His name was Kim Okseon. It was not until he was seven years old that he realized he was missing something. His family told the boy that a dog had bitten off his testicles when he was relieving himself. He was young, but he didn’t believe them. It was not long before he learned that his father had tied off his testicles with a leather strap, so tight that the blood did not flow, and then cut them off. And before he was ten years old, he entered the palace and began to wait on the eunuchs. “It’s a way to make a living, isn’t it?” his father said. “What would you do with those balls anyway?” His father clapped him viciously on the back of the head as the boy left, crying. That was the last he saw of his family. Kim Okseon became a musician. He learned to play stringed instruments and the flute and he memorized songs. When the royal family held an event, he sang and sometimes danced. He once received a fan from Gojong himself during the festivities to celebrate the rebuilding of Gyeongbok Palace. When the empress was stabbed to death, Gojong fled to the Russian legation, and the Coup of 1884 and the Reform of 1894 shook the world both inside and outside the palace. The fate of the eunuchs also flickered like a candle in the wind. They took sides, dividing themselves into enlightenment and conservative factions. The days when they weren’t paid grew more frequent, so the musician eunuchs stopped going to the palace. Some of them taught music and dance to gisaeng. Others returned to their hometowns to farm, but their families did not welcome the eunuchs, and they found it difficult to bear the gossip. Kim Okseon and two other eunuchs wanted to leave for a place where no one knew them. One of them read the Capital Gazette and contacted the others, and a few days later they packed up all they owned and headed for Jemulpo. During their long voyage they spoke less and less to the other passengers, mostly keeping to themselves. Almost no one realized that they had once been palace musicians.
29
IN THE TENT VILLAGE on the outskirts of Mérida, Ijeong was interested in one thing alone. Who would be going to the hacienda with him? When it became clear that they were not all going to the same hacienda, Ijeong hoped that he could go to the same one as Yi Yeonsu and her family. If he could have one more wish, it would be to go with the former soldiers he had come to know on the ship. But everything was decided by the hacendados’ canes. One by one, those he knew were chosen. Still a boy, Ijeong was called out much later than Jo Jangyun and his comrades. As he left, Jo Jangyun clapped Ijeong on the shoulder. “Don’t be afraid. We’ll see each other again soon.”
It was sad for Ijeong to part with the person he had relied on like a father. “Farewell,” Ijeong said, bobbing his head in a bow. He also said goodbye to Bak Jeonghun, who stood silently at Jo Jangyun’s side. Bak Jeonghun squeezed Ijeong’s hand. “We’ll see each other again. The world is not nearly as large as you might think.”
Yi Jongdo and his family were in a similar situation, and it was hard to find a hacendado who would choose a middle-aged man with a wife, a young boy, and a girl. What if they break up the families? Yi Jongdo was extremely nervous. He had long since given up any thought of boldly approaching a Mexican aristocrat and demanding a position appropriate to someone of his status. He was not a fool. On the way to Mérida, packed like luggage on the train, he realized just how impetuous his decision to leave had been, and he regretted it. Neither rank nor learning mattered in this place. The only thing left was his family. While he, thoroughly discouraged, read The Analects of Confucius, the only book he had brought with him, his wife and daughter surprisingly drew water, cooked their meals, and made an effort to get to know the women around them. Had they not, they wouldn’t have been able to survive even a day. Yet the more they adapted, the more he was discouraged by his own powerlessness, which forced his family to mingle with those of lowly standing.
A hacendado who arrived late that day, at around sunset, must have had something in mind, for he began to choose mainly those immigrants who had families. Yi Yeonsu obediently followed her father and stood in a line in front of the hacendado who had chosen them. Among those who had not yet been chosen, she spied Ijeong’s handsome forehead and eyes. Their eyes met. Yeonsu felt the strength leave her body, and she had to grab her mother’s hand as she walked on ahead. Then another carriage arrived, and this hacendado, short and pudgy, chose mostly single men. He poked Ijeong in the stomach with his cane. Yeonsu buried her face in her baggage. Tears gushed out. Once she started crying, she could not stop. Her father cleared his throat and her mother jabbed her in her side and scolded her. “Quiet!” Mucus ran from her nose, past her dirty lips, and into her mouth.
John Meyers look satisfied with himself. Taking into account the passengers’ fare on the Ilford and the food and cigarettes they had consumed, even after splitting the profits with the Continental Colonization Company he would still be left with a large sum for which he would have had to work three years back home. The owners of the Yucatán’s henequen haciendas, which suffered from a severe labor shortage, paid a relatively dear price for the Korean immigrants, who could not speak Spanish and thus were no risk of flight, and who did not have a diplomat stationed here who would interfere in the landowners’ affairs. Henequen, the raw material for shipping rope, had become a precious commodity as shipping tonnage increased with imperial competition for colonies and the rapid development of Western capitalism. Rope made from the fiber of the henequen plant was durable and sturdy. The world rope market was divided between henequen fiber and the Manila hemp of the Philippines. “Put ghosts to work for all we care,” said the hacendados of the Yucatán. They had much to do.
Henequen is native to Mexico and grows to about the height of a person. Leaves grow out from the short trunk, which is as sturdy as a tree. The thick, fleshy leaves measure between three and six feet in length, with sharp, white tips, and are four to six inches wide in the center. The leaves grow thick on the short trunk. After ten or fifteen years, a stalk about nine feet high emerges and flowers bloom. After the flowers fade, the stalk dries up and dies. A plant produces about thirty leaves a year, and anywhere from two to three hundred leaves in its lifetime. The edges of the leaves are studded with countless hard, pointy spikes, like a cactus. The Koreans said the leaves resembled dragon tongues, and so called the plant “dragon tongue orchid.” It is not an orchid but a single-seed leaf plant that belongs to the class Liliopsida. It is similar in appearance to aloe, so many people confuse the two, but their uses are entirely different. A liquor called pulque is fermented from henequen. It is a very useful plant—for its fiber, for making alcohol, and for making dye. It is hardy in dry climates, so it is well suited to the Yucatán. Henequen and sisal hemp became the primary products of the Yucatán in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
The Yucatán Peninsula is roughly the size of South Dakota. To the east, it is separated from Cuba by the Yucatán Channel, which joins the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, and the Gulf Stream flows rapidly northwest. Joining Mexico on the Yucatán Peninsula are Guatemala to the south and Belize to the southeast, and with the exception of Belize, which was under the influence of the British navy and pirates, nearly the entire area had originally been ruled as a colony of Spain. But when the 1,032 Koreans arrived, most of the population of the Yucatán was Mayan. Hundreds of years had passed since the Mayan Empire had fallen, but the native people still used the Mayan language and lived according to the Mayan calendar. The descendants of the empire that had left behind great pyramids, the Mayans fought with the federal government of Mexico and the landowners of the haciendas. Their war for independence reached its zenith in 1847. Tens of thousands of Mayans fled to British-controlled Belize to avoid oppression, and those who were captured before reaching the border were sold as slaves to Cuba and the Dominican Republic. As many as thirty-three additional uprisings broke out between 1858 and 1864, and at one point the main Mayan force captured the central Yucatán city of Mérida. The Yucatán Mayans, who bought weapons from the English pirates in Belize, attacked white-controlled areas using guerrilla tactics, on occasion winning maj
or victories. Yet they were unorganized, and they each returned to their own cornfields whenever it rained, so they failed to secure a decisive victory. Such were the limitations of the peasantry. In the end, mercenaries from Cuba and one hundred military advisers sent from the United States landed, and a massacre began. Federal forces, supported by the United States, completely suppressed the Mayans in 1901. At the end of the long and arduous war, the Mayan population had been drastically reduced, but the demand for henequen fibers exploded. The hacendados had no choice but to import laborers from abroad. Four years later, the Koreans arrived.
The Yucatán is famous for having no rivers. Most of the peninsula’s land is low and flat limestone, so even when rain falls no water gathers. There are few large trees; the land is covered in only short trees and brush. Water must be drawn from deep wells, and for this reason, great wells—underground ponds that go dozens of feet straight into the earth—are occasionally found near ancient Mayan ruins. People climb down ladders, past the limestone strata, to bring the water up. A small minority of the haciendas were fortunate enough to have these wells, called cenotes, nearby, but the rest did not. Cenotes were usually located at least a mile away. And the air was so hot that water either evaporated or was absorbed the moment it hit the ground. The very first thing to torment the Koreans, who came from a land with abundant water and firm earth, was precisely this lack of water. These were people who referred to the space between heaven and earth as “mountains and rivers.” They could never have imagined a world without mountains or rivers. The Yucatán had neither.
30
IJEONG WAS TAKEN to Chunchucmil hacienda. A unique, flame-shaped white arch adorned the entrance. Once inside, a number of narrow rail tracks branched off and disappeared into the interior, winding into a building that looked like a large storehouse and then emerging and disappearing in the vast fields. The large storehouse Ijeong had seen was the mill where the workers extracted the fiber from the henequen. Mayans dressed in white loaded bundles of henequen into carts, which they continuously pushed into the storehouse. They stared at the newly arrived Koreans with blank faces. Ijeong realized he would soon be doing what they were doing. He watched them closely even as they walked into the hacienda.
From within the mill came the regular click-clack, click-clack of machinery, but he did not know what was happening or how. He only saw people in clean clothes counting the bundles of henequen in the carts at the entrance to the factory and then giving the workers chits. Under a sun that blazed down so fiercely it seemed it would burn their flesh, Ijeong and thirty-five Koreans continued to walk along the tracks and into the hacienda.
The hacienda was not like the plantations of Cuba or Hawaii. Unlike these slave plantations, designed according to the spirit of capitalist mass production, the haciendas of the conquistadors were for the most part feudal. The conquistadors from the mainland of Spain wanted to carry themselves like the aristocrats of their native land. To build beautiful houses and surround them with high walls, reigning like kings over their servants and slaves—these were their goals. Their children studied in Europe, while they, the hacendados, enjoyed living in the pleasant villages near Mérida or Mexico City, dropping in on occasion to play king.
Ijeong’s group stopped in front of a great house. A man, perhaps the hacendado himself or just an overseer, appeared wearing a broad-brimmed hat, said something briefly in Spanish, and went back inside. The house was magnificent. The façade, decorated with marble and whitewash, was a vivid example of the wealth that the hacendados had accumulated. Red flowers bloomed in the splendidly decorated windows and verandas, and here and there around the building gilded angels blew trumpets. The group of Koreans began to march again. Every time they moved their feet, clouds of dry dust rose up. Finally they stopped in front of the casas de paja—which the Koreans shortened, incorrectly but conveniently, to “paja”—traditional Mayan housing that brought to mind the straw-thatched houses of Korea. They were huts with palm frond roofs, log frames, and walls plastered with mud and grass. The floor was slightly below the surface of the ground, so it was cool at night, but there were no windows and the huts were very small. The Koreans went inside and found dirt floors. When the first family entered, a squealing piglet leaped out. The Mayans cooked their meals, slept, and even raised livestock inside these huts.
One paja was provided for each family, and one paja was allotted for every four single men. Some had no problem adjusting to the pajas, but this was not the case for everyone. Many men sat outside their houses and gloomily smoked their pipes. Ijeong found a bed in the corner of his paja. It was a net bed, called a “hamaca” by the Mayans. Ijeong successfully strung up his hamaca while his bewildered comrades watched. And after a few tries, he was able to climb into it. His three comrades followed his lead and strung up their beds. Then they introduced themselves and talked about what would become of them.
“Aren’t they going to give us something to eat?” one of the men asked. They had just started to get hungry. He stuck his head out the door to see what was happening and spied a Mayan walking around and handing out something to everyone. Corn. Another Mayan brought water. The Koreans built a fire, boiled the water, dropped the corn in, and cooked it. They munched on the steaming kernels until only the cobs were left. As Ijeong chewed his corn, he realized that this was their final destination, that this was where he would spend the next four years until his contract with the Continental Colonization Company ended, in May 1909, without seeing anything like a school or a market or a city. Had he come all the way across that great, fearsome ocean just to arrive here, a place that was even worse than Jemulpo? With a gloomy spirit, Ijeong looked up at the sky and thought of Yeonsu. Will we not see each other for four years? No, surely we will see each other. This is an enlightened land, is it not? There will be days off. And what country does not have holidays? When the time comes, there will be days when the Koreans scattered here and there will gather together.
The four men climbed into their hamacas and tried to sleep. It had been a tiring day, but none of them could fall asleep easily. “It won’t be that bad.” A pimpled, eighteen-year-old bachelor from Suwon, who pretended to be unconcerned but was twisting about in his unfamiliar bed, tried to comfort them all. “Farming is the same wherever you go.” No one answered him. One boy thought of all the foods he had eaten at home. Stew, noodles, kimchi, red pepper paste, cabbage . . . food captivated him more fiercely than any other memory. Another young man thought of the bride he had left at home. Her parents stubbornly refused to send her, saying she was too young. So he asked her to wait four years, and left. Now, no matter how hard he tried, he could not remember anything about the girl except that her cheeks were ruddy. Would they recognize each other when he returned? He was suddenly worried. But he soon fell into a deep sleep, and a still silence covered the Korean workers’ paja village.
Before they knew it, it was four o’clock the next morning. The whole hacienda began to stir to a clamor that sounded like someone banging on a pot lid. Some of the Koreans asleep in their hamacas were startled by the sound and floundered about before they flipped over and fell to the ground with a crash. Amid the chaos, the quicker ones had put on their shoes, gone outside, and were looking around. Men on horseback were cracking leather whips in the air and shouting. Over by the pajas where the Mayans lived, workers had already picked up their tools and formed a line.
Shortly thereafter, a man pushing a wheelbarrow tossed some long knives on the ground in front of the Koreans’ pajas as he passed by. They were machetes, used to cut the henequen leaves. The women and children stayed in the pajas and the men grabbed the machetes with stern faces. The air was tense. The men’s hearts grew warm with the excitement and fear of starting a new job. And as soon as they grabbed the hafts of their knives, they felt as if they were going to war, and the adrenaline began to flow through their bodies. Having done nothing even resembling work for nearly two months, the men felt that they could handle whatev
er was before them, and their bodies burned with the desire to show these Mexicans, with whom they could not speak, what excellent workers they were.
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