The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  I must have dozed off, because next thing I knew the car was slowing down. We were passing through the tollgates into Seoul. I stared out at the unfamiliar streets flowing past me into darkness.

  Epilogue

  December 3, 2016. The weather was harsh and cold. I dressed in layers and took the subway to Gyeongbokgung Station. There was nowhere to sit because the train came loaded from Ilsan, and the station itself was crowded with passengers standing on the platform and moving up and down the stairs. Everyone fell in line and waited patiently for their turn. The five main roads that fed into Gwanghwamun Plaza were jammed with crowds. For the previous protest, on November 12, we had bought candles with paper-cup guards, but now these were replaced by electric candles with batteries. My wife had stuffed her backpack with blankets and mats, but we couldn’t even step foot in the plaza. We stayed at the edges instead. We had walked around before the march began, looking at the different sections of the crowd that were each protesting in their own way. Young students, Won-Buddhists, movie stars, farmers, labor union members, Catholics, feminists … There were all sorts of people there, including many elderly couples, mothers pushing baby carriages, whole families with parents holding their little ones’ hands, and middle-aged office workers handing out homemade signs. There were also quite a few groups of homemakers, calling on their phones to locate each other in the crowd, their cries of joy and long time no see’s bringing a smile to my lips. And I kept bumping into people I hadn’t met in decades, acquaintances I used to see often who had changed jobs or moved to different parts of the city, friends I would think of from time to time. The protest was a party, a true festival.

  There were many young volunteers helping out. Some wandered through the crowd collecting money, and many people willingly opened their wallets. The heat from the million candles and the mass of people was enough to stave off the cold. In Gwanghwamun Plaza and its surrounding streets, and in cities all over Korea, an estimated 2.32 million people came out for the candlelight protest against President Park Geun-hye, daughter of the former dictator Park Chung-hee. An unprecedented number of people had turned out that day, because the National Assembly was set to vote on the president’s impeachment. A right-wing politician had said dismissively, “Candles go out the moment the wind changes,” which merely incited more citizens to take to the streets, telling their friends and family to come out as well, anxious to see through a successful impeachment vote. Many others had come out to the protest when they found they couldn’t bear to just sit at home and watch.

  The citizens did not throw stones at the police buses that blocked their way but slapped stickers on them instead, and when it got late the young volunteers swept the streets clean and even ripped the stickers off the buses. They did so because they were worried that the riot police, conscripts around the same age as themselves, would have to spend hours doing it themselves.

  I followed the march into Hyoja-dong, past the Jeokseondong alley that I had walked down every day in middle school and high school. There was another roadblock in front of the public administration center at Hyoja-dong; because this was the closest point to the presidential Blue House, a great many protesters were gathered there. They were nearly all passionate young adults in their twenties and thirties. President Park would have been in earshot of their shouted slogans. Demonstrators and police had already battled over the protest in court, where the police would try to block the protest and a judge would remove that block, over and over again. The older folks from the 1980s anti-dictatorship protests, unused to such genteel methods, shouted from the taverns that we needed to charge at the cops with Molotov cocktails if we wanted this to be a real revolution. But nonviolence has always been the order of candlelight protests.

  The organizers were cultural activists with considerable experience in civic groups. They never handed over the microphones to famous personages or politicians. Except for the musicians who had come to perform, no one was automatically entitled to address the crowds. Instead, the microphone was passed between nameless citizens, seniors, middle school students, anybody with a story they needed to tell, who proceeded to share their experiences with the crowd as best they could. If someone got overexcited and attempted to scale the wall of buses, the crowd would calm them by chanting, “Come down, come down! Nonviolence, nonviolence!” and the person would come down with the support of those below. The sight of everyone acting strong but wise, angry but, as individuals and yet deferential to one another, was as beautiful as the candlelight itself. In the plaza, I experienced a new country, a completely different community from what had been before. I do not always like the word citizen, but a new citizenry had appeared before me.

  We wandered until dawn and returned home, whereupon I immediately lay down with the chills and a fever. I had come down with the flu. I’d had a flu shot in the fall, free for all senior citizens, but it didn’t seem to have worked. It was in this state of sickness that I watched as the National Assembly voted to impeach Park Geun-hye on live television. Congratulatory messages flew in from all over. Finally, we were beginning to emerge from the long, dark tunnel of Park Chung-hee’s legacy of dictatorship. His daughter had picked up his historic karma and was being kicked off the political stage. I was nineteen years old when Park Geun-hye’s father seized power, and now I was seventy-five.

  ~

  The policies of the Park Geun-hye administration, which had taken office in 2013, were ill suited to the current times, leftovers from the Yushin dictatorship as they were. The Korean peninsula remained divided; we were still subservient to world powers and at the mercy of their actions. Because we had pursued modernization within the framework of dictatorship, we were bad at balancing different opinions or taking care of the disenfranchised. The power of capital was stronger than ever and its control over politics ever more subtle. South Korea seemed to top every negative ranking in the OECD: suicide rate, irregular employment, work-related accidents, labor hours, youth unemployment. The two conservative administrations of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, through their hostility and Cold War attitudes toward North Korea, had wiped out all our efforts to transform our system of armistice into a system of peace, pushing the Korean peninsula back to the brink of war.

  Most of the people I met at various events agreed that Korea was in crisis, both domestically and internationally. They believed that it was a crisis across politics, the economy, and diplomatic relations, and that we might not be able to overcome it even if all the disparate and dissenting voices in our society managed to come together as one. As usual, the brunt of this crisis would be borne by ordinary people, and wounds much deeper than those sustained during the Asian Financial Crisis would appear in our society. The widespread consensus was that, late as it was, we as a community needed to find a way to survive.

  Park Chung-hee, who seized power through a military coup in 1961, imposed a development-oriented dictatorship to modernize the country, the aftereffects of which are still present in our lives today—wearing the fashionable clothes of democracy over one half of a body that remains divided by a militarized border. Despite two democratic governments in between, the reactionary remnants of the past successfully installed the Lee Myung bak and Park Geun-hye administrations. The daughter of the dictator Park brought back the cronyism between government and industry that had been common practice during her father’s time. Every social system began reverting to the past, conformist thought-policing returned, and surveillance of those in the arts and academia was conducted with even more guile than before.

  In my own case, there had been veiled threats from the government alongside offers of leadership positions in pro-governmental organizations; every year they looked into my bank records and sent mailed notices of having done so. Members of right-wing organizations also posted about me on social media, twisting the former KCIA’s reports about my North Korea visit and labeling me a communist and a spy. These subtle and malicious forms of harassment and surveillance had trickled
on for some time until—immediately after the Sewol ferry disaster in April 2014, which killed hundreds of school students—turning into a deluge, which leads me to believe that the Sewol incident was the true preamble to the fall of the Park Geun-hye administration. As voices criticizing the government’s incompetent and confused handling of the Sewol increased in volume, those who spoke up were labeled as radical leftists or impure elements threatening national security, and got added to a secret blacklist that was only later revealed. I was used to that kind of treatment, but I can imagine how difficult it must have been for younger writers and artists. But I still believe that, no matter what kind of oppression or difficulty ensues, the social function of the artist must begin from a critical point of view. The relationship between the government and the arts must be that the former supports, but does not control, the latter. A society where artists have lost their faculty of criticism and submit unconditionally to power is well on its way to losing its democracy.

  I could not keep my promise to my publisher of delivering the manuscript of this book by the end of the year. I was too sick from an unending flu, and too exhausted from being sick. I rang in 2017 in this state. Soon, my right shoulder was in such pain that I temporarily lost use of the entire arm. My whole life I had insisted on writing all my manuscripts by hand, to the point that I’d suffered from a severe case of frozen shoulder during my exile in Germany. The pain in my right shoulder kept recurring, and the only real treatment was to stop working long enough for it to heal. This time, however, was different. When I was young, I had once caught a middle-ear infection after swimming and couldn’t sleep for days as I cried from the pain, but this pain was much worse. Being an adult, it wasn’t as if I could cry all night anymore; all I could do was lie in bed with my eyes open and moan. The pain pulsed with the beating of my heart; it was all but audible. It got to the point where I couldn’t lift my cutlery; my wife had to feed me. When I finally got checked by a doctor, he declared that the flu must have developed into pneumonia before receding, leaving behind a swollen and infected shoulder joint, long devoid of any cartilage. He drained the fluid from my shoulder and prescribed a regimen of pills and physical therapy, which had me in and out of the hospital all winter long.

  I was born left-handed. I’ve seen American presidents sign documents with their left hands, which makes me think the West doesn’t really discriminate against left-handed people. But in the East, there is a strict tradition of doing anything involving eating or writing with the right hand. Whenever I held a spoon or a pen with my left hand as a child, my mother would slap my hand or scold me. Even the word right has the moralistic meaning of correct, proper, or normal. Is the left hand, then, the “wrong” hand?

  After much correction and practice, I learned to eat and write well enough with my right hand. But when I threw a ball, or swung a fist in anger, or drew a woman toward me after I’d learned how to love, it was my left hand that reached out. My blood called for my left hand, but I was thwarted many times. The world is full of objects for the right-handed. Even in the military, the old-fashioned M-1 rifles were designed for right-handers, which made me a bad shot and subject to much disciplinary action. Through this constant conflict with objects for the right-handed, I developed a perspective that was different from most people’s. This isn’t such a bad thing to have when you’re a writer. But this long-standing conflict had now compromised my body at a key moment. Was this a sign telling me not to use my right hand anymore, or a sign that I did not deserve to use my right side anymore?

  A whole twenty years have passed since I was released from my five-year sentence. Looking back, I cannot think of a single year of my life that might be called easy, but those particular years of exile and imprisonment now seem, from this side of seventy, like they were at least brief.

  When I left prison, South Korea was in total economic chaos because of the Asian Financial Crisis. There were mobs of homeless people around the train and subway stations, large corporations declaring bankruptcy, and soaring numbers of layoffs. The world was being reformatted into the neoliberal order following the end of the Cold War. My own greatest concern was trying to make a living again as a writer. Quite a few of my colleagues whispered behind my back that old Hwang would never be able to write again.

  The first thing I did was go into a big university hospital to get a full-body checkup. Fortunately, no major illnesses were found, but my eyesight had gone quite bad and my gums were in such terrible shape that I needed new molars. They said it was from stress and malnutrition. I was told that I might suffer from insomnia, agoraphobia, and intense introversion—symptoms that could persist for three to four months or even up to a year before slowly returning to normal. I did begin to feel better with time, but meanwhile I would get dizzy and my heart would pound when I was on the subway, or a wave of panic would wash over me when I was in crowded places like shopping malls, forcing me to step aside until I felt able to move again. These were all symptoms of having spent so long in a private cell, I was told. Writing The Old Garden and The Guest, however, helped me overcome these symptoms and bring me back to my old self.

  Writing an autobiography was something I really did not want to do. I had made it a rule to work only on fiction, but, more than anything else, I hated the thought of talking about myself. In 2004, when I was living in London, I was approached about serializing my life story in the JoongAng Ilbo, but I ended up cutting it short for those same reasons. As I chronicled my childhood and youth, the closer I got to the present, the worse I began to feel. It became harder and harder to see myself objectively, and I found myself inadvertently presenting myself in a favorable light or making excuses for the hurt I had caused—and this was not a gratifying discovery. I thought I needed more time to see myself from a distance. I would have given up entirely if it weren’t for the fact that I’d signed a contract with a publisher. I kept putting it off for ten years until the rights went to a different publisher, who was much more persistent in demanding that I either hand over a manuscript or return the advance. I was used to sweating under one deadline or another anyway, so I gave them the rough draft that I had been working on before I’d canceled the serialization. That draft had ended at the part where I go down to Haenam to finish Jang Gil-san, and the remaining narrative was filled in with an “interview” chapter. When Kang Tae-hyung, editor and director of Munhakdongne, heard this, he scolded me, saying that my story was not just the story of an individual but a valuable resource for all of Korean literature, and how dare I mistreat it that way. He returned my large advance, managed to wrangle back the rights, and waited three more years for me to finish.

  I reread the manuscript I had put in storage for ten years and broke into a sweat at the thought of what I had almost done. I decided to start again. As I resumed work, I chastised myself for not respecting autobiography as a literary form and for nearly making a foolish mistake. This past year of looking back at myself and thinking about my life has been a precious experience in my twilight years.

  I became famous at a young age and was cared for by many people. Talented people are arrogant: many of them rest on their talents and have no knowledge of their selves. What is more, I was always rushing headlong toward some new destination. I would reach that place only to turn and head off to somewhere else, leaving behind people and places the moment I’d grown accustomed to them. I had a habit of moving on to the next project when I’d reached the midpoint of my current project, finishing off the latter in a hurry. So you can imagine what my personal relationships were like.

  One day, when I was living in Paris, I was on my way home from a walk with my family. I remember holding my adult daughter’s hand as we crossed the Pont Mirabeau. A cool breeze blew over the river and boats passed by under the bridge. My daughter was excited to be on a trip. Our palms were sweating. It was getting uncomfortable to walk that way, so I let go of her hand. She shot me a sidelong glance and said, “Of course you’d be like that.” Sometimes I will
take such criticisms to heart, but for the most part I overlook them. Then, later, I fall into moments of deep regret. By that point, the person I’ve hurt will have already moved on, as far away from me as a shot arrow, with no way for me to make amends. How many people have I hurt like this? How many friends did I walk away from, and what have I been running toward? All those people, both inside and outside Korea, who helped me in my times of need—I had never missed them more until that moment. Late as it was, I called each of their names in my heart, sending them my gratitude.

  Spring seemed to be coming slowly. The pain in my shoulder receded just as slowly. Coincidentally, the new edition of The Kwangju Uprising was being published at the same time as this work, and while I was revising the edits of both books, the mass Candlelight Revolution against Park Geun-hye lit up our hearts again in Korea. Finally, on March 10, Park Geun-hye’s impeachment ruling was certified. The Constitutional Court’s declaration was a long time coming, but it showed how much our society had grown up.

  On the day of the certification, I looked out into my front yard and saw it was white with apricot blossoms. My shoulder is now much stronger and more flexible than before. Since my sickness, I have discovered that I am ambidextrous. I can hug from both sides. In my old age, I have finally grown up.

  It is thanks to Kang Tae-hyung that this autobiography was reborn. I also wish to thank Yeom Hyun-sook who managed its publication, Lee Sang-sul, and the entire editorial team at Munhakdongne for working so hard to make this, my true release from prison, a reality.

  And if it wasn’t for my wife, Kim Gil-hwa, and her daily encouragement, reading and editing the manuscript scores of times through many sleepless nights, I would still be trapped in the past somewhere, like a prisoner who cannot find the way out.