The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  —Oh, not that that will happen, of course. That was all in the authoritarian past, and we didn’t even press charges on everything we know about you. The government will help you for the next few years to get resettled; when you’re ready to start working again, you must resume writing. I hope we can then meet again as writer and reader.

  This conversation marked the end of the investigation, and as I had no idea their words were only a meaningless formality, I felt a gratitude so powerful that it melted my resentment. I even shook hands with them and posed for souvenir pictures. The head investigator and division manager put me in a car and drove me to the Prosecutor’s Office in Seocho-dong. The forests of Nam Mountain passed by outside the window. The trees had been budding when I arrived and were now green with leaves. Oddly enough, after that day, whenever I was arrested and being transported as a prisoner, I stopped noticing people’s individual faces or attire. They were just meaningless blurs to me. Instead, the only thing that filled my eyes was natural scenery—clouds, mountains, forests, trees. Each time I pictured the outside world from inside my cell, I would recall the blur of passing streets and think about how the only thing missing from them was me. And since I didn’t exist in the real world out there, I was as good as dead.

  The prosecutor in charge of my case was an ambitious young man in his thirties. He reminded me of a first-year officer who had been assigned to my regiment in the last year of my military conscription. Painfully aware of his own lack of experience, he was tense and overbearing during the month he spent raking me over the coals with the written statement I’d made for the ANSP. But I’d already testified to the facts and had no wish to argue with him. I was so obliging from the beginning that it must have scared him, as if I would soon change my mind, which made him push on with the interrogation day and night.

  When I was brought to the Prosecutor’s Office from prison, they put me into a waiting room that was no better than a chicken cage. Tucked into a dark corner was a small bucket that I was to use for a toilet. It had gone unemptied for days, filling the cramped space with the stench of human waste. The room was so narrow that I couldn’t even sit down and had to stand for hours with my face poking through the bars in the little window in the door. The prosecutor often stuffed me into that coffin of a space and left me there for hours, just to rile me up. But what really tested my patience was how this overgrown brat would lecture me in informal Korean as if he knew something of the world. I had no choice but to listen in silence; I was amazed by the extent of my own endurance. His sheer ignorance made it clear that he hadn’t read a single book beyond the legal textbooks needed to pass the bar.

  His family, like my own, had apparently fled North Korea and settled in the South during the war.

  —All that divided-family crap is such sentimental bullshit. Those so-called relatives and blood relations are all commies by now, what kind of conversation would you have with them? My father refuses to go back. He doesn’t want to lay eyes on any of them ever again.

  My family used to spend Lunar New Year making dumplings together and reminiscing about our loved ones left behind in North Korea. But this man’s father would rather die than go back home.

  —You’re a fool, you’re just being used by the commies. Everything you’ve done is bullshit. Reunification? You think America wants that for us? Singing that nursery rhyme about “Our Wish Is Reunification” is for babies. Typical sentimental crap.

  He disguised his self-pity with arrogance and cynicism. If, instead of being from a refugee family, he’d had the least bit of family backing in the South, he wouldn’t have been assigned to the notoriously thankless and tedious national security division, despite having passed the difficult bar. He must have known that the thawing of North–South relations meant his days were numbered, because he kept boasting about how he might move out of Seoul, get himself a place in a smaller city or country town and live like a king. Or, failing that, ditch his job at the Prosecutor’s Office and set up a private law practice where he’d rake in the cash, and other nonsense that I had zero interest in hearing about. Twenty years later, I came across an article about him online and found out what had become of him. Nothing about it surprised me. He was in his sixties, obese, aging badly, and still ignorant of how he’d been a puppet of the system, still using red scare tactics and calling progressives, activists, and opposition politicians “commies.”

  Once my time with the prosecutor was over, I was transferred to Seoul Detention Center in Uiwang. I was given a blue uniform and black rubber shoes, and my clothes and personal possessions were put in storage. I had become prisoner #83; my name, Hwang Sok-yong, disappeared. Visitors often teased me about my number, saying that I’d earned the 83 for having gone back across the 38th parallel that divided North and South.

  The prison covered a wide, flat plot of land and was surrounded by two tall, white perimeter walls. The building itself was structured like an airport terminal, with a long central corridor branching out into three-story prison hives. It was the end of the day when I arrived, the work halls and corridors were empty, and all I could hear was the murmuring of the prisoners. Most of them were roomed in groups of about ten, but as a political offender, I was given my own cell. At the head of each corridor in each hive was a guardroom occupied by two guards, followed by four single cells, with multiple-inmate cells further down the hallway. My space measured about three meters square and had a window with a covered toilet beneath. Next to the door was a little slot with a wooden panel that opened. We called it the “food hole,” but it was used for delivering goods sent to us from outside, as well as our prison-issued meals, usually by other prisoners who’d been assigned to cleaning or miscellaneous chores.

  They shaved off the hair of all except political prisoners. On top of which we enjoyed the further distinction of a red badge sewn above the number on our uniforms. Whenever I passed an ordinary prisoner in the corridor, they would see my red badge and mumble, “Commie bastard.” A few months after I arrived, they stopped shaving prisoners’ heads and color-coding our badges by crimes committed.

  My first night in prison, I couldn’t sleep. I turned toward the wall and thought about everything I’d been through. It was a lot, but at least I was alive. This suffering couldn’t possibly last forever. I was good with people and an optimist. Prison would surely be an important life experience; I was going to make the best of it. I whispered to myself: Let’s live through this!

  I soon grew used to the fluorescent lights that never went out, but in the beginning, I had to put a towel over my face to fall asleep.

  ~

  I see a field of green barley spread before me. A path winds through it trimmed with dandelions and milk vetch that bob in the breeze, and the tall wildflowers, radish, and shepherd’s purse sway with the wind that ripples through the barley. Father, who has walked on ahead, is wearing a fedora and carrying a rucksack while my two older sisters are in summer dresses cut from identical fabric. Their feet are clad in white socks and they, too, carry small rucksacks. Father does not look back as he strides. My sisters skip and run after him, stopping to pick the occasional flower and add it to their bouquets. Mother is carrying me on her back as we follow. I’m itching to walk on my own and want to be near my sisters, so I lean sideways and wave my arms. For some reason, they pretend not to notice. I’m so frustrated that I call out.

  Sisters, wait for me!

  They don’t look back. My mother shushes me and shakes her shoulders.

  I told you to ignore them …

  None of it makes sense, and I’m growing more frustrated by the moment. My father and my sisters walk farther and farther ahead of us.

  Mother told me later that this was a memory of our crossing the 38th parallel. My sisters explained it to me too. They said our parents had told them to pretend we were going on a picnic, and that I wouldn’t remember because I was too little. But I do remember, or at least, I remember this much.

  Like so many others
at the time, my parents believed that they would someday return to the land of their birth. But neither was ever to step foot on home soil again.

  1

  Leaving

  1985–86

  Some forty-odd years after pretending to leave on a picnic, I returned home for the first time, in 1989. But before going into my North Korean visit, I should begin with my very first journey overseas, which took place a few years earlier in 1985. That trip was what inspired me to go to the North.

  We used to be able to sail to Manchuria or take a train to Siberia and even to Western Europe. That was during the Japanese occupation. But ever since the division of the Korean peninsula, those routes have been blocked. South Korea might as well be an island. We think of North Koreans as isolated, but even South Koreans weren’t allowed to travel as tourists until 1989, and it was difficult for us to get a permit to go abroad before then. There existed, however, a new, single-use “cultural passport” enabling artists and employees of large conglomerates to attend international events. The trickiest part of obtaining such a passport was the background checks—you were rejected if there was even a single thing off about your application. Once you did pass the background checks, you still had to attend national security training with intelligence officials and attach the certificate to your application. The US was especially strict about granting visas. It took months to obtain one after submitting tax receipts, financial guarantees, invitations, and going through a grueling interview process at the American embassy. Still, getting a passport was in itself a great privilege.

  I had the luck of applying when the process had been somewhat relaxed, just as Korea was beginning to open up. The background checks were still in place, and while a notoriously anti-government person like myself couldn’t normally dream of obtaining a visa, it so happened that I had published a controversial book of testimonials of the Gwangju Democracy Movement, titled The Kwangju Uprising1—and, counterintuitively, this helped me obtain a passport to leave Korea for the first time.

  Back in 1979, then president Park Chung-hee had attempted to stay in office indefinitely only to be assassinated by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency director, Kim Jae-gyu, after which military officials seized power in a coup d’état and declared martial law. This triggered a groundswell of calls for democratization. In May of 1980, the military government massacred thousands of Gwangju citizens who were protesting against martial rule. Barricading themselves in the city’s provincial administration building, the residents of Gwangju had battled against the soldiers to protect their city.

  Many people tried to tell the country and the world of the truth behind the slaughter at Gwangju. The whole of the Korean media was censored at the time under the government’s reporting guidelines. Only a few were able to learn what had happened, thanks to certain religious groups that had obtained news reports by foreign correspondents.

  Having moved to Gwangju myself, I launched a cultural activist movement in the 1970s that included students, teachers, writers, and artists, and eventually expanded to bring in workers and farmers. Our first mission was to use as many tools of dissemination as possible to publicize the resistance movement in Gwangju. We could not afford modern staging and equipment, so we resorted to a traditional form of drama known as madanggeuk or “courtyard play,” which we performed outdoors in village plazas and empty lots, and created music to go along with it that we recorded on cassette tapes. Painters made posters, and young people with new skills used photography, 8 mm film, and video to create rough but affecting images. These activists went on to become famous directors, playwrights, writers, composers, singers, actors, painters, and filmmakers.

  We decided something big had to be done to commemorate the upcoming fifth anniversary of the Gwangju Democracy Movement. Three teams in Gwangju collected news reports, photos, and videos created by Korean reporters, but more importantly, recorded the testimonials of participants and witnesses.

  Hong Hee-yun, my wife at the time and the mother of my two children, was in charge of the Songbaekhoe Gwangju women’s group made up of activists, wives of political prisoners, teachers, and citizen group workers. They raised funds and provided support to the material collection team. My task was to summarize and streamline the collected records into a concise narrative. The young people gathering the testimonials discreetly forwarded the material to me via the Modern Cultural Research Center, to prevent the authorities from manufacturing a fake spy incident out of our efforts. The center had been established in 1979 by me and Yoon Han Bong, who went into exile in America two years later, and was secretly still in operation after the Gwangju Uprising.

  I came up to Seoul with the materials, rented a room near the publisher’s office, and worked on editing the book for a month. The initial pamphlets were distributed in universities, and a select few college activists staged a protest inside the American Center. It was an attempt to highlight the fact that our military rulers could not have been able to seize power without the tacit approval of the US, which officially held operational command over the South Korean military. The book was published on schedule in May by a brave printer, and 20,000 copies were distributed to bookstores. The publisher, Na Byung-sik of Pulbit Publishing, had been arrested twice before, during the National Democratic Youth and Student Alliance incident. This time he went into hiding for ten days before turning himself in. I was on the run for about a month, until his interrogation ended and the facts of the case were established.

  The world seemed to do a somersault once the book was released. A police raid turned my house in Gwangju inside out, even digging up the flower garden. My clever wife had already stashed the Gwangju materials under the slate roof of an old shed in the corner of our yard. The police went through the shed, but they didn’t think to rip off the ceiling panels.

  I went underground, moving from house to house of my younger writer friends on the outskirts of Seoul. The books were seized after about half of the first printing had been sold, but photocopiers were becoming mainstream and pirated copies entered the market. I called to turn myself in after a month and was taken to the police instead of central intelligence. The station was close enough to the Agency for National Security Planning (ANSP) Nam Mountain headquarters for intelligence investigators to come down and question me. They were trying to avoid a direct ANSP investigation, because the military dictatorship felt threatened by the rumors surrounding Gwangju. Lockup was full of students protesting against the government; they no doubt thought I would be a bad influence if I were in there with them, not to mention the number of famous and powerful people who came to the station demanding to see me. They quickly ended their interrogation and squirreled me away in a remote police station before putting me in the border customs detention center near the airport. The day I got there, a British woman in the next cell said hello. She had come in from Hong Kong. Someone had paid her to pass on something, a packet she had put into her bag without much thought, that turned out to be drugs. She wept with regret. Another cell held two people from the Middle East.

  I was brought out of my cell for questioning a week later. The ANSP agent, a man of few words, said the government was treating my case as rumormongering, and even the highest sentence for this kind of misdemeanor was only twenty days in custody. My trial was set for two days later. He handed me two pieces of paper, which turned out to be invitations in German and English. Apparently, I’d received an invitation from West Germany, and the ANSP was getting heat for not letting me leave the country. But if I agreed to keep my mouth shut and leave Korea for a bit, the government would be willing to let me go. He visited me one more time. I wrote up my passport application in my cell, stamped my thumbprint, and even had my passport photo taken there. The day I was released, I received my passport and a plane ticket sent from Germany.

  My wife Hong had come up from Gwangju to meet me. We spent a night in Seoul and bought clothes and a suitcase for my trip. She had to go back the very next day to relieve our n
eighbor, who was babysitting for us. We were exhausted. She and I had been housewife and novelist, but we’d also been working as political activists for years. We practically took turns being interrogated and investigated, miraculously avoiding arrest every time.

  We had moved to Gwangju in 1976 at the beginning of our national movement for democracy. I was away from home several times a year, from a week up to a month. Hong kept herself busy by putting together a women’s group composed of the wives of our imprisoned younger friends. They did things like knit socks and gloves for the prisoners and take up collections for their prison allowances.

  When I was home, I was so taken up with the novel I was serializing that we never once went out for dinner. My habit of working at night and sleeping during the day also made it difficult for us to have more than one meal at a time together. It was my fault. Even when we did sit down face-to-face, an uncomfortable silence settled between us as we ate. It wasn’t long before we both stopped bothering to do anything about it. That day, after my release, I should have escorted her to the bus terminal in Gangnam, but I took her to a restaurant instead and reluctantly told her over dinner, “I’m sorry, I’ll try to write often.”

  Aside from my general hopelessness with the paperwork involved, we had no telephone at home. Getting a landline installed in any house outside of Seoul was complicated. My colleagues used to joke, “What’s the point of having a phone? The police will just tap it anyway.”

  Hong must have felt some premonition at that moment, because her eyes suddenly grew red and she quickly turned away to wipe her tears.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, surprised. “Are you worried for me?”

  Her usual calm and cool demeanor returned. “I think you’ll be away for longer than you think. But have a good trip. And don’t drink too much.”

  She left in a taxi while I stood there on the pavement staring after her. I had no idea that that was the beginning of the end for us. Even now, when I think back on that moment, my heart is seized with sorrow and I feel swept away by a wave of regret.