The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  As soon as the sun rose the next day, my friend, his father, two men from the village, and I carried well-sharpened scythes out to the fields. Waves of gold undulated before us in the wind. We bent our backs, gripped a handful of the stalks, and scythed at an angle. Once you gathered a big-enough load, you left it lying on the field. The work was different from that of construction sites, and my lack of experience showed. While I kept stopping to stretch out the kinks in my back, my friend and the other men were already far ahead. I eventually developed a method of squatting and waddling along as I scythed.

  The countryside was indeed more generous in the fall. My friend’s mother and sister brought our lunch to the field. We’d had a good breakfast, and lunch wasn’t late by any means, but I was ravenous. The lunch baskets arrived, and the families of the men also came to share the outdoor meal with us.

  After four days the work was done, and my friend, presumably taking a silent hint from his father, suggested we take a day trip somewhere. We went to a temple on nearby Mount Mudeung, where there was supposed to be an amazing view, but it was just an ordinary mountain temple. We walked about a bit before finding a tavern in the village below where we drank makgeolli. We were quite tipsy when someone walked in and greeted my friend. His face was pale, and he looked as delicate as a gentleman scholar. His name was Oong. We invited him to join us, but he said there was construction going on in the temple the next day and he had to bring the workers their makgeolli.

  Four days before the Chuseok holiday, I decided to leave my friend’s house. I could tell I was overstaying my welcome: his parents had stopped talking to me entirely, and even my friend had taken to eating silently at the dinner table without making eye contact. When I was about to leave, my friend’s father stuck his head out the door and asked if he could have the military-issue tent in my backpack. He no doubt wanted to use it as a tarp to cover harvested crops or firewood. As I wordlessly handed it to him, my backpack felt strangely deflated.

  My friend followed me out the gate for a few steps and muttered, “I can’t go far. Have a good trip back.”

  I gave him a wave and went on my way. I knew that it was mostly because life was harsh for the poor, but something about how calculating they were behind the lively and generous ring of their voices made me feel sad about the whole thing.

  I returned to Masan and headed out again toward Jinju. There, I walked around downtown for a while before finding a room at a shabby inn on the Nam River in Cheonbyeon. I was loitering around the city again the next day when I came upon a job posting on a telegraph pole. The word bread caught my eye. The ad mentioned free food and lodgings for workers at a bakery. Back then, Jinju, historically a fortress town, had a small center that one could easily cover, crossing the bridges over the Nam. I don’t quite remember where it was—toward Okbong-dong or Sangbong-dong—but once I left the residential area, I found the place in an alley near the market. It displayed a small, square wooden sign saying “Joongang Bakery.”

  I pushed open the door that led to the work area, which had a coal-burning earthen stove, a large iron oven, two cauldrons, Japanese-style latticed glass doors with good lighting near the front, and a courtyard beyond it. A mound of dough sat on a kneading station built from planks, a little off to the side from the earthen stove. The floor was cement, sticky with wet flour.

  The bakery was staffed by two middle-aged women and a man with a towel wrapped around his head. As he forcefully kneaded the dough, he spotted me and called out, “What is it? Do you want some bread?”

  “No … I heard you were hiring …”

  “Fancy Seoul accent! Are you from Seoul?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go on in.”

  Fidgeting awkwardly, I passed through the work area and the glass doors to the courtyard. There was an overweight woman in baggy pants, an apron, and a towel around her head, washing and straining red beans in a basin at the faucet. She looked up as if waiting for me to speak.

  “I heard you were hiring.”

  “Are you a student?”

  “Yes, I’m on leave.”

  “What a pity. I’ve already hired someone.” But she continued to stare at me.

  I mumbled, “Oh, all right …” and stood there for a moment before bowing and turning to leave.

  When I got to the glass doors, I heard her say, “Hey, student, hang on a second.” She sat on the edge of the porch next to the faucets. I approached again. “You don’t sound like you’re from these parts. Where are you from?”

  “I’m from Seoul.”

  “Your parents both alive?”

  The usual barrage of questions. I stated: I have a widowed mother, a younger brother, and two older sisters, I took leave from school because I needed to earn tuition money, I planned to go back to school after my military conscription, I wanted to see the world before I did and was visiting a friend when I thought I’d look for a job, I could work for at least six months—it all came tumbling out.

  She sighed deeply and said her own eldest son was currently in the military; she had already hired someone a few days ago but since they were still short handed, I might as well suffer, too. With this she laughed so hard that her eyes nearly squeezed shut and her face was as square as a cracker. Oh, my dear Joongang Bakery owner lady, are you still alive today? She urged me to go inside and gave me a little shove through the glass doors.

  “Look here, I’m going to put this student to work.” That was when I learned the man deep into kneading the dough was the woman’s husband. She led me to an annex built right up against the wall across the courtyard, and slid open the paper-screen door. There was a desk and a wooden military-issue cot with a neatly folded blanket. The walls were clean, as if recently papered.

  “You can share this room with the Park boy.” There was a storage room next door, piled with sacks of flour and powdered milk, with cans of shortening and old baking equipment on the shelves.

  I spent the day helping out with minor tasks like carrying flour sacks, going to the taps to refill the water before the tanks ran dry, and arranging cooled loaves of bread into boxes. The Park boy returned from making deliveries, his bicycle loaded with a towering stack of empty boxes. He moved the boxes to a corner of the workroom and parked the bike out front. He kept glancing at me, uncertain of how to take this sudden intruder. The owner man said in an exuberant voice, “Say hello. This is Park, and … what’d you say your family name was?”

  “Hwang, sir.”

  In the evening the two middle-aged women went home, and Park and I stayed behind to clean up the workroom. Park brought in water from the courtyard using a rubber hose and cleaned the cement floor of flour and footprints. He also washed the baking tools and the various basins and tubs. Still awkward with each other, we entered the room. Park said he was from nearby Sacheon. He too had taken the bakery job after some loafing around, waiting for his military service to begin. He told me all sorts of things: that the owner lady was a good person, clever enough to land several school-lunch contracts and furthermore helping out an orphanage in dire straits; that the owner man had learned to bake in Busan during the Japanese occupation and his dream was to open a proper bakery, but it was hard getting good ingredients outside of Seoul, which meant that the best he could manage was loaves of white bread. However, they weren’t very popular, because “the locals have no taste.” The most popular item at the bakery was a bun filled with sweet red bean paste.

  I ate at the same table with the owner man and Park. The owner couple treated us like family, because we reminded them of their sons in the military. I helped the owner man with the kneading and took turns with Park going out to make deliveries. It was all I could do to keep from toppling over on the bicycle at first, with even a few boxes, and sometimes I got lost in the unfamiliar city. At night, I took the bicycle and a stack of empty boxes to the playground of a nearby elementary school to practice my balance.

  Two months later, Park and I were finally able to liberate
the owner man from his work. The owner would put together the basic mix of flour, water, yeast, salt, sugar, shortening, and powdered milk, before stepping back. We would knead it for about half an hour, leave it in the proofing oven to rise, punch it down, and knead it again—after three rounds of this, my face would be drenched with sweat.

  We helped the owner lady as well. We boiled the beans, mashed them and filtered out the skins, mixed in sugar, and boiled the mixture over a small fire to make red bean jam. We made pastry cream by mixing sugar and canned American margarine with egg yolks, stirring until it thickened. In the dead of winter, we suggested making steamed buns and dumplings, which would sell better than the red bean–paste buns; it was the owners who had to convince us that taking the winter season off to rest was a better idea.

  On a March day when it was still chilly but the scent of spring hung in the air, Park and I went for a walk to Chokseongnu Pavilion. We took a spin within the ancient city walls and were coming down a hill when someone walking toward us asked for a light. I handed him a lighter and he said, “Didn’t I see you at Jangchun Temple in Chilwon?”

  Ah, this was my classmate’s friend whom I’d bumped into at Jangchunsa and the tavern in the nearby village! The young man named Oong.

  Oong lived in Jinju. He had been a devout Buddhist from birth, born after his mother had prayed to the Buddha for a son. A sickly child, he was given to the monks at the temple to raise. Oong was on his second attempt to get into university and had gone back to Jangchunsa to prepare. He and Park got along well enough, but it was with me that he really became friends. When Oong heard I wrote fiction, he showed me some poetry he’d been secretly writing. Some were sentimental love poems befitting his age, but the nature poems, thanks to his childhood in a temple annex, were clear and mature. I praised them as well written, and I meant it.

  Whenever he visited his parents, he would drop by Joongang Bakery to see me and got to know the owner couple, too. It wasn’t a big town. Once the couple learned who his father was, the owner lady began referring to him as “the Eastern medicine doctor’s son.”

  One day, Park had the idea of packing a lunch and going on a picnic somewhere, so I suggested meeting Oong at Jangchunsa. It happened to be the eighth day of the fourth month of the lunar calendar: the grounds were crowded with women making donations in exchange for paper lanterns that they could write their names in and hang around the temple. We left the main compound and went up a grassy hillock that overlooked the temple roofs. There we ate our lunch and drank makgeolli. We reclined on our straw mats and fell asleep; I woke up by myself when I felt a chill come over me.

  It was in that moment, my favorite moment of the day, when the sun is on the verge of setting and the horizon is set alight, when a straggler bird sails leisurely through the sky, slowly catching up with its flock, when the world falls silent and the only sound you hear is the breeze rustling through the pine needles—in that moment, I sat up, stared at the darkening mountains and fields, and made a decision: I need to leave the secular world and become a monk.

  I didn’t tell Park of my plans on our way back and merely told Oong that I’d return to the temple soon. A few days later, when I was alone with the owner man and declared my intention to enter a temple, he responded positively, in his usual tolerant and sympathetic manner: “Good for you. If I hadn’t had a wife and children myself, I would’ve become a monk. How great it would be to not deal with this hideous world!”

  Asking him to only tell the owner lady that I was going home, I packed my things. The lady immediately teared up when she heard I was leaving and escorted me all the way to the bus station. She pressed some money into my palm and said, “No matter what, you must guard your health. And use this to buy your mother something delicious.”

  ~

  Monk Dae-hyun was the abbot of Jangchunsa during my stay there, which had been arranged with Oong’s help. A middle-aged man with sharp eyes and a pale face, he seemed to study my every move. No one asked me to, but I helped the old lady congregants by gathering big loads of firewood for them from further up the mountainside. It happened to be vegetable tending season, so I also helped to weed and fertilize the temple’s vegetable patch. In the evenings, I sat with Monk Dae-hyun to talk. When I look back on my life, it seems that my elders tended to take a special interest in me. It’s not that I tried to curry favor with them; I just tended to be direct with others, possibly to the point of rudeness. But I think this might have endeared me to older people.

  Monk Dae-hyun called me to his room one night and asked me to massage his legs. He spoke while I did so. “I became a monk at a young age because, during the Japanese era, I had no other way to survive. The hardest thing was to watch people I knew perish during the war. You will probably leave the temple someday on your own spiritual path, but is there anything you want to say to me before that?”

  Oong must have told him of my intentions. I answered without hesitation: “I’ve always wanted to devote my life to studies that will cultivate my mind and heart.”

  “That is not a satisfying answer, but if it’s what you truly want, I can help you.”

  “Please help me.”

  He told me to go to Beomeo Temple in Busan and wrote a letter for me to the teaching monk, Hadongsan. He added that Monk Gwang-deok in Beomeosa had been his guide and suggested that I see him first.

  Oong saw me off as I left Jangchunsa and headed for Busan. The area of Busan where the temple was located had bustling hot springs but was otherwise just fields and pine forests.

  When we reached the stop for the temple, a boy in monk’s robes got off the bus before me. He was handsome, with well-defined features. I was following him when he turned around and asked, “Are you headed for Beomeosa?”

  “I am. Do you live there?”

  “I do … But what brings you to Beomeosa?”

  I hesitated for a moment. “I want to become a monk.”

  The boy monk was not surprised. “Many people come for that reason. But not many are accepted.”

  “Why is that?”

  “It wasn’t meant to be.” The boy monk spoke as if the answer were obvious.

  We reached a path that led into the pine forest of Geumjeong Mountain. As we passed the main gate and entered the grounds of the temple, the boy monk straightened his robes and bowed with his palms together toward the main hall. I lingered behind him until he gestured to one of the buildings and said, “Go in there. They’ll help you find whoever you’re looking for.”

  I bowed and walked to what looked like an office. A man in gray monk’s robes but without a shaved head was sitting inside. I told him I was there to meet Monk Gwang-deok, and he asked where I was from. When I answered that Monk Dae-hyun of Haman’s Jangchunsa had sent me, a young monk poked his head out and told me to follow him. He led me to what looked like a reception area, and soon after, a tall, skinny middle-aged monk entered. He had the forthrightness of a rigorous intellectual, with a gentle gaze and a face that seemed to be holding back a smile.

  “You’re here to see me?”

  This was Monk Gwang-deok, a follower of Great Monk Hadongsan, leader of the Korea Buddhist University Federation, and later the publisher of Bulkwang, a Buddhist magazine. He passed away a long time later, a year after I was released from prison.

  I handed Monk Gwang-deok my letter from Monk Dae-hyun. He sat quietly for a while before saying, “We can’t accept everyone who wants to be a monk. Keep this letter with you and show it to the great monk when he’s here.” In my memory he never spoke in difficult parables or conceptual language.

  I was shown to a guest room. At dinnertime, novices took turns looking in, and the one in charge of food came with dinner, set it down before me, bowed with his hands together, and sat. “Why do you wish to become a monk?” he asked.

  I answered honestly. “I don’t really know.” Something about his attitude made me think he was trying to rile me.

  “Are you hoping to find yourself?” Had he
read too much Socrates?

  “I came here because I had nowhere else to go.” That much was true. I briefly thought about the nature of talk. This was something different from the kind of euphemisms my friends and I adopted around each other. It was difficult to speak the truth in a simple way. But the truth itself was not complicated.

  After the dinner trays were cleared, it was time for bed. At dawn I heard the sound of chanting, but I didn’t get up. Someone had to come in and wake me, and I reluctantly roused myself, washed, and ate the breakfast they gave me.

  Gwang-deok took me to Monk Hadongsan’s quarters, which were in a separate, quieter spot. A straw screen was drawn over the door. A boy monk emerged, rolled up the screen, and invited me inside. I sat down on the floor and the boy monk opened a sliding door. Inside sat the great monk himself. I did the three sambae bows as I’d been taught and handed him the letter. The old monk, who had aged as softly as a child, gave it a glance before pushing it aside. “So, how long do you intend on being here?”

  I couldn’t answer and only sat there with my head down. The old monk was also silent. Before I bowed again and left his presence, I said, “As long as I have nowhere else to go, I shall stay.”

  This was an interview of sorts. Outside, Gwang-deok asked me, “What did he say?”

  “He asked me how long I was going to be here.”

  Gwang-deok did not ask me anything else, not even what my answer was. That meant I could stay. I went back to the guest-room and stayed another night.