My father was from Sinchong in Hwanghae Province. He had an older sister but was otherwise the only son for three generations and apparently monopolized the hopes and affections of his parents. He lacked my mother’s expressive way with words. In fact, he was downright taciturn. I have no memory of ever hearing him tell stories about himself. According to my mother, he had a happy childhood, but it didn’t last long. His parents died young, in quick succession. His sister married a man from the Baek family in Yonan, and my father spent his dark adolescent years in that household. His brother-in-law was not an honest man; once he got into gambling, he sold off parcel by parcel the family lands that had been passed down for generations. One night, Father waited until everyone was asleep, grabbed the land deeds hidden in the credenza in the master bedroom, and ran away. He came to Pyongyang, sold off the land, went to school on this money until it ran out, and left for Manchuria with nothing in his pocket at the age of twenty. There he worked in a factory owned by a Japanese man, where he ripped apart and reassembled hundreds of car engines until he was able to go into business for himself, setting up his own body shop, which he eventually grew into a big company that manufactured tires.
Photographs from this time show him decked out in a trench coat and a fedora, or a fur-collared coat and a Russian-style fur hat, with round-rimmed glasses. The very picture of a colonial bourgeois. Shanghai and Harbin were cosmopolitan, modern cities, so his sporting a leather jacket as he stands before a car doesn’t seem odd at all.
My father was already in his midthirties when he met my mother. Before then, he had lived with a Japanese woman—which I only found out about at some point after he died, when my widowed mother brought it up as a complaint. I don’t know if he had any children with the Japanese woman, but upon succeeding in business in the Manchurian capital of Hsinking, he ended his affair with her and returned home to Korea in search of a wife. When my older sisters wondered why he had to get married to a Korean woman, my mother would reply with something like, “How should I know? He probably wanted to carry on the bloodline.”
My mother used to jot her thoughts and memories down in a notebook whenever she had time. According to her journals, she herself seemed to have been interested in someone else before she met my father. He was a friend of my eldest uncle and was on the Pyongyang High School soccer team with him. They spent weekend afternoons playing practice matches at school. One early summer afternoon, my mother was home alone doing her homework when she suddenly heard a ruckus. A crowd of Pyongyang High School students rushed in through the front gate. She found her brother and the whole soccer team soaked with sweat and clamoring for water. Mother filled a clean porcelain bowl and brought it out with both hands. A male student grabbed it from her and drank it down in one gulp. Someone laughed and said, “Your mouth touched the side where the bok character for ‘good fortune’ is, so now you’re soulmates!”
After meeting that boy, my mother joined the Cheondo students’ association with him, around the twentieth-century religion of Cheondoism, despite being from a Christian family. (She remained a devout Christian and never let a day pass without prayer, from the day she married my father until the day she died.) The two got together at student meetings, took walks along the Taedong River, and occasionally went out together for cold naengmyeon noodles or snacks of hotteok pancakes. Mother was also talented in sports like table tennis and track and field, often representing her class in competitions, and was the only one of her sisters to learn how to ice skate, which she did with my oldest uncle on the frozen Taedong River. The student she liked often came out on the ice, and the two would glide up and down the river to their heart’s content. But seeing how Mother once told my oldest sister in passing, “If you like someone, never introduce him to a friend,” I have a feeling her love was stolen by a friend of hers.
Father had a hard time understanding Mother whenever she shared something she’d read in a book, or made a literary allusion. Beginning her adult life as a married woman in Manchuria, Mother enjoyed books and American and Japanese movies, whereas my father was more the pragmatic workhorse type. He stayed out late entertaining his customers and often returned home exhausted and drunk from evenings spent in clubs or teahouses. She wrote that the winter nights were so long and cold that she sat next to the Russian stove and read books until late in the night. Mother was also more interested in political issues: not only was Father completely unconcerned with any politics outside of business, he had absolutely no curiosity about it. This was why, when times grew turbulent later on, he had no choice but to rely on his wife.
I have no memories of Manchuria. Liberation happened just two years after I was born, and Manchuria, which like Korea had been controlled by the Japanese empire, became a battleground, invaded by Russian forces and ultimately ceded to Chinese Communist control. My parents had to leave behind their land, factories, and the fortune they had amassed through their colonial business, pack only a few bags, and depart. Father would never recover the vigor of his days as a self-made man or the lifestyle of that time.
Mother brought the family into her parents’ home in liberated Pyongyang before finding a rental house near Moranbong at the end of the tram line. It was a Japanese-style house, which was common around that time. She had also obtained several thick Japanese books containing a range of clothing designs and patterns, to open what became a successful clothing store downtown. Designing, patternmaking, and operating a sewing machine were a small sample of her many talents, and she fed our family with her efforts. Her clientele consisted mostly of the wives of the occupying Soviet military. Father went out every day, but I don’t think he ever found a job.
When I was about four, I played with my older sisters cutting and folding colored paper and drawing pictures with crayons. They would make me epaulets and medals made of silver paper and paste them on my shirt, and I would puff out my chest and strut grandly about the neighborhood.
A Soviet officer and his wife lived downstairs. I recall now that they never managed to have children. Whenever the wife saw me on the stairway, she would come running and hug me and rub her cheek against mine and kiss me. She often gave me fermented herring and rye bread to eat, to my mother’s horror.
During this period after Liberation, Soviet soldiers drunk on vodka would spill out into the residential areas at night looking for women. Young women smeared their faces with coal dust and covered their hair with ratty fabrics to repel them. Every house had a brass basin, and if any drunken Soviet soldiers appeared in the night, people would bang on those basins to alert the neighborhood and scare off the soldiers.
Around evening, my sisters would lead me by the hand to the last tram station to wait for our mother to come home. Sometimes we were lucky and met her just as she was getting off the tram, and sometimes she didn’t show up until long after the sun had gone down and it was dark, making me cry.
My memories now move on to the “tree of heaven house” in Seoul’s Yeongdeungpo neighborhood, the home my father bought and fixed up himself with the help of a carpenter. We settled there after we had left Pyongyang for South Korea and had already moved around a bit within Seoul. The house was close to Yeongdeungpo Station and the market. Between them was a rotary with a street that branched off toward Dangsandong; the house was on that street. Formerly a bicycle store, it had a storefront and living quarters and a fairly wide lot in the back. Father bought the lot as well, expanded the house into it, installed a plank fence, put in plumbing, and built an outhouse next to the fence. The reason we thought of it as the “tree of heaven house” was because of the trees of heaven planted along that new street. A rare tree now, they were heavy with tiny oval leaves like acacia trees and strung with fruit the size of bean hulls in the fall. They grew in the street outside our home, and there was also a grove of them in the empty lot Father had bought. Perhaps the previous owner of our house had planted them, or they just happened to sprout there. They were all cut down during Mother’s remodeling, whe
n she put the house on the market after the war and my father’s passing.
Trees of heaven and sycamores lined the streets by the station, rotary, and market, but the Yeongdeungpo district itself was really a factory zone built up by the Japanese. Just a few steps beyond this district and you were in a countryside with rice paddies, but the towering smokestacks still stood out. Because of all the freight, railroads crisscrossed the district from all directions, and the roads were properly paved with cement. There were empty lots here and there with coal dust mixed in with the soil, where the rain created puddles of black water. Sometimes cement tubes and steel supports lay piled up in these lots. The corner of the elementary school’s sports field opposite our house had an entire hill made of coal. Children climbed to the top to fly kites.
The center of Yeongdeungpo began at the station to the south past the rotary and stretched to the tracks that led to the redevelopments in the west. Around the center were Japanese-style houses and shops from colonial times; Korean-style houses were more common around where our house was. Near the factories stood the company accommodation, cookie-cutter Japanese-style bungalow housing built by companies for their administrative staff and factory workers.
Looking back, the “tree of heaven house” was neither Japanese nor Korean in style; it was simply strange. It was shaped like a box, with a master bedroom used by my parents on the right-hand side and a kitchen behind. Near the stove was a little door leading to the master bedroom and another door that opened to the backyard. Next to the master bedroom on the left was the living room, and in front of that was the foyer with several glass windows. Behind the living room was the left-side exit and the spare bedroom next to the kitchen. The house faced southwest. Strong sunlight shone through the back windows every morning.
In the summer, balsam pear blossom, sponge gourd flowers, and morning glories on their delicate vines would climb up the cords my sisters had tied by the wall and peer into our windows with their pretty yellow and blue faces. In the winters, frost bloomed thickly over the windowpanes; forests, palaces of strange countries, and the sharp peaks of mountains would appear as the sun shone through. Late at night, I was woken sometimes by the sound of trains whistling and wheezing out plumes of steam as they rumbled past.
A little further up from the stream was a dike, and often when the Han River overflowed, the tributary stream would deluge Yeongdeungpo. Beyond the dike lay a long sandy beach and grassland, and across from the stream was the island of Yeouido, which had been an airstrip since the Japanese occupation. Before the Korean War, there were just a few planes there for flight instruction, and my whole family would wake to the sound of propellers firing up.
A crumbling industrial road led from Yeongdeungpo’s center to the factories; the layers of oil and gasoline coating the asphalt would turn the rainwater in the potholes into puddles of rainbows. So many factories shut down after Liberation that the road was all but deserted. It later became a strategic corridor during the Korean War, and I got to watch military trucks and tanks pass by right in front of my nose. Across from our house was a gobanso (the Japanese Korean word for “police station” that was used for a long time even after Liberation). Next to it was the gobanso’s separate interrogation room, a carpentry workshop, a butcher’s, and a restaurant. On the left side of our house was a cabbage patch, and across from that, a big Chinese restaurant called Two Star Pagoda that was built from brick. Toward the market rotary to the right was a barbershop, a few houses, and the home of a family workshop that produced funeral biers.
Father worked at Kyongsong Electric for a while after we moved down South, but I think he soon quit and looked for other work. One day, he went inside the gates (the four old city gates of Seoul—we used to say “going inside the gates” to mean “going downtown” in those days) and met Mother’s cousin once removed, who had come to the South first and opened a shoe store in the Samgakji neighborhood. There was an American military base nearby, and his business was flourishing. This relative introduced Father to a supplier for shoemakers and other goods, and so Father’s shoe store in downtown Seoul must have been thanks to the experience passed on by the cousin.
Mother, being much better educated than Father, found work more easily. A girls’ school called about a teaching job, along with a few other offices responding to her résumé. She eventually became a teacher at a weaving factory nearby, where factory girls lived in dormitories and took classes in the evenings. Mother became vice principal, in charge of managing the educated, middle-aged matrons who guided the factory girls.
Mother put on Western clothing every morning before going to work. I had no choice but to entertain myself alone after my parents and older sisters had left for their jobs and schools. I sat in the shade of the trees of heaven and drew white lines on the ground with talc and dark lines with nails. I mumbled stories to myself as I drew. When a new character appeared in my head, I quickly erased what I had drawn and drew a new picture.
My younger aunt had lived on a hill across from Moranbong in Pyongyang and arrived in the South about a year after we did. She was an elementary school teacher before, which helped her get a teaching job as soon as she arrived, due to the shortage of skilled workers. They had a daughter named In-ok who was two years younger than me and perhaps born a bit frail. She was often sick. Her hair was as listless as stray thread and yellowish in the sunlight. My aunt’s husband usually stayed home with In-ok. For several years, until he eventually opened a store in Namdaemun Market, it was my aunt who kept them fed. I was annoyed and bored with how In-ok refused to share anything and yet insisted on following me around. The few times my aunt’s husband talked to me was to scold me for not playing with her more. I can still hear her calling after me, “Oppa-ya!” If I was on my tricycle, she would run to me, grab the handlebars, and demand that I give it up to her. I pedaled hard toward the rotary to get away, and In-ok wept as she ran after me. If only I’d let her have a ride. The child died not long after.
Mother took me to my aunt’s house the day of In-ok’s death. They didn’t live far from us; her neighborhood was the two rows of Korean-style tile-roofed houses past the large rice mill near the market. The alleys were so similar that I remember I kept getting lost whenever I went to my aunt’s house on my own.
My aunt lived in a hanok-style house that had a courtyard surrounded by a master bedroom, spare room, and another room by the entrance. When we came through the gate, Father and my uncle were drinking soju together on the edge of the veranda that lined the courtyard. My aunt burst into tears as soon as she saw my mother. She had planted daisies by their courtyard walls just like we did, and I remember there were many red flowers in bloom. The door to the spare bedroom was open, and I could see a small wooden box tied with cotton ropes that looked like suspenders. I stared at the box in fear, knowing what it was.
A bearded man arrived and was carrying the box out on his back when my aunt ran toward him and tried to stop him. My mother and uncle had to restrain her as she screamed and cried.
My mother went to the cinema on weekend afternoons, just as she had in Manchuria. She never changed out of her vice principal suits beforehand, though. Instead, she called me over as I played outside with the other children, spat on a handkerchief from her handbag, and hastily scrubbed away at my dusty face. The strange smell disgusted me. Mother would take me by the wrist and lead me to the Yeongbo Theater, which used to present kabuki shows, samurai plays, and operettas during the occupation. Hollywood films were not yet common, and yeoseonggukgeuk performances, with their all-female casts, would become popular only after the Korean War, so we mostly saw plays and operettas during that time.
“The self-playing drum,” depicting the tragedy of Prince Hodong and the Princess of Nakrang, dated back to that time, and “A tale of two sisters” gave me nightmares. When I pretended to be one of the ghosts by covering my head with a towel and moaning, “Mother, why, oh, why did you kill me,” my sisters, who had not seen the play, woul
d run away from me, shrieking with laughter.
I drew scenes from the plays in the dirt and built a barrier of stones and bricks around them so they wouldn’t be trampled on by passers-by. Unless there was rain or wind in the night, the scenes were still there in the morning. One day, my mother came upon my little gallery and its little shapes scratched into the dirt. She called me outside and asked me what this was. As she pointed to each part of the drawing, I explained which character and scene it depicted.
“I see … Well, I think you should be reading books instead of doing this.”
Mother had taken the decision, right then and there, for me to start learning to read instead of waiting to do so at school. Nowadays it’s common for children to learn to read and even learn a foreign language before they start school, but back then even kindergarten was considered unusual. I attended church kindergarten for a while but grew tired of having to dance and sing with girls, my hands and feet fidgeting with boredom. Mother liked having someone to take care of me as she worked and hoped I would take to it, but I soon insisted on quitting.
Mother wrote out the vowels and consonants of Hangul in large brushstrokes, posted them on the walls of my room, and taught me whenever she had a free moment. I memorized them naturally enough and could soon put them together to read. I read my sisters’ books first and then the ones Mother bought me. I especially liked Gulliver’s Travels, A Little Princess, Treasure Island, and The Man in the Iron Mask. My favorite time of day was when everyone in my family had left the house and I got to read all by myself. Later on I pestered our baby-sitter, Tae-geum, to take me to the bookstore near the rotary so I could read new editions of the children’s magazines. Now, not only did I draw pictures but I also painted my face with my sisters’ watercolors, wrapped myself in fabrics, and dressed up in adult clothes to look like the characters in the novels, muttering to myself as I acted out the scenes alone.
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