The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  On April 27, 1993, we went to the airport together. As I approached the departures door, Ho-seop must have felt some kind of premonition as I heard him cry out, “Appa!” The doors slid shut behind me, his cries ringing in my ears as I made my way to the security check.

  6

  Prison III

  About a month after my final sentencing on September 27, 1994—that is, sometime in late October—the security officer brought me into his office for a meeting one week before my transfer to prison. He gave me a few words of advice before telling me where I was to be held.

  —The Gongju Correctional Institute. It’s a good place.

  —Why do you say that?

  —Gongju is not a big city. It was a small township until a few years ago. It’s known for having good schools, which makes the people very genteel. And you wouldn’t want to go to too small a prison, as they have to get by on smaller budgets. A midsize prison such as Gongju’s will be more than tolerable.

  It had been a year and a half since I’d entered Seoul Detention Center. I transferred out in the reverse order that I came in. I was given a physical first, then my belongings were searched, my pre-imprisonment belongings confirmed, handcuffs fastened, ropes tied around my arms, and then we were put on the bus. It was the usual chicken-cage bus they used to transport prisoners to and from court, much too large for just the senior guard, two senior corrections officers, and me. The bus left Uiwang, went past Cheonan and Onyang, over the Charyoung Mountains, and through the Yugumagoksa ravines. The valley was aglow with autumn colors, and I felt as light as if I were on my way to a picnic.

  We reached Gongju Correctional Institute in the afternoon, and my pre-imprisonment belongings were locked up again. My cell was behind a steel door at the end of the first-floor corridor of a two-story building. The door was numbered and bore a wooden plaque that said the cell was for one person and was 0.8-pyeong wide. A junior corrections officer greeted me and said Father Moon Kyu-hyun had been incarcerated here before his pardon. The single cells were about a third of the size of the regular cells that held ten inmates.

  There were three single cells in a row, but the one next to the stairs was being used to store supplies. The one next to mine was for the soji inmates, and the next two were regular cells for “exam prep” prisoners. The rest of the cells in the building housed the prisoners who were hired out as laborers. The exam prep prisoners were being supported by the prison to take their middle and high school equivalency exams, and I thought this system to be a good one. These prisoners were provided with textbooks, workbooks, and desks made by the carpenter inmates, and were taught by visiting schoolteachers and cram school instructors. I helped them in my own way as well, writing to publishers and getting hundreds of books donated to them.

  I was moved to a second-floor cell a month later. That floor was filled with prison laborers who left for work in the morning and returned at night. I was alone during the day, put in de facto isolation. Gongju Correctional Institute was comprised of four rows of two-story buildings; my block was in the very back. The building in front was the special block that held students, officer-level and work-release inmates on the second floor, leader and model prisoners, and gang bosses. But the gangsters and leaders could choose whether they wanted to be in that block. Most chose to be in the regular cells. The first floor held problematic inmates who resisted rehabilitation, or inmates with light mental issues who were held in solitary confinement before transferring to a psychiatric ward in Jinju if their symptoms did not improve, from which they would return if they got better. I was supposed to be on the second floor of that block, but as a “person of interest,” I was incarcerated alone in the exam prep and prison laborers’ block.

  The first winter I experienced in prison proper was much harsher than at the detention center. The cell block was not heated. Gongju Correctional Institute had originally been used as a courthouse and prison since the Japanese occupation, and there had been a mass execution of political prisoners there during the Korean War. The prison moved to its current location in the 1970s, into cement buildings, but the facilities were old and the sewage, running water, and electricity were unreliable. During winter a coal stove was placed in the middle of the corridors where the guards’ desks were, but the heat didn’t reach the prisoners at all. When I woke on cold mornings, I saw how my breath had frosted over the cement walls and ceiling. I lodged formal complaints and stuck thin sheets of Styrofoam on the walls, but nothing helped.

  Serving a prison sentence in the winter is so harsh that there’s a separate term for it. This “winter penance” begins early in October, which is when the winter supplies are provided. All they consist of is padded blankets with unevenly bunched-up cotton batting and a kind of hot-water bottle called yudamppo. The young soji prisoners would spread the padded blankets out in an empty cell to try to even out the batting and mend any rips or tears before distributing them.

  The yudamppo had been passed down since the days of the Japanese occupation. It consisted of a rubber pouch and a cloth wrapper, but the cold was so acute that the water never stayed warm until dawn. The prisoners preferred the military-issue gunpowder containers, but these were granted only to the “barking mouths,” meaning financial criminals, gangsters, and long-term prisoners. The gunpowder containers could hold a lot of water, and the rubber lining around the lid made it safe. Upon request, I also was issued one, and every night I put in hot water boiled on the coal stove in the hall, slipped it into a sleeve made of blanket material, and slept with it under the covers.

  My second wife, Myoung-su, was still in New York at the time and delaying her return to Korea, so there were few people to help me outside of prison. My eldest son, Ho-jun, visited regularly, and Ho-jun’s mother, experienced in supporting prisoners of conscience, passed on via him the things I would need for winter penance: thick socks, gloves, sweaters, hats, and underwear. A few of my women writer friends, who had somehow understood what I needed, also sent me socks and underwear through the post. I gave away the excess to the other political prisoners.

  There was a student inmate and a young man from the South Korean Socialist Laborers Alliance when I entered, but the political prisoners really began arriving the following year. At one time there were a little over ten students and youths held for various offenses of organizing and protest.

  Not a single ray of outside light entered the solitary cell, making the inspection slot on the steel door seem little more than a wall decoration. The food hole, locked from the outside, opened only three times a day for meals. There was a narrow space next to the door where a tiny, low desk was placed, requiring one to edge past sideways when leaving the cell. A fluorescent light bulb hung over the desk, and for 365 days of the year, it was never switched off. If it ever went out, the guard on shift would take a look and get it replaced. The prisoner needed to be visible at all times, whether eating, on the toilet, sitting, or sleeping.

  The walls and ceiling were of cement. The floor, however, was laid with wood. The prison-issue bedding, once spread, left a palm’s width of space on either side. Whether sitting or standing, when I stretched out my arms, my hands hit both walls before my elbows had fully straightened. Lengthwise, it left about three palms’ worth of space at my feet, which I used for storing my toiletries and personal belongings. And then there was a wooden frame wrapped in clear plastic with a door: the toilet. The inspection slot had a good view of the prisoner squatting over the toilet. It was so narrow that my leg muscles would cramp when I used it. A bucket of water was provided for us every day; it took one gourd-full to flush urine, two for the other thing. We were expected to wash our dishes and ourselves with the bucket of water provided, so we had to use it sparingly. Extra water could also be stored in a couple of plastic bottles and used for heating or drinking.

  The toilet wasn’t quite a flush toilet. It smelled so bad that we had to half-fill a plastic bottle with water and plug the hole with it when it wasn’t in use. A stopp
er against the smell, if you will. The more experienced inmates filled rubber gloves with water until they were as taut as rugby balls, tied off the ends, and used those. All you had to do was pull a string to get the stopper out. (I personally found the plastic bottle method more convenient, regularly swapping out the bottles until my release.) I assume the waste traveled down the cement pipes into a cement tank underground. The smell would permeate the whole prison on the days the tanks were cleaned.

  The toilet had a window of sorts with plastic panels for panes if you were lucky and an opaque plastic sheet otherwise, as glass was forbidden. It was the only place that looked outside, and a cell with a good view might let you see faraway mountains. It was the only space where you could glimpse a corner of sky, a wedge of mountain, a fragment of the path of the moon, and a handful of stars. Those imprisoned in the single cells spent many hours in there. The toilet window was also the only place we could communicate with the other prisoners. But unlike in the detention center, most of the people communicating this way were gangsters, who tended to be the leaders in their regular cells. Around mealtimes, they shouted through the windows for their bosses to have a good dinner, and the bosses shouted back that their underlings should eat up as well. The financial criminals were not so blatant in their cell-to-cell communication and preferred to keep within their own groups at the infirmary or during religious services. They do say capitalist class differences are even more conspicuous in prison than on the outside.

  Since my time at the detention center, following the advice of an experienced ex-prisoner, I started every day with push-ups and a splash of cold water. Getting out of my warm bedding on freezing mornings took some serious willpower. But daring myself to endure the cold water helped me survive the chill, mentally and physically, for the rest of the day; after I left prison, I graduated from splashing myself to taking cold baths. In the mornings, we had an hour of exercise time in between breakfast and lunch, after which I would head to our block’s showers. My block was empty from the other prisoners having gone to work at the factory inside the prison. Theoretically I was supposed to have my own guard, but the guard in charge of the exam prep cell on the lower floor happened to be responsible for me as well, and he allowed me to be on my own in the corridors until lunch time. At lunch, the soji brought up my meal. I would enter my cell afterward and shut the door. Then the guards would come around for the first afternoon checks. In other words, for my hour of exercise and an hour after that, I could wander the empty halls of the block and stare out the window at the mountain behind the white wall of the prison.

  The showers had a big tank that was always full of clear water. There was no washing machine, but a nonprofit had donated a spin-dryer that removed most of the moisture from our hand-washed laundry. The Gongju Correctional Institute water came from an aquifer hundreds of meters underground and was said to have received good inspection ratings. I would douse myself with cold water, scrub my body with a towel from head to toe, jump into the big tank, and count to 100. Soon, I could count up to 500 in there. I ran laps no matter what during exercise hour. Half an hour of running was about four kilometers, and I would talk to the young political prisoners during the ten minutes before and after while I warmed up and cooled down. Sometimes, the urgency of the current events outside of prison made us extend our discussions to half an hour, cutting into my exercise time.

  There was also a tennis court that the convicts had made in the corner of the exercise yard. They had put down earth, sprinkled salt, tamped it down with a cement wheel, and sprinkled ash for lines. They even installed steel pipes to hang a net. There were many clever and creative prisoners; it was often said that, given the right materials, the inmates could have built themselves a plane. At a mid-level prison like ours, building a tennis court was a piece of cake. During the regular prisoners’ exercise hours, I’d see inmates wearing flashy, expensive exercise clothes and swinging foreign-made rackets as they played tennis. There was a separate maintenance team that covered the court with plastic on inclement days, sprinkled salt, took care of the earth, and ran the cement wheel over it from time to time. It didn’t take long for me to learn that most of the tennis court users were gangster bosses. I had no interest in tennis myself, but the young inmates in the political prisoners’ cell block asked me to register a complaint. Was this court created for the convenience of a few? Why were political prisoners not allowed to use it as well? The prison authorities were taken aback. They asked if we wanted it shut down, but I suggested that if it was too difficult to open the tennis court to all prisoners, they should at least take applications from those who showed good behavior.

  The internal rules for treating political prisoners were never made public, but since the military dictatorship we had always been subject to special disciplinary measures. We had to be incarcerated singly, our exercise hours were kept separate from other inmates’, all of our letters and books were vetted, limitations were set on the number and manner of visits, audiovisual education (movies or TV) was restricted, and no labor was allowed. We were treated at the most restricted levels with improved conditions by default, depending on how hard we fought for them against the warden, upon whose authority treatment was decided. Whenever a new warden was appointed, everything went back to square one.

  In this case, use of the tennis courts became allowed for the political prisoners. I had begun to see that the “war on crime” the authorities had waged in the past few years, which resulted in the wholesale incarceration of the gangsters that had once proliferated in every city in the land, had introduced a new predator class into the prison ecosystem. One particular boss who headed a nationwide crime organization was said to have received a “king’s sentence”; he even had his own cell phone. There was another by the name of Jang who had made the papers with the Seojin room salon scandal; a former judo champion, he was mild-mannered and silent. Another gangster who left an impression on me, named Lee, was the “chief of operations” of the World Cup gang in the provinces, doing life for launching a surprise attack on the boss of a rival gang and sneaking into a hospital to revenge-murder an enemy. These two were serving the heaviest sentences in the prison, and they would always greet me or chat when we met during exercise hour. Lee, in particular, I found striking. He was a voracious reader and I was often surprised by his insightful commentary on books. Thanks to his influence, the other gangster leaders got along well with the political prisoners.

  A little after my arrival, I went out to the exercise yard and was greeted by all the young inmates, who jumped up and bowed to me at ninety-degree angles.

  —Good morning, Chancellor Hwang!

  I found the use of this honorific amusing and kidded them about it.

  —So, is a college president higher than the warden or what?

  —I believe it’s higher by a hair.

  —But why?

  —Were these grounds not once a public university?

  As they knew everything about what went on here, they advised us political inmates whenever we planned collective action against prison conditions. They updated us on newly appointed wardens and national security officials and had a comprehensive understanding of the workings of the mess hall and commissary.

  I had been getting used to the place, more or less, when a writer friend came to visit and told me some unexpected news: just before I left Seoul Detention Center, the Ministry of Justice had announced that they were going to allow writing in prisons. I had no idea what had been going on since I’d just been transferred, but apparently the ministry had proclaimed this after the UN Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International, and PEN International announced they were sending a fact-finding mission to determine my imprisonment situation and writing conditions. The ministry had even declared through the press that, starting November 1, “All prisoners may obtain writing implements using their own money, use them during the day, store letters and literary works in the prison, and with permission, publish them in newspaper
s or magazines.” They further stated that “Hwang Sok-yong, serving a seven-year sentence, has been permitted to write his screenplay for Jang Gil-san and is currently writing it”—effectively proclaiming that I was writing something that even I wasn’t aware of. I complained about this to the warden. His immediate response was simple: I could write whenever I wanted. But there were conditions. I could use pen and paper during the day, but at the end of the day, I had to hand them back to the guard on shift. “The day” here meant civil servant hours. If a National Security Act violator like me wanted to write something, I needed to submit an application first detailing what I was planning to write, and the warden and prison committee would evaluate it before sending it up to the Ministry of Justice for approval. Once approved, I was to submit a set amount of manuscript pages every week to determine whether my writing fit the proposal, and these pages were to be stored by the prison. Once the work was finished, the prison would hold on to the manuscript until I was released, but it would be up to the correctional committee and the Ministry of Justice as to whether the work would be allowed to go with me. They were basically telling me not to write. I was enraged by the underhanded scheming of the authorities. Their announcement granting me the right to write in prison was just a show put on for the outside world.

  I had no choice but to give up writing while in prison. Right up until the end of my sentences, these conditions never changed. Once, when I tried to pass on to my publisher an author’s note for a new edition of Jang Gil-san, the prison demanded that two of the lines be rewritten, which I refused, and so the author’s note never made it into the edition. Their control of me was this stringent, so I could only imagine how much worse it was for the regular prisoners.