The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  After the release of Neokpuri, we used the project as an opportunity to create an underground media group called Voice of Gwangju. Jeon Yong-ho did most of the work, scrounging time from recording studios where live bar musicians worked, copying hundreds of tapes. He borrowed a small room in an alley behind the market and assigned a graduate student named Kim Yeong-jeong from Chonnam National to sit there all day and manually replace each tape in the four decks as they finished copying.

  Then, in 1983, the regrouped team of cultural activists consisting of Hong Seong-dam, Jeon Yong-ho, Kim Tae-jong, Yoon Man-sik, and Kim Jeong-hee gathered once more to form the cultural activist group Work and Play. We built a permanent theater and got half of its activities funded by a German church group. We also published an irregular magazine titled “Work and play.” Hong Seong-dam did the photography and made prints and paintings of Gwangju, while the Work and Play theater continued to produce madanggeuk and spread the experiences of the group far and wide. Within about a year we had helped establish cultural activist groups in Jeju, Mokpo, Jeonju, Jinju, Masan, and Busan. In Seoul, Chae Hee-wan, Im Jin-taek, and other organizers began a network of thirty-three cultural activist groups that stretched across the country. This grew into an interdisciplinary media movement built on solidarity across literature, art, photography, movies, theater, and music, in which collaboration became essential as the movement latched on to the most effective distributive mediums of the day: recorded music, in the 1980s, to be followed by film and video documentaries. But the madanggeuk constituted the origin of all of these later experiments. We established a national cultural activism association in 1984, and I joined the executive committee. We still felt an obligation to spread the truth of Gwangju far and wide, both inside and outside Korea. Many teams had been gathering information and materials since the moment it had ended, but because it had to be done out of reach of the government’s watchful eye, it took longer than expected. The media was heavily censored under martial rule and many journalists had been dismissed. Occasionally team members would disappear because they were wanted by the authorities, which delayed production for another few years. Meanwhile, I had to somehow finish Jang Gil-san, which I had been serializing since 1974. At long last the final episode was printed, exactly ten years later, in the summer of 1984.

  Early that winter, Jeong Sang-yong and Jeong Yong-hwa, who were among the survivors of the massacre at the Provincial Hall, came to see me. Jung Yong-hwa had run the Modern Cultural Research Center since Yoon Han Bong’s exile and was also in charge of putting together the record of the Gwangju Democracy Movement. Hee-yun would regularly collect material from him, show it to me, and hide it. The two Jungs came to see me to discuss the management of these records. Jung Sang-yong had met with a couple of archivists, but they had refused to help, knowing they would be immediately arrested if word got out. I still felt a sense of debt to the people who had died in Gwangju. Chance had placed me elsewhere during the height of the uprising, and it always weighed on me that I was not there to stand with the people of Gwangju in their hour of need. This, at least, was work I could do as a writer and something that might lessen that guilt. I wholeheartedly accepted but told them I would need time to go through it all and write it up into a book. Jung Yonghwa explained that a few people were working on it already, the first draft would be ready in the spring, and all I would have to do was edit a little at the end. I understood: they needed to borrow my name for legitimacy with the public, and I would have final responsibility for the work.

  The manuscript began making its way to me in pieces the next spring. Cho Bong-hoon drew timelines of what had happened during the incident. I later learned the names of a few of the recorders, but at the time I only knew that Jung Sang-yong, Jung Yong-hwa, and Jeon Yong-ho were involved. Jung Yong-hwa put it simply: “Everything is your responsibility. You don’t need to know anyone else.” I understood what he meant. It was a dark time, and we needed to be prepared for the worst. It was like cutting off a limb in order for the whole body to survive. I might be arrested, but I wouldn’t have enough information to take anyone down with me.

  Pulbit’s Na Byung-sik offered to publish the book. We brought together some influential activists to discuss how to go about publishing it and dealing with the fallout.

  In mid-April of 1984, manuscript in hand, I left Hee-yun and the two children in Gwangju. Hee-yun saw me off, doing her best to hide her worry and exhaustion. We knew that once The Kwangju Uprising was published, I would be on the run for who knew how long.

  During our years together, in the lonely times when I was away, she’d been tasked with raising our children alone, caring for my sick mother, and watching over her as she died. I’d had countless friends over for dinner. She’d once cooked for a hundred people, all without a single word of complaint. Emotionally, though, she was still stuck in the Provincial Hall along with her vivid memories of the uprising. I was not a rock to her but a burden. Leaving was a way to escape both my sense of debt to the people of Gwangju and my guilt for not having been with my family during that difficult time. By then, I’d grown used to being away from home for one reason or another.

  The night train to Seoul left Gwangju and raced through the darkness. Before me lay a long journey from which I would never return.

  14

  Prison VI

  The seasons changed, and it was back to the tedium of winter. The soji boys helped me with the harvest of our vegetable patch. I wrapped the cabbages in newspaper to help them last through the long winter ahead. Just before my fourth Christmas behind bars, I received a letter from Kim Myoung-su. With the Jang Gil-san royalties still in contention for over a year now, we had stopped writing, except for the occasional missive whenever it felt like the other was about to let go of communication entirely. My heart still couldn’t decide, and I wanted to be rid of the whole business altogether. But the guilt and pity I felt toward the mother and son I had left behind in another country made me chastise myself time and again. I carefully read the part about Ho-seop that Kim Myoung-su had scrawled in her nearly illegible handwriting:

  Pulbit Books sent a twenty-volume manhwa version of Jang Gil-san that Ho-seop likes very much. I can hear him laughing as he reads it aloud to himself before bed. He asks about the names. He said Daddy promised to meet him before Christmas and keeps asking me about that, too … His teacher says he talks about you a lot. Ho-seop is very fond of his teacher. Not at first, but with time Ho-seop has opened up to him quite a bit. He’s also inviting friends over more and being invited over himself. He’s very much into music and will get to play the trumpet in the school orchestra next year. He took lessons for an hour after school every Tuesday and passed the audition. His best friend’s father is in the Metropolitan Opera, which is why he wanted to go into music, too. It’s just like that saying, “If your friend goes to Gangnam, you go, too.”

  I imagined my child playing the trumpet. I had missed out on seeing him grow up, ever since he’d turned five, and could not picture what his face looked like now. No matter how I stared at the photos they sent me, all I could recall was my last moment with him. I had never, not once, created a loving home for my children. This Christmas, like their other Christmases, would be spent on their own, scattered here and there without their father. Ho-jun and Yeo-jeong were all grown up, but I couldn’t even say whether Ho-seop still believed in Santa Claus.

  On December 26, 1996, the day after Christmas, the conservative New Korea Party snuck through the Agency for National Security Planning Act and labor law reform bills. The New Korea Party politicians had received phone calls from their party whip on the evening of the 25th, gathered at four hotels in Seoul, and discreetly took tour buses to the National Assembly. They took their seats, and at 6:00 a.m. sharp, in the absence of their opposition colleagues, swiftly passed eleven bills in less than seven minutes. The opposition party was of course up in arms, and artists strongly objected to the revival of the ANSP’s right to prosecute the crime o
f “praising North Korea,” with its potential to suppress freedom of expression. Censorship statutes against movies and music were judged to be unconstitutional, but these modifications in the ANSP Act had enabled government control over an even wider range of creative activity. There were no clear standards of what constituted “praise,” which meant that the authorities had carte blanche to brand almost anything pro–North Korean and therefore illegal. Cultural activists voiced concerns that the new laws could be used against any kind of artistic work that was critical of the government. They would deincentivize creativity altogether, throwing us all into a “mental prison.”

  Myself and the nine student protesters and activists in Gongju Correctional Institution decided to enter resistance mode, as defined by the nationwide Committee of Prisoners of Conscience. Our activities—consisting of hunger strikes, shouting every morning and evening, declarations, and disobedience to prison rules—ended after a week, but as a result young Jong-ho and the missionary were transferred elsewhere. I could only listen to them yelling slogans from afar as they were dragged away from our cell block.

  The warden requested a meeting with me, as the de facto leader of the prisoners of conscience, to clear the air and propose a future of discussion and mutual compromise. I told him I’d talk to the prisoners to see how far we were willing to negotiate with our demands.

  The regular prisoners’ demands mostly had to do with food and censorship of their letters. The political prisoners wanted to be allowed the use of a library, audiovisual education, and to read books without censorship. But because most of the demands had to do with meals, I decided to write up a proposal centered on food to garner maximum support from my fellow prisoners. In addition, if we couldn’t have uncensored letters, the prison could at least inform the senders of why their letters weren’t forwarded so they could rewrite and resend them. As for books, the new civilian government had promised that any book published in Korea, including translations, would be allowed. There was a library in the prison, and the students were to come up with a list of books that any prisoner could request and read. Another demand was to let political prisoners have library time, like regular prisoners had religion time.

  I asked that any personal books left behind by released prisoners be automatically donated to the library. I also wrote to my publishers to donate some volumes. Soon enough, the publishers sent hundreds of books to the prison.

  ~

  As Gongju Correctional Institution housed only a thousand inmates, it had a smaller budget than the prisons of big cities. But it was above all the long-held relationship between the prison and subcontractors that made their food so expensive to buy. We wanted the prison to create daily menus according to the season, post the expenses for materials and fuel on the walls of the blocks, and choose one person per block to assist in the selection of these seasonal menus. We also asked that prisoners be consulted on what could be sold in the prison commissary, and for suppliers to be replaced if their goods weren’t up to par. These were detailed, almost trivial demands, but so obvious that it was astonishing they hadn’t been adopted earlier.

  The authorities agreed to everything we asked for, but as time went by they slipped further and further back into their old ways and it was eventually all for naught. The warden, who had started at the bottom of the ladder of the prison workforce, was now facing retirement. He could be generous from time to time but was a cunning old fox in the end. He was experienced enough to know that the mundane can easily wear you down.

  For a while, though, we had a bit of relief. We tended the vegetable patch during exercise hour and went to the library. The warden rented a video for us every week from downtown. The udon, ramen, and other snacks that the working prisoners had been given for sports day were also given to our cell block guards for safekeeping, and we made ourselves lunch with the materials in the shower room.

  There was a Chosun University student who had been a cook in the military; he made good sujaebi stew. He knew how to knead the flour beforehand and let it rise for a night on a windowsill, and made broth using anchovy and kelp, tossing in some chopped kimchi. The regular prisoners had special visits from their families in the exercise yard or auditorium twice a year; it was a big festival like those in military training camps. Some families brought pots and pans to cook dishes on the spot and would invariably make so much food that the leftover ddeok would come all the way to our cell block. Political prisoners weren’t given this privilege, but after I raised a bit of a stink with the commissary and kitchen, the prison authorities started allowing our families to feed us during visits, provided it wasn’t a broth. The guards began to overlook our carrying in kimbap, ddeok, dumplings, meat, and jeon after our visitors had left. The young political prisoners all wrote to their families, and we were able to supplement our diets thanks to the home-cooked food that came in once every two months.

  Inspector Lee Ju-hee summoned me to the political prisoners’ management office. Like others of his rank, he was a “nobody,” as he put it, having started from the bottom as a two-leaf guard, but he was a hardworking and honest civil servant, nonetheless. I thought he was a little too square at first, but we eventually understood each other better and I was able to discuss matters with him whenever there was a crisis. We talked a lot about our respective families. Lee once visited me in solitary during a hunger strike and tearfully begged me to stop. He had two clever sons, the eldest of whom got accepted to Seoul National University the year I was released. I once went to visit him at Gongju Correctional Institution after I left, and when I built my house in Deoksan in Chungcheong Province, he came to see me with a pot of honey as a gift. He retired as a decorated chief inspector. We exchanged news on occasion; he called once from a hospital to tell me he had cancer. A few months later, when I was overseas for an event, I received a message saying he had passed away.

  One day, Lee said I would have a special visitor the next day. I asked who it was. They had told him not to warn me beforehand, but Lee figured it was more important that I was willing to see them, and revealed that they were from Daejeon’s ANSP office. I grinned. I wondered aloud why they would bother to come to see me, because if it was about my release they would have sent someone from the Ministry of Justice. I added that I had no more business with the ANSP anymore. Lee nodded and said I didn’t have to see them if I didn’t want to. I said I would, curious to find out what they were after.

  The next day, two middle-aged men in suits were waiting for me in the political prisoners’ management office. They were not courteous and kept talking down to me. They had all the arrogance of fancy civil servants deigning to speak to a prisoner. They started by asking me about my health and life in prison, and I did my best to deal with them as if it were any other prison visit. Then one of them cut to the chase.

  —You’ve served just over half your sentence already, haven’t you? You’ve been inside longer than Pastor Moon.

  I kept my response calm and nonchalant.

  —So why not let me go? It’s torture for a writer not to write.

  The other agent pounced.

  —That’s why we’re here, to help you.

  They went on to explain that they had come to ask for my collaboration. Kim Dae-jung had recently reentered public life. He was sure to bring instability to society and had to be stopped from engaging in political activities, for the sake of national unity. Since I knew so much about him, I should write a book criticizing him, and they would surely pardon me soon enough. They offered to provide me with as much research material as I needed and would give me a good writing space to work in.

  I burst out laughing at their naïve proposal. I was tempted to give them a piece of my mind—to the effect that I hadn’t thrown myself into democracy activism and gone to North Korea to do politics; I chose literature because it was my calling; anything I did aside from that came from my sense of duty as a public intellectual, and was part of my literary life; coercing me to write something so nakedly
political and contrary to what I believed in was exactly what they made writers in North Korea do; I was fighting this fight to change all the things they held dear about our current sociopolitical system—but I said the following instead:

  —I’m not going to write that.

  The two men looked at each other, and one of them, angry now, spat out his next words.

  —Then you’re going to be here for the full seven years.

  The other one jumped in.

  —You must like the jailbird life.

  I held my temper in check and tried to sound as contemptuous as possible.

  —I don’t know who put you up to this, but you’re barking up the wrong tree. If you wanted to talk pardons, you should have come two years ago. Now that I’ve gotten through a decent amount of my sentence and learned to have a little fun here, you come crawling to offer me a potential pardon? Who do you think you’re dealing with?

  Apparently deciding there was nothing more to be said, they abruptly stood up and left the room. Lee, who had been pretending to take notes nearby, piped up.

  —I couldn’t have put it better myself.

  We laughed about this incident for years afterward.

  Then came my fifth summer in prison. I was allowed outside visits for the first time. I needed to go to the general hospital downtown because of an ear infection. It all started from the cold water I kept pouring over myself to keep cool. Water must have gotten deep inside my ear, as I kept hearing a sound like a monk’s moktak when I knocked on my head. It annoyed me and I kept digging into my ear with my finger, which led to an infection. I woke up one morning with my ear inflamed and the swelling traveling down my cheek. What was a light ache at first soon began to pulse with every beat of my heart. In the infirmary, they went through the motions of disinfecting the ear and giving me antibiotics. I had nightmares that whole night. A couple of days later, I was finally granted outside medical treatment.