The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  “Hello? Yes, quotation marks, it’s dialogue. Stop right there, you scumbag! If you run, I’ll catch you and rip your balls off!”

  “What is he ripping off again?”

  “His balls, his balls!”

  The switchboard ladies would collapse into giggles, my wife would blush scarlet, and the female reporter on the other end would be too mortified to ask anything more. I was told the reporter had been teased so much by the male editors while loudly reciting these embarrassing lines that she burst into tears more than once. It was always some newbie reporter on the cultural beat who was saddled with this task, making me a sworn enemy of the cultural section, from the chief all the way down to the newest recruit.

  The ten years it took to finish Jang Gil-san and all the episodes and difficulties during that time are too much to detail here. I had to run around going to protests and declarations during the serialization, often carrying my research notes and manuscript paper into inns. But I don’t think my activism harmed my novel. I tried hard to reflect the highs and lows of contemporary society in the novel itself, striving to recreate the conditions and challenges of today’s minjung in the lives of our ancestors from long ago.

  We began our first organized consciousness-raising at the prayer retreat in Okcheon, with fifty farmers. We gathered a bit of money, and the rest was paid by Kim Dong-seop and the book club in town. A few felt the endeavor was too risky and begged off in the middle, but the ones who remained continued to sponsor the farmers’ school.

  We contacted the Christian Academy run by Pastor Kang Won-yong, of Kyungdong Presbyterian Church in Seoul, to send instructors. The ones I remember best are Professor Lee Woo-jae, who specialized in agricultural economics and veterinary science, and Professor Hwang Han-sik, who was an economist. They didn’t have tenure at the time but were dedicated to teaching those who most needed it. I was deeply impressed by their ability to strip difficult subjects down to easily digestible chunks for the farmers; their everyday language and gestures helped students understand their own plight.

  In the fall of 1977, we created the Haenam Farmers’ Association and celebrated by holding a farmers’ festival. We didn’t hold conferences or lectures or write up some manifesto and distribute roles like we would have done before, but instead held a fun event for the farmers, having already decided what our organization looked like. This became the basis for the later South Jeolla Province Christian Farmers’ Association and would ultimately evolve into the Korean Christian Farmers’ Association Alliance, founded in 1982.

  Thus, I had established a base of operations for my fieldwork in Haenam and planned a center of cultural activism for the entire region, including Gwangju. I discussed it with other cultural activists in Seoul beforehand. For the festival, instead of asking professional musicians to provide a visiting show, we wanted events the farmers could easily participate in and be the center of. The professional artists, in other words, would only consult, and the performers on-site would be the farmers.

  We decided to hold the festival in the wide lot in front of the YMCA, across from Haenam’s administrative office. The YMCA building, converted from a Shinto shrine dating to the Japanese colonial era, was surrounded by large zelkova and cherry trees—perfect to hold a madangpan festival. The farmers gathered days in advance to prepare. The traditional music bands had all been dissolved by the government’s modernizing Saemaul Movement, but the jing, janggu, kkwaenggwari, and other instruments had been carefully stored away; it took only a few measures for the rusty farmers to remember the old rhythms.

  Someone suggested we reenact a traditional country wedding as a comedy, something everyone had experience of; but another suggested that the tragedy of a country funeral would be better for creating a “dignified joy.” This was called sangyeonori, in which the funeral procedure and bereavement were turned into spectacle and, when the funeral procession was underway, street performance. The farmers and I sat in a circle and discussed whose funeral it should be. The farmers were all using loans from the National Agricultural Cooperative to pay for pesticide, fertilizer, and roof repairs; as in any rural region, the administrators liked to throw their weight around. It was decided that the cooperative would be the main target of criticism and the subject of the funeral. The farmers recounted what they had experienced at the hands of the cooperative and divided their stories into categories. Each category became a skit. The connecting theme would be how powerless the farmers were in the face of injustice. We needed three teams for the skits and the farmers fought to be the ones to perform. A fat and mischievous-looking farmer got the role of the cooperative; he was undeniably the star of the show. With the aid of balloons, he would grow fatter and fatter throughout the skits as he exploited the other farmers, and his stomach would “pop” at the end. He was teased for his role throughout the production and given the nickname Fatty. Decades later, when I asked Yun Gi-hyun about him, I learned that this nickname had followed him for the rest of his life. “Oh, Mr. Fatty? He’s doing very well. He owns a restaurant now and has a new grandson.”

  The bier was borrowed from a neighboring village, wrapped in five-colored cloth and decorated with paper flowers and the satiric slogans of the wishes of the farmers. The coffin-bearers were the farmers and performers from Seoul. Lee Kang and Kim Sang-yoon brought students from Chonnam National University and Chosun University to Haenam. There were many attendees from both town and country who, having expected an ordinary festival, seemed overwhelmed by the spectacle. Who knows who invited them, but the wife of Haenam’s mayor also came, as did the wife of the pastor of Haenam Church, seemingly perplexed that there were no separate seats reserved for them. All we did was give everyone a mat to place on the ground as we sat in a circle.

  It was only when the street performers loudly beat their drums as they marched through the main street and the curse-filled and occasionally racy skits started that the community leaders and their wives slunk off the scene, allowing the real festivities to get underway.

  The fat “cooperative” character expired, and the funeral procession began. The singer in the front called to the pallbearers in back, who responded in unison, the sound sweeping through downtown to every corner of the market and residential areas as the procession progressed. It was actually a farmers’ protest. But no one could rightly object to it, as it preserved the form of a farmers’ festival and performance.

  At around the same time, it came to light that the rice mill and the local administrators of Haenam had conspired in the process of buying grain, and the farmers organized to boycott the buyer and demand their grain back. The mayoral office, afraid the situation would escalate, forced the factory to make the necessary repayments. The farmers saw with their own eyes how each of them received exactly what they were due, right down to the last kilo. This did wonders for morale. Since this happened right after the farmers’ festival, the number of farmers in our group skyrocketed, and similar groups popped up all over the little towns of South Jeolla Province.

  ~

  In 1976, the year I came down to Haenam, the US House Committee on International Relations began an investigation into rumors that the Korean American lobbyist Tongsun Park had engaged in bribery of US legislators under orders from the Park Chung-hee administration. Kim Hyong-uk, the former head of the KCIA living in the US in exile, also denounced Park Chung-hee’s corruption. The American press dubbed the incident “Koreagate.” All through that year, activists, minority-party legislators, college professors, and students put out endless petitions and statements, held protests, and got arrested. Professors who’d been fired formed an association and published a manifesto for democratic education.

  Those arrested for violations of martial law decided to protest on March 1, 1978. Kim Dae-jung was being held on sedition charges at Seoul National University Hospital. In June, students from Seoul National University and Korea University held a surprise demonstration demanding the end of the Yushin administration and, for the first time
since the dictatorship was installed, managed to make it all the way to Gwanghwamun in central Seoul, close to the presidential Blue House. Park Chung-hee was once more “elected” as president, following a superdelegate vote of the National Conference for Unification, held in a gymnasium. He was probably intent on keeping himself in power in this fashion until he died.

  At the end of June, the novelist Song Gi-sook called me and asked if I had any plans to come to Gwangju. When I took the hint and went there, Song said he had just been to Seoul to meet with dismissed professors, including Paik Nak-chung, editor of the Quarterly Changbi, and Sung Nae-woon. They feared that the number of expelled and arrested students would rise again with the new semester, in which case the professors promised to immediately join together to issue a statement of condemnation. At Chonnam National University, professors were held accountable for any protests in the school and expected to keep an eye on students at every gathering on campus. In other words, staff were tasked with becoming informants and policing students. What’s more, the authorities made professors pair up with detectives to prevent students from attending events in the city. Song Gi-sook said the academics, unable to bear the humiliation and political pressure, had decided to join the student movement to bring down the Yushin government.

  During the Yushin era, a National Education Charter modeled after the Education Decree of the Japanese colonial era, was proclaimed. Every student from elementary school to college, not to mention soldiers and civil servants, had to be able to recite it at the drop of a hat. Soldiers were punished if they couldn’t; office workers had to stay at work until they finished memorizing it; and students’ grades were docked if they failed to perform it perfectly. Song Gi-sook was planning to make a statement against the charter. Professor Sung Nae-woon came to Gwangju with the declaration Paik Nak-chung had written. He was determined not to let the semester pass without taking action. About fifty people had signed it in Seoul, but there was no consensus yet, which made them decide that eleven professors from Chonnam National University would sign first, and the petition taken up nationwide once something came of it. Kim Nam-ju and I were not indifferent to the affairs of the Council of Writers for Freedom and Practice. As a founding member, I contacted Park Taesun, Lee Mun-ku, or Lee Si-young whenever something happened in Seoul. Kim Nam-ju was in Gwangju to manage the Minjung Cultural Research Center. I spent a few days a week in Gwangju with him and traveled around other regions like Daegu, Busan, Masan, and Jinju in the name of solidarity. We drew quite a crowd at my lectures and Kim Nam-ju’s poetry recitals. Nam-ju would recite a few of his poems and several translations of Neruda and Heine.

  As Kim Nam-ju ran the Minjung Cultural Research Center with Kim Sang-yoon’s help and the Nokdu Bookstore as its base, he put together a seminar and rendered into Korean the Japanese translation of a book on the Paris Commune. One day, a student lost his bag; the police somehow got their hands on it and found some fliers and the Japanese copy inside. They caught the owner and brought him in for questioning. When they learned that Kim Nam-ju had taught him, Nam-ju fled to Mokpo.

  In any case, the Chonnam National University professors were ready to be arrested as soon as the students set out on their protests. Since this was the first major demonstration since the April Revolution and was expected to bring instant solidarity between activists and students, most organizers were raring to go. Naturally, the main organizers were the recently launched cultural activist clubs of Chonnam National University and Chosun University.

  As soon as the Chonnam National University professors made their declaration and were arrested by the KCIA in Gwangju, I went to Song Gi-sook’s house with Yoon Han Bong. Song’s wife was a demure woman of few words, who seemed unfazed by her husband’s latest exploit. Yoon Han Bong went to the city accompanied by pastors, lawyers, feminist activists, and Christian activists in Gwangju, and I used Song’s phone to notify Seoul of our developments and to ask them to gather in Gwangju. For two days, Paik Nak-chung, Park Taesun, and Paek Ki-wan from Seoul met with various people in Gwangju, figuring out what our next move should be. We were confident these movements would pressure the authorities, and torture seemed unlikely now that the foreign press was catching wind of what was going on.

  A meeting was held at a YMCA downtown. My wife handed me the phone on the afternoon our petition for the professors’ release went public. It was Song Gi-sook. “They said they’d let me go once the investigation was over. I think you can stop agitating.” However, he was arrested for violating martial law, sentenced to four years, and sent to Cheongju Prison. The other professors like Sung Nae-woon who participated in the preliminary meetings were also arrested and sacked. Student protesters took to the streets to demand the reinstatement of their professors, walking down Geumnamro Street, but the organizers of the protest fled. A few of them were taken in by cultural activists in Seoul.

  Ten days later I had returned to my house in Haenam when I received a surprise visit from Kim Nam-ju and Choi Kwonheng. The patient and considerate Choi Kwon-heng, along with Lee Hae-chan, was part of the younger generation involved in the National Democratic Youth and Student Alliance, and also a scholar of French literature. He was blood brothers with Kim Nam-ju and Park Hyoung-seon from the early days, and the three were very close. Choi Kwon-heng and Lee Hae-chan ran a nonfiction publishing house called Hanmadang in Seoul. The three of us were drinking soju when Kim Nam-ju suddenly said, “I can’t stand it anymore. This Yushin dictatorship will not fall if we pussyfoot around like this! It would be better if we did nothing at all. I want a real fight.” I asked him what he meant by that and he said, “Let’s put out an underground newspaper.”

  “The three of us?” I said. “Don’t we need an organization?” Kim Nam-ju said we could make the newspaper first and the organization would form later. I said that we had just started a mainstream movement and needed to wait a little longer—it would take time for the effects to spread into the general populace. “Look at how the Haenam Farmers’ Association became the South Jeolla Farmers’ Association.” But Kim Nam-ju said that as soon as he got his fee for the translation he was working on, he would go to Seoul.

  The next day, as we parted, he gave Hee-yun something wrapped in a handkerchief as a present. It was a copy of Che Guevara’s farewell letter to Fidel Castro as he left Cuba.

  All sorts of thoughts are entering my head now: meeting you in María Antonia’s house for the first time, you asking me to join your group, the tension we felt when we were preparing for our journey, when we decided who would send word of each other’s deaths when the time came, when all that potential suddenly became our reality.

  That famous letter. On another page was a copy of the letter he left for his beloved young daughter, Aleida:

  I write you a letter today though it will be far in the future when you read this. But please remember that I have never forgotten you for a single moment … Remember the endless struggle before us. When you’re grown up, you will join the struggle. Prepare, always, to become a revolutionary person when you grow up … Mother’s kisses will fill the time that we cannot see each other.

  Kim Nam-ju must have given me Che’s letters to show he was decided on moving to Seoul. In the meantime, he was going to avoid the police by hiding out in Mokpo, where he translated Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. He finished his manuscript soon after and moved to Seoul.

  My eldest sister in Seoul informed me that Mother was on her way to Haenam. I had decided she should come live with us. My wife and I had been discussing whether to buy a house or rent a bigger one. Mother arrived in Haenam with very few belongings. I cleaned up the spare room for her, reproaching myself for having neglected her for so long. A few days later, the Haenam police intelligence officer asked to meet me. He wanted to know if I was aware that my house was in the plans for a new urban renewal project. It wasn’t supposed to happen for a few more years, but there would be a road going through the house and I would lose out if I didn’t sell th
e place now. I smiled and said, “Are you telling me to leave Haenam?” His eyes grew wide as he waved his hands and protested, “No, no, not at all, I’m just trying to do you a favor here. A citizen of this nation has the right to live anywhere he chooses …”

  I went on needling him. “The thing is, my mother has come to live with me, so I’m looking to buy a bigger house anyway. Someplace downtown? I love it here so much that I think I might settle down.”

  The officer caved. “Oh, Mr. Hwang, please don’t pull my leg. My phone is practically on fire because of people calling about you! It’s killing me! My superiors have it in for you. They’re trying to get you to leave Jeolla Province.”

  I joked again, “Well, if you can get someone to sell my house, I can offer you a cut of the price.”

  “There’s no need, I’ll take care of it immediately.”

  I wanted to ask him if it was even true, what he’d said about the new road, but thought better of it.

  Yoon Han Bong called saying he’d found a good house in Gwangju, and, just like before, I sent my mother and family ahead on the bus while I loaded up a truck with our things and crossed over Useuljae.

  ~

  Yoon Han Bong and I decided to open our office in Gwangju. We renamed it the Modern Cultural Research Center, so as to not raise government alarm with the word minjung. Fundraising was to be done on a rolling basis, but no one was going to give money to the pro-democracy movement just like that. You could be prosecuted for aiding and abetting criminals. Many people had been imprisoned already for helping activists and students go underground.

  I came back to Seoul and talked with my trusted friend Yeo Un again. He knew everyone who was anyone—writers, reporters, and businesspeople. He first suggested selling some work by painters that he knew, but then he had a better idea. Making and selling celadon vases decorated with paintings and handwriting of famous painters and artists was sure to raise a lot of money. We made them and displayed them at the YMCA in Gwangju; fundraising ended only days after. The buyers had an inkling as to what the money was for, but no one was bothered about it.