gets to eat it with a show of strength. Here we go, a wrestling match. The others hit the pungmul drums and kick up a storm. Jenga-jenga-jeng, now this is culture, OK? Damn, I’m thirsty, here comes the drinks cart.”
I remember that Chae Hee-wan and I hastened to buy five bottles of beer and a dried squid so Paek Ki-wan wouldn’t stop talking. And that’s how he came to tell me about the Jangsan Cape hawk.
I thought I could put together a tale from the mood and tone of the story, and decided I’d go out to see Jeong Seokjong as soon as it was day. An adjunct college instructor who hadn’t found a home yet, his rented room was as shabby as mine. He was short and looked younger than his age, but his eyes lit up whenever he talked about “the bad guys.”
Social change in the late Joseon Dynasty was his area of interest. Around this time, his historian cohorts were striving to expand the academic reach of Korean social history in order to overcome the mainstream colonialist thinking entrenched in schools. Older historians, like Kim Yong-seob or Kang Mangil, were examining transitions in social status by combing caste records and family registers, concentrating on economic changes in rural localities. At that time, Jeong Seokjong was digging through the mountainous records of the Goryeo-Joseon dynasties’ Uigeumbu judiciary in the Kyujanggak royal library.
The Uigeumbu records were untrodden, virgin territory. He suggested I go through them on my own first, but embarking on my research I figured out a more cunning method. I paid a few graduate students to look through the material until they found something I might use. In any case, he’d given me hundreds of pages on Jang Gil-san alone—from both The Annals of the Joseon Dynasty and the Uigeumbu records. I had no idea where to start.
I began my research and visited Jeong once a month to discuss it with him. My rapid assimilation of the material seemed to surprise him. The younger researchers specializing in history seem surprised to this day by my imaginative powers: many times they thought I was being absurd, only to discover for themselves that my conjectures were right.
I used any spare time on research trips for short journalism articles to hunt for material for this book project in the antiquarian book markets of Insa-dong and Cheonggycheon. I had no money to buy expensive rare editions, so I would simply read the book while standing in the shop.
~
Kim Chi-ha disappeared after we sixty-one writers participating in the anti-Yushin petition were arrested and eventually released. The authorities were looking for him, and we were trying to get word to him to flee. Many others in our barely-months-old planning committee for a cultural activist organization were arrested, and still more went into hiding.
Seoul National University Student Association representatives and drama club students came to see me. The first to do so was the actor Kim Seok-man, followed by the dancer Lee Ae-ju, sori musician Im Jin-taek, singer Kim Min-ki, talchum dancer Chae Hee-wan, traditional musician Kim Young-dong, and later the future movie director Jang Sun-woo. They had been told that if the “Bandit” disappeared, they were to work with me. The “Bandit” was a nickname for Kim Chi-ha. These artists were later referred to as the first generation of the cultural activism movement, and they would eventually give me a nickname, Gura Hyeongnim, which I guess you might translate as Bullshit Brother. I probably earned that moniker for the stories and gags I’d learned from watching snake-oil salesmen spin their yarns in the marketplaces.
Looking back, Park Chung-hee’s Yushin era brought about the nationwide spread of a mainstream nationalist student movement and the organization of intellectuals, of a kind that had disappeared after the Japanese occupation and throughout the wars. It also incited solidarity movements between laborers and farmers to converge across the nation. During that single year of 1974, national student heroes were made; the literary group we had been preparing was launched as the Council of Writers for Freedom and Practice; and this news was spread along with free press declarations of reporters from the Dong-a Ilbo and other papers, including the Chosun Ilbo, which is now a conservative paper. I spent those fraught years during the 1970s and 1980s with most of these fellow activists in joy and happiness.
~
It was around this time that my first short story collection, “A strange land,” was published by Changbi. It was, I should say, the spark that ignited the age of volume-publishing. Mineumsa and Moonji followed suit with collections of Korean contemporary short fiction of their own, although none of us had any confidence yet that readers would actually purchase these books. Thanks to word of mouth among students, my collection circulated rapidly.
Hee-yun was pregnant with our second child, but our financial situation was still dire, and we were always out of cash. The baby was nearly due by the time my story collection came out. When my literary friends found out I’d received an advance, they clamored for me to buy them drinks. A national curfew was still in place, which meant we were always pressed for drinking time between dusk and midnight. We had to drink quickly. After midnight, many of us gave up on going home. A few whose families were already angry at them for staying away too many nights would call up reporters they knew who were on night shift to accompany them home, or bribe a garbage truck to swing by their houses, pinching their noses the whole way, or even beg a ride in a police car. Some who couldn’t be bothered would simply walk into a police station on their own and spend the night in lockup.
Had I pocketed my advance and gone home right away, I would have proved a decent family man. But my friends had shaken me down, going from this tavern to that, and when I finally showed up at the Changbi office after a bowl of hangover stew, looking pathetic, Paik Nak-chung sat me down for a scolding. “I moved heaven and earth to get you that advance so you could use it for your wife’s impending hospital bills, but you never even went home! Don’t you know what’s happened? Your wife just had the baby. She’s in the hospital. Go see her.” He gave me another advance on my royalties. Still perturbed by my sorry state, he sent me on my way with a final warning. “Don’t do anything stupid on your way home!”
Hee-yun had given birth to a daughter, Yeo-jeong. Even now, whenever my eldest son brings up that day, all I can do is shut up and listen. Ho-jun was only three at the time. Daddy was out and Mommy was going into labor. Hee-yun had no choice but to leave him crying in the courtyard and take a taxi with the landlady to a hospital in Suyuri. We barely had enough for the rent at the time, let alone for hospital fees. She called my eldest sister, who immediately came running with her husband.
Ho-jun still remembers everything that happened that day. After his mother suddenly disappeared in a car, he went down to the bridge over the stream and cried until nightfall. The landlady came back from the hospital, found him, and took him to see his mother. She had already given birth. The poor boy had to spend the next few days in the hospital room beside his mother and new little sister.
During my time in a dark prison cell, I would abruptly remember certain buried memories, things I could never take back, and it’s this incident, and the fact that I could not be by my mother’s side when she passed, that break my heart the most. I went about the entire country as if possessed, not even properly supporting my wife and children, and in the end left them nothing but hurt.
One spring, I published a few short stories in Lee O-young’s magazine, Munhak sasang (Literature and Thought), which had launched a couple of years before. Lee was fond of sitting visitors down and lecturing them. He would mock my realist tendencies in a roundabout way but, according to others, had always recognized my talents. Something about having no manners but being a good writer. True, I wasn’t the obsequious type, but that didn’t mean I was completely without respect.
&nbs
p; I visited him because he was talking about serializing a full-length novel in the magazine. I happened to be gathering information on Jang Gil-san at the time. He listened to me hold forth for a while and then said, “That doesn’t sound like it can be contained in a novella or a novel.” But he must have told the Korea Times about the project without letting me know, because I was soon contacted by Chang Ki-young, the paper’s owner.
Chang was shouting on the phone when I was led into his office along with one of the department heads. I stood awkwardly as my escort bowed without a word, and Chang gestured for us to sit down on the sofas.
Chang Ki-young, having reputedly built up the Korea Times from nothing, was said to have a military-issue cot on the floor above the editors and to share night shifts with the reporters. There were enthusiastic slogans hung up in the stairwells, like “Think while you run.” The Korea Times kept calling itself “a young, new newspaper” in those days.
He sat down and read the synopsis of Jang Gil-san that I had written for him. “A good bandit has to make us feel better in these harsh times. He’s got to punish this bastard and that one, he’s got to use his power the way he wants to.”
I asked him, as a kind of test, “There’s been a lot of censorship lately. Can you guarantee it won’t happen to my story?”
The Prisoner Page 54