The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  Around this time, there were reports that international human rights organizations had begun demanding investigations into rights protection in South Korea, having found the government’s violation of such rights and relevant international treaties problematic. The UN Commission for Human Rights notably passed a resolution that my incarceration under the National Security Act was a case of arbitrary imprisonment and demanded that South Korea honor its human rights agreements. These events came to my attention when Amnesty International, which had petitioned UNCHR on my behalf, revealed the UN resolution to a South Korean human rights organization after nothing was done by the government despite being notified of their human rights agreement violation by the UN in October of 1994. On January 25, 1995, a resolution by the UN Commission of Human Rights’ Working Group on Arbitrary Detention was made public, in which “the detention of Hwang Suk-Yong [sic] is declared to be arbitrary, being in contravention of article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the Republic of Korea is a Party.” The resolution also noted that the South Korean government had refused to respond to the UN’s requests for consideration on this matter and had declared the UN’s intervention to be egregious.

  Most inmate complaints were related to the mess hall and the commissary, so much so that we used to say that fully half of the misery of doing time was the food. Mealtime began after the prison laborers left for the factory in the mornings. A shout of “Ready provisions!” would prompt a response shout from the soji, the clatter of their carts, and the smell of approaching food. Despite the enticing meal schedule posted in the hall, the dishes we received were pretty much indistinguishable, consisting largely of unidentifiable broth with scant meat or vegetables. Most of the time I could only tell whether it was supposed to be a soup, a stew, or something braised, by the dregs that had settled to the bottom. Any day where a piece of tofu, pike, or pork made it onto your tray was a good day. Something about the food coming through the food hole in the door made my throat close up with tears at first. The fact that I was like an animal kept in a cage, fallen to the bottom of life, and the prospect of doing this for years to come, filled me with despair and frustration.

  The daily budget for inmate meals was less than 1,000 won per person, which meant only about 300 won—roughly 25 cents—was spent per meal. When I mentioned to the prison officers how we’d been given more food at Seoul Detention Center, they told me that Gongju was allocated a smaller budget because it had fewer inmates. With the civilian government coming into power, the kinds of goods inmates could purchase were curtailed as well, in order to deal with corruption among subcontractors.

  The prison had a carpentry workshop, a sewing and knitting factory, and a work-release factory, which doubled as trade schools. The prison laborers ate at the factories, and the work-release prisoners, according to the policies of their workplaces, could get whatever food they were allowed there. The block I was in was all prison laborers. It was quiet all day and bustling in the evenings. After I became acquainted with the chief of the cell next to mine, I began getting surreptitious snacks slipped in through the food hole. They were mostly items not found on the commissary list that could be hidden away from the physical inspections they received coming back in: blood sausages, dried meat, or smoked pork trotters, flattened inside workbags. Around Lunar New Year, a plastic soda bottle popped through the hole as the next-door cell head shouted, “Enjoy a cool, refreshing soda, Mr. Hwang!”

  A cool, refreshing soda in this weather? I grumbled a bit but took a polite sip, seeing as he’d gone to some trouble to get it for me, and was surprised and delighted at what I tasted. He had dumped out enough of the soda to mix in a bottle of soju. A kind gesture, enabling me to have a drink in honor of the upcoming holiday. A gangster from Mokpo, he lived next door for a year before transferring to the cell block across from us. The soju, I realized, was from the boss of bosses, Jang, who was something of a leader of all the gangsters in the prison. In the winter, the other lifer, Lee, sent me a change of thermal underwear, and in return I sent him some thick socks and a cap.

  There were normally two soji per block, and the prison authorities assigned one of them to me. He was to keep me company, and keep an eye on me, since I was alone during the day. They tended to trust political prisoners more after our third year, when they would leave our door unlocked and allow us to roam about the block during the day. I would even go and have lunch with the other young political prisoners.

  People behind bars think about food all day long. We were given our three meals, but the menu hardly varied within each season and neither did what was available at the commissary, causing us to crave the delicacies we loved when we were outside. Aside from those working overtime shifts, the inmates had to stay cooped up all day in their cells on the weekends. This is when they would “dine out,” “go out,” or “sleep out.” Just what kind of a prison sentence is that, you may think, but it’s the kind of dining and sleeping out that’s all in the imagination. “Dining out” means talking about all the delicious things you used to eat outside of prison; to a single-cell inmate like me, it was like reading a cookbook or a collection of essays on food.

  One time, guards had to charge into one of the group cells and pull apart two inmates who had gotten into a fight. I heard later that they were arguing over whether jjajangmyeon or jjambbong was tastier, which escalated into whether sweet-and-sour pork or japchae noodles were tastier, whereupon one of them apparently couldn’t take it anymore and shoved the other guy, thus starting the fight.

  Dinner in prison was normally served at five. That was followed by checks, then the day guards went home, just like any other civil servant. The night guards took over then. By nine, the meager dinner would have been digested and I would already be too hungry to even lie down. I tried not to snack at night myself, but this was the time the regular inmates would eat their instant noodles, dried squid, or the single brand of crackers available at the commissary. I could ask the soji, if they were walking about in the halls before lockdown, to boil some water for me for instant noodles, but I could hardly ask that of the lone night guard. The dried squid sold in the commissary was so tough that it took a long time to chew and swallow just one arm, and my jaws and chin would ache so much the next day that I’d have difficulty eating. I learned to soak the squid in water before eating it.

  I borrowed cookbooks from the library. The supplementary booklets from women’s magazines with their precise instructions proved to be the most popular books checked out by inmates. The first thing I wrote when I came out was an essay on food, the result of all my yearning over food while I was in prison.

  If that’s “dining out,” then what’s “going out”? I also learned about that from the regular prisoners. It required a few different books. First, an atlas. Then, anything on driving, hiking, and fishing, along with travel guides—which were just then beginning to come out in South Korea, following the easing of restrictions on overseas tourism. There were travel guides for Europe, the US, South America, Southeast Asia, Japan, and China. For domestic travel, you picked the car you wanted and opened a map. Soon you were motoring over the Daegwanryeong ridge and following the East Sea, or down the west coast and onto a ferry at Mokpo, where you would cross to Jeju Island, drive across the island past Mount Halla and arrive at Seogwipo or zoom along the coastal road. You went hiking, or angling for parrot fish, or you struggled to reel in a bonito. When you were tired of Korea, you went overseas. If I asked the next cell for reading material, they might answer: “I just left Paris and am headed over the Pyrenees,” and offer to loan me the book once they’d finished their tour of Spain.

  “Sleeping out” required interior decoration magazines or a copy of Country Home. I used to secretly tear out pictures of interesting materials or decorations that caught my eye. First, I planned a two-story house, but thinking it would be better to separate home and office, I divided th
e house into living quarters and an annex for work. Time flew by while I drew up these plans. Once they were done, I stuck the tear-outs on top of them and constructed the buildings in my mind. I poured concrete for the foundations, put up the walls, and placed the roof, all the while constantly changing the construction materials.

  The interior required more attention to different textures. I didn’t like wallpaper, so I finished the walls with something that had a more natural feel, like stucco or plaster. The colors took a long time to choose. In the end I decided that the whole house should be painted in the same color but with a warm, bright shade for the children’s rooms. The study should have rough stucco walls, befitting a workspace. The kitchen had to be to my wife’s taste, with consideration for efficiency of movement, and various bathroom fixtures, faucets, and doorknobs all clamored in my mind to be chosen. The more I looked into it, the more there was to be done. It didn’t take months, like a real house, but I could easily fritter a month away just rolling it over in my mind. Best of all, I could always knock down the house mentally and start again from scratch.

  I really wanted a fireplace. It would be nice to roast sweet potatoes and chestnuts with the family; but it was the thought of sitting alone by the fire and doing nothing, not listening to music or reading, that made me feel sweetly drowsy and happy. Oh, and I wanted a Jindo dog. I had a picture of one cut from a magazine but thought it would be better to have a pair, so I found another to cut out and put beside it.

  Some called it point-blank “going home” instead of “sleeping out.” Prisoners dreamed of returning to homes they would never be able to build in real life, but once they awoke, they only found themselves surrounded by concrete walls. I once read about a long-term prisoner who dreamed he left his cell to frolic in a meadow filled with wildflowers, then rushed back to the cell to make it before checks and waking; I myself had a similar experience many times. Once I dreamed that I had “gone out” and was going home, only to find that my house wasn’t on the street where it was supposed to be, so that I woke up in my cell. This was devastating. Another dream had me released from prison to find that my wife and child were gone and another family was living in our house. Yet another had me as a child losing my whole family during the Korean War evacuation and finding our house bombed out. I sat in the yard and cried for my mother until I woke up. At that moment, I realized the child wasn’t me but had the face of my son Ho-seop, whom I had left behind in New York.

  I played this house-building game for a long time before tiring of it. As the days passed, I began to doubt that I would have any home to return to by the time I was released. Would the house I dreamed of ever really exist? Maybe crossing the 38th parallel on my mother’s back at the age of five was the moment I lost all hope of ever having a home to return to.

  7

  Childhood

  1947–56

  The great division began as political change swept the peninsula. By May of 1947, it was only a matter of time before two separate governments were established. I was five years old. One night, we grabbed some of our belongings and went to my youngest aunt’s house. My mother never so much as hinted to her other siblings that she was planning to flee to the South. We had already entered the days in which people questioned each other’s “ideology.”

  My youngest aunt had just gotten married. Her husband was an “ideologue” who had studied law in Japan. When his Japanese student conscription notice arrived, he headed first for Pyongyang before fleeing to Manchuria. They say that later, upon Liberation in 1945, he entered the newly founded Security Cadres School, then became a high-ranking political aide during the Korean War. He was also an ambassador to some country or other, but I am not sure which. I heard more stories about him years later from his children, after I’d become reacquainted with my aunt. His last days were spent as a caretaker at a government-run farm in Sariwon, until dying sometime in the 1960s.

  My mother brought her husband and children to this aunt’s house because she was the only person in the family in whom she had confided about fleeing to the South. My aunt’s husband pretended he knew nothing about it but actively helped us by hiring a driver to take us to Hwanghae Province, just north of the border. My mother suspected he helped us because he considered her an educated person, unsuited for life in the North. In any case, all I can recall of that drive is us getting out of the car and pretending to go on a picnic.

  I think we had dinner at an unfamiliar cottage. There was soybean paste stew with whole baby potatoes boiled in it and a side dish with little crabs marinated in soy sauce that I can still picture. Those tiny creatures had even tinier claws and beady little eyes, and their bodies were bright red from being cooked. I picked one up with my fingers and examined it closely, but I could not bring myself to eat it. That was in the boatman’s house.

  I also remember taking a boat at night and sailing down the river to the sea. Everyone had to lie flat against the wet boards and not make a sound, because we did not want to get caught by the patrols along the 38th parallel. At the time, the patrols were still relatively lax, and riding in the boat with my family were peddlers who regularly went back and forth between North and South. I was too preoccupied to be scared, fascinated as I was by the shaking of the stars as the boat rocked from side to side.

  We reached a building, something like a school, which was filled with people. It was a refugee camp in Kaesong; we must have stayed there for about four days. On the hill behind the schoolyard were mounds of red dirt shaped like graves and flanked by soda bottles sprouting wilted flowers. There were many Japanese families that had come down from Manchuria and the northern regions in the midst of the war and its aftermath. The long journey had left their children vulnerable to even the slightest cold or bout of dysentery. The little red mounds were where they were buried. These emotive scenes are what is left of my childhood memories of walking those mountains and rivers during the first days of the North–South division.

  I have almost dreamlike recollections of moving from neighborhood to neighborhood once we reached Seoul in the South. I remember a wide backyard and an apricot tree and a cherry tree. The garden had been neglected and the ground was thick with soaked, rotting leaves. I picked up a fallen apricot and bit into it. The fruit, wet with dew, melted on my tongue.

  For several months we lived in a two-story house in Hyochangdong. It was a Japanese colonial-style building with tatami mats covering every floor. Some cunning person must have snapped it up for an absurdly low price the minute the Japanese owners left, just like in Pyongyang. The landlord lived on the first floor and we on the second. My mother had to cook our meals on the stove on the first floor before carrying them up with my sisters’ help. Each closet door revealed a wicker trunk filled with bedding and clothing that smelled of mothballs.

  My mother liked to frame our flight south in apolitical terms, telling people that we’d simply moved to Seoul because my father was looking for a job. My parents must have brought gold and other valuables with them from Pyongyang to help us get established. My father had a nest egg saved up to open a business or buy a house, but one day, when the upstairs living room had been briefly left empty, someone stole all the money. According to my eldest sister, the culprit was surely the landlord’s newlywed daughter, who visited the house often. We never saw this daughter again. A successful businessman during the colonial era, my father tried his whole life to recover the standard of living he had enjoyed in Manchuria; but there was only so much he could do after losing all his savings so soon after being uprooted.

  For the longest time, under my mother’s influence, my siblings and I grew up believing deep down that our life in Seoul was temporary. We assumed we would return home someday. We were “refugees” for years. We all were: Northerners who had waited out the Korean War only to endure the long reconstruction period and continuous military dictatorship; rural migrants who’d given up on tilling the land and crowded into the city from every corner of this end of the penins
ula, which was so tiny that if they so much as tripped they’d be back home already; emigrants who couldn’t survive here and were pushed out into foreign countries; and everyone who could never go home or see their loved ones again because the Cold War had us living under different political systems. Every Korean was a refugee. For years my mother could not take a bite of a fruit in season or some vegetable without lamenting: “This tastes terrible, the cucumbers back home were so much better.”

  In my memory, kimbap seaweed rolls were the fare of vagabonds. You may think that kimbap would have been a luxury in those times, and I suppose there’s truth to that. There were other wartime foods, from jumeokbap—lumps of cooked rice molded into a ball the size of a fist—to gaetteok cakes and beombeok porridge and sujebi soup, all made from cheap wheat flour. And, later, ggulgguli jook, or “pig slop stew,” which was made from food scraps found in the trash outside of US military bases and looked about as appetizing as it sounds. But kimbap was always the street food of refugees. Or at least the barley rice smeared on low-cost sheets of seaweed, unevenly stuffed with sour kimchi or pickled radish, that passed for kimbap.

  Such are the wisps of memory that remain: the tatami rooms, the smell of mothballs wafting from built-in closets, lumps of rice wrapped in dried seaweed, and our family’s solemn prayers as we sat before our meals.

  I’ve already mentioned that my grandfather was a pastor. My mother was one of four girls and two boys. Her father started out in the Methodist ministry but moved on later in life to teach at a divinity school. Like most of the early members of the school of Enlightenment before him, he was a pro-education nationalist. My grandfather was prominent enough in Pyongyang to have established a medical school and a high school. Whenever I asked my mother why a pastor would found a medical school, she replied with a mixture of pride and resentment in her voice: “Back then there were very few hospitals, and many people died because they couldn’t find treatment.” The resentment came from having to return home from studying in Japan, despite having made it through vocational school. After Grandfather was jailed for joining the March 1 Movement in Pyongyang, and then spent another seven years in lockup for refusing to submit to mandatory Shinto worship, there wasn’t enough money left for her to continue her studies. Around this time my mother received a marriage proposal through a match-maker, and this is how she met my father.