The Guest

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  Father, who’s done this to you? Who hurt you?

  Father just pulled up the blanket and closed his eyes.

  Ah, you were someplace safe. Pray, I say, and sing a hymn.

  I wasn’t exactly in the mood to gather my hands together for a prayer, but father’s request was so subdued that I ended up doing exactly that, together with Mother.

  Almighty God, give me the courage to fight fearlessly against distress and persecution. No matter how fiercely the hordes of Satan come down upon us, help me at least to die as a martyr of our Lord. God teaches us that those who are persecuted and wronged for His sake should rejoice, for they will be rewarded in Heaven. We know that some of us suffer already—not just from jeers and whippings—some of us have been bound and thrown into jail, some us have been stoned, knifed, and sawed to death while still others were forced to crawl, clothed in sheepskin and goatskin, starved and mistreated. Oh, if we live, help us to live for Thee, Our Lord, and if we die, help us to die for Thee, our Lord.

  Finished with the prayer, I sang the hymn “The Way My Savior Leads Me” two times in a row. Later, our mother gave me the details of what happened. I found out that Illang had been in charge. I also learned the names of all the men who had taken Illang’s orders. Most of them were former tenants of ours, but some had been tenants for Sangho’s or Pongsu’s families. There were about fifty households in our village at the time—the entire population, including the womenfolk, numbered around two hundred. Out of this two hundred, the total number of official Party members back then was, at most, around five or so. The fact that Illang was appointed chairman of the local Farm Village Committeeand put in charge of the land distribution was ridiculous enough to make the cows laugh. We didn’t even find out what that good-for-nothing’s surname actually was until some time after the liberation—and even then, everyone in the village just called him by his Japanese name: Ichiro. No one really knew for sure when it was that Ichiro first showed up in Ch’ansaemgol and started living in our midst. He was somewhere around forty at the time, but none of us knew his exact age, either.

  Our home, Ch’ansaemgol, with its large expanses of rice paddies, vegetable fields, and orchards, was known throughout the area as a wealthy farming village. Three or four families owned a significant amount of land, and more than half of us were independent farmers who made a comfortable living. The rest were tenants. Nobody really had any special need for servants, especially since the tenants would come by and help out their landlords during the busy seasons. Of course the bigger landowners, like Father, would usually have a couple of men and women workers all year round, but these were usually former tenants who moved in as house servants. That was how Uncle Sunnam, too, came to live with us and work in our orchards, remember?

  Eventually a group of independent farmers chipped in and hired Ichiro as a kind of village servant. In the summer, he’d do things like fix the broken stepping stones in front of the village, manage the village mill, and take care of the community compost heap. During the busy farming seasons he’d go from house to house and help out with the farmwork. His wages were paid to him in rice. Sometimes he’d even draw water from the well for the families that were really short-handed. Anyway, do you remember all the dugouts that used to be at the mouth of the orchard, next to the mill and near the funeral house? You know, those mud cellars where we used to keep the saplings. Ichiro made one of them deeper and covered it up with straw mats. That was where he lived for a while, at least, at first.

  No one in the village used the polite form of speech to Ichiro, but he would use the high honorific form to all the married men, regardless of whether they were older or younger than himself—he only spoke the low form of speech to young children. The children, in turn, spoke it right back to him, as if he was one of them. . . . To think that man laid his hands on Father—if that’s not an example of the world turning completely upside down, I don’t know what is.

  Within six months of the liberation, Ichiro suddenly became “Comrade Pak Illang.” His attitude had already started changing in the fall of that year, but no one dared quarrel with him about his new manner of speaking. Putting their personal feelings aside, even the adults in the village started to use the polite form of speech when addressing him. A few years before liberation Ichiro had moved out of his dugout and into the village sarang, where he spent his time weaving straw mats and mesh nets. Then one day, he simply disappeared. He showed up a few months later, when winter was nearly over.

  According to Mother, on the day he took our father, Ichiro just walked right into our house, bold as you please, wearing his people’s uniform and an armband that said “Rural Village Committee Chairman.” He was accompanied by some boys from the Democratic Youth League. He called out for Father. When Father came out and asked what was going on, Ichiro whipped out a piece of paper and waved it in his face. “The Land Reform Order has come down from the provisional People’s Committee,” he said, “and I am here to execute it.” He asked Father if he was willing to donate his land for fair distribution or if he’d rather subject himself to blind confiscation. Assuming that the bastard was illiterate, Father said his vision was too weak to read the document and asked Ichiro to read it aloud. Ichiro held it up and began to read it slowly. Father yelled at him to stop, snatched the paper away from him, and tore it to pieces. In that same instant, lights burst before his eyes—you see, Ichiro punched him right in the face. Father collapsed to the ground, cradling his face in both hands. Mother saw it all with her own two eyes. She leapt on Ichiro and grabbed him by the throat.

  “You ungrateful beast! How dare you lay your hands on him!”

  Slowly, Ichiro twisted Mother’s wrist. Then, all at once, he thrust her away. While she was down on the ground, he went into the main room without taking his shoes off and ransacked the chest of drawers with his gang, searching for the title to our land. He found it. Then, Mother said, he concluded with his new catchphrase.

  Comrades, arrest this enemy of the People.

  I, too, know a little bit about Brother Illang.

  As I told you before, I went to night classes for a while before I left your orchard to go and work at the mines in Ŭnnyul. In those days, I used to go to the village sarang to practice writing or to read leaflets all by myself. That was back when Brother Illang was still Ichiro. In the winter, the young ones in the village like your brother Yohan and some of the older men were constantly in and out of the sarang. They would always stay late into the night, so we never really had a chance to share the thoughts that lay deep within our hearts. Because he’d spent his entire life serving others, Ichiro hardly ever opened his mouth. You remember, don’t you? And the man always shaved his head. He might have let it go for a month or two, but just as it started to get a little bushy he’d go into town on a market day and have it shaved clean with a pair of hair clippers.

  It was after the autumn harvest that I finally became friends with Brother Ichiro. I, too, decided to start spending my nights in the village sarang. You see, no matter how bland or boring a guy seems, if you start sleeping together in the same room every night you’re bound to develop a sense of kinship. There were plenty of branches to be pruned off the trees in the orchard, so we had more than enough firewood. We stuffed the furnace full of them, and by the time we entered the room the floor was always boiling hot. We cooked peas and steamed sweet potatoes together. Every now and then you boys would bring us some tongch’imi, and then we’d take a bite of sweet potato and wash it down with tongch’imi juice that still had bits of ice floating in it. We’d pick out the crunchy slices of radish that floated in the tongch’imi bowl and chew them up. I saw that Brother Ichiro was in the habit of sleeping without a blanket—without any covering of any kind, actually. The floor might have been warm enough, but the room could get quite chilly, especially at dawn. I asked him, Brother, why don’t you cover yourself with a blanket when you sleep?

  I’ve never had anything to cover myself with . . .

>   I was so dumbfounded that I asked him again, You mean you’ve never slept with a blanket, not even when you were a child?

  That’s right. There aren’t any blankets up in the mountains. The first time I ever saw one was after I came down into the village.

  That’s when I realized he had lived in the mountains, in the slash-and-burn fields, ever since he was a child. I tried asking him a different question.

  Brother, doesn’t it make you angry when little children talk to you in low form?

  They are all the precious offspring of my masters—why would I be angry?

  Brother, I’m five years younger than you—please, don’t use honorifics when you speak to me—plain form is enough.

  Brother Ichiro simply smiled in response and didn’t say a word. Living together in the village sarang for four seasons, we became as close as if we were real brothers. I found out that Ichiro was born in Sanp’an. He’d lived with his parents and his grandmother in a nearby hill village; they all worked at an eatery for laborers. The name “Ichiro” was given to him by a Japanese foreman. His father was working as a logger when he was crushed to death under a log, and then his mother left to make money. She never came back. Eventually, he and his grandmother moved to the slash-and-burn fields, scraping together a living by working other people’s land. All they could grow was millet and potatoes, and since they were working as a kind of tenant family they had to give up half of what little they harvested to their landlord. When he turned eighteen, Ichiro found a woman, got married, and even managed to stake out a little slash-and-burn field for himself by burning off the slope of a hill. Then, as luck would have it, the government began to crack down on the slash-and-burn fields, and Ichiro was sent to prison. By the time he got back to his home after serving his ten-month term in Haeju, the whole place had been burnt to cinders and, thanks to a wide-scale evacuation, everyone had scattered to heaven knows where. His grandmother had died, and his young wife had disappeared. After that, he just drifted from one construction site to another until he ended up along the Chaeryŏng River. Eventually, just like my family, he floated on over to Ch’ansaemgol in search of rice paddies to work.

  When we were liberated from the Japanese, the first thing I did was search out Brother Ichiro. Like I said before, I learned all about Communism during my time in the mines, so when we formed the Hwanghae Province Regional Committee, I told Mr. Kang about Comrade Pak Illang. While you Jesus freaks were organizing your Chosŏn Democratic Party, we were busy too, forming our Communist Party. We set up a security office at the police station in town, held the People’s Committee meetings in the county hall, and started giving lessons at the community center. In Ch’ansaemgol, Ichiro the village servant, two other household servants, and Uncle Chungson were the first to join the party. They were all recommended by me, you know.

  In three months, from October to January, Comrade Pak Illang learned to read and write. He left Ch’ansaemgol and went to work as a guard at the county hall. Day in and day out, he memorized the han’gŭl alphabet that Mr. Kang had written out for him with a brush. A man from Pyongyang who’d served in the China’s Eighth Route Army showed us how to apply layers and layers of pork fat onto a wooden board and paste a thick laminated sheet of paper lacquered with bean oil on top of it—if you do that, you can write on the board with a stick, then lift the oiled paper to erase it. He told us that was how they studied during field operations. Ichiro, the same Ichiro you all thought was a brainless half-wit, the same Ichiro you talked down to—just think about it for a second—that same Ichiro learned to read and write. He learned to write his own name. Pak Illang. If that’s not what the liberation was all about, I don’t know what is. Comrade Pak Illang, who used to carry firewood and work like a cow while you people ate white rice, slept under warm blankets, learned at schools, sat in churches, read Bibles, prayed and sang hymns—well, he learned too, and now he could read and write words like land reform.

  Because I helped to organize the Red Guards with members of the Democratic Youth League and the Women’s League, I was put in charge of security. I ended up going with Brother Illang when he went up to Pyongyang to take his training course. We got on the train in Sariwŏn. I had a little spending money, so I bought some soft drinks and boiled eggs. Brother Illang ate an entire case of eggs in one sitting. I think I had three or so myself. Back then I hadn’t yet broken ties with the idea of the family system, so I still called him “brother.” I said to him, Brother, you’re eating way too much—you’ll give yourself indigestion.

  He told me he’d had a couple of eggs before, at the village feasts, but he’d had to eat them so sparingly—he’d just always wanted to eat them to his heart’s content. There are ten eggs in one case, you know.

  At the training session in Pyongyang, they knew there was no way any talk about Bolshevism or the writings of Marx and Lenin would ever make any sense to us. We’d all just barely finished learning han’gŭl, and the only use we ever had for books until then was to roll cigarettes or wipe our asses—big, complicated words were still a bit beyond us. But you see, the way the Japanese had oppressed us, the way the Japanese collaborators and the landowners had, step by step, ruined our lives—that was easy to understand. Especially when it was explained to us in simple, easy words, like a children’s story:

  “Comrades, open your hands and look down at your ten fingers. Seven of your ten fingers are tenants who don’t have an inch of their own land and poor farmers who do have a bit of land but have to work as tenants, too. The three fingers that are left are the Japanese companies and the pro-Japanese landowners. Now, let’s say that all the farmland in the country equals ten. Those three fingers own eight out of that ten. And that’s only counting the rice paddies and the fields, since the rest of the land and the forests belonged to the Japanese. To prove that we are truly free, that we have completely driven out the Japanese, the People need to take back their land. Comrades, what is feudalism? Feudalism is a system where the king dishes out land to a handful of subjects who are willing to guard him, with the lower-ranking officials and the yangban33 class controlling the common people and forcing them to work as tenants. When our king surrendered to the Japanese, our nation became a Japanese colony, and the emperor of Japan and the Japanese governor-general took his place. Soon after that, the yangban became Japanese collaborators, which made the life of the common people even worse than before. Comrades who owned no land and had no education worked their fingers to the bone, living as servants or dirt-poor farmhands for generations on end, but they were given nothing, nothing in return for their hard labor. Comrades, from now on, starting the moment you go back home, you must take back what is yours. No matter what, land should belong to those who farm it. When you go back, comrades, will you be able to tell the village elders and the gentle, honorable landlords to give back your land? They will shout, eyes glaring, angry that you dare to be so impertinent. If you feel frightened at the thought of this, you will be a slave to feudalism forever. Never forget that these are the enemies who sucked the blood of your ancestors, enemies of the People who must be overthrown. Come now, everyone, can you do it? Louder! Ah, naturally, in a small village you are bound to have emotional ties—there will be familiar faces and fond memories around every bend—if, however, you do not sever these ties, cutting them as with a knife, you will never be truly free.”

  With simple words like these they taught us the foundation on which the reactionaries had built their lives was that of the feudalistic tenant system. In order to maintain feudalistic power in the rural areas, the landowners were sure to oppose any form of democratic reform. And yet, obviously, the land belonged to those who tilled it, those who had been tilling it for generations. The land that used to belong to the Japanese organizations, the land that belonged to those who worked for the Japanese or for the political organizations that were in place under Japanese rule, the land of those traitors of the People who fled their hometowns upon the nation’s liberation, any land
over fifteen thousand p’yŏng owned by Korean landlords, any land, regardless of size, that had been used for tenant farming, and any land over fifteen thousand p’yŏng that was owned by the churches, temples, or other religious organizations—these were all subject to confiscation. Blind confiscation and blind distribution, that was the principle. We were fully prepared to deal with any resistance from those determined to hold fast to the old order.

  The big landowners and those who had openly collaborated with the Japanese all fled, crossing down into the South. The ones who lagged behind, lingering too long in the North—they were mostly Christians. They felt that they hadn’t done anything they needed to be ashamed of, and they’d been told they would be free to worship in whatever way they chose.

  After all, the ministers and presbyters were still busy trying to establish a nation of God by bringing the Chosŏn Democratic Party to life, regardless of the cost. In response to the Land Reform Order, the Christian Youth and churchgoers throughout the North launched various counteractive campaigns. Within a week of the order’s issuance the citizens and students of Hamhŭng held a large demonstration. The result? Six dead, thirty-three wounded, and over two thousand arrested. More demonstrations followed, in our district, in Changyŏn, and in Unnyul.