The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  It took us all day just to reach Daejeon; we jumped off the train as it slowed down coming into the station. The rain that had fallen since the afternoon was still pouring down, so we threw on our army-issue ponchos. The rain soaked into our student caps, making our heads stink with old sweat.

  There weren’t many cars on the road to Gongju. Gwang-gil and I sat on the stoop of an empty farmhouse, with our legs poking out from under the eaves, and ate the injeolmi my mother had made us. Frogs were croaking all around as the rain mercilessly drenched our legs.

  We were lucky to find a place to stay that night at another farmer’s house. It was past dinner time but the farmer’s wife gave us barley rice, radish kimchi, and pickled shrimp to eat. While we poured water into the rice and scarfed it all down, the farmer sat next to us and kept saying things like “That Dr. Rhee Syngman, why did he have to go all the way to Hawaii? It would have been better for him to stay here. Oh well, those young students died, a lot of them, too, I suppose he can’t stay in Korea now.”

  We would continue to bump into older or old men in places such as barbershops or noodle stalls who would bring up politics in a condescending or critical way. They were probably asking us, as young students, what our political leanings were—but we didn’t read the papers too closely either, so we didn’t really have precise opinions. Because there were so few educated people outside the cities in those days, I guess they expected high school students to know more about what was going on in the world than they did.

  I don’t know why we were so passionate about visiting each historic spot. It must have come from some desire to know every corner of the country. We went on to Buyeo, where we climbed Nakhwaam Rock, and on to the battlegrounds that were said to still be haunted by the ghosts of dead soldiers. Then we headed to Nonsan, to see the Eunjin Mireuk statue of Buddha in Gwanchok Temple. The sound of the wind as we sat under the crumbling stone towers of Baekje was so sorrowful and lonely that Gwang-gil and I sat on the grass for two hours without exchanging a word.

  One day we walked for miles down a darkening, deserted national highway where poplar trees flanking the unpaved road looked like brooms planted upside down. Our upper bodies were dry thanks to the ponchos, but our lower bodies were soaked to our underwear. The heel of Gwang-gil’s army boot came off, but he limped on. Whenever we passed the small, poor villages by the road, we felt ready to follow the light of any faint lantern and fall asleep atop a pile of straw.

  We walked and walked and finally reached Jeonju, where we spent the night at the house of one of Gwang-gil’s uncles. The sound of train horns in nearby Jeonju Station was so forlorn that I couldn’t fall asleep.

  Gwang-gil and I dropped by Namwon for Seong-jin to join us. We had already let him know by postcard that we were coming; he said he’d been counting the seconds until we arrived at his grandmother’s house. He grabbed a simple box of water-colors and a few sketchbooks, and we set out. After the somewhat heavy mood of being alone with Gwang-gil, having the hyperactive artist Seong-jin around was like seeing a black-and-white world turn Technicolor.

  Gwang-gil’s Sunchang country home was bubbling over with cousins who had come visiting for the summer. Gwang-gil’s father was the eldest son, but he had left home early on and not been back once since the war. Seeing how he had never managed to land a job and relied completely on his poor wife’s support, I wonder now if Korea’s history of colonialism and war had left him traumatized. I also remember meeting Gwang-gil’s deranged uncle in that house. He grew his hair and beard long, like a wise man of the mountains, and went about the fields and hills in traditional hanbok clothes. He had studied in Japan like Gwanggil’s father, and it was said he had “gone crazy because he was too smart.” He would return home at night, and his perfectly sane and kind wife or sister-in-law would make him dinner; once he’d eaten, he’d go out and sleep in any old place. He had been a partisan in the war, and Gwang-gil’s grandfather had to liquidate a good deal of his fortune in order to save his life. I once jumped out of my skin when he crept up on us and suddenly stroked our hair and cheeks.

  Gwang-gil’s grandfather presided over a household of scores of people, and he spent all day in a corner room of the men’s sarangchae annex looking through old books written in hanja characters. But he was also curious about new things and once asked me to read him one of my short stories, which I did by the light of a lantern. He listened to the end, and said, “Good writing, of course, should be short and clear.”

  One day, the three of us took a fishnet from the house to a tributary stream of the Seomjin River. The water didn’t reach over our knees in most places, but there were spots where it was one gil deep. Only Gwang-gil knew how to throw this particular net, but even he wasn’t very good at it. After a couple of awkward attempts by Gwang-gil, Seong-jin, who was quick on the uptake, took the net and threw it in a wide arc into the air. When we pulled it up, we found three or four sweetfish trapped in it. Seong-jin got better and better at casting the net. Soon, our pail was filled with sweetfish and minnow, and we picked perilla leaves from a nearby field and ate the fish sashimi-style along with garlic, bean paste, and chili paste we’d brought with us. All we had to do was slice off the heads and tails of the sweetfish, wash out the innards, and dip them in the paste.

  Seong-jin groused about drinking, so Gwang-gil went to a little store near the entrance of the village and brought us bottles of soju. We got drunk and jumped into the stream and ran along its sandy banks naked. We saw groups of people passing by across the stream—voters on their way to the July elections after the events of the April Revolution. The entire village and even the neighboring ones immediately began talking about a group of boys running around by the stream, sloshed and naked in broad daylight. Gwang-gil’s uncle heard the gossip, as did Gwang-gil’s grandfather.

  We had passed the long hot summer afternoon and returned to the house for dinner when the women of the house, whispering in fearful tones, said Gwang-gil’s grandfather had been calling for us. We had to kneel down with Gwang-gil at the sarangchae’s porch and be roundly scolded by the old man.

  After dinner, we were sitting on the straw mat in the yard and talking when Gwang-gil’s uncle approached us with a bottle of makgeolli and said, “If you want to drink, you’ve got to drink at home. Out here in the country, people are always watching. Also, out of respect to the good nourishment that is drink, please keep your clothes on when you do.”

  We drank several bowlfuls into the night and stretched out on the bench and mat as we gazed at the stars and sang a few songs before falling asleep. But the night air was a little chilly, and the swarming mosquitos made it impossible to keep sleeping. We crawled into the grandfather’s room at dawn, grabbed the mosquito net, and fell asleep on the heated floor again.

  Seong-jin’s face was quite a sight when we woke up in the morning. It was so swollen from the bites that his entire face looked flattened. We all wondered aloud who this stranger could be as we roared with laughter.

  A few days later, along with boisterous country folk and their pigs, chickens, wooden bowls, and baskets radiating the smell of fish, we boarded the train to Mokpo that traveled as slowly as if it were caught in time. Seong-jin held a sketchbook half the size of a notebook in one hand and drew the passing scenery with the other. We fell in love with the sea. At a food stall on the ferryboat dock, we had a few shots of soju along with some grilled clams and sashimi.

  The waves were so strong when we crossed the Jeju Strait in the boat from Mokpo that almost all the passengers were delirious from seasickness. Inside the wide, auditorium-like space reserved in the hold for third-class passengers, everyone rolled this way and that like so many stockfish. The first-and second-class cabins weren’t much better, just a few rooms tacked on to the crew members’ space on deck, where the passengers sprawled out flat on tatami mats. The three of us weren’t seasick at all; on the contrary, we digested our food so well that we were unbearably hungry in the middle of the night. Seo
ng-jin and I rolled with the pitching boat and snatched up food that had been dropped by those too ill to eat. There was soju, some bread, and even a cracked watermelon. Once we’d crossed the dark ocean waves into dawn, we could make out the faraway triangle of Mount Halla. We could see it clear as day, but it must have been farther than it looked because the boat didn’t pull in to the western docks until well after sunrise.

  The harbor has changed a lot since then with the construction of breakwaters, but at the time the tide surged right up to the docks like river water. An old junk, sailed in and summarily abandoned by Chinese refugees, tilted and wavered in the water. Farther inland, Jeju’s freshwater, which came from underground, running through the gigantic water filter that is Mount Halla, attracted women who washed laundry and dishes wherever there was a spring. One of the young women fetching water was so beautiful that Seong-jin and I talked about her for a long time afterward.

  The whole country was in postwar ruins, but it was worse the further south you traveled. The only people eating regular meals were salaried workers in the cities or salespeople. Many farmers were tenants who did not own the land they worked, and their families would go hungry every spring.

  Jeju was populated by many refugees who had come during the war and not managed to return. A few years before the Korean War, there was a violent suppression of communist guerrillas at Mount Halla. I myself did not learn of the Jeju Uprising until the 1980s, when I saw the evidence and heard eyewitness accounts of the revolt and massacre, and how the fighting had continued right up to the final days of the war in 1953.

  I still can’t forget a certain female high school student we met in Gwaneum Temple. That rascal Gwang-gil insisted we climb Mount Halla, so we ended up hiking for a whole day up to a pavilion at Gwaneumsa. The arid, rocky path seemed almost flat, but apparently we were over 1,000 meters above sea level. I got so thirsty that we stopped at a hut near a watermelon patch to buy a melon and rest our legs. This gave me an upset stomach and I was ready to collapse by the time we reached the temple. Gwang-gil, of course, was eager to make the summit, and even the normally lazy Seong-jin was game, which left me waiting for them alone at the temple. Just a little while later, the sky suddenly darkened and a mist-like rain began to fall. I was too exhausted to move from the muddy floor of the pavilion.

  I saw someone heading toward me through the mist. The figure was taller than me, wide-shouldered, carrying a backpack, and wearing a military-issue jacket with the hood drawn firmly down. They’d obviously just come down from the peak.

  “What are you doing here by yourself?” I had assumed it was a man, so the female voice caught me off guard. I told her I was waiting for my friends, and she asked if I was sick. I replied that I had an upset stomach. She said the water was the only good thing around here and that I should drink a lot of it. It turned out she was a year older than us.

  “Something big just went down in Seoul, huh?”

  “Yes. My friend died. He was shot …”

  “It’s all bullshit when they say the history books will talk about it. The people must make an effort to remember.”

  Though I didn’t understand what she meant at the time, her words stayed with me. She seemed as mature as any proper adult. I asked her if she came up here often, and she said she climbed Mount Halla once a week. We talked about the mountains and the sea. Her family had once lived here in the mountains but after their neighborhood was destroyed in the fighting, they moved to the city. When we finished talking, she reshouldered her pack and disappeared down the slope. They say that experiencing a tragedy takes away your innocence—she was clearly grown up. I learned later that everyone from Jeju is separated by only one or two degrees from people who lived through unspeakable suffering.

  By the time we reached Gyeongju, having taken the ferry back to Busan from Jeju Island, the station and administrative offices there were struggling with an influx of penniless student travelers like us. There was nowhere for us to scrounge a decent meal. As the rest of the peninsula still lay in ruins, Gyeongju had become known as a class trip destination; everywhere we looked, there were pairs of students. That evening, the three of us sat in a grove of pine trees on the side of a mountain and watched the sun set. The light from the same sun as yesterday was weakening over the millennia-old stone towers and grave mounds.

  Gwang-gil insisted we cross Mungyeong Saejae Provincial Park on foot, making Seong-jin and I grumble as we got off the train. But luck was with us as we found ourselves treated to a picnic lunch in Mungyeong. While walking across an irrigation ditch, we happened upon a group of farmers eating beneath a giant zelkova tree; they gestured and called to us. They shared with us their rice mixed with barley and side dishes made from pumpkin, eggplant, bean sprouts, young turnip kimchi, and chili peppers dipped in bean paste. The makgeolli they drank was more refreshing than any soda pop. I would be given such an outdoor lunch again during field training in my military conscript days, but even this tradition disappeared with the modernization of the 1970s.

  By the time we returned home, I felt I’d left my boyhood behind. I couldn’t fathom the idea of returning to school, to a world that tried to control me with rules and grades.

  ~

  My friends and I began going to the European classical music parlors in Myeong-dong around this time. There was Dolce, where our literary forebears of the 1950s hung out during the war and the national division, and Donghwa, which was located near the Savoy Hotel behind the Chinese embassy. It later changed its name to SS, but we thought that sounded like the initials for the Nazi guards, so we kept on calling it by its former name.

  At Donghwa, I befriended boys who were a year or two older; we all treated one another as equals despite the age difference. They, too, seemed to be of a literary bent, although no one really flaunted it. We threw off our school uniforms and put on work clothes or windbreakers and visited bars together where we casually sat around with the adults, smoking.

  At the end of the winter, I was hit with some shocking news: we would be notified of our grades and class rankings before the new school year started, and we would have to get them signed off by our parents.

  Our homeroom teacher called me and a few other boys separately for interviews. When I entered the meeting room, he was looking unusually serious. “You didn’t sit your midterms last semester, correct? Do you know how many days you were absent?”

  I stood there, silent.

  In the fall semester of 1960, I’d started skipping classes at the drop of a hat. Not that I wasn’t interested in learning—I just didn’t want to learn what school had to teach me. Most of the days I was absent, I went to the National Library near Midopa Department Store. My homeroom teacher declared that I had flunked. He told me to bring my parents to school, because I was to be held back a year.

  Everything went white; my mind was a complete blank. I had never been a bad pupil, and even when I was lazy about getting the grades, I always had this sense that I was really an excellent student underneath. I felt like I’d fallen off the assembly line and was deemed defective before I could even be brought to market. I could almost see the rough fields and shadowy back alleys that I would haunt for the rest of my life.

  I stumbled out of school and kept walking as I grew more and more devastated. A group of female students walked by in a row, giggling among themselves. I was going the other way and couldn’t bear to raise my head. I was to tread a different path from them from now on.

  In the new year, my friends all moved up to the senior class while I stayed behind. A crushing humiliation began from the moment I got on the bus to school. I felt like I was diseased or had something terrible smeared on my face. The nightmare of those few months dominated the rest of my adolescence.

  It was May 1961. Around the time we left Yeongdeungpo and moved into the house we’d built in Sangdo-dong, the May 16 coup d’état took place. I was eighteen. Since then, everything important in my life began occurring around the month of May, and my
friends and I began to refer to this phenomenon as my “May Crisis.”

  About a month before the coup, my mother’s cousin once removed and his folks who lived in the Samgakji area of Seoul spent the night. They were pious Christians who went to an evangelical church. They said that something big was about to happen and that they needed to cross the Han River and sleep at our place. This was not even a year after the April Revolution, when the postwar Democratic Party administration was still very powerful. We were so unaccustomed to democracy that there was chaos on the streets from daily protests. People kept whispering among themselves, “Wait and see, trouble is coming.”

  Finally, on the day of the coup, we heard the sound of gunfire all night around the Han River Bridge, and the radio began reporting a coup d’état at dawn. I was still going to school at the time and was passing downtown on the bus. There were tanks stationed here and there and armed soldiers guarding certain buildings and road crossings. Gwang-gil and I sat on Oriole Hill during lunch, talking about the political situation. Ordinary citizens who didn’t know any better were saying, “This will be an improvement, it’s good the incompetent Democratic Party has fallen.” But seizing power by force would eventually turn those weapons against the people. My friend Taek dropped out of school around then, while Seong-jin and Sang-deuk applied for leaves of absence and disappeared.

  About a week after the coup, Taek and I met at Donghwa. He showed up in workman’s clothes and a towel stinking of sweat around his neck. He was working on the construction site of the UNESCO building in Myeong-dong, which was being built through foreign aid. He said he was moving to the mountains the next day, to this place he’d found. “It’s not far. It’s a really cool cave. I’m going to take a load of books with me and read all day and try to write something.”