The Guest

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1 - The Exorcism

  Chapter 2 - Possession

  Chapter 3 - Keeper of the Netherworld

  Chapter 4 - From One Generation to Another

  Chapter 5 - A Pure Spirit

  Chapter 6 - God, Too, Has Sinned

  Chapter 7 - The Birth of a New Life

  Chapter 8 - Requiem

  Chapter 9 - The Fork in the Road

  Chapter 10 - Burning the Clothes

  Chapter 11 - Matrix of Spirits

  Chapter 12 - Farewell Guests

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE FOR The Guest

  “An unflinching, ambitious novel.”

  —Timothy Peters, San Francisco Chronicle

  “A provocative novel . . . with a subtle power. [Hwang] takes the reader to the edge of a gruesome scene, then steps back and focuses on the sort of mundane detail that sticks in one’s mind more firmly than any blood-splattered image.”

  —Austin Ramzy, Time Asia Magazine

  “The majesty of Hwang Sok-Yong’s compelling story resides in its telling. . . . Hwang is unflinching in his determination to understand his country’s past and the tragic events that broke his country in two.”

  —Charles R. Larson, Worldview magazine

  “Like the detached, disembodied voices in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, the oral testimony of the spirits is chilling.”

  —Charse Yun, KoreAm Journal

  “Expert, idiomatic translation renders visible a story that helps explain the present weirdness in North Korea . . . deeply rewarding.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Vivid snapshots from the Korean War and surreal encounters with ghosts intersect. . . . [A]n ambitious exploration of a postwar survivor’s chaotic psyche.”

  —Publisher’s Weekly

  “A ghost story of striking originality, The Guestis also an extremely relevant journey into the heart-break of collective violence and possible redemption.”

  —Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maidenand Mascara

  Author’s Note

  WHEN SMALLPOX WAS first identified as a Western disease that needed to be warded off, the Korean people referred to it as “mama” or “sonnim,” the second of which translates to “guest.” With this in mind, I settled upon The Guest as a fitting title for a novel that explores the arrival and effects of Christianity and Marxism in a country where both were initially as foreign as smallpox.

  As smallpox reached epidemic proportions and began sweeping across the nation, shamanic rituals called “guest exorcisms” were often performed to fight against the foreign intruder. The Guest is essentially a shamanistic exorcism designed to relieve the agony of those who survived and appease the spirits of those who were sacrificed on the altar of cultural imperialism half a century ago.

  This twelve-chapter novel is modeled after the Chinogwi exorcism of Hwanghae Province. The ritual consists of twelve separate rounds. As is the case during an actual exorcism, the dead and the living simultaneously cross and recross the boundaries between past and present, appearing at what seem like random intervals to share each of their stories and memories. My intention was to create an oral discourse in which a type of time travel provides the latitudinal coordinates of the story, with the longitude provided by the individual characters’ first-person narratives, revealing a wide range of experiences and perspectives.

  If it is true that trying to rid yourself of residual memories inevitably results in a clearer and more solid memory, then the spirits of the past must be impossible to escape, regardless of whether they are alive or dead. At times, these apparitions can be more than mere phantoms: they are sent to us by the tragic wars of the past as a form of karma we must deal with—they are facets of the burden of history, a vivid reality.

  In Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the reader is exposed to the ghost of a forefather who inexplicably returns to life. In that text also the ghost is more than a mere magical phantasm. A reality rife with exploitation and repression had weighed upon the people of Latin America for countless years. A product of the pressing actuality that freedom is an impossible dream, the phantom is one that history itself must face down, fight, drive out, use, and conquer. Countless souls have been lost to the blind inevitability of history itself; dismantling this structure and returning to a state in which time belongs to the people is a goal of this novel.

  I began work on The Guest in 2000, the fiftieth anniversary of the Korean War. The September 11 attacks a year later came directly after The Guest was first published, and the onset of this new “Age of Terror,” along with the inclusion of North Korea in the so-called Axis of Evil, and the beginning of a whole new war, made the fragility of our position clearer than ever. It was a chilling experience to be so reminded that despite the collapse of the Cold War infrastructure, our small peninsula is still bound by the delicate chains of war.

  Because of Korea’s identity as both a colony and a divided nation, both Christianity and Marxism were unable to achieve natural, spontaneous modernization; instead, they were forced to reach modernity in accordance with conscious human will. In North Korea, where the legacy of class structure during the traditional period was relatively diluted compared to the South, the tenets of Christianity and Marxism were zealously adopted as facets of “enlightenment.”

  During the Korean War, the area of North Korea known as Hwanghae Province was the setting of a fifty-day nightmare during which Christians and Communists—two groups of Korean people whose lives were shaped by two different “guests”—committed a series of unspeakable atrocities against each other.

  Today, in a district known as Sinch’ŏn in Hwanghae Province, there stands a museum that indicts the American military for the massacre of innocents. The literal translation of the museum’s name is “The American Imperialist Massacre Remembrance Museum.” Many years ago, when I visited the North, I was given a tour of this museum as a matter of course.

  Later on, during my stay in New York, I met a Korean minister named Ryu and heard the eyewitness account of his childhood in Hwanghae Province. Not too long afterwards, in Los Angeles, I was lucky enough to meet another survivor who shared with me her detailed firsthand account of the actual wartime incident that led to the founding of the aforementioned museum.

  As it turns out, the atrocities we suffered were committed by none other than ourselves, and the inner sense of guilt and fear sparked by this incident helped formthe roots of the frantic hatred that thrives to this day. Less than five years ago, when I first completed The Guest, I received fierce attacks from both Southern and Northern statists.

  The scars of our war and the ghosts of the Cold War still mar the Korean peninsula. I can only hope that this particular exorcism helps us all move a step closer to a true, lasting reconciliation as the new century unfolds.

  1

  The Exorcism

  WHAT REMAINS AFTER DEATH

  REVEREND RYU YOSŎP had a strangely distinctive dream a few days ago.

  It might have been the day before he went to New Jersey to meet his older brother, Ryu Yohan, a presbyter of his church—or maybe it was the day he first heard the news that he could now visit his homeland for the first time in forty years. He wasn’t sure.

  The dream was in pieces, disjointed and divided, but each scene remained as vivid as the moments that were passing.

  A murky day. A black-and-white photo almost: trees, branches, earth, all black through and through, set against a sky in chalk-white. Something flutters in the wind—a rag, perhaps, or a piece of laundry. Could that black bird be a crow? From the corner, underneath a pat
ch of distant darkness, a human figure slowly approaches. One shoulder drooping lower than the other, the figure limps up to the middle of a latticed screen. It is carrying something over its left arm, and every now and then the faint cries of an infant can be heard. The baby is wrapped in a billowing bedsheet that trails down to the figure’s calves. A wind passes through and away, shaking the trees, but the birds in the air merely quiver in silence. The figure lifts the baby onto the first branch and begins to wind the rest of the sheet around it. The soft, squeaky crying continues, growing fainter and fainter, until gradually it dies away.

  Again, but this time different segments. This time the sound comes first. The delicate trembling of a violin floats up from the depths of a dark, hollow pit. Barely audible, like a breeze escaping from a deep cave. It is the song called “Touch-me-nots.” No doubt about it. And then, perhaps because of the song, a vision of red petals, slowly swirling by like bits of colored paper.

  At the mouth of a village in early winter an overcast sky hangs low and heavy over a mountain ridge. Whitish pellets of soft hail float through the air. A man rushes down the hillside, and as he enters my field of vision, I recognize him: my older brother. He looks exactly the way I saw him last, a head of white hair and a bent back. In one hand, he holds a pick, dragging it behind him as he comes down the hill huffing and panting and letting out long gasping breaths. I am dreaming, yes, but even so I can’t help but wonder what my brother might have been doing beyond the hill. Up front, up closer to the screen, he is searching for something; he kneels down swiftly, his backside jutting up—ah, he means to drink some water. He gulps it down like an animal. Suddenly he lifts his head; a bell tolls nearby. Still kneeling, he raises his upper body, and clasping both hands, he lets his head drop to his chest as though he is going to pray.

  Completely incoherent, totally disordered, and yet each scene was somehow familiar to Yosŏp. It was a mystery to the Reverend—his life was in America, but the dream fragments that greeted him every morning upon waking were invariably about Korea. A full twenty years since he’d immigrated, over ten years since he first became pastor of an American church, but the big, foreign noses had yet to show up in a single dream.

  Despite the twenty years, however, Yosŏp still lived in a humble Brooklyn apartment. His brother Yohan, on the other hand, had long since moved to a white residential area in New Jersey, as befitted a true immigrant of the sixties. It was an unremarkable place—a small, wooden house of the kind commonly found in the suburbs of New York: it had a garage, a deep basement, a living room, and bedrooms of indifferent size, a backyard just spacious enough to hold a barbecue, and a white wooden fence out front.

  The heat was stifling. Yosŏp drove to his brother’s in the old minivan he usually used to shuttle around the members of his church. On this day, of all days, the air-conditioning in the tired van had finally failed, so he was driving with all the windows down. He made a point, however, of rolling up both windows whenever he hit a red light on a secluded street. He knew better than to ignore the advice of his faithful churchgoers. If you simply stood at an intersection with your windows open, they’d say, a black man would be sure to materialize, gun in hand, and hop in. One church member, on his way home from work, had been subjected to just such an ordeal. He and the black man had driven all the way home together, and he’d ended up simply leading the burglar up to his apartment, opening the door, and obediently inviting him in. By the time Yosŏp finally arrived at his brother’s house, the back of his dress shirt was drenched in sweat, and he was ready to collapse from exhaustion.

  Every visit to his brother involved something of a production. There were a number of motions one had to go through before one could be admitted into the house itself, the inside of which was always dark. Such darkness might have been considered routine in the dead of winter, but in this, the height of summer, Yohan actually had to employ wooden pincers on either end of the heavy curtains to keep them tightly closed.

  Yosŏp pressed the doorbell. No sign of life. A home-security company sticker was plastered on the front door, advertising to all that this home was, electronically speaking, decidedly secure. Most likely his brother was examining the security monitor that would now be displaying the upper half of Yosŏp’s body. He heard a clicking rattle and then, “What brings you here?”

  Yohan’s voice was always the same. He was getting on in years but he still spoke as if he were in a great hurry, biting off each word. Under it all lay the constant suggestion of cold irritation.

  “I just came by to see you.”

  “Alone?”

  Never mind the fact that they both knew he was watching the monitor. The whole exchange was so ingrained in Yosŏp that he answered automatically, his “Yes” obedient. For quite a while, as was customary, he was left standing on the landing to stare at the unresponsive front door. At this point, his brother would be peering out of the French window in the living room, the one situated to the left of the door where he could check the front yard and street. Yosŏp saw the curtains move. Then, only then, did he hear the sound of the inner door being opened, followed by the turning of each lock in the outer door, one by one, and lastly the removal of the iron chain. The door opened a tiny sliver.

  Ryu Yohan, a presbyter of his church and Yosŏp’s older brother, lived alone. Well, to be more precise, he shared his house with a cat. No one knew how old the cat was exactly, but it had already been getting on in years when one of the churchgoers had given it to Yohan’s wife half a decade ago. It was probably safe to assume that the cat was older than its current master, at least in cat-years. Yosŏp always found it sleeping on an old blanket spread out by the fireplace in the living room. It was black and white: white belly and legs, coal black everything else. Only its eyes were visible when it crouched down in the dark. Yosŏp’s sister-in-law, dead these past three years, had loved the cat intensely—so much so that she had always insisted on keeping it in the bedroom itself. When she died, Yohan gave the animal to the owner of a hardware store several blocks away. Less than three days passed before it found its way back home. After attempting to return the cat to its new owner on multiple occasions, only to have it come back time and time again, Yohan washed his hands of the matter. Now, each completely indifferent to the other, they simply shared the house. The only light in the darkened living room came from the cable TV. A cartoon flitted across the screen—one of those involving a coyote that continually got itself in hot water for chasing after some sort of wild hen—and the volume was too loud. Yosŏp immediately reached for the remote and unceremoniously turned it down.

  “Big Brother, it’s such a fine day. Why not go for a walk or something instead of just watching TV day in and day out?”

  “With the ache in my legs, even walking is a pain. What did you come for today?”

  Instead of answering, Yosŏp simply lowered his head and began to pray. Being a presbyter himself and so unable to protest, Yohan pretended to lower his head along with his younger brother. Yosŏp prayed in the name of God for the good health of his brother, living all alone, and for the safety and prosperity of his two nephews now working and living in different cities.

  “Actually, the truth is . . . I’m going home.”

  “To Seoul? Why?”

  “No, not Seoul. I’m talking about our hometown in the North.”

  “The North . . . you mean Hwanghae Province?”

  “Yes, exactly. I’ve been given a chance to go to Ch’ansaemgol—to Sinch’ŏn.”

  The moment he uttered Ch’ansaemgol, Yosŏp realized that some forty years had passed since he’d last mentioned the name of his hometown. Ch’ansaemgol. The word started out with the scent of a mountain berry, lingering at the tip of one’s tongue—but then the fragrance suddenly turned into the stench of rotting fish. It was as if a blob of black paint had been dumped on a watercolor filled with tender, pale-green leaves, the darkness slowly seeping outward towards the edges.

  “You’re . . . so. I gu
ess you’re involved with the Commies now.”

  Big Brother was anything but delighted. The glance he shot his younger brother was full of suspicion, the kind of look one might expect from an old man who lived alone.

  “There’s an association called the ‘Committee for the Promotion of Reunions for Separated Families.’ If you pay a small fee for service and travel expenses, they help you get permission from the North Korean government to visit your hometown. They have such businesses now in Canada and L.A.”

  “Do you think it likely that God will allow you to go back to North Korea?”

  “It is through the grace of God that things have worked out as they have. But never mind that—Big Brother, don’t you ever think of your wife? Of Daniel?”

  Yohan betrayed no sign of emotion and continued to stare blankly at the television. He wiped his two palms over his face in one smooth motion.

  “All dead, probably. If Uncle is still alive, he may at least know where they’ve been buried. Don’t you think so?”

  Presbyter Ryu Yohan had certainly changed a great deal since the old days; even his legendary stubbornness was beginning to lose its edge. These days, at best, he simply fell silent or began to digress.

  “If you go there . . . look for them.”

  Yosŏp, tempted to ask outright why his brother wouldn’t go look for them himself, decided to keep his peace. Until now, the two brothers had never discussed the subject of “home” at any length. It was likely that Yohan had already noticed how his younger brother found it difficult to forgive the man he had been in those days.