The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  ~

  One rainy morning, I woke to find my father staring out at the street. He stood where we would later install a floor to expand our house, but at the time it was just dirt with a roof over it. The building had once been a bicycle shop; the earth was black and often yielded rusty nails and bits of metal. This was the space where my father, along with a cobbler he had hired, made shoes to sell to stores. Next to the piles of shoes and leather pieces and shoe trees was a row of windows where he would often stand and watch the rainwater flow over the street, or observe what was happening in the neighborhood.

  A formation of soldiers was marching toward us. They each carried Soviet rifles as long as they were tall or submachine guns with perforated barrels. The officers wore long trousers and sand-colored leather boots and sported pistols at the hip. There were female soldiers with bobbed hair and a boy who was so short and young-looking that he reminded me of one of the older kids in my neighborhood. These North Korean soldiers marched past our house for a long time. A group of children and I ventured as far as the train station and saw even more soldiers and tanks from up close. The soldiers in the tanks invited us in one by one and showed us the interior of the tanks and gave us army biscuits.

  The rice mill woman was named the new neighborhood captain. She was fat and had a perpetual, disarming smile. She sought out my mother, saying the neighborhood needed someone with an education to be her assistant. Mother reluctantly accepted the position but on condition that it was only for a month, and indeed she resigned a month later. She was pregnant at the time and getting closer to her due date. In fact, it was thanks to her obvious pregnancy that my father was safe from harassment the whole time we fled from Seoul.

  The American air raids occurred more and more frequently, and Yeongdeungpo, an industrial zone, was hit especially hard. Whenever the bombing started, it was as if the explosions were going off right next to me. Father would make my sisters sit in a corner and throw a thick winter blanket over them, while Mother pushed me underneath her Singer sewing machine.

  One time, after Seoul was retaken, a fire broke out at an ammunition depot nearby. My mother and sisters were ironing the old-fashioned way, using heated coals stuffed into the cover of an old blanket, when we heard a thud, and a lump of metal crashed through the roof and landed in the middle of the spread fabric. It was long like a sweet potato and had sharp sides like a knife. My parents said it was probably shrapnel from a bomb.

  Father was a survivor. His wisdom helped us survive in the midst of strife. Even during the war, we almost never went without a meal or came too close to death. But perhaps the effort to keep his wife and children alive through the long years after leaving Manchuria was too much in the end. Because just a few years into the armistice, he would suddenly sicken and die.

  There was great pressure on the people of our neighborhood for volunteer labor. Many things needed to be done, such as restoring bombed roads and railroads and putting out fires that still burned from the previous night’s bombing. Mother took me to one of these initiatives in Yoeuido once. She said Father was in the country trying to get us food and so she’d stepped up on her own to help. We saw many people from our neighborhood, including the fat captain woman. She told my visibly pregnant mother and me to go sit in the shade of the trees with the food vendors, who peddled corn, sweet potatoes, and bran cakes. One old woman had brought a load of melons, and the sweet smell of this fruit was enough to drive both of us crazy. I begged my mother to buy us one, but she would only open her eyes wide and make a scary face at me. Subsequently she would reproach me for this incident. “How foolishly insensitive you were, to think of eating melons in the cool shade while everyone else sweated in the sun carrying rocks and soil!”

  After some discussion, my mother and father decided to move us to “Gwengmei” for a while. This was what is now called Gwangmyeong, but Seoul slang at the time tended to soften the “uh” and “ah” sounds. Still later we moved into temporary lodgings in “Naggul,” on the road to Mount Gwanak. This turned out to be Nangok, near Sillim-dong.

  Our new place was like somewhere a student would play hooky, like a watermill or the market clearing on the way to school. We stayed in our Yeongdeungpo house for a bit, letting people see that we were there, and then after an appropriate amount of time we moved to the little house in Gwengmei. Once there we acted like refugees from the city for about ten days, returning to the Yeongdeungpo house before they got too used to us being there. This enabled us to keep to ourselves in both places. It was probably part of Father’s survival plan.

  I’m not sure which part of Gwengmei we were in. It was an utter backwater. A clear stream flowed through it, and the cluster of houses was surrounded by rice paddies. In one of those houses, we rented a room that hadn’t been used in a long time. We stayed in the cowshed until Father and the landlord were done putting down new flagstones and redoing the floor with a mixture of dirt and straw. The cows had disappeared during the chaos of war. We swept it clean with a large broom and put down a mat on the floor, but the stench of cow dung was incredible. After a few nights’ sleeping there, though, it smelled downright savory. We nailed a mosquito net to the wall and pillars and slept side by side.

  There wasn’t much to do for food in the city, other than my parents taking turns to go out and trade their belongings. The shoes we had sold in our store must have been useful for bartering, and the sewing machine, bicycle, clothes, and jewels would have been the last to be traded away. When the wave of refugees reached far down south, my father ended up converting all of our gold into cash and rented a truck so he could sell things to them.

  I played in the stream nearby with the village children, catching little fish and frogs. I learned how to rip the legs off frogs and cook them using a branch as a skewer. In the summer the village children ran around naked except for cotton pants held up with elastic bands. Of course, my mother was not one to tolerate this. She never allowed me to leave the house without a shirt on.

  There was a girl next door who caught my eye. She seemed to have come from the city; I’ve forgotten her name. Her parents had left her and her younger brother with her grandmother. The house had a melon field, and as summer deepened, the grandmother spread a mat in front of her house and sold melons and steamed corn.

  My mother took me and my sisters to buy some melons one evening. That’s when I met the little girl, sitting next to her grandmother. She wore a dress, like my sisters, instead of black linen bloomers and little rubber shoes. The grandmother told stories about her life spent following her late miner husband in the mountains of Hamgyeong and Pyeongan Province, and my mother talked about Manchuria. They became close, and we children would play together into the night on a mat near the mosquito fire in the grandmother’s backyard. Amid the scent of burning mugwort, the night sky with its flood of stars seemed to land very gently on my head. We lay on our backs and looked for the Big Dipper and the trails of comets.

  My friend once called me over when I was playing hide-and-seek with the other children. She took out what she was hiding in the folds of her skirt. It was a large piece of scorched rice from the bottom of the rice pot. Not the hard kind, but the toasted kind with some unburnt rice still stuck to one side, round from the curve of the pot. The exact kind of treat that every child likes, the kind where you bite down into both soft rice and crisp crust. As I ate it, my heart beat fast and I felt a bit shy. I had a naughty feeling of doing something illicit.

  There were red dragonflies in the air, so it must have been the end of August. We’d been going back and forth between Yeongdeungpo and Gwengmei when my mother sat down in the middle of the road one day and murmured, “If only I had some cold noodles …” But my father could not do anything for his pregnant wife.

  One day, we came to Gwengmei to find the mood had changed. Young men wearing armbands were walking about, and the girl I knew now kept herself at home with her brother. We spent a few days in Gwengmei and returned home, never to go th
ere again.

  The fighting worsened a little after our return to Yeongdeungpo. Every day, bombers and fighter planes swooped in like wasps to bombard downtown Seoul across the river. Father heard from somewhere that the Americans had landed at Incheon. All night we heard the sound of nearby cannon and the whistling of bombs flying overhead. The next day, Father took us out on the road again. We had reached the rotary when we saw a camouflaged North Korean army truck on fire, and a completely black fighter plane called a Grumman flying low in the sky. Father bowed low by instinct and kept pushing me on in front of him. A North Korean soldier stood underneath the tree in front of the photography studio, firing at the fighter plane.

  Our family reached the new road going to Suwon. Near Seoul Usin Elementary School, on a railway bridge, was a North Korean fort, a wall of sandbags guarded by a machine gun. I heard my father urgently say to my mother, “We have to get out of here, this is an ammunition depot. The planes will be attacking it soon.”

  We rushed across the street, and sure enough, as we climbed a hill, we saw the planes bomb the fort. We were used to the sound of machine guns from the fighter planes, and the rockets might as well have been farting noises to us. A ball of fire drew an arc in the air and exploded with a flash of light. My sisters, used to it now, didn’t bother to block their ears, only cringing at the explosion.

  The “Naggul” house was very shabby, a thatched-roof hut surrounded by a bush clover fence. There was a low hill behind it. A young farming couple lived there with their newborn, and the wife’s face was dark from the sun. There was a child about my age living next door. It was chestnut season, and I did what the child did and got a long stick to knock chestnuts off their branches. We peeled the still unripe husks with our shoes, revealing the little chestnuts with their white fuzz inside. Scraping off the bitter skin with our teeth, we finally reached the flesh inside, tasting of raw sweet potato. As we knocked the chestnuts off the branches, we stopped for long moments to stare at the planes flying overhead on their way to bomb the city.

  The North Korean army had split up, and their troops came through Naggul to cross the hill behind the village. They sometimes entered the village to ask for a drink of water before going on their way. Their uniforms were ragged and soaked in sweat. Some of the recruits were very young, and the sight of teenage girl soldiers made my mother discreetly wipe away tears. Once a girl and boy soldier, who looked to be about high school age, asked for water. Mother gave them the sweet potatoes she had been steaming in the rice pot instead. They scarfed them down in a hurry. Mother patted the girl’s back, telling her to take the time to chew, and in a South Jeolla accent they told her without prompting that they were brother and sister. Whenever my mother reminisced about this moment, she would add, “How their mother must have worried about them!”

  Mother’s fearless generosity would get my father into trouble. This was still early on, and some North Korean troops that had been marching by happened to come to our house. Their commanding officer singled out our family and a few other households across the street and offered us provisions in exchange for cooking for them. An entire division’s worth of soldiers seemed to have been allotted to us alone. They never dared enter the house itself, and instead sat talking and smoking in the shade of the tree of heaven out front, or on the edge of our store when the tall doors were open. An older soldier who was probably a petty officer always seemed happy to see me and reached into the pouch on his shoulder to give me a handful of stir-fried beans. He even rubbed them between his hands and blew on them to unpeel them. Perhaps I reminded him of his own son, for he wouldn’t leave my side and kept annoying me with questions like how old was I, what was my name, what grade was I in, did I know the words to “The song of the general” or “The morning shall shine.”

  With the help of two neighborhood women, my mother placed rocks in the yard to make a firepit and set the iron rice pot over it to make rice for all the soldiers. All we had for side dishes were soybean paste stew made with greens and some kimchi we’d obtained from our neighbors, but they ate their fill. Breaking the silence of the meal, a young soldier asked my mother where she was from. My mother, somewhat tense, asked him why he wanted to know.

  “Well, ma’am,” he said in a Northern drawl, “you sound like you might be from Pyongan Province, is that right?”

  Mother reluctantly admitted she was from the city of Pyongyang.

  “Then why do you live here?”

  Not missing a beat, she replied, “I see that your own mother never married?”

  The soldiers roared with laughter.

  ~

  We returned to Yeongdeungpo after the front lines had swept over Seoul, and the Americans that had landed in Incheon had crossed the Han River at many points. There were still buildings on fire and many fallen telegraph poles, their lines stretched to the ground. For days American trucks and tanks and amphibian vehicles passed our house.

  Mother learned that the rice mill woman and neighborhood captain had been arrested by the security forces, and that the carpenter had killed several people before he fled to the North.

  The carpenter’s shop was across the street from us. It was always noisy with the sound of electric saws and trucks arriving with wood. There was a child my age there, who was very clever, and spoke with a Gyeongsang accent. When we needed sticks to play soldiers with, he would let us pick whatever we wanted. We made wooden swords and spears out of them. His father and an uncle had been stationed at a naval shipyard and were now community leaders, so we called him “the leader’s son.”

  Their house was abandoned after the retaking of Seoul. According to my mother, the carpenter had gone around executing people when the North Korean retreat seemed imminent. Mother had once gone to Yeongdeungpo Market and glimpsed him from afar as he loitered around the linen shops. His expression was so fearsome that she had almost fainted next to the fried foods stall. “People did all sorts of terrible things whenever either side invaded or retreated,” she would say. “It takes two hands to clap and make a sound.”

  When the police returned to Seoul, many people in our neighborhood and factories were arrested. My father was briefly taken into the police station across the street for questioning when they learned we had once fed a group of North Korean soldiers. My pregnant mother paced for half an hour before going in there herself and arguing with the police, who subsequently released my father after taking a statement. Mother told them that our family had deliberately left Pyongyang and crossed the 38th parallel because we hated the North so much. She said the North Korean soldiers had offered us rice in exchange for cooking it, that she had to accept if she was to feed her children in the middle of a war, and what person in their right mind could say no to men with guns?

  According to many postwar memoirs and autobiographies, Seoul had divided into those who crossed the Han River and fled and those who had to stay behind. But the ones who fled, and bombed the Han River Bridge behind them, came back after the retaking of Seoul and accused those who had been stranded of being traitors. It was a time that drove home the fact that, to live in the divided South, one had to be able to express one’s reasons for choosing a side and to be able to loudly condemn the other.

  The chaos continued, but our neighborhood went on as usual, and as before the war, the children called each other out to play. There were piles of abandoned ammunition and shell casings lying about in bombed-out buildings and empty lots. The children would open the bullet casing, take out the bullets, and gather the gunpowder inside the casing. The 50 mm machine-gun bullets were the most popular; they were about as thick as a small turnip. Putting in a wick and some petrol and placing a can over it made for a very handy lamp. The machine-gun bullet casings were filled with gunpowder that was like the lead inside thick pencils. The children cut pipes and fastened wooden handles to make guns.

  There were many accidents. One intrepid child tried to take apart a trench mortar by knocking it with a rock and went flying, along
with all the children around him. I also experimented by punching a hole in the bottom of a tin pail, putting some gunpowder into it, and lighting the bottom—I almost fainted when the pail exploded into the air with a loud bang. For a while I thought my eardrums had burst. Playing at war was very different from when we played capture the flag on a pile of sand. Finally, the adults took action, and the police went around and confiscated all the explosives.

  The schools were not open yet, and the South Korean army and allies had reached the Amlok River on the northern border of North Korea, but as the weather turned cold, we heard some depressing news. The Chinese had entered the battle on the North Korean side, and the Allies—South Korean, American, and United Nations forces—were in retreat.

  One cold day in December of 1950, our family were once again refugees on the road south. My father had gone to the train station for the past few days to look into transportation. My mother made me wear a thick coat, balaclava, and large women’s shoes that came up to my ankles. My feet couldn’t feel a thing through the three pairs of socks I wore. Mother and Father both wore simple clothing and carried suitcases. The quilts and other household items were moved for us by a man with a wheelbarrow. The sun hadn’t risen yet. Everything around the market rotary was still dark. Footprints in the ice made the roads bumpy. Shards of frozen mud splintered beneath the hard soles of my shoes.

  As early as it was, Father was rushing our departure because of what we’d experienced last time. He figured it would be better to get a head start on going somewhere safer and finding a living. We had spent days preparing, as we dug a hole in the corner of our courtyard and buried our more precious belongings, but I had no idea what was going on. The passenger trains at the time had either been destroyed or were being used to transport troops, with refugees and supplies now being moved on freight trains.