by T'aejun Yi
On his way back to Seoul with barely five thousand won in his pocket, Han paid close attention to the areas alongside the railway tracks and to the factory district of Yŏngdŭngp’o, but smoke rose from only a couple of chimneys, and, in many roofless factories, rusting red machinery stood exposed to the elements, like enormous graves filled with huge corpse-like machines.
It was when the train pulled into Yongsan Station that Han was to catch sight of a real human corpse and not some corpse-like machine. It was surrounded by several rail workers and had not yet been covered with straw matting, so he could see that the head was smashed in and the torso covered in blood. Judging from his clothes, the dead man was also a railway employee, but the faces of the colleagues who surrounded him, turning alternately pale and red with fury, suggested that he had not been hit by a train or died through some mistake of his own. Everyone who heard the story raged with fury and was busily telling others what had happened, as if it had happened to them.
Apparently the dead man had been a member of the support staff at Yongsan Station. He had rushed to the south-facing platform on account of some urgent business at Yŏngdŭngp’o Station when the train was already moving. He jumped and clung to the side of a car that happened to be reserved for American soldiers, and an American army officer, who had been standing in front of the door, shouted something at him. The support worker had said he would move to another car, but with the words “God damn,” the American officer had kicked the worker in the chest with his boots, sending him flying. When the station workers reached him, they discovered his head had hit the iron bar of the next track and he was already motionless. Meanwhile, the American officer had pulled out his gun and was leisurely stepping back into the car of the disappearing train.
Han’s small but normally sharp eyes blurred, and he felt dizzy as his train continued on to Kyŏngsŏng Station.
What on earth do they see when they look at a Korean? I’d heard that racial discrimination was bad here, unlike with the Soviets, but how on earth could they do something like that …
The following day he took his five thousand won to the Antique Art Society’s auction hall, alongside Mr. Sŏng. The hall was on the second floor of a Japanese house in Chin’gogae that had formerly been a branch of Edogawa.
Books were not the only items on display. There were also some paintings and calligraphy from both the Koryŏ and Yi dynasties and some several thousand pieces of pottery. Han was pleased to see so many familiar faces, but it was clear that Americans in army uniforms had replaced the Japanese—they walked in wearing their boots and restlessly looked around.
“Do those people also buy some things?”
“Some things? They buy almost anything that’s expensive, that’s my worry.”
Sŏng removed his hands from a book he had been examining and stepped back when he saw an American officer looking down over his shoulder.
Han finally found the old edition of Collected Works of Wandang for which he had been looking so long. The book was noticeably popular with people milling around, amongst them Han found several friends who shared his tastes and whom he had been wanting to meet again.
“Well, who is this?”
“Oh, when did you get here? Isn’t it the first time we’ve met since Liberation!”
“Well, talk of the devil …”
“We must stay away from this Collected Works of Wandang then, since Mr. Han Moe is here and he’s been working on that one for a long time!”
Han’s hands trembled as he held the five volumes of Wandang’s Collected Works, stored in a box case decorated with a phoenix tree, but he secretly felt rather relieved; not only were his friends pleased to see him, but they adhered to the custom amongst Korean friends of shared taste of deferring to whoever most earnestly desired a particular item. Han gazed at the beautifully stained covers, as light and soft as lambskin, and at the unconventional yet elegantly written characters, which were somewhere between the Song and the Ming style and composed on thick paper the color of the white of an eye. He could not prevent his mouth from watering as if his eyes were caressing a beautifully colored flower or fragrant meal.
At last, the auction began.
The Americans all sat astride chairs lined up on both sides, still wearing their boots, while each had their own regular broker or buyer who sat beneath them on the floor.
For the most part, it was the Koryŏ celadon that caused the greatest excitement amongst the Americans. But they also jumped in without fail on the most expensive works of calligraphy and painting, and some of them also launched bids on the Collected Works of Wandang, for which Han held such great expectations. Sŏng’s first bid was five hundred won, in response to which a broker working for one of the Americans tried to break his spirit by jumping straight to three thousand won. Han glanced at Sŏng and dipped his lotus-bud-shaped beard, which trembled a little. Sŏng responded by calling out three thousand five hundred won. The other side immediately leapt up another thousand to four thousand five hundred. Han’s forehead burned. He only had five thousand won, and it looked as if this would go much higher. Whatever it might take, this was the one book he did not want to let slip away. Once it fell into their hands, it would leave Korea, and there would be no further opportunity to buy it. He had Sŏng call out his final bid of five thousand won. The American officer glanced over at Han and smiled, and then he tapped the shoulders of the broker sat in front of him and said, “Go on, go on.” Six thousand won. Han’s face blanched with shock as another buyer, sitting in front of an American on the other side of the room, stepped in and bid seven thousand won.
Noticing that Han had withdrawn from the bidding, one of the Koreans with similar taste stepped in, but he could only hold his ground, and his breath, up to ten thousand won before he too fell by the wayside. Only the Americans were left, and the atmosphere turned into one of a card game or sport, unbecoming to the purchase of a valuable antiquarian book. If one raised the bid by a thousand, another would raise it by two thousand, and the first one would then raise it by another three thousand, as they whistled and clicked their fingers, until finally the Collected Works of Wandang went into the possession of an American officer, whose whistles had been ear-splitting, for twenty thousand won.
What does Wandang’s Collected Works mean to them?
Han rubbed his eyes, as if they were full of sand.
The two sat there a bit longer while a piece of Koryŏ celadon was brought out. The level of tension in the room changed with the appearance of this inlaid piece decorated with a bird and willow tree by a river, and bids were shouted out from every direction. All the Korean bidders had dropped out after 50,000 won, when it became a fight between the foreigners; there were murmurs that the man who dropped out at 290,000 won, just before the piece went for a final price of 300,000, was the French representative from the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea.
The likes of Han’s five thousand won meant nothing in this place. He could not bear to stay there any longer and nudged Sŏng to leave before the auction was over.
“What can Koreans buy in a place like this?”
“You think that’s only the case here? It would be okay if it were only antiques and paintings, wouldn’t it? But the problem is that the entire economy has become like that!”
“But why have those bastards got so much money?”
Whether intentionally or not, Han had started calling the Americans bastards. Sŏng followed suit when he answered.
“Ah, it’s because of those bastards’ dollar, isn’t it? One dollar is worth about two thousand won at the moment. Now those bastards back there are only lower-level officials, but they earn about two hundred dollars a month. Now how much is that in Korean money? It’s four hundred thousand won, isn’t it? That means they come to Korea and earn four hundred thousand won each month and then, thieves that they are, they’re not idiots, so they end up with more than their salary. Ha!”
“…”
Han w
alked on, expressionless.
“If those bastards throw in just ten thousand dollars, then they’ve already raised twenty million won in funds, haven’t they? We struggled against Japanese capital when one won equaled one yen, but how long do you think we can last out against American money when the difference has increased two thousand times in just three years? Eh? Americans, they’re told to come to Korea freely, to invest as much American money as they like, to take anything they want whether material or immaterial … that’s aid in name only, are the people receiving aid saying that? Ha!”
“…”
Han’s slightly embittered lips remained closed, and he walked on.
“If you think about it in terms of that Collected Works of Wandang just now, we bid five thousand won, but still couldn’t buy it. Those bastards bought it for twenty thousand won, but that’s only four times more than five thousand, isn’t it? With money worth two thousand times ours they paid four times more, so to those bastards that twenty thousand won is nothing more than words. They’ve really got it for free because in their money they’ve paid no more than ten dollars. And I bet in their country it’s hard to buy a decent five-volume book for ten dollars.”
“My word, you’re right!”
“Until last year I couldn’t understand why anyone would call America imperialist when they don’t even have an emperor, but now everyone understands that, even complete idiots.”
“…”
Han had not thought about this before. He could not suppress an urgent interest in this monster called the “dollar,” and this was not because he had suddenly become a leftist, but because he had not been able to do anything to stop a book that he had really wanted to buy from slipping through his hands.
Those Japanese bastards destroyed us through annexation, but these bastards have figured out how to destroy us through aid!
By this point they were entering an alley in Myŏngch’i-chŏng. All of a sudden the children selling American cigarettes and gum scattered into the alleys to hide, crouching like a flock of birds spooked by a hawk. A crowd blocks the crossroads ahead, where the former Stock Exchange had once stood. The sound of fighting can be heard within the bustle. Policemen with badges on their chests and MPs with large English letters painted in white onto bowl-shaped helmets … they all blow their whistles as they try to elbow their way through the crowd. They cannot get through. Then, from somewhere, comes the pop of a pistol, not the sound of a hunting gun. The crowd pulls back with a “wah,” and the policemen and MPs poke their way into the gap. The crowd contracts again, as if numb to the sound of gunfire, and people rush in from this alley and that. It hadn’t been the sound of a fight, but of a speech.
“Our nation is one. Why would we set up a separate government here in the South? Ladies and gentlemen! If you really want our ancestral homeland to be united and independent, if you really don’t want our nation to be sundered and our brothers here in the South to become colonized slaves again, then these August 15 unified elections …”
A young laborer has been standing in a shop window, clutching his cap in his hands and shouting at the top of his voice, but now he finds his words interrupted by policemen and MPs dangling from his arms and legs, like a swarm of bees. The young man wriggles his legs free and kicks the policeman. The MP draws his gun.
“Go ahead, shoot me then!” shouts the young man. The policemen use their clubs to beat the young man around the face. His lips are torn and blood gushes out, but still he shouts.
“Ladies and gentlemen! We have no choice but to achieve a united independence with our own hands. The only way is for these unified elections …”
“That’s right!”
“Yes!”
There are shouts of agreement from all over the crowd. The policemen crawl up the laborer’s body, front and back, as if climbing a tree. Then a crash, as the shop windows break and the laborer falls down onto the ground in a heap with the policemen. The crowd contracts with an “aah.” They push each other in the back, falling onto the policemen as they swoop in to attack. There is no doubt that the crowd is attempting to prevent the arrest of the laborer.
“Step on the bowls of shit!”
“Squash the bowls of shit down into the ground!”
The “bowls of shit” referred to the helmets and caps that the policemen and MPs wore. Here and there in the midst of the confusion, young men, older women, and boys held lists of signatures and were adding names as people in the crowd quickly signed up. A middle-school student unrolled a sheet of paper in front of Sŏng and Han too. Sŏng quickly said, “I’ve signed up in my own district.”
He spoke politely to the young man. Han was flustered. When he realized that adding his signature in such an environment meant taking part in a desperate and bloody battle, he withdrew his hands.
“Mr. XXX is standing in our district.”
The name of the candidate flowed stealthily from the student’s trembling lips.
“It’s your decision, but please sign quickly if you want to.”
A flash in the student’s eyes seemed to ask, “Are you with the patriots or the traitors?” Han felt the unpleasant pressure of a kind of test. At the critical moment, he turned away from the student, fanning himself and adopting an aloof expression that seemed to say, “I’m not with the Left or the Right.”
Policemen were running up the street toward them, hitting people on the head and beating them on their backs with clubs. Breathless, Han pushed through the street with Sŏng in his wake, as if falling though a hole, and then quickly hurried away.
The speechmaker seemed to have disappeared, uncaught. The policemen dusted the dirt off their clothes and fled, wielding their truncheons at anyone who came near them, as if afraid of being knocked over by the crowd again.
No sooner did the police and MPs appear to go their separate ways than the street kids poured out of the alleyways again, flocking like birds to cover the street.
“American cigarettes for sale!”
“Buy your gum here!”
“American toothpaste! American soap!”
Han thought of his housekeeper’s son, Taesŏng, back in Pyongyang. These boys and girls were about his size, but they were all trying to sell American cigarettes, gum, toiletries, combs, and knives, and other things that they carried in paper boxes or simply in their hands.
“You brats, get out of the way, get out of the way …”
Sŏng chased them away in anger.
6
Han returned to his daughter’s house in a bad mood. But when he arrived, he discovered his daughter’s family of three in even worse shape.
His eldest grandson made no attempt to get up from the stone step but simply blinked his bright-red, bloodshot eyes, while the youngest hid his face in his mother’s skirts as she in turn leant against the veranda post.
“What’s wrong? Have they got into a fight?”
“No.”
“It’s sweltering today. The kids must be exhausted, what with the heat …”
“Father?”
“What is it?”
His daughter’s eyes burned with hostility, but fortunately there was no trace of tears as she spoke.
“I was wondering why those sons of bitches hadn’t been here recently, it turns out they locked up the kids’ dad a few days ago!”
Han entered the room without even removing his hat, and stood there with a blank expression for a while.
“Oh, that useless man …”
He blamed his son-in-law.
“Father, you think it’s his fault?”
“Cultivate the body and put the house in order, only then can you govern the country. But look what he’s done to this house, and now he’s ruining his own body, isn’t he?”
She stared at her father for a while. He looked less like her father than a member of the Korean Democratic Party or one of Syngman Rhee’s gangs.
“Whatever … please stay here with the kids for a while.”
; “Where are you going?”
“He hadn’t been eating well and was feeling weak anyway, I can’t just leave him.”
“You mean you’re taking him food?”
“Yes.”
“How will you pay for it?”
“…”
“You’ll sell something else?”
“I still have our gold rings put aside for an emergency.”
“You’re selling your wedding rings, the ones that your parents gave you when you married …”
“…”
His daughter did not answer but did indeed appear about to sell the gold rings. Han took out the five thousand won that he had hoped to use to buy the books and tossed it toward her.
“Here’s five thousand won.”
“But father, you need this money, don’t you? Anyway, yesterday a friend dropped by and told me that private meals have to be paid for a month in advance and cost at least ten thousand won …”
“At least ten thousand …”
He could no longer pretend to ignore the situation as her elder.
“Stay here while I go to see someone.”
He meant for his daughter to entrust the matter to him and left to raise the money.
He visited three or four friends before it grew dark. But even procuring a thousand won was not easy. They were mostly friends who had been at the auction hall and had returned with empty pockets, having managed to buy only a few small pictures and letters in which the Americans had taken no interest.
He was embarrassed to return empty-handed, because even though she was a daughter, she was still a child of his who had left home to marry. Finally, he went to see Sŏng to discuss the problem, but Sŏng said he was already indebted to everyone from whom he might be able to borrow money and there was nothing he could do to help. Gazing up at the stars in the now dark sky, Han tried expanding the range of his acquaintances in Seoul. And then, he suddenly nodded as a new name came to mind.