Black Flower

by Kim, Young-ha

  That was both a curse and a prophecy. Yet there was not a single person in the storehouse who understood it. When this Cassandra of the Yucatán foamed at the mouth and passed out, Ignacio and the overseers locked the doors of the storehouse, went home, and threw themselves on their beds.

  44

  A FORTNIGHT AFTER meeting with the diplomat Durham Stevens, Yun Chiho, the Korean vice minister of foreign affairs, found a telegram from Seoul awaiting him at the front desk of the Imperial Hotel: “Depart for Hawaii and Mexico. 1,000 yen sent to the Bank of Japan. Seoul.” He began to prepare for his trip, but Stevens, who came to visit him at the hotel, told him 1,000 yen was only $500—barely enough to travel to Hawaii, let alone Mexico. Yun Chiho’s face turned red from shame at his government’s miserable funds, but he was not deeply troubled. “They’ll surely send more.”

  Two days later, Yun Chiho boarded the Manchuria in Yokohama. His heart fluttered at the thought of a new journey, but it was also heavy. Hawaii, Mexico . . . it was his first time traveling to both, and this was not a lighthearted trip but a mission to check on the immigrants and resolve their problems. At four in the afternoon, the ship’s whistle sounded. Oba Kanichi, of the Continental Colonization Company, came up on deck and tried to curry favor with Yun Chiho. Though Yun Chiho had always disliked Oba, a typical peddler, he had no choice but to deal with him. Oba launched into a defense of his company. “The reports concerning Mexico are all mistaken. The immigrants are doing fine. The Continental Company is opposed to Korean emigration to Hawaii, but we welcome emigration to Mexico. We have Japanese already working in Hawaii, which might make things difficult, but there are almost no Japanese in Mexico, so we foresee no problems there. If you can correct the erroneous rumors about what has happened in the Yucatán, the company will take care of all your travel expenses.”

  Yun Chiho bristled: Does everyone want to pay the travel expenses of an official of a poor nation? Yet there was clearly some truth hidden in Oba Kanichi’s words: even though emigration to Mexico was extremely profitable, the company did not send Japanese there. This alone was enough for him to know that conditions in Mexico were much worse than in Hawaii. Oba was offering a trade: if Yun Chiho returned from Hawaii and Mexico and spoke well of them to the emperor, he would resume sending laborers.

  On September 8, 1905, Yun Chiho arrived at the port of Honolulu and met with Governor Robert Carter and Japanese consul Saito Miki. At eight o’clock that evening he met eighty Koreans in a Baptist church. They all cried: they could not have imagined that such a high-ranking official would come to see them. A few days later, Saito met with Yun Chiho again, requesting that he pick up the $242 that had arrived for him at the bank. This was for his travel expenses for the trip to the Yucatán, sent from Seoul. The travel agency told him that the round-trip boat fare was $360. Yun Chiho went to the post office himself and sent a telegram to Seoul. The telegram read: “$300 more needed to go to Mexico.” The telegram cost $18.48. That afternoon, he left Honolulu to meet with the Koreans who were spread out among the various islands.

  For twenty-five days, until October 3 of that year, he visited thirty-two sugar plantations and gave forty-one speeches before some five thousand Koreans. He vigorously threw himself at the task. He scolded the lazy, soothed the diligent, and preached to them to believe in Christ. The conditions on the Hawaiian plantations he visited were relatively good; when Hawaii was incorporated into the United States in 1898, the bond slavery system was abolished, so Koreans could move freely between plantations. Many Christians and intellectuals could be found among the immigrants, though they did not adjust well to plantation life. Those who had never farmed went to the cities, like Honolulu, to start businesses and study. Young women back home had agreed to marry men based only on their photographs, and boarded ships to become the brides of men they were meeting for the first time in their lives. From what Yun Chiho saw, there were few problems with the Hawaiian plantations. The work was tiring and difficult, but as a Baptist, he considered labor a blessing from God. The only problems were with those Koreans who had fallen into a debauched life of alcohol and gambling. Here was an opportunity for Yun Chiho to strengthen his convictions about enlightenment. He firmly believed it was his duty to awaken these ignorant and immoral people. The Hawaiian plantation owners enthusiastically welcomed this attitude. They fought with each other to bring Yun Chiho to their plantations, and as time went on he began to seem like a hired lecturer. After his speeches, in which he told the Koreans to work hard, have faith, never fight, never gamble, and never drink, a sudden change would come for a few days. But the non-Christian Koreans quickly went back to their old ways, and the laborers grew derisive of Yun Chiho, who came wearing his black suit and white shirt with empty hands, only to scold them as he rode around all day in the plantation owners’ carriages. “He should work like us for a day,” some Koreans muttered. They had no reason to be pleased to see him.

  Yun Chiho returned to Honolulu and checked for messages from Seoul, but there were none. Did he really have to go all the way to Mexico? He was already tired in both body and spirit from touring the Hawaiian plantations, which were all quite similar. And he didn’t have the money. So Yun Chiho boarded the Manchuria and headed back to Yokohama.

  In Tokyo, he received an imperial grant of 600 yen from the Korean legation. The emperor still wanted him to go to Mexico. Yun Chiho sent a telegram to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: “Round-trip fare from Japan to Mexico will be 1,164 yen, a hotel will be 400 yen, for a total of 1,564 yen, but the 490 yen I received previously and the grant of 600 yen total 1,090, leaving me 474 short.” He was depressed about having to do petty arithmetic with the imperial grant.

  The next day, October 19, Yun Chiho met a slightly haggard Durham Stevens in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel. Stevens bit down on a cigarette and looked around. “There are a lot of Koreans who are threatening to kill me. But I am not concerned. Koreans don’t have the courage.” Everyone now knew that Stevens was actively supporting the interests of Japan, openly declaring that Koreans did not have the ability to rule themselves.

  Yun Chiho emphasized the importance of his going to Mexico, but Stevens showed a completely different attitude from when they had last met. He spoke candidly: “I sent a telegram to Seoul saying that you must not be sent to Mexico.” Yun Chiho asked why. Stevens flashed a smile. “The Japanese minister Hayashi and I distrust the emperor. Do you think he is trying to send you to Mexico because he pities his people? Hardly. The emperor wants to let everyone know that he wields independent diplomatic authority. If you were to act as the Korean consul to Mexico while you were there”—he smiled quickly again—“that would be a problem.”

  Yun Chiho made no reply. Perhaps Stevens was right: it had been a long time since Korea had been treated as a nation anywhere. The Straight-Forward Society was constantly urging the government to hand over full diplomatic authority to Japan. Yun Chiho sent another telegram: “Fare to Mexico has not arrived. Request permission to return to Korea.”

  On November 2, Yun Chiho left Tokyo. After four days at sea, he arrived at the port of Busan; from there he took the newly opened Seoul–Busan Railway. He arrived in Seoul shortly before midnight. On November 8, he had an audience with the emperor. The emperor asked his minister how far he had traveled and where he was living, but there was no strength in his voice. The emperor looked fatigued. Yun Chiho didn’t mention Hawaii, let alone Mexico. Disappointed, he withdrew. The next day, the Japanese ambassador extraordinary, Ito Hirobumi, arrived in Korea. With the fate of the nation and the dynasty in Ito’s hands, the Mexico problem was the least of the emperor’s concerns.

  On November 17, Minister of Foreign Affairs Bak Jesun and the Japanese minister Hayashi Gonsuke signed the Second Korea-Japan Treaty, also known as the Protectorate Treaty of 1905, which handed over diplomatic authority to Japan and reduced the Korean Empire to a Japanese tributary. Yun Chiho resigned his position as vice minister of foreign affairs.

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sp; 45

  FATHER PAUL WAITED for the shaman all night, but he did not return. When dawn broke, a number of people gathered at Father Paul’s paja. Choe Seongil calmly lay in bed, pretending not to notice. Children ran in and said that the shaman was locked in the storehouse and had been whipped all night until he had passed out. “What did that interpreter son of a bitch do, anyway?” someone shouted, enraged. “They said he just took his money, got into the carriage, and went back to his hacienda.” “Son of a bitch!” The men clenched their fists. The women began to denounce the hacendado, who had trampled on their ritual. “At this rate, we won’t be able to perform any rituals at all. It’s bad enough that we were deceived into coming here. Are they going to beat us senseless as well?” Several women fell to the ground and wailed. The gathering soon turned into a strike.

  Choe Seongil got up, lit a cigarette, and quietly left the paja. Father Paul spoke to the group, haltingly at first, but once he started he grew so impassioned that he surprised even himself. It was almost as if someone were borrowing his body to speak through him. “We came to this place to earn money, not to be whipped. We came to this place because we were hungry, not because we wanted to become the dogs of some mad hacendado. He is mad—mad for religion and starving for blood. Let us go and teach him a lesson!”

  People armed themselves with machetes and stones. The overseers, who had approached on their horses, figured out what was going on and fled. Now everyone gathered, including the women and children, and ran first to the storehouse where the shaman was. When stones flew and the storehouse windows broke, those who had been guarding the building fled. The men thrust open the doors and ran in. The shaman was asleep, still in chains. When they woke him up he stared at them in wonder. His face was empty, as if he had no idea what had happened. His naked body, striped with wounds like snakes, looked like a captured wild boar.

  The crowd grew aggressive. Like a genie released from its lamp, they sought a victim. “Let’s beat those overseers to death!” someone shouted. They went to an overseer’s house nearby. Dozens of stones rained down noisily, breaking the windows. Joaquín, infamous as an evil overseer, more hot-tempered and rough than any of the others though merely twenty years old, boarded up the doors and windows and stayed inside his house. As the baptism of stones continued, he was so seized by fear that he dared not even breathe loudly. “He might have a gun,” someone said, but the fear this conjured up only stoked the men’s belligerence. To hide the fact that they were scared, the men attacked Joaquín’s brick house like fiends. A few young men ran forward and kicked the front door. “Come out, you bastard!” The heavy door didn’t budge. A few more climbed up onto the roof and began to tear off the roof tiles. When a hole appeared in the ceiling, the men shouted and threw the roof tiles into the house. A scream followed, and then Joaquín unbolted the door and ran from the house like a badger from his burrow. With every ounce of his strength, he fled to the hacendado’s house. A stone hit him square on the back of the head, but he seemed not to notice. The massive door of the great house did not open to his pathetic cries, so he ran toward the front gate of the hacienda.

  Seventy Koreans had congregated before the hacendado’s house, which, having endured one hundred years of Mayan riots, stood more like a castle.

  Rifle barrels poked out of the loopholes near the top of the wall. Shots rang out. “Sons of bitches!” The Koreans cowered and ran in all directions like a pack of rats. The sound of gunfire pierced the dawn, echoing through the hacienda. A short while later, mounted police raced through the front gate in a clamor of horses’ hooves. At that moment, the hacendado’s front door opened and the overseers rode out firing their guns, with Ignacio Velásquez in the lead. The mounted police struck the fleeing people with their clubs, seeking their next prey as soon as one had fallen. The hacendado and his overseers sealed the entrance of the hacienda and cut off the Koreans’ escape. Those who had fled to the pajas were eventually surrounded and dragged out one by one. Those who had been struck on the shoulders or back by the clubs of the police were the lucky ones, though they bled from where they were hit. Father Paul was one. Unable to open his eyes from the blood that ran down into them, he was dragged before Ignacio. “This is wrong!” he cried to the hacendado, making the sign of the cross. “This is wrong! Has the God you believe in not taught that we should side with those who are most shabbily clothed, those who are poorest, those who are most oppressed? Has he not?” The only reply he received was a clubbing. No one at Buena Vista hacienda understood Father Paul’s words that dawn. Even the Koreans did not understand. To them, Father Paul had been Mr. Bak. This Mr. Bak did not bend beneath the clubs but stood up with indignation and began to pray before Ignacio and his overseers in the Latin he had learned at the seminary in Penang: the Lord’s Prayer, the Doxology, the Hail Mary, and the Apostles’ Creed. He thought he had forgotten them long ago, but they all flowed freely from his lips. If there was a God, he would grant him dignity as his priest. Now more than ever, he needed God’s power and miracles. A strange Mass began. A few of the overseers unconsciously made the sign of the cross every time Paul shouted “amen.” But the hacendado resolved the confusion: “Look, Satan defiles the words of the Lord! The power of demons borrows his mouth to recite sacred prayers!”

  In Ignacio’s eyes, this man—from a savage land in the Far East, wearing torn clothes that showed his knees and shabby straw shoes, his hair unwashed for a month and seething with lice, fluently reciting prayers in Latin and pretending to be a priest—truly appeared to be the soldier of Satan. At Ignacio’s words, a baptism of clubs poured down on Paul. He fell, catching a glimpse of Choe Seongil, who stood behind Ignacio, pointing directly at Paul.

  In that moment, Paul realized that his God was without doubt a jealous God. God had shown no power whatsoever in this fight, which had begun with a shaman. Though he knew that these people suffered for all the sins committed by Korea, Japan, and Mexico, God was as jealous as a sulky little girl. Father Paul closed his eyes. No one would ever again call him Paul. He was no longer Father Paul. He was Mr. Bak, Bak Gwangsu.

  46

  AFTER EVERYTHING HAD calmed down, Ignacio Velásquez returned to his study, knelt on a satin floor cushion, and prayed. “Lord, why do you give me such trials? How can I bring your gospel to those ignorant people? Father, give me the strength and the courage to not submit to pain, and give me the wisdom to not fall to the temptations and wiles of Satan.” In no time at all, hot tears flowed from Ignacio’s eyes. His sympathy and compassion welled up for those poor people, those who refused to see his heart’s desire to lead them to heaven.

  When his fervent prayer ended, a servant brought him coffee. Ignacio smoked a Monte Cristo. When the servant held a spittoon in front of his face, he spit out thick phlegm with a practiced motion. Usually, the coffee and cigar—the former made by the Mayans of Guatemala and the latter by the blacks of Cuba—brought him joy. But the excitement at dawn had not yet faded. In particular, the sight of the one who had challenged him, and recited through madness those sacred Latin prayers, remained strong in his mind. He had never heard a single story like this from his grandmother, his grandfather, or all his many aunts. It was certainly difficult to fathom the mysterious powers of Satan. He shivered and crossed himself.

  47

  AT YAZCHE HACIENDA, they had no idea a riot had taken place at Buena Vista. Gwon Yongjun kept his mouth closed; he did not want any trouble at Yazche until the day he returned to Korea. During the harvest moon festival, the Koreans of Yazche assembled and performed their ancestral rituals. Yi Jongdo transcribed the written prayer and offered an interpretation of the complex rites. The festival was a traditional farmers’ holiday, so Yi Jongdo, who came from an old family of Seoul aristocrats, had no particular interest in it, but he was the first to bow in greeting as a representative of all. This was the natural duty of a Confucian scholar, and no one was as well versed in complicated Confucian procedures as he. His face brightened slightly for the
first time in weeks at being able to confirm that his existence had some meaning. The ancestral rituals stirred up nostalgia. Those from peasant families, who placed great importance on the harvest moon festival, were already growing red at the corners of their eyes after a few glasses of ceremonial liquor.

  Gwon Yongjun did not participate in these rituals. He had separated himself as far from the hacienda’s Koreans as possible. The way he saw it, the Koreans would lounge around as soon as the overseers looked the other way, so there was no choice but the whip. He was thinking like a hacendado and acting like the aristocrats of Korea. They didn’t like to work but they liked to give orders, and they struck and scorned the weak as if it were second nature. But they bowed their heads without delay to the strong. The aristocrats who had swaggered down Seoul’s Bell Street, going in and out of the gisaeng houses, were the only example he had, so it was natural for him to act like this. He had received the hacendado’s permission and brought in a Mayan woman to keep his house, but at every opportunity he pestered other women. He lay down on his bed and fondled the Mayan woman’s breasts, thinking of Yeonsu and eating corn.

  When the ancestral rituals were over, the topic of conversation among the people shifted to Yi Jongdo’s letter. Yi Jongdo cleared his throat a few times and said that he had finished the letter and it would be sent soon. He added that they should not expect much of it, but he could not prevent their hopes from taking wing and soaring to the heavens. “A reply should come in three or four months, shouldn’t it?” someone said. “Maybe the government has already sent an official.” Hope spread rapidly through Yazche hacienda, the hope that this letter would be sent and a diplomatic official would be dispatched who, after seeing their situation, would strongly protest to the Mexican government and the governor of Yucatán. It would be revealed that the contract was not binding, and the workers would be sent home. Some expressed the hope that Japan would handle the matter instead of the Korean Empire, but they were reproached by the others and immediately withdrew their opinions.