The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  “You’ve been out of contact since yesterday.”

  He told me the date. I realized I had slept through the previous night and most of the next day. How many hours was that? I tried counting with my fingers and gave up.

  “I ate three wild ginseng roots yesterday,” I said, and told him the whole story of Kim Il-sung’s goodbye gift.

  He slapped the desk and wailed, “How could you eat it all by yourself? You have no loyalty, Mr. Hwang. You should’ve shared it with me! Because that can only be real wild ginseng!”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “It’s wild ginseng tithed to the chairman. If anyone dared offer up a fake, that person would be sent straight to the mines in Aoji. So of course it’s real. Since you’ve eaten three of them at once, about eighty percent of it is going to pass right through you. Well, I guess you’ll still have twenty percent left.”

  I joked that I had just been to the toilet and that my stool had come out a lustrous golden color.

  This three-ginseng incident became a long-running joke that even the ANSP inter rogators and prison wardens would tease me about for years. The guards would dismiss any complaints I made about the cold. “Why are you shivering?” they’d say. “You’re the lucky man who ate three wild ginseng roots!” Well, they had a point: throughout my four years of exile and five years in prison, I never did catch a cold.

  I had made public my intention to write, but I found it hard to concentrate. I had just finished the first chapter of my travelogue when the novelist Jeon Jin-woo contacted me through my wife, Myoung-su. He had been fired from his journalist job in the 1970s and somehow managed to return to the Dong-a Ilbo. He interviewed me about my impressions of North Korea, stayed in my apartment for a few days, and returned to Seoul with the first part of my manuscript. Shindonga had agreed to serialize the work.

  Itō Narihiko and I met with the Japanese human rights lawyer Niimi Takashi about my visa, which was set to expire on May 11. We visited the Ministry of Justice and requested an extension, but the Japanese authorities officially turned me down the next day. Niimi submitted another request for a special stay, mainly because processing the paperwork took forever and it would buy me a month or two more. Professor Itō was in contact with the German embassy, just in case. He had studied in Germany when he was younger and received a degree for his work on Rosa Luxemburg. I heard later from him that West Germany had immediately accepted my request and expressed their willingness to protect me as a member of another divided nation. Meanwhile, Japan’s Ministry of Justice sped up their paperwork so efficiently that it took them only a week to officially deny me my stay.

  There was a press conference scheduled for the afternoon I was to fly out of Japan, but I decided to give my petition to Professor Takasaki Sōji, of the Japan–Korea Solidarity Committee, and leave quietly. We threw a small goodbye party in a café in downtown Tokyo, where Wada Haruki and some of the committee people came to see me off. Professor Itō was to escort me all the way to Berlin. At the airport gate, someone came up to the professor and me, begged our pardon, and took a picture. Professor Itō let him, saying that he was probably just a Japanese agent who needed photographic proof that I was leaving Japan. It was May 19, 1989, when I got on that Lufthansa flight and left Japan for Berlin.

  ~

  We were transferring at Frankfurt when someone again jumped in front of us and took our photograph in the transfer corridor in the airport. He was Asian, and after two snaps, he stepped aside for another Asian man who asked me, “Are you Hwang Sok-yong? Where is your next destination?”

  “And who are you?”

  He smiled as he walked next to me and said, “You know very well who I am.”

  “I’m going to Berlin next. All right?”

  “Be well.” He fell behind.

  Professor Itō, who had been walking ahead, looking nervous, asked me if he were a reporter. I said no.

  “Then he must be one of your biggest fans,” he joked. We both laughed, and the tension lifted.

  There were more suspicious people waiting for me at Berlin’s Tegel Airport. It was a small place and the parking lot was close to the exits, making it easy to pick them out. They didn’t approach and would slink away after taking a photograph. We decided on a downtown hotel. Professor Itō telephoned Yun I-sang. Itō and Yun were old acquaintances. They had both been in a worldwide campaign against Kim Dae-jung’s death sentence, with Yun I-sang being the main contact in Germany. Itō and Japanese civic organizations provided much help to Yun when he was sentenced to life in prison for the East Berlin Spy Incident. Yun led a petition effort in the European Parliament for Kim Dae-jung, as well as directly appealing to West Germany’s minister of foreign affairs, Willy Brandt.

  The Yun couple welcomed me gladly but cautioned against staying in Berlin. They thought it would be better if I went to the countryside until Moon Ik-hwan’s trial had advanced further and the waves we’d made with our North Korea visit had calmed down. I mentioned Song Hyun-sook and Jochen Hiltmann to Itō the next day—the couple I’d met on my first Berlin trip—and he offered to appeal to them personally on my behalf. I was feeling bad about the trouble I was causing him and assured him he didn’t have to, he should feel free to return to Japan since I was a grown man who really ought to take care of himself. But Itō insisted that he could not go back before I was properly settled somewhere.

  A mere thirty minutes after I had called a Korean German mutual acquaintance, who had been a nurse alongside Song, and explained the situation to her, Song Hyun-sook herself called me back. She said she was in their Oevenum house over the weekend, but they would be back in their apartment in Hamburg on Monday. Itō and I went to Hamburg and spent the weekend swanning about like tourists and frittering the time away.

  Jochen Hiltmann and Song Hyun-sook knew of my North Korea visit thanks to all the hoopla in the Korean press, and they were quick to offer their Oevenum home as a writer’s residence for me. Itō and Hiltmann, whether because they could converse in German together or their mutual interest in politics, quickly became friends. It was decided that Itō and I would spend a night in Professor Hiltmann’s house before Itō went to Frankfurt by train and flew back to Japan from there. Hiltmann had classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday but decided to cancel his Thursday class so he could take me to Oevenum.

  The next morning, the Hiltmanns and I saw Itō off at Hamburg Station. Itō and I hugged before he got on the train. I saw he was in tears. I was in tears as well. Hiltmann patted his back and said not to worry, that they would take good care of me, and Itō boarded the train with reddened eyes and stood in the door and said, “Write well,” to which I replied, “We’ll see each other soon.” I felt as if I were parting from an older brother as I watched the train pull away.

  Jochen, Hyun-sook, and their five-year-old son Han-song and I went to Dagebüll Harbor from Hamburg as planned. Jochen drove while Hyun-sook sat next to him and nagged him about speeding. If there was a car in front of him, he would lean on the horn as he accelerated around them, which for me—famed as I am for my impatience—was a secret delight every time.

  We took a ferry from the harbor. Oevenum, where Jochen’s country home stood, was in the middle of Föhr surrounded by forests and fields. We rode bicycles all weekend and explored the island, bought fish at the docks to grill, and spent time on the beach. In a tidepool after the tide was out, I felt something squirm beneath my foot, and when I gripped it with my toes and brought it out, I saw it was a flatfish the length of two of my palms. Jochen and Hyun-sook also prodded around with their feet but only caught a few between them. The sight of me pulling up flatfish after flatfish with my feet must have made me seem like some oriental mystic with magical powers, because they couldn’t stop exclaiming about it. They could not guess it was from my childhood years of playing in the streams in Yeongdeungpo, Seoul. I brought this up later, when Jochen and I were wrangling over stereotypes: I told him that his ideas about Asians being more
instinctual than intellectual, having more highly developed senses or being closer to nature, were all stereotypes. It was only a matter of our different childhood experiences.

  I was left alone in the village of Oevenum when the Hiltmann family went back to Hamburg. Actually, another family member stayed behind with me, by the name of Kowalski. Kowalski was a jet-black cat. Jochen had adopted him from Sarah Kirsch as a kitten, and the poet had been the one to name him as well. Song Hyun-sook asked me to take care of him. There was nothing to it; all I had to do was feed him twice a day and bring him in at night.

  I had never had a cat before and wasn’t too fond of them. Kowalski immediately picked up on this and kept his distance from me as well. They say cats are independent, and this proved to be true. But if I happened to be napping, he would come up to the foot of the bed and meow for food. If I grew too absorbed in my work and missed a feeding time, he was apt to crawl right up my leg and loudly meow for his meal. I ended up with a nick on my knee from him. His meal consisted of cans that Hyunsook had bought at a supermarket. All I had to do was fill his bowl with one along with a bowl of water. After his breakfast, Kowalski would disappear somewhere. There was a neighboring farm next to the wide lawn and another house over the hill by the road. If I couldn’t spot him around dusk, I would walk all the way up this hill, calling out “Kowalski! Kowalski!” And when I came back, he would always be standing by the back door of the house, waiting patiently for me to let him in.

  I continued to work on my travelogue in Oevenum and felt calmer in body and mind as I settled into a simple routine. I would wake in the morning and take a walk in the woods or go to the bakery for a brötchen, eating it as I came back. I sometimes borrowed one of the Hiltmanns’ bicycles to ride along the peaceful coastal roads. I wasn’t great at bicycle-riding but had fun tooling around the empty roads outside the village where there wasn’t a cultivated field or human being in sight.

  The Hiltmann couple returned to their country home when the semester ended, and I was about halfway done with my travelogue. A Korean student going back home for vacation delivered the manuscript to my wife, Myoung-su, in Seoul. Shindonga had published the beginning of it, but they deleted so much in their edit that I decided to cancel the serialization, after arguing fruitlessly in a long-distance phone call.

  An activist friend in Berlin called me in early July. The National Council of Student Representatives in South Korea had sent delegates to the World Festival of Youth and Students in the North. He said that he had cried at the sight, caught on TV, of a young female student entering the stadium, energetically waving her arms. This was the twenty-one-year-old Lim Su-kyung from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, who had had to cross continents, going via Japan and Berlin, to reach Pyongyang. After the event Lim had wanted to return to South Korea through the North–South armistice line, the most heavily guarded border in the world. The Catholic Priests’ Association for Justice sent Father Moon Kyu-hyun to protect Lim, who was a Catholic. After days on hunger strike, Lim held Father Moon’s hand and was arrested by South Korean agents as soon as she stepped across the border at Panmunjom. These dramatic scenes were captured by the foreign correspondents who were in North Korea for the World Festival, and were splashed all over TV screens and newspapers.

  Being all too familiar with the situation between North and South Korea, I thought that Lim Su-kyung had acted with bravery and wisdom in how she conveyed the determination of South Korea’s university students. She switched North Korea’s slogan “Joseon is one” to “The Fatherland is one,” and wrote it on a sash; she asked for watercolors to paint a South Korean flag, which she wore as a cape. It all showed that she was part of South Korean society and that she would never forget her friends at the Jeolla Province chapter of the National Council of Student Representatives. I heard later that she never accepted North Korea’s requests unconditionally. She sang the well-known children’s song “Our wish is reunification” over the militant songs popular among the activists, even teaching the North Koreans to sing along. I believed that Lim’s explosive appeal among the North Koreans was due to the strong individuality of this twenty-one-year-old from the South, her vibrant sense of unfettered freedom and her tireless energy that bowed to no one. She made extemporaneous speeches that moved tens of thousands of people. No doubt the sight of a young woman acting with personal agency was a shock to North Korean youth, accustomed to mass games and collective behavior. The North Koreans are sensitive to mass emotion, which they use to their advantage, and soon Lim was being paraded as the “flower of reunification.” The South Korean leadership, on the other hand, was harshly critical of her and cut her off from public view as soon as she was arrested on her return. Such prejudice and disapproval have never fully abated, but Lim herself lives on well enough in the second half of her eventful life.

  ~

  Berlin’s summer, which wasn’t that hot to begin with, had already given way to autumn by mid-August. On August 13, amid the furor accompanying Lim Su-kyung’s visit to the North and return to South Korea, thirty-six elder writers including Kim Tong-ni, Hwang Sun-won, Jeon Sook-hee, and Kim Nam-jo announced a “Proclamation on the current state of affairs.” In it they stated that “we abhor certain purposeful literary organizations that produce propaganda for violent revolutionary forces,” and urged the government to “make the consequences of their divisive actions clear to Moon Ik-hwan, Hwang Sok-yong, Lim Su-kyung, Moon Kyu-hyun, and others of their ilk.”

  Most of these writers, who had become the mainstream of South Korean literary society after the war, were fond of claiming that they were above politics while standing in for the authorities in their own “literary associations.” In response, the Hankyoreh published an op-ed by one of their readers:

  A proclamation by certain veteran writers was published on the 18th calling Pastor Moon Ik-hwan, author Hwang Sok-yong, and others “impure forces,” complicit with the communists and lackeys of leftist ideology, goading Korean society into chaos. I can’t but be surprised at such a simple-minded lack of logic … Today’s social unrest is not because of visits to the North or the spread of minjung (“people’s”) literature, as claimed by establishment writers, but the result of our enduring dictatorship and the political paradox of our system … Minjung literature is writing that expresses the lives and emotions of the people, who make up most of our citizenry, and unless literature goes against the flow of history, a literature that fights for the survival of its people and aims for the overcoming of division will continue to be popular with the masses. It is regrettable that in these difficult times, the only thing our elder writers can come up with is the national security argument and justification for far-right positions.

  I had moved from Oevenum to Yun I-sang’s house, where I stayed until early September. Yun introduced me to the chief administrative officer of the Academy of Arts, Berlin, and they promised to support me in establishing my status and finding a place to live. I met many members at an academy event and was introduced to its president, the novelist Walter Jens. Later, the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Berlin office connected me with Dr. Joachim Sartorius, later head of the Goethe-Institut. The director of DAAD was Barbara Richter. I became an Academy of Arts invitee with support and residency supported by DAAD. They had received information about me from the South Korean embassy in Germany and were aware that I was being persecuted by my government for violating the National Security Act. A house was assigned to me, but I had to wait a month because the current tenant still had time left on their contract.

  I often socialized with the Korean European Council for Democratic Activism folks on my outings to downtown Berlin. They were mostly former miners and nurses, plus some students, who had organized themselves into groups like the Jeon Tae-il Memorial Group, Labor Class, Women’s Group, and the Korean German Cultural Association. The council was a coalition of these groups, as per the political trend in South Korea to merge groups. They even published a newsletter, entitl
ed Minjujoguk.

  In early October, my novel The Shadow of Arms received the Manhae Prize. I was contacted through the poet Lee Si-young of Changbi Publishers and sent my acceptance speech via fax. The jury considered that I had “clearly exposed the fundamental truth about the model capitalist state that is the US through a measured, realist depiction of the oppression of a third-world nation.”

  About a week after the news of the award, I was finally able to move into my DAAD apartment, located in a complex on the corner of the Bundesplatz. It used to be a factory but had been converted into studios and spaces for artists. My apartment had been formerly occupied by a female Romanian composer. There were a few other invitees like me living on different floors. Across from my room was the widow of a Berlin painter. Judging from the strains of flute and cello that I heard from time to time, a musician lived downstairs. The apartment was a studio and, true to its industrial design, the ceiling was two stories high. A floor-to-ceiling window filled one of the walls, and it had a sleeping loft. Beneath the loft was a good amount of office space, and the living room was wide enough to be used as a painter’s atelier. There was a kitchen and a bathroom to the side. The unit came with a sofa, bed, shelves, and utensils. All I had to do was call the superintendent if I needed anything fixed. Most invitees stayed from six months to a year, but it was possible to ask for an extension.

  Berlin is sufficiently northerly for dusk to fall at 3 p.m. in November. For the first few days I kept missing the daylight, having woken around 1 or 2 p.m. after reading late into the night or dozing off while writing. I soon got used to it, though, and began to enjoy the depressingly dark loneliness that one might read about in Russian novels.

  On the evening of November 9, 1989, the telephone rang when I was deeply absorbed in writing my North Korea travelogue. It was Yun I-sang, who rarely called. I could hear his voice trembling down the line.