I have a memory of those days that had been submerged for a long time but has recently broken through the surface. I once followed my mother to the Changgyeongwon Garden and met a stranger there with whom we spent a sunny afternoon. My mother had put on a pretty Western dress and scrubbed me clean and given me a neat change of clothing. The man and I bought a bag of feed for the fish, and we sat by a pond and threw the feed to the colorful koi that gathered with their mouths protruding from the water. This memory would come back to me from time to time like a wordless scene from a movie before being forgotten again. I remembered this scene when, as an adult, I read my mother’s notebooks and realized that this man was my mother’s first love, the student who had drunk from the bowl at the bok character for “good fortune.”
There were other children my age in the neighborhood; they were either the poor children who were born there or the offspring of laborers who lived in the factory housing across the street. The children of the funeral bier house were known for being little troublemakers. The eldest was three or four years older than me, the middle son was my age, and there was a girl who was five. The girl always had a sty in her eye. She couldn’t look directly at people but had to glance at them sidelong, prompting my sisters, who didn’t know her real name, to call her “Lobster.”
The funeral bier house employed a number of craftspeople, including one who made all of the wooden decorations that went onto the biers and another who painted them with intricate and colorful patterns. Whenever a funeral was held, they’d get drunk and have screaming fights late into the night, making my mother shake her head and say, “This is a bad neighborhood.” Father tried to reassure her, arguing it wasn’t bad enough to force a move elsewhere.
The poor children had their own games. For instance, if they found a straw effigy in an irrigation ditch, they’d hitch one leg up, stand on their toes, and spit three times to inoculate themselves before removing the money or food from inside. It was all strange to me, so I hopped on one foot and spat as they did, but I couldn’t bring myself to put my hand into the straw dolls to take out the money and food. Around then it was common to see effigies tossed into the irrigation ditches or the gutter after a shaman gut ritual, along with pieces of rice cake or other food.
The children of the funeral bier house were more brazen than most. One time, the boy who was the same age as me took me into an outhouse and touched my crotch, made me take out my penis, and put his against mine. He started rubbing them together. When I asked him what he was doing, he said it was what grown-ups did. He sometimes did the same thing to his sister. I was scared and felt like I was doing something wrong, so I went home and hid inside the closet for a long time.
Once the war had come and gone, the neighborhood became vibrant with more houses being built and children moving in. It was exciting to explore strange new worlds with them, rather than stay at home or go to church. Outside was a whole unknown universe that made my heart beat fast, as if something great was about to happen.
The new road in front of my house toward Dangsan-dong led to more factories, the largest of which was the Yeongdeungpo railway engineering works. It had the most laborers. The Gyeongin, Gyeongbu, and Honam Lines split into their respective destinations from Yeongdeungpo Station, and the railway ran past the center of the neighborhood and into the factory area, with the engineering works where they maintained the trains somewhere in the middle. This was the second largest of its kind after the one in the Yongsan district. Whenever we heard the sound of exhausted trains creeping and sighing into their berths, my mother said it reminded her of Manchuria. At dawn we heard bicycle bells and the footsteps of workers going to work; by dusk the streets were filled again with workers leaving, the sound of metal chopsticks rattling in the empty tin lunchboxes that hung from their handlebars.
That part of the city maintained how it looked after the armistice and all through the years of modernization and military dictatorship. The trees along the avenues grew tall but gaunt, their leaves covered with thick dust. The cinder blocks in their faded camouflage added to the desolate atmosphere, the same old patches of paint over obscured, scrawled slogans. The tiled hanok roofs still looked as if they had been crushed, and the empty alleys and the blackness of the dirt remained as they had always been.
In a neglected and crumbling lot that had once been factories, weeds grew as tall as children and rotting water pooled in ditches, sometimes giving off green foam. But the stars at night were much clearer and cleaner than they are now, and the sunsets were beautiful. The weeds were dotted with dark berries like black pearls; two cupped palms’ worth of them filled the mouth with sweetness like a blessing. All the children used this lot as a playground, where praying mantises and band-winged grasshoppers would befriend more familiar insects, like mole crickets or earwigs.
There seem to have been frequent clashes at the 38th parallel the year before I entered school. I knew all the words to the song “The ten human bullet warriors” that my sisters learned in class. There were truckloads of sand at the construction site where they were building an elementary school, and this became a playground for the neighborhood children. I followed around the older boys who split into teams to play capture the flag. The little ones like me were too young to be soldiers, so we sat on the side and watched over the piles of the older boys’ coats and shoes. Military trucks carried loads of soldiers past our neighborhood every day, heading for the western front. We heard the shout of marching songs as the trucks passed at night: Before us lies the bright road, a gun in one hand and love in the other, the wide, wide heart of man has forsworn his youth and fears nothing …
We learned these songs and sang them at the top of our lungs without knowing what they meant. My sisters, playing with a Chinese jump rope or tossing ojami balls (fabric pouches filled with grain), often chanted Japanese songs they didn’t understand—songs like the legend of Momotarō, or how a great man named Ninomiya used to sell straw sandals as a child. We kept on learning and forgetting songs whose meanings escaped us, every time the world changed.
~
I was finally old enough for school. One cold spring day in 1950, Mother brought home a leather satchel and school supplies I’d never seen before, like notebooks, a pencil case, pencils, and crayons. Father sharpened my pencils for me and laid them side by side in the pencil case.
On the first day of school, I put on a woolen sailor shirt, a pair of shorts, and white socks, and slung the leather satchel over my shoulders. I looked like the son of a rich family. I had always hated wearing new clothes my mother made for me, because then I was forbidden to roll around on the ground or play in the dirt. Mother was angry if I got new clothes dirty. I wore altered shirts that used to be my sisters’ or my mother’s or made from worsted fabric, along with shorts and long socks, and I hated how I was always dressed like a girl. Having my hair grow from its short buzz and getting it parted with a comb made me look just like my sisters when they were younger.
I kept fighting with my mother about my appearance even as I reached my teens. She would say, “Looks matter,” and I would retort that comfort mattered more. She must have wanted to assert her modern education and middle-class values, having been forced to move to a new milieu.
School was my first experience of things that were “not me.” I was assigned to a teacher and her class at the playground. My teacher was a tall, pale woman in her late twenties, probably a newlywed. Everyone shouted along to her whistle—one, two, three. As I took my seat in the classroom, I was swept up in the noise of other children. I was only used to my own face, having looked at it in a mirror. Everyone else was so strange, their voices so different, and nobody sat still. One child was already crying for his mother, others were hitting each other and fighting, and another was grabbing other children’s things. I plugged my ears with my fingers. But the sight of children moving and crying without a sound was even stranger. I repeatedly plugged and unplugged my ears. The resulting ringing was like the hum
of machines.
I told my mother I hated school as soon as I got home. When she asked why, I replied, “There are too many children I don’t know.”
“You’ll be friends with all of them soon. School is not just for studying, it’s also for making friends.”
It had been three or four months since I’d started school. One day, I heard loud claps of thunder, and the mood among the adults turned tense. When I got to school, our teacher ordered us to return home. I had reached the front of Yeongdeungpo Station when the crowd suddenly began to scatter, sirens wailing from the nearby fire station. Sirens sounded every noon and midnight in those days, but this time they were accompanied by the roar of propeller planes. A man on a bicycle stopped underneath a tree and gestured at me, saying “Child, come here and hide or you’ll get shot!”
Not knowing what else to do, I ran and stood with him beneath the tree. Planes swooped down with a clamor like bamboo poles banging on a hardwood floor. When the noise receded, people quickly moved along under cover of the canopies of the storefronts that lined the street. I ran past the rotary to home. My sisters said they had heard in school that war had broken out. Airplanes from the North had bombed Yoeuido and fired machine guns. We didn’t have to go to school anymore. The neighborhood kids said they’d climbed the embankment of the tributary and seen twin-prop Australian planes dogfighting with Northern ones.
A stream of refugees began to flow past our house. My father stopped one to question him and was told they were from the northern part of Gyeonggi Province and had just crossed the river. Truckloads of soldiers moved in the opposite direction. When evening descended, we anxiously listened to sporadic cannon blasts, sounding like the portents of a storm.
I’m not sure whether we joined the stream before or after Seoul was taken. All I remember is that one night we heard a series of blasts that shook the earth. It turned out to be the bombing of the Han River Bridge. All the cars hastening southward fell into the water, and many pedestrians also died in this brutal way.
The Rhee Syngman administration continued to broadcast a recording on a loop that proclaimed, “We shall guard Seoul to the end, our citizens must not panic,” while anyone with a modicum of political connection had long fled further south. Despite there still being soldiers who had not retreated from the North, the South Korean government had bombed the Han River Bridge to keep Northern troops out. When the mood of the people turned against the Rhee administration, some colonel or other took the blame and was executed by firing squad.
Our family left the house one early, rainy morning. This was after my younger aunt had already gone south to Daejeon, where my uncle knew someone. I packed my books and notebook into my satchel, but my mother had to convince me to leave it behind. We got together with the family of a distant relative of my father, his cousin’s child, whom we referred to as Haeju Aunt. Together we went past the station where a few train cars stood empty on the tracks, and began walking toward Incheon. I believe the plan was to catch a boat. Haeju Aunt’s family had fled Haeju to Incheon on a fishing boat. They say this method is why, to this day, there are so many people from North Korea’s nearby Hwanghae Province living in South Korea’s Incheon.
Our progress was slow because we were mostly women and children. On the way, we met with other refugees coming from Incheon, and upon hearing what was going on, we had to turn back. It was rumored that North Korean troops were already there. Our hesitation had resulted in our being stuck between the front lines of the North and South Korean forces.
The sun had set when we reached Oryu-dong in southwestern Seoul. Haeju Aunt’s husband went to a farmhouse that was visible from the main road and managed to buy us a night of shelter. We sat in a room with straw mats, facing each other as we ate our dinner by the bright light of the petroleum lamp. The gochujang stew made with tiny whole potatoes with their skin still on was delicious. Our family spent the night crouching in the dark, and all night we heard the sound of cars driving past outside.
The next day, I was outside by the road with my mother, watching military trucks go by. The driver and ranking officer sat in the front and the soldiers in the back, a couple of men with rifles at the ready sitting at the head of the soldiers’ rows. They were all armed to the teeth and had grass and leaves for camouflage stuck to their helmets. A passing jeep stopped in front of us to ask my mother something. The ranking officer gave me a bag of army biscuits before going on his way. He had told my mother that the Noryangjin neighborhood was the front line and that we should retreat south toward the city of Suwon. But the adults seemed to have given up on fleeing and were planning to return to Yeongdeungpo, reentering the district once the two front lines crossed each other. Planes flew overhead, and the sound of guns and bombs was incessant. We decided to crawl into an irrigation tunnel with another family that we’d met on the way and spend the night there. The tunnel had been dug to let out water during the rainy season and was big enough for farmers to pass through. We spent two nights in that tunnel.
Soldiers found us at our first dawn there. It was too dark to see whether they were Northern or Southern; they shone a flashlight into each of our faces and disappeared. Another group of soldiers appeared early the next day. They were probably police or reconnaissance teams, whether from the North or South we still couldn’t tell. We heard hours of gun fighting that night at close proximity. I was young, and the shock of what happened next would continue to haunt my dreams as an adult. The soldiers shone a flashlight into the tunnel again and gestured for us to come out. My father carried me on his back. My mother gripped my sisters’ wrists and stuck close by my father. I had my head against Father’s back and could hear him breathing loudly.
The soldier who seemed to be in charge stepped forward. “Who do you follow? Dr. Rhee Syngman or General Kim Il-sung?”
No one dared to answer at first, but then someone said it was General Kim. That person was quickly taken away into the dark by another soldier, and we were summoned to answer again. When we remained silent, the commanding officer barked, “Shoot them all!” and we heard the sound of guns reloading.
My father spoke up then. Mother repeated his words so many times later on, I can hear them to this day. “We are only peasants and know nothing of politics. Teach us which side we should follow.”
It worked like magic. The soldier delivered a long speech, told us to keep hiding where we were, and the men scattered into the night when the sound of gunshots broke out nearby.
We hunkered down again inside the tunnel. There were a few other children aside from us, but strangely enough, none of us cried or whined. Mother told me later on that although the soldiers were dressed in South Korean uniforms, they were doubtless North Korean reconnaissance troops in disguise, as the man who had said he supported General Kim was found the next morning having breakfast at a nearby farmhouse. It was still early in the Korean War, and even the most excited of soldiers did not dare harm the peasantry.
We returned home a long time after the front lines moved south. On our way back, while approaching a bridge in Guro-dong, where you could see the railway cross the Siheung River and curve toward Suwon, I saw a man die for the first time—and at close proximity, no less. We were walking toward the bridge when someone grabbed my wrist. I looked up to see a man in padded cotton trousers. My mother had to help me get away from him.
“What a mess your clothes are!” she exclaimed, as she pretended to hoist up my trousers while the man moved safely past. Right ahead was a North Korean checkpoint where people coming from the direction of Incheon were being interrogated. The soldiers wore sand-colored uniforms with wide epaulets and bore rifles punched with holes along the barrel.
We were filing by in obedient lines when we heard a shout up ahead, and in a split second, someone was running down to the irrigation ditch. Everyone swiveled in surprise, and I saw it was the man who had grabbed my wrist. He jumped into the green rice paddy, and two soldiers standing side by side on the dike fired off sev
eral shots. The man fell into the rice paddy and did not get up. Later, my mother said he had been ordered to lower his trousers and that he had probably been wearing a Southern army uniform underneath.
We crossed the bridge and entered the factory zone where we saw the devastation left behind by the bombardment: exposed steel bars twisted like human hair, walls riddled with bullet holes, shattered windows, and a collapsed roof that still gave off a plume of smoke. By the side of the road was a damaged truck. A tank lay absurdly on its side, its long cannon bent. On the tank was a black lump of a human body, clothes burnt off and limbs barely recognizable. Behind this was another object that looked similar. Mother covered her mouth with a handkerchief and pushed me forward, saying: “Only look forward, just follow your sisters,” but I kept looking back.
My feelings as we returned home that day overlap in my memory with how I felt when we returned home after our second retreat from Seoul. I’d kept a diary during the second retreat, and I followed my mother’s suggestion to rewrite that day’s entry into an essay titled “The day we returned home,” which won me a commendation in a national elementary school writing contest. The shattered windows and the shards, the bedrooms with the footprints of people who had broken in and made a mess of our possessions, the torn wallpaper drooping from the ceiling, the floors soaked from the rain, the earwigs and millipedes that dared to crawl into the house now, the spiderwebs in every corner, even the silly graffiti I’d secretly drawn—everything looked abandoned and pitiful.
The Prisoner Page 29
