The night is so long. I wake up thinking I have slept for hours, but it is the night guard’s footsteps that have awoken me. The buzzing noise from the fluorescent light begins again. My mind feels clear, like gazing into a burning candle. I clearly see the flame fluttering and the wick glowing as my thoughts sink deep inside of me. The fluorescent light gets louder in the silence; my conscience flickers. Why is it that the past becomes clearer as the stomach empties? The act of eating three meals a day belongs to a reality, the present. Maybe you leave the present when you stop eating. Old memories that were hidden somewhere in my brain slowly dissolve and spread throughout my body. But what is really strange is that my most vivid memories are of little mistakes I made and cruelties that I heaped upon others.
I think of the dogs we had. There was Mary, a nameless one with black fur, and many others. But the first dog I remember is Mary, who my mother got from a neighbor. Her fur was a mixture of gray and white, and I think she was a mix of a small dog like a spitz and a big one, a sheepdog perhaps.
Mary is smart. She understands people’s words, and of all people her favorite is my mom, who feeds her every day. One rainy morning, I see Mary mating with a yellow dog about twice her size. I am on my way to school when I see the local kids surrounding them. The yellow dog does not care who is watching, he bares his teeth and growls as he mounts Mary. This is the first time for Mary, and she lets out pathetic yelps as she is pushed from behind. The scene is made even more pitiful when I see that her fur is wet, her ears are plastered to her head, which happens when she is scared, and her legs are flailing. I approach her despite my shame for her, but she is too stupefied to notice me. Kids throw pebbles at them and try to separate the two dogs by beating their connected behinds with a stick. A store owner comes out cursing with a bucket of hot water, and she throws it on them. At once they separate, and the yellow dog runs away and licks its still hard penis. Mary collapses to the ground, unable to move, still yapping. When the other kids move away, I pick up the stick they left behind and start beating her. I am disgusted with that little dog. Mary’s legs give way and she crawls away as fast as she can manage back to our house with me chasing her. She hides under the little porch by the kitchen, and I poke under there with the stick, still furious. Mary cries and then snarls at me sharply. I throw away the stick and hurl insults at her, but when I finally calm down and look underneath, I see her meekly wagging her tail. She lives with us for seven or eight years. Then she contracts a horrible skin disease and someone tells my mom to treat it with boiling water and red beans, which only scalds her skin and makes her worse. A plasterer who has come to work at our house sees her and volunteers to take her with him, saying that she will not live much longer and that her owner cannot put her down. So my mother lets her go, but she tells us later that Mary resisted, that she did not want to go with a stranger. Not knowing what else to do, my mother comforted Mary and told her, Listen, my little girl, I’m sending you away because you’re really sick. When you get better, you can come back home. And that is how Mary left our house, her leash pulled by the plasterer and the poor dog looking back toward the house several times as she walked away.
My black puppy comes when my mother has promised to get me a new dog as a prize if I am at the top of my class at the end of the first semester. When the report arrives I cry and swear and kick and scream for hours, and my mother cannot stand it any more. She takes me to the Youngdeungpo market and buys me the puppy. It lives with us for about five days. I torture the puppy. As soon as I bring him home I give him a bath with ice cold water and feed him steamed sweet potatoes, and he gets sick. I do not even have a chance to name the puppy. I come back from playing with my friends and there he is, already stiff, lying under the back wall in our backyard. I am so angry, I just roll his body up in a piece of newspaper and throw him into a river nearby. I still remember the newspaper and the dead body of the puppy floating separately and slowly drifting away.
After two weeks of my hunger strike, someone from the infirmary starts to visit me every other day to check my blood pressure. Naturally, my blood pressure is much lower than usual. Water tastes especially good. My beard is long and my skin dull, but my eyes are clear and bright. The guards come and go; one of them leaves me an apple, and the other opens a thermos with bean paste soup so I can smell it. Before they lock down the cells at night, I ask for permission to visit the administrative office and there return the food to them, untouched. They threaten to force feed me but I hold my own and tell them that I will file a complaint of torture if they do. Between the eighteenth and twentieth days, a resolution is offered. It is not exactly what I asked for, but close enough. This is the final critical point. If you want them to accept your request, you need to show them that you are not going to stop this until you die. This last phase is a long, tedious uphill battle. You know it can be over in a couple of days so you become impatient and your stomach begins to growl. All of a sudden, time stops. The day is long, the dark night seems to last forever.
Because of the cold weather you are emaciated, and you get frostbite on your ears and hands and toes from exposure to the cold. At first, it just itches, or you do not feel anything. I take off my socks and touch my toes, which are ice cold. I rub my hands together, I massage my toes, I caress my ears over and over again. After sleeping curled up under the comforter, its filling rolled up unevenly, and in a sleeping bag I made by sewing a blanket into a sack, my whole body is very stiff. No matter how hungry I am, I need to get up and run on the spot for at least an hour in order to loosen my limbs and let the blood circulate. Finally, they accept my conditions. After three weeks of enduring hunger, now I have to fight with myself again. Recovery is the most crucial and difficult phase. Twice a day, according to the infirmary’s prescription, the prison assistant brings me a bowl of thin porridge. Sometimes it is accompanied by another bowl of bean paste soup with a couple strips of cabbage. The fragrance of rice and bean paste is wonderful. Now the memories of the past are replaced by the taste and smell of food. I write down everything that I want to eat on a piece of paper, and I start cooking the foods in my head according to my own recipes. Now I am back in the real world. After three weeks on a hunger strike it will take at least ten days before I can eat normal food again.
If there is one thing the inmates and guards agree on, it is how important eating is in prison. The political prisoners frequently demanded that the kitchen distribute a monthly menu, including quantity and price, but this was rarely carried out. When a menu was printed, it might have looked acceptable, but what was actually served would not have changed. The food budget was minimal, the kitchen was staffed by fellow inmates, and everything they cooked looked exactly the same. Everything was watery with little solid pieces. For example, the menu listed braised fish, but what was in the bowl was a murky liquid with crumbled fish bones. If you were at the top of the prison hierarchy, you could ask the kitchen to save pieces of meat or fish and cook them properly later.
The most popular items in the prison library were the supplementary cookbooks that are included in woman’s magazines. I read all of them at the beginning of my prison life.
How about rice with mixed vegetables in a hot pot? Thinly slice carrots and sauté them with sesame oil and salt; blanch bean sprouts and season them with sesame oil, sesame seeds, and salt. Also thinly slice meat and season it with spices and soy sauce and sauté; halved and thinly sliced zucchinis are also sautéed with salt and sesame oil. Put oil in a pan and sauté the minced meat, then add hot pepper paste and water and sugar, and let it bubble away before adding pine nuts. This is the sauce. In a stone pot, put a layer of cooked rice and top it with the cooked vegetables and meat and cracked egg. Heat the stone pot until everything is hot, mix everything together with hot pepper sauce, and dig in.
If you jump into reading cookbooks too quickly, you only deepen the sense of deprivation. Since it is so cold, I pull my comforter up to my nose and close my eyes before I begin my cooking. My
mouth is filled with memories of taste, and the memories of my family, of all the villages and streets I roamed around, of people I met.
Rice with bean sprouts tastes better with bean paste soup. They were my late father’s favorite dishes, he ate them almost every weekend. Around lunchtime on Sundays, he would mumble, as if for the first time, Maybe we should make rice with bean sprouts today. Yes, let’s make rice with bean sprouts. Right after the war, we raised our own bean sprouts in a dark pantry in an earthenware jar lined with cotton cloth. I remember my mother watering them often. When the beans sprouted and grew to the length of my little finger, they tasted the freshest and the most delicate; at this stage the yellow beans tasted nutty and the root hairs were not too long. I sat with my mom and helped her take the ends away with my fingernails. Meanwhile, my mom prepared fish stock by boiling a pot of water with a handful of dried anchovies. Later, when things were more plentiful, we used beef stock made of lean shank and added the cooked meat to the sauce, too. The next step is to layer rice and bean sprouts in a pot, add minced meat if you have some, and pour in the stock, using a little less liquid than normal. While the rice cooks, make the sauce. Add to soy sauce sesame oil, chopped scallions, red pepper, minced garlic, black pepper, and toasted sesame.
Now it is time to make the bean paste soup to accompany the rice. I think bean paste soup with clams goes really well with rice with bean sprouts. Freshwater clams were everywhere, all we had to do was just go to the river and walk around the soft sand and bring back a basketful. Using two fingers or just our toes, we found a handful of pretty little clams about the size of an adult’s fingernail. As soon as we got to the house, the little clams would be soaked in salt water to clean out any sediment or sand, and then boiled twice, first just for a minute, and then in a new pot of fresh water until they were fully cooked.
When the clams open their mouths and the broth turns milky, add bean paste, but not the dark, crusty part from the top of the jar, use the golden yellow soft paste from inside. Add cubed tofu and scallions, and it is done. To make the soup more fragrant, add a few young stems of crown daisies at the last minute. When mixing the rice with bean sprouts, fluff the rice lightly. If the rice and bean sprouts get flattened by the serving spoon, it does not taste good anymore. Add the sauce little by little and mix it into the rice as you eat it.
Now I feel like eating sujebi, a humble soup of fish broth and torn dough. We ate that a lot right after the war. There was a brand of wheat flour called Handshake, packaged in a white sack printed with two hands shaking under a shield with stars and stripes. When we were evacuated to the countryside during the war, my mother used to make us whole wheat cake when she could get some of the dark brown flour. She mixed the flour with salt and water, measured it by the handful, and made each into an irregular oval shape. She steamed them in a cast-iron cauldron. I would take the dough and chew it in my mouth. We called it Korean chewing gum. The black whole wheat cakes were imprinted with my mother’s fingers, like the grooves on the handle of a well-made tool. Sometimes she added black beans to the dough, and it would remind us of the special rice cakes we used to get on New Year’s Day. The white American flour was so fine, I hesitated to touch it. With that soft flour she made a dough, threw little pieces of it into the boiling fish stock, and seasoned it with soy sauce. If she had kimchi, she chopped the cabbage and threw that in, too.
I remember going to my friend Kwang Kil’s grandfather’s house in the countryside when I was still in high school. Kwang Kil is long gone now. His house was in a little village miles away from the nearest train stop, so we had to walk for almost half a day along a winding dirt path beside a tiny river. It was wintertime, and the river, which was more like a stream, was frozen, and the dry grasses and trees were lightly coated with snow. I remember the first dinner at his house. There was no electricity, and Kwang Kil’s grandfather lit a lamp, which he usually did not. It was a simple dinner of rice cooked with radishes and soup with fermented soy beans. The rice was shaped into a little mound and served in an old porcelain bowl printed with two Chinese characters that meant life and fortune. It was a bit overcooked, but still tasted good. The radish was sliced thickly and cooked with the rice, and some barley was mixed in, too. There were various kinds of kimchi, made of cabbage or radish, some spicy and some not, and many, many side dishes that I had never seen in the city. The soup with fermented beans was thick and stinky like an unwashed sock. It was difficult to try it for the first time, but once I tasted it I could not stop eating.
Early in the morning, we were awoken by the sounds of Kwang Kil’s grandfather coughing up sputum. It was before dawn, still dark outside, but his aunt was already up and had started a fire in the fuel hole. The courtyard was filled with the spicy smell of burning wood. It was cold outside, but the smell of smoke made us feel warm. Kwang Kil and I found a crude-looking army flashlight and an insect net that was used mostly in summer, and we walked into the bamboo forest behind the house. The tree sparrows were just waking up, and their chirping was almost deafening. I pointed the flashlight at a random spot and pushed the button. The spotlight surprised the birds, and they froze in place. Numerous tree sparrows stuck to each branch, forming a picture that looked like a fruit tree that needed to be harvested. Kwang Kil simply took the net and scooped them up, easily catching two or three birds in one motion. When they finally realized what was going on and tried to fly away, it was too late. With a little time and effort spent in the early morning, we were able to catch dozens of tree sparrows. We brought them back in a sack and roasted them on the embers in the kitchen fireplace. The kitchen was filled with the warm fragrance of cooked rice, and I remember eating the tender flesh of roasted birds with a little salt.
When my recovery was finally over, I could return to normal, everyday life in prison. My appetite was enormous, and no matter how regularly I ate, I was never satisfied, and I couldn’t get rid of the persistent craving. January was the most brutal month in prison, and while trying to survive the month, suffering from cold and hunger, it was natural to feel that you were in danger. Like air escaping from a balloon, I lost almost twenty pounds. The Lunar New Year was approaching, and vegetables were scarce. But I had prepared for this with a prison assistant from my building since the previous autumn. The assistant, a model prisoner who got the job of doing menial work around the prison, knew me well. We got permission to raise napa cabbage in a vegetable garden in front of our building, and by early December we were able to collect dozens of large, fresh napa cabbage. We wrapped each one in a sheet of newspaper, stacked them in a plastic box we got from the prison snack bar, and stored them in a cool, dark spot under the stairway. This kept the cabbage fresh throughout the winter. They had to last until March, when fresh vegetables would be served again. We ate two out of three meals a day near the storage facility, and each of us ate a head of napa cabbage per meal. We took off the tougher outer leaves and dipped the inner ones in hot pepper sauce thinned with sesame oil. It tasted slightly bitter, but the savory fragrance was pleasant and palatable. The first couple of days were easy, and we had no problem finishing our portions, but after a few days I tasted grass in my mouth from just looking at the cabbage. But we had to finish the boxful of cabbage if we wanted to stay healthy. If we didn’t take care of ourselves during the winter, our gums would become inflamed and we’d lose teeth later on. I remember my colleagues lost at least a couple of teeth each after they were released from prison. They told me how their teeth became loose and came right out after pushing them a little with their tongues. So I ate the yellow inner leaves of napa cabbage, I stuffed my mouth with the leaves and rice and the sauce and chewed, thinking all the time how much better it would be if there was a piece of meat or fish to go with it.
The Old Garden Page 37