The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  Song Hyun-sook graduated from a girls’ high school in Damyang and, like many other women intent on helping their family, trained as a nurse before being sent off to Germany. Instead of directly supporting patients, though, she was assigned to various kinds of menial labor around the hospital. Her teachers had praised her drawing ability in elementary school, and she once won an art contest in middle school for a painting. But she could not afford the pencils and watercolors to keep it up in high school. In the German nurses’ dormitories, she kept a sort of diary by drawing pictures with a ballpoint pen to mitigate her homesickness and work stress. One day, she boarded a train to visit a nurse friend of hers in a nearby city, and Jochen happened to be sitting next to her. They became friends. When Jochen saw her drawings, he convinced her to apply to his art school in Hamburg. In any case, they seemed determined to help the Korean democracy movement any way they could after having visited Gwangju and listened to people’s stories. They were a great help to me later on.

  My first stop after leaving Berlin was Hamburg. They were renting an apartment there near Jochen’s school, but it was too small for all their books, to say nothing of workspace, so they’d also bought a farmhouse on an island near the Danish border. From Hamburg you had to drive or take a train north for about an hour and a half before boarding a ferry from Dagebüll to the island of Föhr, where the house was in the village of Oevenum. The Hiltmanns stayed in this hundred-year-old farmhouse every term break, fixing it up. There was a large library and studio with a living room in the middle, and a loft that served as a bedroom and storage. There were many little empty spaces throughout the house, as if designed for hide-and-seek. Each spot was equipped with comfy chairs and small tables perfect for reading or drinking tea. The house had a thatch roof nearly half a meter thick, made from a mixture of coal tar and the tall reeds that grew all over the island.

  The poet Sarah Kirsch visited Oevenum for lunch one day. She had left her husband in East Germany in 1977 to come to the West. Her poem about the husband left behind suggests she had abandoned him on the spur of the moment. Her poetry was melancholy but beautiful; critics later called her the Sappho of East Germany.

  She brought with her a younger man who was her lover, a composer, and together we discussed the problem of borders. Song Hyun-sook did not know much about literature at the time and her German was also limited, but this curb on our German–Korean communication stripped the conversation down to its essentials, much like children and their simple metaphors, prompting our imaginations to fill in the blanks and use symbols to express the unspoken. Kirsch said her poetic theme was winter, and though we couldn’t share much about what she meant, her words were enough to make the day-to-day of socialist society seem palpable. I wondered what kind of society would go so far as to prohibit lyric poetry. Perhaps if I had met her a little later, I would have been even more interested in her work. At the time I thought of Heinrich Heine’s poems; this colored my thoughts on Kirsch. I couldn’t help but ungenerously think, what freedom could she possibly lack here? I also did not have the wherewithal to consider how important lyric poetry might actually be to a fighter like her. Later in my Berlin asylum years I would slowly read through Brecht’s Buckow Elegies and Kirsch’s “At the White Pansies,” and find the means to dream for myself a different life in Korea.

  ~

  When I arrived in France from Germany, the first thing I did was call my poet friend Choi Min. He said he couldn’t make it to Gare du Nord, the train station in Paris I was arriving at, because he had class that day, but he had asked Hong Sehwa’s wife to pick me up. Hong Sehwa, an exiled dissident who would later become a writer and politician, was making a living as a taxi driver.

  I was having a simple breakfast of a baguette and coffee at Hong’s house when his young son and daughter, both in elementary school, began talking to me. The son approached with pencil and paper and asked if he could draw my portrait. After he was done with that, he drew every animal I asked him to with a good likeness of the real thing. His bright, innocent eyes made my heart break, the eyes of this boy who had to live in a foreign land because of his father’s exile. I thought of my own two sons waiting for their father in our Gwangju home.

  Hong Sehwa finally came in. He still gave off the air of a melancholy literary youth, as wordless and brief with his smiles as he used to be in the music cafés of Seoul. He had just lost his job at a restaurant owned by someone known for being pro-North, and the tongues of all the Koreans in France had been wagging about him. The exiled are never free.

  It was almost the end of summer when I returned to Paris from my travels through Italy and Spain. Friends told me Seong Nak-young had called from Göttingen, so I went from Paris back to Germany to his Korean acquaintance’s house in Düsseldorf where he suggested we meet. The couple living there had met as a coal miner and a nurse and had just managed to leave the world of manual labor to open a dry goods store. The miners were beginning to leave the pits of Bochum for Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Essen, and Cologne, where they could pursue new lives. Whenever Koreans of note visited, they would set up events for them and help them get around.

  Seong Nak-young told me at the Düsseldorf house that Yoon Han Bong had called several times from Los Angeles in the hope that I would visit the US someday to help him there. Seong Nak-young also had a fax page with him, an invitation from a Christian organization in America. I had only a single-use passport and no American visa. Still, I thought it was worth a try, so I applied for a visa at the American embassy in Berlin. The embassy man at the counter looked askance at my application. He said the rules stipulated that I had to go back to Korea to apply for this visa. I was about to give up, but Seong Nak-young launched into a whole spiel in English on my behalf as he handed my passport back to the staff member. When I asked him what that was about as we left, he said he had suggested they call the organization in America themselves.

  We went back to the Düsseldorf house and contacted the Korean Resource Center in Los Angeles. For the first time in five years, I was hearing Yoon Han Bong’s voice. He happened to be with a group of my friends living there. They passed the phone around. During Yoon Han Bong’s drastic exile to America, my friends had visited him at an event and told him they were happy to help any friend of mine. Such is Korean society: it’s always easy enough to find someone who knows someone, and it made me feel that Korea was indeed a small country.

  When I went to the American embassy the next day, a staff member handed me my passport with the visa stamped in it and said, “Your application was accepted. We made an exception for you.”

  At the airport in Los Angeles, my old friend the poet Lee Se-bang and the playwright Jeon Jin-ho were there to greet me. Lee Se-bang’s father was a leftist who had gone missing during the war. The poet had been raised with his younger sister by his single mother, an elementary school teacher. The family managed to immigrate to the States when the sister got a job as a nurse there. Lee Se-bang had ceased being a poet and become a photographer, while Jeon Jin-ho had fled the South Korean dictatorship of the 1970s by marrying Lee Se-bang’s sister and settling in the States.

  We arrived at a house in Koreatown that bore signs saying “Korean Resource Center” and “Young Koreans United,” where we were met by young members and some adults who had prepared a spread. The house had an outdoor deck and a wide backyard. Yoon Han Bong still looked like a day laborer in his jumpsuit and sneakers, with his hair cut short. We did not hug each other like Americans but clasped each other’s hands and shook them firmly. He was smiling but there were tears in his eyes. I had to turn away to wipe my own tears.

  Right after the Gwangju massacre, I had helped several younger friends who’d fled from there to get settled in Seoul, placing them with acquaintances in the capital who had the space to hide them. Yoon Han Bong did not believe that the military dictatorship would ever surrender power to a civilian government and was predicting another bloodbath. Yoon Han Bong, Choi Kwon-heng, and I were all
in Seoul that spring ourselves, and we helped Yoon scout out a place to hide just in case his fears were realized.

  I found another sanctuary at the artist’s studio of my ex-wife Hong Hee-yun’s friend. It had the advantage of being down an alley in a nonresidential area, away from prying eyes. Yoon Han Bong was wanted by the police. The assumption was that he would be tortured to death if caught. We hid him in the studio for almost a year, but he was recognized by a visiting literary couple who happened to be related to the landlord. Since he was unable to live there any longer, a plan was hatched to spirit him out of the country. A handful of people got involved, and finally contact was made with the crew of a ship that sailed international waters. On the night of April 29, 1981, Yoon boarded the Leopard, a ship registered in Panama. He hid in the bathroom of the ship’s infirmary, a space about four meters square where, during his thirty-five days at sea, he almost died from fear and starvation. A sent package needs receiving, and Gwangju’s church leaders had made contact with their counterparts in America. A Korean pastor was to meet him at the dock with an agreed code: the pastor would ask Yoon, “Do you like roses?” and Yoon would answer, “No, I like azaleas.” The Korean church informed the Americans that “the package has been sent,” and asked the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization for protection.

  The infirmary bathroom was next to the boiler chimney, which made the room as hot as a sauna, and the sailing route included an Australian detour. In the process of crossing the equator twice, Yoon became a ghost of his former self.

  When the pastor arrived to meet the stowaway, he hesitated because a group of Americans in trench coats were loitering about the dock. He learned later that they were from Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, and had come to escort Yoon to safety. The Korean pastor snuck onto the boat and found Yoon, who was near death, and asked him the code, but Yoon wasn’t conscious enough to answer. Thinking it was a trap set up by the Korean government, the pastor left the ship and went home. It was only when his Korean informant on the phone urged him to return, insisting that the man in the bathroom was “unmistakably our package,” that he went all the way back to the ship to rescue him—a mere hour before the ship was due to sail.

  Who could have guessed that, after all that trouble, we would meet each other again in this foreign land?

  I should say a little about Yoon’s nickname. He entered the Chonnam National University College of Agriculture after his military conscription duties, which made him four years older than the other first-years. He also looked older than his age, and was such a country mouse that the students called him Hapsu, a Jeolla dialect word for a kind of manure made from combining urine and excrement. This actually pleased him, as he declared it was the most precious kind of manure to a farmer and that he hardly deserved such a title, although he marked each of his textbooks with large Chinese characters for hapsu. By contrast, the poet Kim Nam-ju’s nickname was Mulbong, after the Haenam-style soft-boiled potato, for her accommodating nature and generosity toward others.

  Hapsu was truly a born revolutionary. I was in awe of him, but I was also at times exasperated. I often criticized him for his strictness about rules, intolerance of any deviation from the Party line, and combative way of making his point, saying his attitude was not conducive to a mainstream political movement. But despite his constant suspicion of my liberalist tendencies in managing the cultural movement, he always took my side in the end. I used to joke that he was the politician among us cultural activists. He created the Korean Resource Center in Los Angeles and met young Korean Americans through South Korean students studying abroad, giving talks at youth groups in major cities along the East and West Coasts. He was more effective in informal talks with a dozen people than in large lecture halls filled with an audience.

  The student groups met once a quarter to go on team-building trips and hold debates. Centers were established and run by both full-time workers and volunteers. They printed newsletters and gathered clippings on the South Korean democracy movement. The Korean Americans also dealt with community issues such as the lack of documents, unpaid wages, and insurance and tax consulting. I was especially impressed with how they worked in solidarity with different organizations—including religious, human rights, and feminist groups; they even participated in protests going on in different states. Young Koreans United brought together incoming South Korean students, who had a clear political consciousness of what was going on in Korea, with 1.5-and second-generation Korean Americans, who, as US citizens, were able to draw in non-Korean volunteers to help with the organization’s many projects. This was how one person managed to spark great change in the lives of people living in a faraway country.

  The organization was keenly aware that it still needed its elders, who were the foundation of Korean American immigrant society. These were first-generation immigrants who followed North–South relations closely and had left South Korea during the dictatorship-led development phase of the 1960s and ’70s, people who had by this time settled down in the States. They had all sorts of jobs—professors, doctors, lawyers, pastors, businessmen, shop owners, technicians, farmers—and what drew them together was Korean churches. Maybe the only thing that truly made them feel like they belonged somewhere was to meet other Koreans at church once a week.

  Yoon Han Bong exerted a persuasive influence on young people from the start of his period of asylum, but the older Korean Americans shunned him. He hadn’t been famous and was not even a Christian, much less a pastor. They called him a troublemaking demo-kkun (a term akin to today’s “paid protestor”), having bought the Korean government’s line that the “Gwangju Incident” was no more than a commie riot.

  My American visit was special to both of us in many ways. I had credibility as a democracy activist and could vouch for the fact that Yoon Han Bong had been sent to the US by our movement. My name was fairly well known thanks to the serialization of Jang Gil-san. As a record keeper of what had happened in Gwangju, I could discuss it with authority, so our appearing together at events was a good opportunity for him to become better known in the Korean American community.

  We gave a lecture in LA and toured the country, talking to other Korean American groups. The Korean Resource Center had connections across the US, and we easily attracted audiences in San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, San Diego, Dallas, Houston, and Denver. After resting in LA, we flew east to New York where more lectures and local talks followed. For the next three months we also toured Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Boston, Chicago, and Detroit. Inspired by our tour, Yoon Han Bong created the One Nation Korean American Alliance with a network of first-generation Korean Americans.

  I had known Yoon very well before, but I got to observe him up close during this time. He had certain rules when it came to his life. First of all, he did not consider himself an immigrant but an asylee in exile, and he made no effort to adapt to American life. He did not try to learn English and he did not take on American manners. Second, in deference to the poor and imprisoned in Korea, he did not sleep on a bed but on a futon spread on the floor. Third, he did not spend money on frivolous things. He relied on the funds of the main office and always submitted receipts for housing and meals. Furthermore, he did not want to impose too much on the Korean Americans who put us up while we were on tour, so he tried to use their bathrooms as little as possible. He showered or bathed only once a week.

  The Korean Resource Center in LA was a house with a wide backyard that had been donated by a Korean American. Yoon got rid of the grass and planted a vegetable patch instead. He told me that the lettuces, mugwort, perilla leaves, and chilis he grew there halved their spending on food. Many guests who stayed there complained good-naturedly about being woken up early by Yoon to help with watering and weeding the garden. Kim Yong-tae and Yoo Hong-jun, who stayed after I did, made the same joke as me before the table full of greens: that here we were in the Land of Plenty but without a shred of meat or any of the LA galbi (marinated ribs) that were so ubiquit
ous in the city. As Yoon crisscrossed the country meeting people and giving advice, he carried, just as he had in Korea, a small plastic suitcase, like a traveling salesman. It was a dark chestnut color, so that his acquaintances called it “the shit bag,” after what appeared to be Hapsu’s favorite shade. The case contained underwear, socks, writing implements, a Swiss army knife, nail clippers, and other items that might have come in handy should he have found himself marooned on a desert island. I referred to this as his “prisoner mentality.”

  At the American PEN Center in New York, we reported on the status of imprisoned writers such as Kim Nam-ju and Lee Gwang-ung and requested solidarity in the efforts to have them freed. We also visited the Human Rights Commission of the American State Department with an American pastor who was a lobbyist at the Korean Church Alliance in DC. We discussed the human rights situation post-Gwangju. We visited the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights center and the offices of legislators interested in Korea.

  Among the Korean Americans I met and came to know well were some who had written about their visits to North Korea. They had family there, had traveled to meet them several times, and had recorded their experiences in a book published in the States that was circulating in South Korea. I wasn’t the only one who was moved by this book.

  We had finished our tour and were resting when I suggested that a cultural activist group should be established in the US. The first thing I did when I’d gone down to Jeolla Province had been to create such a group to help educate and mobilize people. Yoon Han Bong knew what I was talking about from his years in Gwangju. He approached people at Young Koreans United who might be interested and tried to attract students who could be active in the cultural sphere, even if they weren’t members. I decided to write a courtyard play first; I finished it just as we were gathering members and beginning rehearsals. I felt it was necessary to share a “people’s history” of the Korean peninsula with audiences, especially younger Korean Americans. The first scene was of Jeon Bong-jun, leader of the 1894 Donghak Peasant Revolution, being tried and executed. The play ended with the citizen uprising and the final night in the provincial administrative building in Gwangju. It was told mostly in pungmul-style percussion and dance, with spoken lines compressed as much as possible. The flow followed the structure of a shaman gut ritual. We found someone who could choreograph and another who could play samulnori drums.