The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  When Myoung-su learned that my ex-wife was coming to see me with Ho-jun, she became suspicious. I wanted her to come back to Korea with our son, but she wanted him to be educated in America and refused to come back. Physical distance and time apart led to distrust and misunderstandings between us, aggravating our conflicts past the point of no return. When I heard from my father-in-law that Myoung-su had entered a dance school to extend her stay in America and become eligible for a green card, I congratulated her in my letter but resented her for it, nevertheless. As our conflict crested, her letters ceased for a time, and I begged her in mine to be patient and endure, our future wouldn’t always be so dark; once I was out of prison, I would be a good husband and father. Myoung-su explained how much effort it cost her to involve all sorts of people in the campaign for my release at the same time as rehearsing for her performances. She told me that, if only for the future of our child’s education, I needed to be clear on where the royalties for my best-selling work, Jang Gil-san, were to be paid: to her, or to my ex-wife and other children. In her eyes, this was not just a matter of money but of her rights and pride as the author’s wife.

  After two years of torment over the issue, I finally had the publisher give her half of the royalties generated from Jang Gil-san that had previously gone to my ex-wife and my two older children. The psychological pain of this time was greater even than what I experienced in the punishment cell. All these things culminated in a years-long divorce dispute after I was released. The thing about divorce is that the longer it drags on, the worse the mudslinging becomes, with both sides devoted to ruining the other. Any trace of guilt or sympathy is obliterated. Ho-seop, whom I parted with when he was five, went through his rebellious teen and college years and became a grown man in my absence. When I think of him as I write late into the night or lie in bed unable to fall asleep, I still think of him crying “Appa!” as I left him behind at the airport in New York.

  Unlike the four seasons of the outside world, prison has only winter, which is cold, and not-winter, which is not cold, and surviving each long winter was a great struggle. Winter in prison lasted from October to March. It was around the start of this time, when padded blankets, vests, and hot-water bottles started appearing in preparation for the long freeze ahead, that the Hiltmanns visited me from Germany.

  When I entered the reception room, Jochen and Song Hyunsook rose from the sofa to greet me. We made light conversation at first, asking after each other’s families and plans in Korea, until Jochen, normally so serene, suddenly began to cry, wiping away his tears with both hands, which prompted Song Hyunsook and I to shed tears as well. Through her sobs, Song Hyun-sook continued to interpret for Jochen. He said it was the prisoner number sewn on my tunic that had broken down his restraint. He knew many stories of the Nazi concentration camps. As a professor of the arts, the sight of a writer wearing a prisoner’s uniform was a great shock. Song Hyun-sook interpreted:

  —Artists should not be locked up in prison and made to wear blue POW uniforms.

  I told them that I was called No. 1306, pointing to the cloth tag as I explained that the numbers referred to my cell block and room.

  —He says that Germany managed to reunify, but it will take a long time for East and West Germans to get along with each other. And he apologizes for Germany reunifying ahead of Korea.

  Song Hyun-sook had an exhibition in Korea and was staying for a while. They told me about being denied entrance to Korea while I was in the US. The Hiltmanns had helped me during my exile in Germany, taken me in when I had nowhere else to go, and put me up in their house on an island in the North Sea so I could write. When this became known, the Korean Embassy’s intelligence officer had responded with threats and even came to Jochen’s school to investigate my whereabouts. Denied entry at Gimpo Airport, the Hiltmanns were questioned and held in a narrow cell for a sleepless night until their flight back to Germany. Jochen had cried like a baby then, and continued to cry on the plane. I knew the same thing had happened to Professor Itō Narihiko when he tried to visit in order to invite Paik Nak-chung and the poet Ko Un to Japan, and there were many other instances of overseas Koreans being turned away the same way; but with the Hiltmanns I felt especially guilty. They had managed to finagle an interview with me through the help of the Germany Embassy of Korea and the Goethe-Institut. Later, when Korea was the guest of honor of the Frankfurt Book Fair and I met them again at a literary event in Hamburg, I felt strangely sad to see how the three of us had aged. Despite the years that had gone by, the world hadn’t changed much, and there were still wars going on.

  Postcards, newsletters, and books began to arrive a few days after—a result of PEN America, Japanese PEN, and German PEN making me an honorary member, and Amnesty International designating me a prisoner of conscience. I was also sent a magazine called International Socialism, perhaps having been mistaken for a Western socialist. I read it with the aid of a dictionary, thinking it would help me with my English, but gave up, much to my subsequent regret.

  Dutch people from all parts of society sent me postcards, and many came from a kindergarten that one of the Amnesty members apparently taught at; by Christmas I had a stack of hundreds. I used bits of leftover rice to stick them on the wall, which made the bare cell look more festive with their colors. The children’s drawings made my heart swell. I managed to find, in the pile of letters, one from a woman around my age who seemed to be the head of the kindergarten, and I wrote her a letter of thanks. In the early 2000s, when “Mr. Han’s chronicle” was published in the Netherlands and I visited Amsterdam, I imagined those little children grown up into young adults and visited the Dutch offices of Amnesty International to give them my belated thanks.

  The poet Lee Si-young faithfully visited once every two months, bringing news of the outside world. One day, he whispered that he was confident I would be included in the Liberation Day pardons. I laughed it off, saying how could he know such a thing, and asked whether he’d had a glass of soju with President Kim Young-sam. He said that the novelist Lee Mun-ku had obtained a promise to that effect. A certain female poet in the Association of Writers for National Literature happened to be high school friends with the wife of President Kim’s son, Kim Hyun-chul. Lee Mun-ku had visited Kim Hyun-chul’s house along with his wife. Unofficially, it was to plead for my release. Kim Hyun-chul had smiled and said he had been too busy to think about pardons, but promised to include me in the next Liberation Day list.

  The news made me believe I only had a few months of my sentence left, which got me so excited that I gave away my books and useful things. But Kim Hyun-chul, far from pardoning anyone, ended up getting arrested himself for the Hanbo Steel incident. President Kim Young-sam threw him in prison to show he was different from the military dictators of the past. Expecting a pardon in that situation was absurd. I was a bit disappointed after my brief high at the prospect of imminent release. I managed to retrieve my dictionary, my knife fashioned from a scrap of can, and a few other things I’d prematurely given away.

  Cho Se-hui, who is remembered by generations of readers for his novel The Dwarf, came to visit me to talk about old friends and of the funeral of playwright Jeon Jin-ho, who died a lonely death in the US. He proposed we create a literary magazine together after my release. He took out a cigarette, ranting about how we needed to sweep away the sycophants of the dictatorship era, and didn’t even glance at the guards in the reception room as he offered me one. I was genuinely not intending to start smoking again. I hadn’t had so much as a whiff of secondhand smoke in years. I shook my head, and he lit up, saying,

  —Did you know white people are calling cigarettes drugs now? The world is so boring, we may as well enjoy at least one drug, no?

  He held the cigarette between thumb and forefinger and took a blissful drag. Watching him made me long for my lost freedom more than any cigarette. It was my determination to use this opportunity to quit smoking once and for all, especially considering my health.

&
nbsp; This resolution, however, broke down only a few days after I was released. The poet Lee Si-young took me out for drinks at a Japanese restaurant to congratulate me; he ordered hirezake, made from charred blowfish fin, and smoked so enticingly as he drank the hot hirezake that, before I knew it, I’d smoked one too. Lee Si-young reminded me of an incident I’d forgotten: one evening as I sat shivering in my cell and a snowstorm raged outside, I’d had near-hallucinations of a guard opening the food hole and offering me a warm shot of hirezake. I was on my second smoke when Lee slipped out to buy me my own. He tossed the carton on the table and said:

  —Who wants to be alone and bored after everyone else has gone? Let’s smoke all we want, and go when it’s our time!

  That’s how I went back to being the hopeless nicotine addict I was before I went to prison. Lee Si-young, on the other hand, whose liver deteriorated, successfully quit.

  Speaking of the people who came to visit me in prison, I can’t leave out the story of the mural in the exercise yard. Gongju Correctional Institution was divided roughly into two blocks, with a steel fence running left and right between and a connecting corridor down the middle. Administrative buildings were at either end of the corridor, which again gave way to another corridor leading to the outside wall and the gate of the prison. The outside wall wrapped around the inner wall in a circular fashion, with lookouts posted along the top. The left block had the prison factories and in front of it the large exercise yard, while to the right were four cell blocks with one on the very end for political prisoners and felons and the smaller yard that we used in front. The smaller field had a track for jogging and an ad hoc tennis court in the corner.

  It was in this exercise yard that the gangsters bowed to me my first day there. The sight of these tall, muscular young men bowing to me was the first surprise, and the giant mural along the long wall was the second. I could guess, as soon as I saw it, whose work it was. For one thing, the style was known as minjung art. It depicted the four seasons of the agrarian cycle: plowing and sowing in the spring; weeding the fields and lunches eaten outdoors in the summer; harvest and dancing to pungmul drums in the fall; and scenes from Lunar New Year, spinning tops, and games of yut in the winter. The artist apparently wanted to show prisoners a healthy life of work and play, but it didn’t quite fit with the difficult lives and complex emotions we all felt behind bars, and looked as didactic and preachy as some church pamphlet. Maybe a well-intentioned warden had deemed the long white wall too stark, indeed, detrimental to the prisoners’ reform? I laughed on the inside: the painting looked as imprisoned as I was.

  The poet Cho Chae-hun of Kongju National University, a member of the prison’s civilian steering committee, came visiting a few times with other cultural notables, including the painter Kim Jeong-heon and another professor from the Korean department. I had to tease Kim, for I knew that it was he, as an art professor, who had designed the mural.

  —Your painting is making my sentence even worse than it is. I have to spend my precious exercise hour looking at the same tedious images every day.

  But he had come prepared to be made fun of.

  —Are you kidding? I was barely able to do that much. They wouldn’t stop butting in, telling me I can’t draw this, I can’t paint that. And don’t even get me started on all the interference from the folks hanging out their cell windows, trying to put in their two bits. Hey mister, why don’t you draw that skirt a little shorter? Make her boobs bigger, too, while you’re at it.

  I couldn’t resist.

  —Aside from the content being boring, it’s downright badly painted.

  He turned red in the face and I realized I had gone too far. I had to backtrack.

  —What I mean is, it’s just as trapped as I am. I hope they let us go.

  In fact, the painting was in peril of disappearing along with our smaller exercise field. A new warden appointed by the Ministry of Justice decided to build a nondenominational worship space for Catholics, Buddhists, and Protestants on that ground. There were just three political prisoners at that time—a union rights activist, a student, and me—and the prison authorities tried to convince us first. After negotiations, they agreed to put in table tennis and badminton in the empty lot between the third and fourth cell blocks, and, even more importantly, allowed political prisoners to grow vegetables on a small plot. This was how the soji and I came to cultivate vegetables in prison.

  Around this time, five students and two civic group activists, sentenced for unlawful assembly and protest, were transferred to my prison, bringing the total number of political prisoners to ten. They were all held on the second floor of the cell block in the private cells. Before they arrived, the three of us had been a cozy group. The union activist worked at one of the faddish radical labor groups, and the student, Jong-ho, was from Gwangju in Jeolla Province and attending Dongshin University. Jongho had developed a social conscience from an early age, having followed his father to work at construction sites where his father operated heavy equipment. He said that when he got out he would continue to work hard to provide for his family, but he was also determined to participate in the labor movement.

  The three of us played table tennis during the exercise hour and extended our stay outdoors into the lunch hour with our little “farm.” Calling it a farm is a bit generous, but it was precious to us nonetheless. The empty lot in front of the fourth cell block was fairly wide, and faced south; there was a little slope below the path, ensuring good drainage. The prison hadn’t simply given us some bare land to cultivate—it had provided a former flower bed. Our tools were a shovel, hoe, and sprinkler; we’d been worried about plowing the whole thing by hand, but one of the long-term prisoners brought along a tiller and plowed it for us in the blink of an eye. Our furrows were almost straight. Growing vegetables was dubbed a “sentence killer,” and it was true: an entire season would zoom by while watching the garden grow. After exercising, we fetched cups of water to sprinkle on the crops; when the roots got stronger, we borrowed a hose from the prison greenhouse workroom to water them. In a few months we were eating fresh lettuce, kale, and mugwort with our meals, dipping the green chilies and perilla leaves into jang paste or making jangajji preserves using soy sauce and gochujang. The regular prisoners had their own patch in front of the factory and ate fresh vegetables every summer. It was true: the joys of the daily ritual of watering and harvesting made us forget we were in prison.

  On the first day that Jong-ho and I planted seeds in the patch, we were startled to hear someone shouting behind us. Well, I was startled, but Jongho seemed to know what was going on, as he pointed to the shouter and called him Mr. Candidate. We politely called each other “political prisoners” but the guards still called us by the old term, “spies,” or even “red commie thieves” when they were angry. The second floor of the fourth cell block was for political and private prisoners, with the first floor an infirmary of sorts, and the windows of half the first-floor cells were covered in steel pipes behind which they held prisoners with mental issues, such as Mr. Candidate. The prisoners of the fourth cell block were well aware of the sounds the lower-floor prisoners made.

  Mr. Candidate had a life sentence. He’d been dragged off to the Samcheong Reeducation Camp, created under the guise of “socialization” when the Shingunbu “new military faction” came into power, and had resisted the guards. He was transferred to Gongju after being tortured. While working in the prison factory, he’d had a psychotic breakdown and beat another prisoner to death with a hammer. During his episodes of mental instability, he ranted endlessly about the people who were out to destroy him and protested his innocence. The sound of his screaming at night was devastating. The other prisoners shouting that they couldn’t sleep and the guards trying to shout down the chaos turned the entire prison into pandemonium in the wee hours of the night.

  He’d start shouting all of a sudden as we watered our plants. He always began with “Citizens, please listen to me,” and went on to expound
his political views, ending with, “Please vote for me as your National Assembly representative.” He would holler former president Chun Doo-hwan’s name, along with slogans advocating his removal. At first the enraged guards would try to shut him up but after a certain point they just left him alone. On days when his symptoms worsened and his nerves were on edge, he’d lie in wait with feces in his food bowl and throw it at patrolling guards.

  In the vegetable patch, we would occasionally look up from watering to see his face in his bathroom window. He seemed to be gazing into the distance and not at us. For the most part he would eat his meals, but sometimes he threw his food around and smeared feces all over the cell; the soji kids who had to clean it up were furious. He occasionally was taken to a prison with a psychiatric ward and would come back a little calmer. This went on for about three years, until one day he didn’t return. I asked a guard what had happened. He smirked and murmured,

  —He probably got out.

  —How can that be? He has a life sentence. Did his family take him? And is Korean law so backward as to leave mental patients in prison?

  The guard replied nonchalantly.

  —I mean if he’s out it’s because he’s dead.

  There was another young man there everyone called Telegraph Pole. He was in his early twenties, knew who I was and what I was in for, and was clearheaded enough to ask me for books to borrow. He wasn’t in the inner, steel-shuttered side of the first floor but an outer room. In other words, he was a little disturbed, but not too seriously. He was as tall as a basketball player; the other prisoners would lament how good he would have been at prison sports if he’d only been right in the head. But he always made a fuss when the warden or auditors or anyone high-ranking came around for inspections, cursing them or spitting at them as they took turns peering at him. It took three or four guards to hold him down and bind him with leather belts and ropes, and once he came out of that, exhausted, he would kick the cell door some more. Telegraph Pole also visited the prison with the psych ward once every six months, growing quieter every time. His exuberance turned to silence, and he became thin as a rail. The youthful spirit in his eyes vanished. He already looked like a middle-aged man. One day I asked the exercise-hour guard about him as we watched the bedding being carried out to dry in the sun.