The Spirit of the Dragon

by William Andrews

  The radio went silent two hours later, and soon after that, the bombing stopped. The water stopped running altogether and the lights went out. That night, everything was deathly quiet. Young-chul sat on a sofa with his legs to his chest and said nothing. After a while, I snuffed out the candles we’d found, and we curled up on mats and tried to sleep.

  The next day we stayed huddled in the merchant’s house. We ate some dried pork and a can of peaches and drank some of the water we’d saved. Young-chul wanted to go outside to see what was happening, but I didn’t let him. “We are safe here,” I said. “Let’s not look for trouble.”

  We stayed inside the house for two more days. Young-chul never came out of his darkness. He spent hours looking out the window, saying nothing. Then, on the afternoon of the fourth day, we heard a voice coming over a loudspeaker outside. We opened the window and looked out. Slowly rolling down the street was a green army truck with a huge conical loudspeaker on top. “Everyone in this area must go to the Government General building outside Gyeongbok Palace to register with the new government,” a voice said over the loudspeaker. “In one week, anyone caught without registration will be arrested.” The truck rolled on and repeated the announcement farther down the block.

  I pushed the window closed. “What will I do?” I asked Young-chul. “They cannot know who I am.”

  “Why can’t you register under a different name?” he replied. “They won’t know.”

  And so I did. We went to the Government General building—a huge, ugly building the Japanese had erected during their occupation. We waited in line in the lobby where a red flag with a white circle and red star hung from the ceiling. When we got to the desk, I told the male clerk my name was Chun-ja Yi and my son was Sang-ho Pak. When he looked at Young-chul he said, “The boy looks like he is Japanese. Are you giving us your real names?”

  Young-chul’s jaw went tight and I was afraid he’d say something. “My son’s father was Korean and was killed during the Japanese occupation,” I said quickly. “I assure you, we are giving you our correct names.”

  The man grunted and wrote something on a ledger. Then he asked us for an address, and I gave him the address of the house we’d taken over. He wrote it on the ledger next to our names.

  “Put your right hands over your hearts,” he said. We did and he said, “Do you pledge your complete and everlasting support to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and to its leader, Chairman Kim Il-sung?”

  I remembered Commissar Kim from my time with the rebels. Back then, he’d been a charismatic leader, but I never dreamed he’d become the supreme leader of North Korea. I also knew how brutal he could be. I remembered how he’d left Young-ee to die after the mamushi had bitten her. I remembered how he sent me to be killed by the bomb with the short fuse.

  “I do,” I said.

  Young-chul did not say anything and the clerk glared at him. “What do you say, boy?”

  Young-chul glared back at the clerk. “Son,” I said quickly, “you must agree.”

  Young-chul looked at me, then back at the clerk. “I do,” he said finally.

  The clerk filled out some papers and handed them to us. “You must keep these with you at all times,” he said. “If you are caught without them, you will be arrested. Now you may go.”

  “What will we do for food and work?” I asked.

  “What you did before,” the clerk answered matter-of-factly. “Everything is the same under the new regime. You are to carry on as if nothing has changed.”

  I gave him a slight bow, and Young-chul and I went back to the merchant’s house.

  The clerk was wrong. Nothing was like it was before. The Namdaemun market vendors, most having escaped to the South or afraid to come out with communist soldiers roaming the street, had abandoned the market. The awnings stayed rolled up, and a few had boarded their windows. When I tried to buy food, I learned we had to exchange our money for North Korean won. When I went to the exchange, they gave me only one tenth of what I’d had before. So Young-chul had to find food for us. Eventually, the water and electricity came back on. When we turned on the radio, the only station we could get broadcast propaganda about the virtues of communism and how the great leader, Chairman Kim, was uniting Korea under the Democratic People’s Republic. “We will be one Korea again!” the reporter said with a little too much enthusiasm.

  Everywhere I went I was afraid I’d see someone from the rebel group. Every night, I worried that there would be a knock on my door. But no one ever came to the merchant’s house and, contrary to what the reporter said, Korea never became one.

  In September, the Americans invaded west of Seoul at Inchon, and the ensuing battle for Seoul destroyed more of the city. Once the Americans took control, some Koreans who had fled came back. Even so, the city had lost the life it had before the war. We hoped and prayed that the war would end soon so we could rebuild and South Korea would be the way it was. But the radio went off and never came back on, and the Namdaemun market never opened.

  Everyone expected the South Korean government and Americans to provide aid. But it was slow in coming, and by the time the daylight grew short and the north winds promised winter, the starving citizens began to panic. Packs of angry, hungry men roamed the city looking for food. Women and children stayed in their houses and stared out of windows with fatalistic eyes.

  Eventually, Young-chul and I went back to our house. When we got there, I was relieved to see that it was still standing and that North Korean soldiers had not ransacked it like they had so many others. I still had my pots and cooking utensils, although all the ingredients to make my confections were gone. We had nothing to eat, so Young-chul spent every day searching for food. I wondered if he was in one of the wild packs, but I didn’t ask. Half the time he came home empty-handed, so most nights, we went to bed hungry.

  One cold November day, I heard the United Nations was passing out food in the square outside of the Government General building. I went there. The line stretched down the block. I took a place in the back behind a woman about my age.

  “Is this the line for food?” I asked the woman.

  “Yes,” she said with a nod, clutching her coat around her. “My brother came home this morning with green cans that had meals inside.”

  “Good,” I said. “We need help.”

  The woman gave me a look that was both desperate and angry. “Yes, we need help and it could get worse. There is word that the Chinese have entered the war and are winning battles in the north. Pray the war does not come back to Seoul or thousands will starve during the winter.” She turned back and said nothing more.

  It took over an hour for me to get to the front of the line. There were several military trucks parked in the square guarded by American soldiers holding rifles. Alongside the trucks were makeshift tables made from crates. When I went to a table, a blond American woman with the blue-and-white UN armband over her coat handed me two green cans with English writing on the lid. “This is from the United Nations,” she said in broken Korean. “There’s food inside. Use the key on the bottom to open the can.”

  I thanked the lady with a bow and took the cans home.

  When I got there, Young-chul took the metal key from the bottom of one of the cans, peeled back a tab on the side, and opened it. Inside were crackers, jam, sugar, and coffee. We hadn’t had anything to eat for days, and though the food had a stale, metallic taste, we ate it all. Young-chul wanted to open the other can, but I told him not to. “We do not know when we will have something again. We should save it.” We hid the can inside one of my pots.

  Every day for several weeks I went to the square outside the Government General building for the food the United Nations gave out. Sometimes they had rice. Sometimes they gave out beans. Most days, they handed out the food in green cans.

  Then one day, the trucks weren’t there. Everyone held their places in line and waited for the trucks to come. Then, we heard bombs exploding north of the city. We stare
d at each other. A man came running into the square. “The Chinese are advancing,” he said. “The Americans are in full retreat!”

  I ran for home as the bombs fell in white flashes to the north. I got to my house and rushed inside. “Young-chul!” I cried out, but he wasn’t there. I went back outside. Two low-flying jets roared overhead. They dropped their bombs a mile north, and I saw a white flash as they hit and a few seconds later felt their concussive thuds. Thick black smoke rose from where the bombs fell.

  People began to come out of their houses and into the street, but unlike before, there was no panic in them as they moved. Instead, they walked with their heads down and their shoulders slumped forward.

  I saw Young-chul coming toward me. “Young-chul!” I called out as another bomb flashed white, closer now. “We have to run!” I said.

  “Why?” he asked. “Where will we go? They have not rebuilt the bridges across the river. We are trapped here.”

  I looked into his face and could see he was in his dark place again. “Young-chul, we have to try.”

  “It is no use,” he said, shaking his head. “I cannot find food anywhere. We are doomed.”

  A bomb exploded a half mile from where we stood, making the houses around us shudder. The entire neighborhood to our north was on fire. Smoke filled the air, stinging my eyes. People walked faster.

  I looked at my son. I had come so close. I’d had a job and was making money. If war had not come, I would have done well and could have gone to Japan to find Hisashi. Now there was nothing but chaos and despair all around. But I had to go on, had to see Hisashi again and tell him that I never stopped loving him. I wanted him to be Young-chul’s father. I wanted Young-chul to know Hisashi the way he was before he left me. “No,” I said. “I refuse to give up. I will not stop until I see Hisashi again.”

  “Hisashi?” Young-chul exclaimed. “He abandoned us! And he is Japanese.”

  I grabbed Young-chul’s shoulders and stared into his face. “Do not judge him,” I said. “He is a good man and you are his son. We will find him someday, I promise. Now, take us to a place where we will be safe.”

  Young-chul returned my stare. After a few seconds, his face softened. And as the bombs flashed and the explosions thumped, he nodded and said, “Follow me.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Young-chul and I survived the war, but after it was over, I could not save him. The four invasions of Seoul had decimated the city. Bombings and firestorms leveled entire neighborhoods. Only brick fireplaces and iron stoves still stood. A fraction of the population remained. The people like us who’d survived were destitute and desperate. For years after the war, suffering and death was common.

  We lived miserably in a slum with thousands of others. Our shack was a corrugated tin lean-to with a green army tarp for a door. It was stifling hot in the summer, unbearably cold in the winter, and wet during the rainy season. Raw, foul-smelling sewage ran in the ditch behind us. What remained of the streets were muddy all summer and full of frozen ruts all winter. I had to trek a mile to get water. We often went days without eating. Our clothes were little more than rags.

  Young-chul’s sullenness before the war grew to anger in the years after. He turned callous and hard. He never asked about his father. He never smiled. He only thought about what he needed to do that day so we could survive. He roamed the street like a wolf hunting prey. I tried to keep him grounded. I tried to talk about a brighter future. I tried to give him hope, although in a city overwhelmed by hopelessness it was difficult to have it myself.

  My son was a young man now. He had shiny black hair and big liquid eyes like Hisashi. I believe people hated him because he looked like a Japanese man and they blamed Japan’s thirty-five-year occupation for their fate. I suspected that he got into fights.

  One bitterly cold day after years of living like this, Young-chul came home with a chicken and a small bag of rice. I was sitting on the frozen ground in our shack with my blanket around me, trying to stay warm. Young-chul put the rice and chicken on the dirt floor without saying anything.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked, examining the chicken. This amount of food was rare in the slum, and I couldn’t imagine where it came from.

  “I’ll find some wood for a fire while you pluck it,” Young-chul said. He started to leave.

  “Young-chul,” I said, “tell me where you got this.”

  “You do not need to know, Ummah,” he said over his shoulder. Then he left to find firewood.

  That night, we ate chicken for the first time in years. I’d forgotten how good it was to have a full stomach. I said that we should save half the chicken for another meal. Young-chul insisted we eat it all. “I can get more,” he said.

  “Young-chul,” I said after we’d eaten and were wrapped in our blankets, “did you steal the chicken?”

  “No,” he answered, leaning against the tin wall. “I bought it.”

  “How did you get the money?”

  “I have a job.”

  “A job? Doing what?”

  “I work for some men selling things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  Young-chul eyed me. Then he said, “Opium.”

  “Young-chul!” I cried, throwing off my blanket and going to him. “It is dangerous to sell opium. The police will arrest you. You might be killed!”

  “What would you have me do, Ummah? We need food. We need somewhere better to live.”

  “I have been without food before,” I said. “I’ve lived in crueler conditions.”

  “It does not matter,” Young-chul said, shaking his head. “It is the only thing I can do.”

  “Then we will go to Japan,” I said. “We will find your father.”

  “How will we get the money to go to Japan? Anyway, it will be no better there,” Young-chul said, his voice straining with anger. “There, I will be a Korean. The Japanese will treat me the same there as the Koreans do here.”

  “But Japan and Korea are working together now,” I countered. “They are helping us rebuild.”

  “Ha!” Young-chul scoffed. “Do you think the Japanese and Koreans will ever stop hating each other? Do you?”

  He glared at me. I didn’t want to, but I had to agree he was right.

  “They will always hate each other and you know it,” he said. “And I, half Japanese and half Korean, will forever be hated by one or the other.”

  He looked at his hands. “And if I work for these men, we will not starve.”

  We said nothing more, and after a while, Young-chul pulled his blanket around him and went to sleep. Though my stomach was full for the first time in months, I couldn’t sleep. It was the curse of the two-headed dragon. I’d brought the curse on myself and I’d brought it on my son, too. Perhaps, all those years ago, it would have been better to escape to Manchuria as Father wanted instead of marrying Hisashi. But I loved Hisashi and I loved Young-chul. I wouldn’t have had either if I’d run away.

  But why was Young-chul cursed? I had invited the curse, not him. He didn’t deserve it. I needed to do something to help him. I remembered that I still had my silver hairpin. I opened the rucksack and took it out. I stared at the elegant tines, its carved trees and crane. It would fetch a handsome price from a silver merchant in the Itaewon market. But I couldn’t sell it. It was the only thing I had that connected me to Hisashi. Anyway, the money would only last for a month or two. Then, Young-chul would have to go back to selling opium.

  And so, I couldn’t stop my son from his illegal business, and we never went hungry again. Young-chul moved us out of the slum into a tiny second-floor apartment in a part of town the war had not destroyed. He bought mats for the floors and a table where we ate. He bought clothes for us. I constantly worried that he might get killed or arrested. Every day, I made him promise that he’d be careful. Every night I didn’t sleep until he came home.

  Though we had food and a place to live, Young-chul stayed angry. I sensed that he’d started using opium himself.
He was gone for long hours and sometimes stayed out all night. When he did come home, he didn’t want to talk. He was always depressed. Some days, he came home with bruises on his face and cuts on his hands and I could tell he’d been fighting again. I tried to think of ways to make money so he could quit his business and get off the street. I tried to find a job, but there were thousands of poor people like me looking for work. So I spent my time in my apartment or walking through the city, trying to think of a way to help my son. I thought about reaching out to Yoshiko for help but I couldn’t. I’d promised to take care of Young-chul and I had failed. I didn’t want her to see that Young-chul had turned to selling drugs.

  One day, there was a knock on my apartment door. My heart sank. I thought it was the police to tell me they’d arrested Young-chul or that someone had killed him. I went to the door and said, “Who is there?”

  “It is Shigeru Saito,” a man answered.

  I cracked open the door. There, standing in front of me with his hat in his hand, was Mr. Saito. He wore a tailored suit and his hair was almost completely gray. He wore glasses now, round with gold-wire rims. There were lines around his eyes that hadn’t been there before. Even so, his powerful square frame made him imposing.

  “Mr. Saito!” I exclaimed. I was so surprised I didn’t think to bow.

  “Hello, Miyoko,” he replied in his sonorous voice. “I am sorry—Suk-bo. I should call you by your Korean name. May I come in?”

  “Of course,” I said. I opened the door.

  He stepped inside my apartment and looked around. “You should have somewhere more appropriate to live,” he said.

  “I’m sorry for the condition of my apartment,” I said.

  “Forgive me,” he said with a wave. “I’m sorry I mentioned it.” He gave me a smile. “It is a pleasant day. Will you take a walk with me? I sit in meetings all day and do not get to stretch my legs.”

  “You want me to walk with you?” I said.

  “If you would. I have some things to talk to you about.”