The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  The Prisoner

  The Prisoner

  by Hwang Sok-yong

  Translated by Anton Hur and Sora Kim-Russell

  This book is published with the support of the Literature

  Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea).

  First published in English by Verso 2021

  Translation © Anton Hur, Sora Kim-Russell 2021

  Originally published in Seoul, Korea, in two volumes:

  (The Prisoner 1: Across the Border) and

  (The Prisoner 2: Into the Fire)

  © Munhak 2017

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Verso

  UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

  US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

  versobooks.com

  Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

  ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-083-9

  ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-085-3 (UK EBK)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-086-0 (US EBK)

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A catalog record for this book is available

  from the Library of Congress

  Typeset in Sabon by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  “You’re putting your fate in someone else’s hands,” said my mother, to discourage her son from becoming a writer. Your son as a young man wore you down, and now as an old man dedicates this book to you.

  Contents

  Editor’s Note

  Prologue

  1. Leaving: 1985–86

  2. Prison I

  3. Visit to the North: 1986–89

  4. Prison II

  5. Exile: 1989–93

  6. Prison III

  7. Childhood: 1947–56

  8. Prison IV

  9. Lost: 1956–66

  10. Prison V

  11. Deployment: 1966–69

  12. Dictatorship: 1969–76

  13. Gwangju: 1976–85

  14. Prison VI

  Epilogue

  About the Translators

  Editor’s Note

  This book is published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea), which the publisher gratefully acknowledges.

  The short excerpt from Hwang Sok-yong’s novel The Shadow of Arms is from the translation by Chun Kyung-ja, published by Seven Stories Press in 2014, and appears here with permission.

  Readers should note that in order to bring the original two-volume Korean text into one English volume, this translation is a slightly shortened version of the text, abridged in collaboration between the author, translators, and editor. All Korean and Japanese names are set in the Asian style, that is, family name first and given name second.

  Prologue

  I was eating my last lunch in the underground room. Not the usual cafeteria food on a tray but seolleongtang beef soup from a nearby restaurant. The head of the investigation, as he waited for me to finish, had divided thick reams of statements into manila envelopes to give to the Prosecutor’s Office. He began to speak.

  —We’ll all be going home at five on the dot once you’re gone. You’ve been through a lot here, haven’t you?

  The investigator standing by him spoke up.

  —What do you think your sentence will be, sir?

  I answered as if I were talking about someone else.

  —I don’t know. Three years?

  The head of investigation looked surprised.

  —Really? So little?

  —They give smaller sentences to the instigators than to the followers.

  I must have been thinking about Moon Ik-hwan, the pastor who was pardoned after three years in jail, when I made that joke.

  —But you’ve gone to North Korea and met Kim Il-sung several times, so they’ve got to put you away for at least seven or eight.

  I replied again as if it were some other man’s business.

  —Oh my, what a bother that’s going to be.

  —Or maybe not. Isn’t this meat and potatoes for you writers, your “material,” if you will?

  The other investigator agreed.

  —We know you’re going to write about us when you leave …

  —You gentlemen sure know how to make me feel important.

  I kept on joking, pretending to be unfazed. It was a skill I’d mastered during their interrogations, an acquired habit of keeping my cool no matter what, so as to not lose in the battle of nerves. In the last few days, I was beginning to feel more like their coworker than a prisoner. These twenty days of the investigation by the Agency for National Security Planning (ANSP, formerly the Korean Central Intelligence Agency) were coming to an end, but I had only cleared the first of the gates of hell. Now I would be up against the Prosecutor’s Office.

  I was never tortured. I was arrested several times during the Yushin dictatorship of the 1970s and once jailed for disobeying martial law declared after the assassination of President Park Chung-hee, but I never got so much as a slap across the face. Was I lucky, or were my stunts too tame to make it worthwhile? My fellow writer friends used to joke that one of these days my luck would run out and I would get my comeuppance. Thinking back, luck had something to do with it, but it probably helped that I was also a famous young novelist with a large, mainstream following, one who had serialized a saga titled Jang Gil-san every day for the past ten years in the pages of a daily.

  When I was first arrested at the airport and dragged, blindfolded, to this underground room, the anti-communism investigators tried to intimidate me by shoving me into a corner and having a phalanx of investigators bark questions at me. A skinny man with piercing eyes cursed at me as he swung his fists. I had readied myself for this. I ducked the blows, pushed him away, and tore off my shirt.

  —What, the law isn’t enough for you? Fine, torture me. Hit me!

  The investigators tried to calm the other man down and pulled him away, calling him “Siljangnim,” which allowed me to guess that he was the section chief. I still remember what he said to me before he left.

  —You bastard, you think the world has changed? You think all you got to do is bullshit a little and we’ll let you go? We’re gonna flay the skin off your ass!

  The painter Hong Seong-dam was once arrested and severely tortured for sending slides of his murals to the World Festival of Youth and Students in North Korea. He later drew a portrait of his torturer and published it in a newspaper; it turned out to be the same face as my own would-be torturer.

  But whenever an investigator tried to use their usual violent tactics against me, another would stop him.

  —Hurting him is more trouble than it’s worth.

  On my first day at the ANSP headquarters, I had been asked to take off my clothes. I looked askance at the investigator before removing my shirt.

  —Do I have to take it off for you? Strip!

  The irritation in the investigator’s voice made me tense at the thought that the torture was about to begin. I reluctantly took off my pants. Another investigator standing by tossed a military uniform on a chair and left with my clothes. I gritted my teeth and proudly stood up straight while the remaining investigator looked on indifferently.

  —You’ll get your clothes back when you leave. Put those on for now.

  I put on the worn, loose army uniform. In the middle of my first interrogation, I was dragged into the corridor and made to stand with a sign that had my citizen’s registration number on it as they took my picture. A doctor came down to the int
errogation room and performed a quick checkup. I had to stamp my thumbprint on numerous documents saying that I agreed to everything I was subjected to and that I would take sole responsibility for whatever happened. I had expected verbal abuse and humiliation to be part of the investigation process, but what was unbearable was the lack of sleep. Scores of investigators took turns questioning me in groups of three or four, and for the first few days I was confused by the hourly flow of new faces. Whenever there was a change in investigators, the questions started over from the beginning. The walls and ceiling of the interrogation room were of perforated soundproofed particleboards, and there was a desk, four chairs, a military-issue cot in the corner, and a bathroom. As time went on, I learned that the interrogations were also being watched from the outside. I realized this when I happened to say something inconsistent in my statement, and a higher-up came running into the room to hound me about it. There were some fluorescent lights on the ceiling and a vent, as this was underground, but the lack of windows made it impossible to tell whether it was night or day. There was, of course, nothing like a clock. All I could do was measure the hour by the fatigue on the investigators’ faces and guess at how many days had passed. Sometimes, when I went into the bathroom and dozed off on the toilet, an investigator came in and dragged me back to my chair. More than once, someone clasped me by the shoulders and gently rocked me, saying, “What a pity if something terrible were to happen to this important person,” before waving his fist in the air as if nothing would make him feel better than to let it fly into my face.

  One time, probably late at night when everyone would have been itching to leave work, a man sauntered into the interrogation room. He looked older than the other investigators and stank of alcohol.

  —Why are we wasting time questioning this worthless bastard? In my day, we’d just order the younger guys to deal with him. They’d take him out with one blow to the head.

  The investigator interrogating me got annoyed.

  —Why don’t you go sleep it off upstairs? You don’t need to be down here.

  —We should toss all these bastards into the East Sea and let the seaweed do the rest.

  He wandered out of the interrogation room. The young investigator muttered under his breath.

  —Those old farts, always a pain in the ass. He’s retiring in a few months.

  The older man’s words chilled me more than any act of physical violence, for I had just realized what he meant. I thought of the motorboats in the Korea Strait that were used to transport pro-democracy politician Kim Dae-jung after he was kidnapped in his Tokyo hotel room and forcibly returned to South Korea during Park Chung-hee’s dictatorship. How many people had been drowned on that Cold War sea border?

  Around the time I decided to visit North Korea, I’d set myself a steadfast rule: I was going to make my thoughts and actions as transparent as possible. I believed that the only way for my deeds to be interpreted objectively and escape distortion was for my every word and gesture to be made completely public. Since I knew I would be arrested as soon as I returned to South Korea, I tried to document every event and meeting I attended, in either interviews or my own writings beforehand. Thanks to this, they already had a wealth of information on me, and the first thing they did was to verify all of it. Or, to be more precise, they began by making me repeatedly write and rewrite my “statement,” an unending repetition of testimony designed to lead me into making mistakes or revealing new facts or contradicting myself. But I was confident that I had all my facts straight from beginning to end. No matter how many times I rewrote my statement, my memory never wavered.

  The investigators would break down my statement into smaller units of time by chronology and grill me on them. Each broken-down statement became another plethora of episodes that were recreated in detail through repeated questioning. When it seemed like nothing more could be gleaned from my memory or statement, that was when the real wringing out began. Interrogators entered in shifts and asked over and over again about the section of the statement they had been assigned. This part was the toughest. I’d reassured myself that I had nothing to hide since I’d already made everything public, but I wasn’t prepared for the distortion and the sheer manufacturing of facts. And yet, how could I have prepared for that? They were the ones writing the script designed to drive us toward one foregone conclusion, while I was the clown at the center of their comedy, helpless to stop any of it from happening no matter how clever I thought I was.

  My mistake was to assume that people would understand the truth from facts alone. But it turns out that facts are treacherous things that can be twisted and used to distort the truth. I see now how naïve I was, how clueless about what was coming my way. The investigations were like a foundry, and the National Security Act was the mold. While I was out bouncing from place to place and dodging them, they had been sharpening their knives for four years, discussing how they would cook me up upon my return, and at that point, “flaying the skin off my ass” wouldn’t have been enough for them. As it was, I fooled myself into thinking that I emerged from the investigation with my writerly dignity intact; later, I came to realize that all I’d really succeeded in doing was learning to roll over and play dead on command, like a well-trained dog.

  To get this out of the way, I do not support the ideology of the North Korean communist regime, and all I wish for is the peaceful reunification of the divided North and South. The same was true for the journalist Chung Kyung-mo and the pastor Moon Ik-hwan, who accompanied me, not to mention the activists that supported our visit to North Korea. More specifically, we believed that when South Korea became a truly democratic society, we could change North Korea for the better. I still believe this, although I have since become more of a pacifist than a reunificationist, as the concept of reunification has become vague and misused for political marketing over the years.

  Created from the division of North and South, the National Security Act is a Procrustean bed, a torture rack on which those who don’t conform are stretched or chopped down and made to fit. This law, modeled after the internal security laws during the Japanese occupation, was unilaterally legislated by the ruling party after the formation of separate North and South governments in 1948. It is built on the premise that North Korea is not a sovereign nation but an “anti-governmental” or terrorist organization, a premise long discarded in practice since North and South Korea simultaneously joined the UN in 1991. The act itself, however, was never struck down and remains the law of the land to this day. Even the most vaguely positive-sounding mention of the North Korean regime can be construed as a crime of “praising” terrorists; the only way to stay legally safe is to criticize North Korea unconditionally. To meet with a North Korean is to “consort” with the enemy, and if the meeting place happens to be overseas or in North Korea, it is seen as an additional attempt to “infiltrate and escape.” Even if that North Korean is a parent or a sibling, it is absolutely illegal to meet with them. Receiving any kind of money or goods from a North Korean constitutes “bribery,” and telling them any news about South Korea is a “breach of confidentiality.” The Supreme Court even ruled that sharing news that has already been broadcast on the airwaves or in the press with North Koreans is considered a breach, as “any information deemed to be advantageous to North Korea falls into the category of confidentiality.” Moreover, any gathering of North and South Koreans is deemed a terrorist organization and a conspiracy to foment unrest, a conclusion that is easy enough to reach when it comes on top of the other, previously mentioned crimes.

  When I was blindfolded and walked down the steps to this room where I opened my eyes to the dark, I was sure that I would be laid on the bed of the National Security Act and my limbs would be hacked off. Every single statute of the act would be brought down upon my head.

  After lunch, the head investigator had me change into civilian clothes and took me to the reception area on the first floor. It was an ordinary room with a sofa and a desk, but the sunl
ight shining in from the south-facing window was too bright for my eyes after twenty days of darkness. I had to wait a moment for different colors and shapes to emerge from the blinding white.

  The division manager told me to sit. He was usually sharply dressed, but today he’d gone with the casual look of T-shirt and windbreaker. He offered me a warm cup of coffee and a cigarette. The coffee wet my tongue and spilled down into my soul, followed immediately by a lungful of nicotine, which together woke a repressed craving for freedom that spread to the very ends of my body. It was the first coffee and cigarette I’d tasted since leaving New York some twenty-odd days ago. Later, in prison, I would learn what “going to Hong Kong” meant, but for now the few puffs of tobacco left me feeling light-headed and weak, and I felt I would do anything in that moment if asked to. The manager spoke.

  —You see how we’re all human beings here. I feel that we’ve treated our writer guest with the utmost respect. You did not experience any torture or violence during the investigation, am I correct?

  I was so relaxed that I couldn’t help feeling moved by the words “we’re all human beings.” I quickly shook my head, as if it were unimaginable that I could have been treated as less than human in a place where all were human beings.

  —Never, never.

  I was thinking that being deprived of sleep while being questioned was barely comparable to the other kinds of torture that went on. The manager nodded and went on with the rest of it as if following a script.

  —I’m afraid there’s more hardship still ahead of you, but I’m sure you’re ready for it. After all, you brought it on yourself. In truth, we both love our country, only in different ways, do we not? We may contradict each other during the trial process, but if you deny any of the facts that you confirmed and signed off on …

  He trailed off and glanced at the head of investigation, who completed the sentence for him.

  —Then we’d have to meet up again.