Maninbo

by Ko Un

  to say where I was.

  Stricken by frostbite,

  he lost one leg.

  ‘So how could I ever be loyal to Japan?’

  Young Yi Seung-tae

  grew up.

  Soon after Liberation

  he became deputy head of the youth division

  of the Committee for the Preparation of National Foundation.

  He was a fine young man.

  When Yeo Un-hyeong was assassinated,

  he fasted in mourning for one week. Then he disappeared.

  Love

  I have seen a

  love that is higher

  than parents’ love,

  than a father’s love,

  than children’s love.

  That poem was written by a young man

  wandering through northern Manchuria in the autumn of 1930,

  fighting for the liberation of his colonised country.

  His name, Yi Ik-jae,

  aged 27.

  He was rather young

  to leave such a poem behind.

  When he was killed in action,

  the South Manchuria independence fighters

  buried him at the foot of a hill

  and carved that poem

  on the wooden gravemarker.

  Again

  the world went back to parents’ love,

  went back to wives’ and children’s love.

  And the walls of each house grew higher than the next.

  A Single Photo

  In August 1950,

  as day was dawning,

  Shin Jo-jun of Pyeong-san, Hwanghae,

  crossed the Imjin River, on the western battle front.

  He swam straight across the river

  holding in his teeth a single photo

  of his mother and father when they were young.

  He was in Seoul, capital of the South. It lay in ruins.

  Living as a beggar

  he became a South Korean.

  Then he gave up begging

  and ran errands for a grogshop,

  then for a shoe-shiner,

  bringing him shoes to be polished,

  before he became a shoe-shiner himself.

  He bought a wooden shack.

  Fifteen years after leaving his northern home

  he was president of the Actors’ Academy in Chungmu-ro, Seoul.

  He had his parents’ photo enlarged

  and hung it on his wall.

  Somebody asked:

  ‘What period are those film stars from?’

  So-called Student Soldiers

  When the Communist army came South,

  fourth- and fifth-year middle-school students

  were summoned en masse

  and forced to enlist.

  Fourth and fifth years of middle school!

  On 4 January 1951,

  when the Northern forces came down again,

  first-year high-school students

  were summoned at random en masse:

  and forced to enlist.

  Boys in their later teens,

  those early plums,

  those early apples,

  those early jujubes

  died in battle at Pohang,

  died on the central front.

  The land the South recovered, wherever the battle ended,

  was all graves.

  VOLUME 17

  That Old Woman

  She had many stories in her.

  Millipedes dropped from the rotten thatched roof of her hut.

  Falling raindrops

  were part of her family.

  Hard times were her strength.

  Neither cholera

  nor other common diseases visited her.

  Even the ghosts

  disliked poverty. The daytime moon was one of her family.

  Drinking a cup of water,

  she tried to forget a host of stories

  in the Japanese colonial period,

  when moonlit nights were bright in the ruined nation

  and then again in the age of a divided Korea.

  Once, Eon-nyeon from the village opposite,

  came by after gathering greens and said:

  ‘When you die

  we’ll make the memorial offerings for you.’

  ‘I don’t need that,’ she said

  with a smile, her first in a very long time.

  If she had no teeth

  she still had gums.

  Her gummy smile was all she had.

  Paddy Fields

  There were children laughing in the Pyeongtaek fields,

  and girls singing, too.

  In that hallucinatory world,

  there were tender yellow-green

  baby rice plants

  in the freshly planted paddy-fields.

  Now it was the turn of sunlight,

  of water.

  After three rounds of weeding the rice would ripen.

  They were the fields of the Republic of Korea,

  fields of the People’s Republic,

  then of the Republic of Korea again,

  then of the People’s Republic again,

  then of the Republic of Korea again.

  After American jets flew over, the fields were quiet.

  Don’t be sad.

  Your descendants will continue forever because of these fields.

  The rice is ripening in the scorching heat.

  On the dirt bank of one field, homeless dogs are coupling.

  Two Deaths

  Gwon Pyeong-geun, aged 47.

  Yi Seok-u, aged 26.

  Gwon put on the suit long left hanging unworn:

  now he was a gentleman of the harbor.

  Yi appeared wearing a clean shirt

  without his usual People’s Guard’s armband: a lovely young man.

  On September 8, 1948

  they joined the crowd out to welcome the American military

  landing at Incheon harbour,

  a zone still being guarded by Japanese police.

  There, Gwon Pyeong-geun

  and Yi Seok-u were shot dead by a Japanese policeman.

  Rejoicing at Liberation,

  and gone out to welcome

  the liberating army, the allies,

  they were killed by the last tatters of Japanese imperialism.

  Nay, it was liberation that killed them.

  Gweon Pyeong-geun had been chairman of the central committee

  of the Incheon branch of the Korea Workers’ Union;

  Yi Seok-u had been a guard in the people’s militia.

  Regarding their corpses, the Americans said

  that the Japanese police were right to fire.

  That evening, the Korea Workers’ Union

  shouted anti-American slogans

  along with anti-Japanese slogans

  and tore down from the wall

  the Stars and Stripes.

  Flowers

  In prehistoric times, forty thousand years ago,

  as people were moving their homes

  one by one from caves to huts,

  when a father was killed while hunting

  his son

  brought him home on his back,

  put the body up in a tree

  then offered flowers on the ground beneath.

  Forty thousand years later

  in Jinan, North Jeolla Province,

  a family made a grave for a man who died in the war

  then a four-year-old boy offered flowers.

  Behind him, his mother wept.

  A few wild chrysanthemums.

  General de Gaulle

  Today, again, General de Gaulle was sitting in the café.

  The faces around the stove in Café Geosang

  behind the old Hwasin department store in Jong-ro, Seoul

  turned red

  around the hot stove.

  His name was Kim Cheol-sun;

  his nickname, General de Gaulle;

&
nbsp; his occupation, none;

  his marital status was unclear –

  sometimes he was said to have a son, sometimes not.

  More than once every day

  the words ‘General de Gaulle’ were sure to come tumbling

  out of his mouth, which looked like a turtle’s.

  ‘In France, General de Gaulle got rid of every traitor,

  those who fawned upon Hitler,

  those who fawned upon the Vichy government.

  He executed some,

  sentenced others to life imprisonment,

  deprived more than 600,000 of civic rights.

  But in this bloody Republic of Korea,

  pro-Japanese people have become patriots,

  while patriots are blamed as traitors,

  as reds.

  Where on earth is our national spirit?

  Of what country is Dr Syngman Rhee president?’

  A few days after,

  General de Gaulle failed to appear in the café.

  An outstanding bill of eight hundred hwan

  began to gather dust.

  Lee In-su

  Humanity became a tool of barbarity.

  Humanity was a sacrificial offering.

  During the Japanese colonial period

  talented Lee In-su studied English literature

  at the University of London,

  then came back. After Liberation

  he was the pride of Korea University’s English department.

  One English teacher from Mokpo,

  eager to meet him,

  even made the two days’ train journey up to Seoul.

  Lee In-su was the pride of Korea’s English studies,

  he looked cool after he’d shaved,

  he was laconic at all times.

  Lee In-su had a wife and children.

  He moved between home and school.

  War broke out.

  He was not able to leave Seoul.

  During the three months under the People’s Republic

  Kim Dong-seok, who had previously gone North, came back down.

  At his urging

  Lee In-su made English broadcasts aimed at the American forces.

  Even Byeon Yeong-tae, the future premier who had taught English in China,

  could not match his English.

  After Seoul was recaptured

  Lee was arrested.

  Kim Seong-su, the founder of Korea University,

  addressed a petition to President Syngman Rhee.

  Many people

  tried to save his life.

  Defence minister Shin Seong-mo had him swiftly executed.

  Lee In-su was a brilliant scholar

  when he was in England.

  Shin Seong-mo had been a ship’s captain amidst wild seas.

  He always considered Lee In-su his rival.

  From early days,

  small Shin Seong-mo

  had thought only of getting rid of tall Lee In-su,

  by any means.

  An Outstaring Game

  The meeting started,

  the first session of the very long,

  very tedious

  armistice negotiations.

  The UN’s chief delegate was American Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy,

  the North’s was General Nam Il.

  Outside Panmunjeom, the fighting was still furious.

  Joy proposed: ‘Let’s make the armistice line the Kansas Line,

  passing through Yeoncheon and Cheolwon in Gyeonggi province,

  Geumhwa and Ganseong in Gangwon province.’

  Nam Il proposed:

  ‘Let’s go back to the 38th parallel as before the war.’

  Nam Il again:

  ‘During the seven months of the war,

  our northern forces occupied territory south of the 38th parallel for five months,

  while you occupied land north of the 38th parallel for only two months.

  If you insist on the so-called Kansas Line,

  we’ll insist on the Nakdong River way down south as the armistice line.’

  Joy:

  ‘No. We have gained full control of air and sea.

  In the war against Japan

  we made Japan surrender

  without even one American soldier landing on Japanese soil.’

  Nam Il:

  ‘You are forgetting some important facts.

  What made Japan surrender

  was first the Korean people’s fight for independence,

  then the Chinese people’s eight-year battle against Japan,

  and the entry of the Soviet Union into the war.

  You fought against Japan for five years,

  but you won thanks only to the entry of the USSR into the war.’

  After that

  they spent the next 7 hours 10 minutes in an outstaring game,

  lips tightly shut.

  Whoever blinked first would lose.

  This scene was witnessed

  only by the English interpreter,

  second lieutenant Kim Hyeong-gi,

  a briefing officer for the defence ministry’s information bureau,

  and Choi Byeong-u, reporter for the Joseon Ilbo newspaper.

  All the other reporters depended on Choi.

  Later Choi Byeong-u was killed by Chinese gunfire

  on the battlefield of Kinmen Island in the Strait of Taiwan.

  His wife would become the wife of Professor Wagner

  who taught Korean history at Harvard.

  Relations in life spread.

  A Room at Last

  Having escaped, I came back alive.

  Grandfather, grandmother,

  mother were gone.

  I was all alone.

  For food, I dug up the roots of alang grass,

  gnawed pine needles,

  ate amaranthus raw.

  I lapped up a bowl

  of stale left-overs.

  I came back alive.

  I slept under a straw mat in the shed of some house.

  I slept in an empty stable.

  I came back to bombed-out Seoul

  after it was recaptured.

  In Anguk-dong old tile-roofed houses remained,

  the houses where court ladies used to live.

  There was one house still empty.

  I collected scraps of wood and

  made a fire to heat the floor.

  My body thawed out.

  My name is Yi Jong-su.

  How long had it been?

  Lying on the warmest spot in the room

  I looked up at a framed photo of the owner of the house,

  who had run away.

  A handful of rice remained in a jar.

  I ate the rice alone, without side dishes.

  I wished

  for soy sauce,

  I wished

  for red pepper paste,

  I wished

  for aged kimchi.

  Saying that, I fell asleep.

  Dreams were unnecessary.

  Mud-flats on the West Coast

  They say Kim Il-sung has come to Seoul.

  They say Syngman Rhee is going to Pyongyang.

  Who’s Mao Tse-tung?

  They say Mao Tse-tung has come to Seoul.

  Or else

  Truman is going to Pyongyang.

  They say those goddamn Seoulites

  have packed their bags to flee any number of times.

  They say all the folk on the mainland

  are having a really hard time.

  In the most remote of the Gyeongnyeol-bi Islands in the Yellow Sea

  live nine fishing families,

  and in one of them

  is Sujin’s Mom,

  so gaunt and skinny

  she’s called ‘Bamboo chopstick’ or ‘Metal chopstick’,

  with her flat chest.

  Today too that Chopstick’s been out gathering oysters,

  and now she’s mending her husband’s ne
t,

  the net with so many holes.

  Three or four times a day

  planes pass overhead.

  Whether they pass

  or not

  the waves never stop breaking.

  Empty boats creak,

  tossing in the waves.

  No news at all

  from Ilmo’s boat,

  still not back.

  The crimson sun drops down in a flash.

  The whole ocean, surprised, grows dark.

  If a few planes pass overhead

  or not, who cares?

  One Day

  In the yard of an empty house

  a leftist was killing a rightist.

  He battered his head

  with the back of a spade.

  He fell,

  his hands bound with wire.

  Then he struck his exposed breast

  with the back of the spade.

  Blood spurted out.

  He made his last farewell:

  Goodbye, bloody reactionary.

  And Another Day

  A rightist dragged a leftist

  to the square before the station,

  and the leftist’s wife as well.

  You whore,

  now watch your husband die.

  The first cudgel blow.