The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  Why is it that fasting makes the past more vivid? Having three meals a day creates clear demarcations of time and brings one back to the world of the fully alive. Without regular meals, the body leaves the present. Memories burdened by excess activity in the brain cells are slowly freed, their forms becoming clearer in the mind’s eye. But of all those memories, I could summon only the ones that I thought were insignificant and therefore had forgotten, or else incidents where I’d done something wrong.

  At two weeks of my hunger strike, the infirmary sends someone every day to measure my blood pressure, which is, of course, much lower than normal. Water tastes extremely good. I grow a beard and my skin becomes rough, but my eyes seem clearer and brighter.

  The guards take turns leaving things like apples, and one holds out a thermos full of bean paste soup, bidding me to smell it. Right before afternoon lockdown, I go to the cell block office and return the food untouched. They threaten to force-feed me, and I retaliate by saying I will publicly disclose such an act as torture.

  Eighteen days in, we come to not quite a victory but a compromise of sorts. But this is the final test. If I want them to accept my terms, I must make it clear that I will continue with the strike until my last breath. And yet, the thought that there are only two or three days left to go makes me impatient, the urge to get this over with rising from the pit of my stomach, making this last hurdle a truly high one to clear. Time suddenly stops then. The days become endless and the night seems to last forever.

  The cold forces your body to work harder, and you risk frostbite on your hands, ears, or toes where they are exposed to the cement walls. There’s a numbness at first, followed by pain and itching. I discover my toes have frozen stiff when I take my socks off. I rub my hands together to warm them and rub my toes one by one. I stroke my ears, up and down, countless times. Sleeping in a fetal position all night stiffens my body so much that I can’t easily uncurl myself in the morning. Only when I slowly jump up and down for an hour in front of the steel door do my joints recover from their stiffness.

  But the hunger strike isn’t over just because your demands have been met. After having endured it for over three weeks, now comes the battle against yourself. This is the hardest part of fasting: recovery. The kitchen soji delivers thin rice gruel twice a day on orders of the infirmary. I also get some soybean paste broth with two leaves of lettuce floating in it. How fragrant the smell of rice and soybean paste! All my past memories disappear and there is only the present. A present filled with the aroma and taste of food. I write down a list of things I’d like to eat and follow the cooking instructions for them in my mind. I am in the process of reentering the world of the living. The fast has lasted for about three weeks, which means I’ll need about ten days to recover.

  Once recovery is over and I return to the usual prison routine, my appetite returns to normal and I still feel hungry after every meal. I’ve spent the coldest month here passing from hungry to freezing and back again, which makes my body think it is in danger. I’ve lost seven or eight kilos and feel like a deflated balloon. Lunar New Year approaches, a time when the saltiest of last year’s kimchi is bottoming out.

  At feeding time, I take out my white plastic rice bowl, stew bowl, side dish bowl, and the sleek wooden spoon and chopsticks that I asked the carpentry inmates to make for me, and I sit in wait by the food hole. The cart comes, the food hole opens, and the steaming rice and stew and side dishes are served. There’s nothing more to come, but I don’t close the food hole right away, waiting a moment just in case. Then, I start eating. I sit with my face to the wall and shove a spoonful in my mouth, chewing without a thought in my mind. As a courtesy, the guard on shift puts on some music. It’s just an old cassette player on the desk that plays the same tracks over and over again, but no one complains. Because no one can hear it. I hear only a low murmur and the sound of eating from the other cells. It’s a sacred moment, as in a house of prayer.

  One snowy evening, I was eating my bowl of rice mixed with lukewarm stew when I suddenly gasped and began to cry. What did I see? A calendar with all the months printed on one page hung on the wall in front of me, the kind distributed by religious organizations to the prisoners. Under the picture of a sheep-herding Jesus with a halo and staff were the words: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.”

  What made me sob was not the words or the picture but the countless X-marks on the calendar. The days I had spent in there was time that had no meaning. There were so many crossed-out days where I had struggled with all my might to make something happen, to protect something at all costs. But what had I really managed to protect? A shred of meat in our stew, a little bit more time for exercise, loosening the censorship of our letters, allowing forbidden books to be checked out without special permission, demanding that officers punish a guard for assault, putting on a show of resistance every holiday or memorial day—all of these gains were struggles to hold on to the least of what made me myself. But even these new conditions, procured sometimes through hunger strikes, would fall away and things would return to what they used to be each time the seasons, and the people of the prison, changed.

  9

  Lost

  1956–66

  Where did I get my tendency to distance myself from other people and things in general? I was capable of showing different versions of myself to different people, much like the Monkey King, who can pluck a few hairs from his sideburns and blow on them to create doppelgängers of himself. As a child, I’d enjoyed playing alone, whispering characters into life and dressing up in order to see new people reflected in the mirror. I read all sorts of books on the sly while keeping my impressions to myself. I spent a lot of time alone because I didn’t feel as if anyone in the house shared my interests—not my mother, my two older sisters, or my much younger brother.

  The Gyeongsang Province kids used to tease me with a sort of rhyming curse, “Seoulnaegi damanaegi,” which literally meant “city slicker onion,” but referred to the fact that I was a lazy fool whom they could not figure out, no matter how they peeled at my layers. I still remember an upperclassman in middle school named Shin Wu-seok, whose eyes flashed as he hissed, bewilderingly, “You can’t fool me, you’re an Eleven-Faced Guanyin.” But I was neither an onion nor a Guanyin. Just a coward who’d realized he could never truly connect with anyone. The me that I showed to the world was whoever I thought the other person wanted to see. And sometimes I surprised them by showing the opposite of what they wanted. It was, in a sense, my way of avoiding hurt.

  One day at school, I was informed that my father had passed away. I left class early, and as my train crossed the Han River, I burst into tears. My poor father … He never had managed to rebuild the nest egg that was stolen from us before the war, but he did leave enough for all four of us to continue our studies. He must have exhausted himself, never letting on to anyone, in the effort to keep us fed and alive during the war years. I still remember the tears in his eyes when we stood in the middle school sports field and they announced my school admission. It was for him, perhaps, a moment where self-pity and the anxieties of his responsibilities toward his family collided.

  The first thing I felt in that exclusive Seoul school was the self-consciousness of having come from the margins, at least in terms of education. The boys enrolled there had all come from top schools in Seoul and were better at their studies than I was, clever as hell and good-looking to boot. I felt intimidated throughout the first semester, and my grades confirmed my mediocrity—I’d been buried in the middle of the class rankings, invisible and insignificant. I became the class clown around this time. I made my classmates laugh and practiced making funny faces in the mirror. Anytime I was absent from class, my friends would say to me the day after, “Class was boring without you.”

  But the class clown is always in a precarious position. If he stops working on his act, he may find he’s become a
tedious has-been overnight. He might win a sympathy laugh or two, but the class clown isn’t thought of as important. His loneliness is frequently ignored.

  When my voice began to change, I yearned to become a real man. This longing also came from not wanting to be the child of a widow—I wanted to be my father’s son. A male adult with a strong sense of self who didn’t show others what he thought or felt, someone who, depending on the listener, might utter a few effective words, but no more.

  As the chaos of postwar reconstruction began to abate somewhat, the availability of book sets and pocket editions soared. I collected books instead of borrowing them from the market shelf. There were many translated world literature series, as well as various nonfiction classics of Western and Eastern philosophy. I also began reading magazines.

  Around the end of the year, stationery stores would sell thick daily planners with childish inspirational quotes at the bottom of each page. I used those to jot down short thoughts or poems. But I never showed my writing to anyone. The schools were enforcing a one-student, one-talent educational program where you could enroll in a special class during special activities hour, but I never joined the literary club and instead chose swimming or water polo. I never went within arm’s length of the literary club in high school either, opting for the hiking club. I just felt that the more you cared about something, the more you needed to keep a certain distance from it. More than anything else, the thought of gazing at the moon or a flower and striking a pose as I held my pen aloft, poised to write, made my flesh crawl. Later, when I entered the real world, this developed into a yearning for the act of writing and the act of living to become one and the same.

  I wasn’t naturally antisocial. Student life, from the middle-school entrance track in the sixth grade through all three years of middle school, consisted of taking monthly exams to compete for a higher class ranking. On top of which I was forced to wear a Japanese-era school uniform and cap over my hair, shorn to a regulation stubble, and every morning we were required to meet with the upperclassmen prefects and disciplinary teacher for instruction. We had to do inspection parades in military formation as part of the Korean National Defense Student Defense Corps every Monday.

  One evening during the second year, my monthly exam ranking was so bad that my mother demanded I go back to school that very minute to write down the names of all the students above me. “You seem to have no idea how badly you’re doing!”

  It was already dark outside. I was starving, exhausted from the hour-long commute home, and dying to lie down for a moment. Returning to school at that hour meant multiple bus and tram transfers. The school’s steel gates were closed. The guardhouse light was on, but the injured veteran who was our groundskeeper had gone out on patrol and was nowhere in sight. After staring up at the three-story brick building that loomed like a monster before me, I went to the small shop in front of the school and bought some matches. Whenever I recall that night, I wonder why I thought to buy matches but no candle.

  I slunk along the wall around the school trying to find a good spot to climb over, when I spotted a wheelbarrow leaning up against it; on the other side was the swimming pool. Standing on the wheelbarrow, I managed to hoist myself to the top of the wall, but landed badly on the other side and scraped my palm on the cement. Sucking at the graze as I passed the swimming pool, I pushed at the main door only to find it opened easily. Finally, I stood in front of the results posted by the teachers’ lounge. There was a column of mimeographed names and rankings; I figured my name would be somewhere at the end of that long sheet of paper. Why didn’t it occur to me, like it would have for any sensible kid frustrated at the school’s authorities, to just tear that stupid thing up then and there?

  I took out paper and pencil, struck a match, and read the first names on the list. I managed to scribble them down in the dark, strike another match, and read the next name and rank. Once I got the hang of it, almost burning my fingers several times, I got into a rhythm of memorizing and writing down the names of two students per match.

  “Who’s there!”

  I heard a shout and saw the groundskeeper limping towards me with a flashlight in his hand. He shone the light over me from head to toe, glanced at the rankings list, and said, “What are you doing here?” No wonder he thought something strange was going on: from outside he’d seen a faint light going on and off in the school corridor.

  “I’m writing down the rankings and scores. My mother told me to.”

  He shone his flashlight at the paper in my hand and the name tag on my chest, and sighed.

  “Your mother, she must be some lady. D’you have any idea what time it is?”

  We moved after I passed my high school entrance exams. Mother worked hard to eke out the money that Father had left, trying out businesses and selling things. She was planning to build a new house for us, and go to newly built neighborhoods to buy or rent market lots. Every night she would stay up late drawing plans for the house. It was on a hill and had five whole bedrooms. My sisters had graduated from prestigious all-girls’ high schools and were now attending prestigious universities, almost completely independent as they earned most of their tuition and expenses through part-time work.

  My siblings and I got separate bedrooms once we moved into the new house, and mine was a quiet room at the far end of the hallway. I read many books in those days. I rediscovered the Western classics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and I also began writing fiction. I wrote in a college spiral-bound notebook with a ballpoint pen; sometimes I stayed up all night writing. At first, I got worried about going to school when my window started to grow light, but eventually I just didn’t bother with sleeping at all and would go directly to school. This led to constant dozing off and jolting awake during morning classes. Mother picked up on it eventually and barged in one night, snatching away my notebook. She read some of it and set it on fire in front of me. I watched the notebook burn, feeling my heart about to explode. My mother, widowed early with four children to raise, had set my rebellion ablaze with her expectations of how an eldest son should behave.

  I began going to school with only the books I wanted to read, rather than with my textbooks. During lessons I would secretly read a book spread open on my lap. My grades were a mess at the end of the year, but the first short story I submitted won an award in a student literary journal, and after that I got another story into a college literary magazine. Soon, everyone in the school knew I was a fiction writer. But Mother, far from praising me, became ever more adamant that I should not do the one thing I really wanted to do.

  “Look at your eldest uncle. Even that spineless man can get by, despite how hard things are right now, thanks to his medical skills. Writing is a hobby for children. You’re supposed to drop it when you grow up, or else you’ll end up a loafer, ruin the lives of the people around you, and destroy yourself with drink.”

  The first short story I wrote was titled “Lamenting fate,” about Tae-geum, the girl who had worked for us before leaving to start a family of her own. My next story was called “The day I got out of prison,” based on the story of the older brother of one of the kids in our neighborhood. I wrote it from the point of view of a boy who returns home after being in juvenile detention for some minor offense. I wrote many other short stories and observations of varying lengths in notebooks throughout my high school years.

  As I mentioned before, it was on the swimming and water polo teams in middle school that I made full use of my experience playing in the waters of the Mapo River and its tributaries every summer. I even won awards and set records in national competitions for the hundred-and two-hundred-meter freestyle. There was a swimming pool at school but it wasn’t regulation size for water polo, so I mostly went to the Han River to practice, which involved taking a rented boat out into the middle of the river and floating about for two to three hours. My face and body tanned dark as a seal, and kids started calling me “Mr. Dark.”

  The Literary Club kids
were soft and quiet, like girls, calmer and more mature than I was. Most sports clubs are the same in how they attract students who like getting into trouble. I naturally had more friends among the sporty kids than the literary ones. We went site training at natural pools in Anyang and Gwangnaru, and later went to Mallipo Beach together as well; it was the first time I had gone on a ten-day trip with friends, which made it feel like freedom.

  My high school hiking club, like many others at the time, still followed the Japanese occupation–era tradition of upperclassmen escorting lowerclassmen on rock-and ice-climbing trips. I befriended two very different boys around then. There was a hill to the right of the school gates that we called Oriole Hill. From early spring to early summer, golden orioles would fly from branch to branch and sing their bright and beautiful songs. In May, students brought their lunch boxes to picnic on benches near where the acacias bloomed. After lunch, I would stretch out on the bench and read. One day, a boy in the same year as me came up to my bench and asked what I was reading. It happened to be Albert Camus’s Nuptials. “You mean that guy who hates everyone?” he said, which told me that he’d read Camus, too. I was surprised, but I immediately got what he meant. “Yeah, he’s like that. His short stories, too.”

  He was holding Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a piece of semi-autobiographical fiction. “Westerners must all live alone, or something.”