The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  Right behind the house I moved into, the side of the mountain had been cut away. In the house behind ours lived a boy named Il-lang, who became friends with my son. Il-lang’s home looked more like a classical tenant farming household. The father had once found occasional work as a carpenter or a plasterer but lately had taken to drink; his wife made money by helping out with farm chores around the village. The eldest son and daughter had long left for the city, and a middle school–age daughter remained, along with six-year-old Il-lang. This daughter, of course, had only graduated elementary school and helped her mother or occasionally babysat for Ho-jun and Yeo-jeong, which was Hee-yun’s pretext for giving the family some money every month. Then, one day, the daughter left home, saying she planned to become a hairdresser. Scattered to the winds, the family left Haenam a few years later. I do not know which city slum they disappeared into.

  Our house had a little entry path next to the stone wall; there was no front gate. We had a view of the main house, which was large with a traditional tiled roof and looked like the master’s quarters to our servants’ dwelling. When I greeted the owner, he struck me as the grandchild of a once-great landowner. He was in his late forties or early fifties and, much like others of the landowning class who had fallen into ruin, looked sadder and more tattered with each passing year.

  Two weeks after we moved to the gateless house, someone came to visit. The man’s face was tan as a farmer’s but, incongruously, he wore horn-rimmed glasses. As I came out to the yard, he bowed and said, “My name is Kim Nam-ju.”

  I was familiar with the poet’s name, of course. He had been arrested and imprisoned for political publishing, and debuted as a poet in the Quarterly Changbi when he was released. One of his poems memorialized the moment in which an intelligence officer held a gun to his forehead during an interrogation, an incident he related to me again when we met. The hole in the muzzle of the gun had looked so big, he’d felt like a cannonball would burst out of it and shatter his head. His poems were so modern and sharply satiric that it was hard to imagine he was born in a simple farming household. In a later poem he would describe his father as a farmhand on a landowner’s estate.

  Kim was obsessed with books from a young age, but his father would scold him for wasting the lamp oil. His father used to say that if only one of his sons would become a forestry official and the other a civil clerk, he would have nothing to fear as a farmer. His idea of paradise, in other words, was to chop all the firewood he wanted and not be bothered by the pesky laws and regulations that seemed designed by low-level government officials to thwart the peasantry.

  He studied on his own, passed his high school equivalency exams, and was accepted to the English department at Chonnam National University. He’d grown too accustomed to studying by himself to attend classes regularly by then. One time, during a Shakespeare lecture, he suddenly stood up, laughed out loud, and left the class. After he was released from prison, Nam-ju opened a bookstore called “Kafka” so he could write poetry and support young writers. Park Seok-mu had Changbi and other publishers send him stock without Kim paying a deposit, but the bookstore soon closed anyway. It was bound to fail: there were always four or five young people who practically lived on the premises. They would go out drinking late into the night, which meant the bookstore would be closed all the next morning, and what business could thrive like that? Nam-ju was subsequently nicknamed Mulbong by his friends, for his inability to resent anyone or say anything bad about someone else. A mulbong is a Haenam-style sweet potato boiled until it’s very soft and sweet; the nickname was given to anyone in that region who was especially softhearted and easily pushed around. But the mainstream would dub him “Warrior Poet,” for never relenting against the Yushin dictatorship.

  I told him of my wish to move to the country and added that the dictatorship would never fall unless we joined forces “with the minjung.” I cited examples from revolutions in other developing countries. We talked about Mao Zedong in China, Frantz Fanon in Algeria, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, and Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Cuba. I pointed out that half of their time preparing for revolution had been given to teaching and raising the consciousness of their minjung, an effort that continued right up to the uprisings. I remember introducing him to Black Skin, White Masks by Fanon, Aimé Césaire’s poetry collections from Martinique, Lee Yong-ak’s poetry collection Nalgeunjip (An Old House), and Oh Jang-hwan’s hand-copied translations of Sergei Yesenin’s poems. Kim Nam-ju could read English, having majored in it, studied Japanese on his own, and eventually learned German so well that he would translate Heinrich Heine’s poetry.

  Kim Dong-seop brought someone to our home around this time. His name was Jung Gwang-hoon and he was five years older than me, but everyone called him Deacon Jung. He was always dressed in old work clothes and forever seemed to be just waking up, but his eyes had a clever twinkle and his mind was so keen he could understand any book immediately and retain its contents for a long time. After high school, he had been a signalman in the army and an electrician after that. He learned his trade by taking apart and reassembling radios, televisions, and refrigerators on his own, becoming the only working electrician in Haenam. He attended the biggest church in the village, and was so diligent and easy to get along with that he acquired the “general problem-solver” title of Deacon. He had inherited no land or money from his parents, which meant he made his living from skills learned on his own.

  As the handyman of the village, Deacon Jung would come running with his only tool, a screwdriver, if anyone called for help with their fuse boxes or sockets or radios. He also worked as an electrician on construction projects. I immediately sensed he was a salt-of-the-earth type. He was a born organizer who did not use the language of intellectuals but could explain the content of books in an accessible manner. He read a truly astonishing number of books and always had one in his hand. I introduced him to Kim Nam-ju.

  Later he became chair of the National Federation of Farmers’ Associations and threw himself into international solidarity activities, allying with farmer activist groups in other emerging nations. He even flew to Mexico as part of the resistance movement against the WTO’s liberalization of grain markets.

  Early spring in Haenam made itself known by the warm sunlight that fell on our cold necks and the gentle spring breeze that seemed to wake the barley sprouts. In early March, Park Seok-mu brought Kim Sang-yoon, who had been above him at the National Democratic Youth and Student Alliance, and the novelist Song Gi-sook to see me in Haenam. I took them to a tavern near Daeheung Temple. We had just raised our glasses when a burly, rough-looking man entered the tavern and demanded to know which of us was Hwang Sok-yong. I reluctantly said it was me, and he told me to follow him, without so much as a greeting.

  There was a black jeep parked outside. The man said he was an intelligence officer with Haenam Police and that I needed to get in the car, because we were going to the police station for a bit. I was taken to the intelligence division room. I could hear barked commands outside. The officer had just said he’d heard I’d moved here, and wished to take this opportunity to introduce himself, when a man in his fifties, dressed in a sharp suit, entered the office. The policemen of lesser rank all sat up ramrod straight and saluted. He gave me a piercing look and sat down in the section chief’s chair.

  “I’m the intelligence coordinator for the area. This is Mr. Hwang Sok-yong, correct?” He glanced around the room and everyone answered for me: “Yes, it is.” Later I learned that the KCIA had spread their operatives around the country, calling them coordinators. This one was in charge of Jangheung, Gangjin, and Haenam. “I have no time for this,” he groused. “I suppose it’ll be dawn by the time we’re finished?” He took some papers from an envelope as the other detectives left the room. What he said was simple. At Myeong-dong Cathedral, a group of religious persons and independent intellectuals had distributed a petition for the striking down of the Yushin Constitution and the release of those detained for
the March 1 pro-democracy declaration. My name was on this petition.

  “Everyone involved is being investigated for espionage. Do you want to get arrested yourself?” That was when I realized what had happened. I had moved to the boondocks, but my friends had probably needed a famous name to attach to their petition and so they’d used mine. I told him that while I had no idea how my name had ended up on the petition, I was sympathetic to striking down the Yushin Constitution. Further, Park Chung-hee’s elimination of presidential term limits was against the democratic principles of our original constitution.

  He went on to question me about every single thing I’d done over the past few years, my reasons for moving to Haenam, my contacts there, and what I planned to write. I stated that because I had so many friends in Seoul who were constantly bugging me to do things with them, I wanted to move somewhere quiet where I could concentrate on writing. He wrote up my statement on what looked like a novella’s worth of paper, handed me a single sheet, and instructed me to write down what he said. It was a kind of pledge that I would do no more than write, and not participate in any political activity. “If you were in Seoul right now, you’d be arrested for violation of martial law. That’s at least three years in prison. Be thankful I’m not arresting you now.”

  I assumed he would attach my declaration to my statement and submit it to KCIA headquarters. It was one in the morning when he finished and left for Jangheung. The next morning, Park Seok-mu and Song Gi-sook came to see me, having worried the night away at a nearby inn. We went for some hangover stew and Park Seok-mu joked, “My word, it’s hard to even get a drink with Mr. Hwang now.”

  From then on, the big detective who looked like a wrestler became my handler and visited once a week. Sometimes, it was the calm and fastidious chief of intelligence. They told me to let them know if I ever needed anything while living in Haenam. I was in my thirties at the time and therefore still in the reserve force. The training sessions were far more frequent than in Seoul. I asked them if they really wanted me to attend military reserve training, walking about criticizing the Yushin administration and the president. The chief said, “Of course not!” With that, I was immediately exempted from training. I learned the name of the burly detective from Deacon Jung, who also told me that, despite his intimidating appearance, he was actually rather lazy and not very bright.

  Gathering people together was like building a snowman. You start with a small, hard ball of snow and roll it around to make it bigger; then, when it reaches a certain size, you roll it in as wide an area as possible until it takes on the shape of a snowman. I thought the sponsor group and the activist group should be organized separately. If we had about ten each of rural activists and intellectual activists, we would have enough for a good organization. There were little churches dotting the countryside at the time, mostly affiliated with the Presbyterians. Among Protestants, the ones who practiced minjung theology—led by graduates of Hanshin University and part of the Presbyterian church—were critical of Korea’s development-based dictatorship, and believed that the way back to Jesus’s original intentions was to return to the lives of the minjung, to live and think with them and assist the less fortunate. The Presbyterians already went into shantytowns or factory zones and were just beginning their evangelism in rural areas. While not all Presbyterian affiliates were as enlightened, the ones who had ventured into the countryside showed at least some sympathy toward the minjung movement.

  One day, I heard from Jung Gwang-hoon that the Okcheon Church’s pastor seemed interested in the movement, which made me cross over Useuljae to pay him a visit. I met him in the living annex of the church. He was very welcoming and invited me to have ssambap lettuce wraps with him. I was already good at making friends with new people, and it helped that I was by then a well-known writer. In fact the pastor wasn’t thinking too much of activism at that time, concentrating on increasing the number of his congregants.

  The church was full of elementary school children listening to a story being told by a volunteer. Because the annex was right next door, I could hear the story as we ate. It was about a small insect who was made fun of by the other insects for being born in a dung pile, but one day it shakes off its chrysalis and shines its bright light in the dark night sky. The story had such a delightful sense of narrative to it that I became curious about the storyteller. His name was Yun Gi-hyun, a subsistence farmer with only an elementary school education, who was supporting his widowed mother. The pastor introduced us, and I asked him where he had heard such a beautiful story. He answered shyly that there were no books at home or anywhere to hear stories, and that he had come up with it as he did his farmwork while thinking about what children would like to hear. He was fond of dreaming up stories as he worked in the fields, combining this strand with that.

  “Have you thought of writing fairy tales?” I asked.

  He looked confused. “What’s a fairy tale?”

  I had no idea how to begin, and simply said they were stories for children. “You just have to write down exactly what you told those children just now.”

  Yun Gi-hyun visited my house on his way to market in town and started to write fairy tales as I’d suggested. I taught him how to use manuscript paper, but Hee-yun more considerately coached him on proper punctuation and spelling. In just a few months, he finished two fairy tales. I introduced him to Lee Oh-deok, a fairy-tale writer and children’s educator. Yun Gi-hyun continued to write and submit to magazines, won a literary award, and debuted as a children’s author. He avidly borrowed books from me and had such a capacious intellect that his learning seemed almost effortless. The singer and activist Kim Min-ki would be so moved by his first book of children’s stories, Seollu gan heosuabi (The Scarecrow Who Went to Seoul), that he adapted it into a musical, titled Sarangui bit (The Light of Love).

  I asked Kim Dong-seop to introduce me to any college graduates he knew around town, and he connected me to various people including school friends and drinking buddies. There were middle and high school teachers, a military clerk, a pharmacist, a veterinarian, the owner of a general store, and even a former fighter back from a life outside his hometown. I met them in twos and threes at first, and when a pocket edition of my book was published, I invited them all to a restaurant to give them personalized copies. A high school teacher who was already in cahoots loudly suggested we might as well set up a gye association, a common funds-and-credit-sharing arrangement, which developed into a book club.

  On market days, when the farmers came to gather in a local store, they would instead be led to my house; soon about twenty farmers knew about our place and around ten of them would come over directly, every market day.

  Kim Nam-ju and I started out by talking about the current sociopolitical situation and its corporate, or chaebol-focused, modernization. Then, there would be an open discussion on “Why is life so hard for farmers?” Farmers complained about the things petty bureaucrats had done to them, how landowners would threaten them, how the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation wasn’t owned by farmers but by its executives, and how the cooperative decided the price of crops. Farmers’ objections to why they had to have an outside authority set the price of their crops, when a street vendor was free to set the price of his junk food, was helpful to us in seeing where we had to start with our activism. We couldn’t simply explain books we had read to them; we needed to listen to their stories and learn, visit where they lived and worked, if we wanted to find a way to help.

  The Catholics, who had already started to organize farmers in the 1960s, formally established the Catholic Farmers’ Movement in 1972, raising their campaigning to the national level. There were several reasons why the minjung movement centered on churches during the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s. Firstly, if minjung activism in the post-division South was in danger of being persecuted by anti-communist interests, organizing under the umbrella of religion was relatively safe. The second reason was that the Catholic church had a
strong hierarchy and international backing that stretched all the way to the Vatican, while the Protestant churches had almost as many followers as the Buddhists and could attract solidarity from overseas as well. Thirdly, we could lean on the churches to raise the funds needed for on-site activism.

  We decided to set up a three-day farmers’ education meeting and borrowed a prayer center run by a Christian organization in Okcheon. We excerpted or summarized works that we thought farmers should know about for course materials. Lacking access to a printer, we ended up using a mimeograph machine through sponsorship of the YMCA for handouts.

  In the midst of all this, I was still sending Jang Gil-san installments every day to the Korea Times in Seoul. At night, I went to my study in the neighboring house to write, and in the morning, Jung Gwang-hoon would transform into Deacon Jung and take the manuscript to the bus station. He would grab anyone going to Gwangju and ask them to drop off the manuscript at the Gwangju branch of the Korea Times. Once dropped off, the manuscript was transmitted by telex to Seoul where an editor on the receiving end would decode the English into Korean letters before setting it into my column space. I was so late on deadlines that, on some days, Hee-yun had to run to the Haenam post office with the manuscript herself, borrow the headpiece from the switchboard operator and dictate the entire manuscript to the Seoul editor on the other end. Telephone sound quality was not great between Seoul and the rest of the country. She had to shout out the scenes from Jang Gil-san, a bandit’s story rife with curses and other rough language, not to mention sexual allusions.