They lead me across the large avenue. It is lunchtime, and the restaurant is pretty crowded. The truth is, I was eyeing an old Chinese restaurant next to a fire station and craving noodles with black bean sauce, but the moment I heard the word “beef” I easily gave up that idea. What is strange is that whether you are in prison, or in the military, you never fantasize about really fancy, expensive food, maybe because the gap between your imagination and the reality is too big. When “eating out” while reading a cookbook, you skip the pages with elaborate dishes made by chefs, but linger on the ones you ate all the time at home. I used to think of large meat dumplings, each the size of a man’s fist, served at a dark Chinese restaurant with dirty tables. Sometimes you found a piece of pork fat, the hair still attached to the skin, among the vegetable filling. Or I’d desperately crave the noodles with black bean sauce. I could almost hear the chef banging and kneading the dough to pull the noodles, and I could smell the pork and vegetables and the sauce being cooked in a wok engulfed in tall flames. Whenever the inmates talked about food during the exercise hour, they inevitably ended up comparing the noodles with black bean sauce from their own favorite restaurants, boasting that each one of them knew the place where they served the best bowl of noodles. I once saw two young criminals in a fist fight that left them both with bloody noses, because they couldn’t agree which dish tasted better—sweet-and-sour pork or stir-fried noodles. But why had I never thought of grilled beef?
The four of us walk down the hallway, take off our shoes and sit around a low table in a large room. As the marinated meat cooks away on a small grill on the table, the windbreaker uses a pair of chopsticks to place a few pieces of it on my plate.
“Well, well, this prisoner’s life ain’t so bad, is it?”
The leader gives him a look, frowning.
“Stop the bullshit. Help yourself, Mr. Oh, eat as much as you want. We eat this all the time.”
I put a piece of meat in my mouth and chew. The texture is so tender, and my mouth is soon filled with the flavors of garlic and honey and soy sauce. It has been a while since I have tasted any seasoning. The kimchi at the prison looks red, but it is never spicy, just salty.
“It’s much better outside, isn’t it?” the suit mumbles.
My eyes are burning, and I bend my head down because I do not want them to notice anything. When I put my chopsticks down on the table, the leader asks, “What’s wrong? It doesn’t taste good to you?”
“No . . . It’s just . . . a little . . . spicy.”
“I guess so; you haven’t had food like this in a long time. By the way, you should have something to drink, too. What do you like, soju or beer?”
“Beer?”
He orders it. Cold bottles are brought to the table, and a glass with the white foam up to the brim is placed in front of me.
“Well, congratulations!”
The windbreaker raises the glass to me. Confused, the suit raises the glass and asks, “What? What are we celebrating?”
“Congratulations on your release! Well, let’s call this a rehearsal.”
After a few glasses of beer, my face is enflamed and throbbing. And I finally relax. I almost think for a moment that I am, indeed, released.
In the darkened movie theater, I feel like I am spending a holiday with friends. For a Buddhist monk or a soldier, or for any young man who does not have a regular job, the movie theater is the only point of contact with the rest of the world. What you are watching may be a story from a different world or a scene from a foreign place, but you are participating in what others are also seeing and feeling and remembering. The newspaper is not as vivid an experience, but I still remember the shock, which remained for months, when newspapers and magazines were allowed again after a long time. The world was thriving without me, as if nothing had happened.
It is still bright outside when the movie is over, about half past three in the afternoon. My eyes are blinded by the autumn sun’s dazzling rays. All the colors on the street, people’s clothes, everything is so vivid, it looks like there is a festival going on. People push past me, indifferent.
“Look, we don’t have too much time,” the leader says. “Can you think of some place else to go besides a department store?”
The suit asks me, “How about a marketplace?”
“The market? That’d be too tricky to escort, no?” says the windbreaker, looking at the leader.
“Yeah, but the Great East Gate market is nearby. We can just walk around there, I guess.”
I am just standing here, at the intersection, listening to their blabber. Since I remain silent, they take my silence as agreement and head toward the marketplace. While walking, I become convinced that it is actually a good idea to visit the market. There are four of us, so the leader and I walk in front while the suit and the windbreaker follow us. We wander around the market place, zigzagging through the numerous stalls and vendors, “Choose one, only 1,000 won for a T-shirt!” “5,000 won for a pair of pants!” “Come on, take a look! It’s practically free!” “Down parkas, bonded goods!” “Watch out, heavy load, out of my way!”
The noise at the marketplace sounds like little children chattering behind a glass window at the end of a room. Only the voice of the leader rings clearly, sometimes loud, sometimes soft, as my ears are slowly unclogged.
“Mr. Oh, don’t you wanna buy something? Go ahead, you have money from your deposits, remember?”
Ah, that’s right. I finger the three 10,000-won bills folded in half in my pocket. I keep one hand in my pants pocket while I look around.
“But you should know you can only get what is allowed inside,” he says, “or it’ll be confiscated when you go back.”
Only then do I remember my friends left behind. I stand in front of a stall selling underwear. During the exercise hours we wear boxer shorts, but the officially distributed ones are always white and easily stained. On cold winter days, the prison fashion is to put on boxer shorts over thick thermal underwear, as if we were imitating real boxers. Although it does not really look like we are walking outside wearing only underwear, we cannot help but laugh at each other, pointing out each other’s odd appearance. I pick out some large-size boxer shorts, with stripes or dots, and long-sleeved cotton T-shirts to wear under the prison uniform. Only four colors are allowed—gray, navy blue, white, and black. No printed letters or elaborate patterns. I spend 30,000 won. I pay with my own hand.
“Well, the day has come to an uneventful end,” the leader says as he looks at his watch.
“Let’s go, hurry!” the suit adds.
“I’m not staying there tonight,” the windbreaker says.
“Where do you think you’re going?” the leader asks. “You’re still on the job until we go back.”
“What? We have to sleep there, too?”
“What’s wrong with it? We shouldn’t spend all our traveling expenses. But I guess it’ll be okay to have a drink after we check him in.”
“Are we going somewhere else?” I ask him, finally.
“Didn’t you know? According to the rule, you have to spend the night in a prison. But I can tell you now, you should look forward to tomorrow.”
“Aren’t we going back tomorrow?”
“We just need to be back before the lockdown.”
The group grabs a taxicab again, and once settled in the passenger seat, the leader tells the driver, “We’re headed to Anyang.”
The taxi driver quickly glances back at us through the back mirror. “Where in Anyang?” he asks.
“The prison. We’re escorting a prisoner, so push on that gas pedal, will ya? Don’t worry about the traffic.”
Sitting in between the two guards in the backseat, I remember the night I was sent to the detention cell. It was the middle of the night and raining. I remember the cool metal of the handcuffs tight around my wrists, too tight. We get out in front of the prison gate and walk in through a small door. As we walk into the other side of bleached-white walls, I
smell cooked rice. A speaker blares the sound of a trumpet, announcing the end of the daily schedule.
“We made it just in time,” says windbreaker.
We walk past another wall to reach the main building. Things are busy, hectic. The shift is changing, some guards getting ready to go home. We wait like peddlers among the bustling uniforms. The leader appears with a section chief, who is holding onto paperwork and studies me up and down. He asks to the leader, “Did you feed him dinner?’
“We didn’t have time. Can we order him something from the staff cafeteria?”
“Sure, not a problem. Take him to the visitation room, he can eat there first and then you can lock him up.”
He assigns me a new guard.
“I bet you’re tired,” the leader says. “So go eat your dinner and rest. And I’m telling you, we have a surprise for you tomorrow.”
The windbreaker and the suit remain seated, but they raise a hand as I leave. I follow the new guard to the second floor and reach the special visitation room furnished with a single coffee table and a couple of couches. The young guard does not say anything to me. The only time he asks me something is after he calls the cafeteria to order my dinner.
“So what, a home visit?” he asks.
“No,” I say, “just a field trip.”
While I eat my dinner of soup with cabbage and rice, he stands in the corner holding a small tape recorder, and an earphone in one ear. It seems he is learning a foreign language, because he keeps quietly repeating a few words. When I am done with dinner, he makes me walk in front of him, directing me with curt orders, like I am a bull being driven into his pen. “Forward!” “Left!” “Right!” “Turn!” “Stop!” “Attention!”
I am taken to a special cell where prisoners spend the last few days of their sentences before being released. It is a large room with a heated floor, and the walls are not bare, but covered with wallpaper, although the pattern is tacky. The floor is already quite warm, so they must have been heating this room for a while. The young guard pushes me in and slams the door. It looks just like any other cell door. He bolts and locks it and shouts to the guard stationed midway along the corridor, “One additional prisoner for the night!”
It is still a prison cell, but I feel like I have traveled far. This cell is so unfamiliar that I actually miss my little cement cell. I lie down under a blanket and stare at the ceiling. The mildew is different, so are the images I see. There is a lot of writing on the walls: dates of release for the prisoners before me, quick notes on their thoughts and feelings. They are written all over the walls in tiny handwriting. Did they want to leave behind some evidence of human existence in here?
“My darling Sook, I’m coming to you tomorrow.”
“Thirteen years of bloody tears.”
“To my late father, your son is finally coming home.”
“Park Kap Joon, screw you! You’re my enemy until the end.”
“It is all gone, my youth.”
“My fellow brothers, do not ever commit a crime. This place is a trash can for human beings.”
“Money is the problem. Have no money, then guilty.”
Deep sea divers need to decompress as they emerge from the ocean so their bodies adjust to changing pressures. And in an old myth, there is a river of oblivion between this world and the next; one forgets everything by crossing. Most inmates spend two or three days in this cell. It is still in the prison, but there’s one more wall that confines the general population. Here, the inmate is halfway out, and within a few days he begins to forget all about what happened inside. Once released and sent home, he faces a new reality, yet soon finds that he is still naturally connected to his own past—and prison becomes just a gap in his memory. However, he is mistaken if he thinks that nothing has changed. The world is like flowing water and it has moved on, while he thinks that he has landed in the same spot, that he is soaking his feet in the same water as before.
I do not sleep well, maybe because I am not sleeping in my own cell. Just like at any other prison, the daily activities begin as soon as the sun is up. The guards have changed, but the same young man opens my cell door. I walk the same corridors as I did the day before and go to the visitation room. The leader and the windbreaker are not there; only the suit is waiting for me.
“Did you eat breakfast?”
“Yes, they already served it.”
“The chief will be here soon. Guess who’s coming to see you.”
I have been thinking that someone is coming for a special visit. The suit continues in a whisper, “If only you wrote down something, then you could have gone home, too. It’s not a home visit, so a special family visitation during the field trip is a privilege among privileges.”
“Family?”
As I say this, the leader, still wearing the same clothes as yesterday, walks in with another guard from this prison. All of a sudden, he uses a polite form of speech.
“Mr. Oh Hyun Woo, your sister is here to see you,” he announces in a dignified manner.
Behind them, the door is tentatively opened, and my sister’s face appears in the widening gap. Then I see the familiar hat my brother-in-law always wears because he is bald. Dumbfounded, I get up from the chair. “What are you two doing here?”
My sister grabs both my hands and shakes them, and her eyes behind her glasses are already turning red.
“Please, take a seat,” the local guard says. “Since this is a special visitation, you have plenty of time. So take your time, enjoy.”
The leader signals to the other guards from my prison and takes a place on a folding chair in a corner while the suit leaves the room. My sister is carrying two large shopping bags.
“Those bags were inspected at the front?” the leader asks.
“Yes, don’t worry. It’s all food.”
My sister looks as if she still cannot believe that she is facing me directly, without an iron grill or an acrylic panel to separate us. They came to see me last spring, so it has been more than six months since the last time we saw each other. A prison assistant brings us drinks on a tray and leaves after placing them on the table. I really don’t know what to say. Nor do my sister or her husband. The leader, sitting there with a visitation record book in his hand, waits with a pen held in midair.
My sister breaks the silence. “I heard that you looked around the city yesterday.”
I nod. My brother-in-law opens his mouth, too. “We got the word just yesterday morning, out of the blue, and your sister was not able to sleep at all last night.”
“I am so sorry. I’m always such a burden to you.”
“Just take care of yourself . . .” she says, “and join us soon.”
She opens the shopping bags.
“I made a few dishes for you. And you need to get ready for the winter. I deposited two sweaters and two pairs of thin thermal underwear, just like you wanted, and a few pairs of thick socks.”
The leader chimes in from behind, as this is one thing he is sure of.
“We have them. When we go back, we’ll register them and hand them over to you.”
My sister takes out dish after foil-wrapped dish, spreads them out on the table, and peels each of them open.
“Look at this. Rice rolls, just like Mom used to make.”
I know them well. All of us went to school picnics and festivals with those rice rolls. Whenever she made them, we surrounded her and fought each other for the chance to nibble on the ends, where the filling stuck out. We all knew her recipe by heart. First, you lightly toast and brush some sesame oil onto the dried seaweed sheet. Spread the rice on it, making sure it is not too sticky, and arrange the fillings. The filling is the key. Minced meat is stir-fried with sweet and salty seasonings, spinach is blanched and dressed, the old-fashioned pickled radish is sliced long and thin, eggs are whisked and cooked into thin sheets on a hot pan. If even one thing is missing, the rice roll won’t taste good and that is the end of it. My mother used a bamboo mat to roll all
of them into a round log shape and, with a knife rubbed with sesame oil, slices the roll into pieces of precisely the same thickness.
After the rice rolls comes beef cooked Seoul-style with the meat pounded before being seasoned and cooked on a charcoal grill. Then braised short ribs and various dishes of vegetables and mushrooms, sautéed and seasoned. There are tiny fried oysters and meatballs, pears and persimmons, which are in season, and a dessert drink with fermented rice in a thermos.
The taste of the rice roll reminds me of the house we lived in, the one in Youngdeungpo built by the Japanese with many built-in closets and an indoor bathroom. Only then it occurs to me ask them about my mother.
“How’s Mom?”
My sister is looking down at the table and does not raise her head. No one says a thing. The last time my mother saw me was more than eighteen months ago, and that was through an acrylic panel.
“Come on . . . eat,” my sister says, her eyes redder than before.
“You told me she was not healthy, but it’s not a big deal, is it?”
“So-so. Please, eat some more,” she says reluctantly.
I stuff my mouth with rice rolls. Fortunately, I had no appetite for my prison breakfast after the previous day’s splendid meal in the city. Now I was ravenous. I cannot remember what we talk about for those hours. I just remember eating until I can’t swallow one more bite. I am so full, I can’t breathe, and I think even my throat is filled up with food. When it is time for them to leave, the leader allows me to accompany them down the steps. My sister grabs my hands again to say farewell.
“Be strong. Outside, they’re making a huge fuss that we’re hosting the Summer Olympics and the Asian Games and all that. Who knows? Maybe things will change when these things happen.”
“Don’t worry, I’m actually doing well.”
It is my brother-in-law’s turn, and the usually reserved man of few words mumbles, fingering the brim of his hat without putting it on, “The thing is . . . I have something to tell you . . . Hyun Woo, the truth is, your mother passed away. It happened last September, and . . .”
The Old Garden Page 44