As I got off the train at Cheongnyangni Station and made my way to my mother’s new address, I was filled with anticipation and anxiety. She was frailer than ever, and my younger brother was now a senior in high school. I would have to go back to college, but we couldn’t really afford that. I had returned to my depressed youth, full of dread about the future.
Mother had taken a sewing job as a last resort and had, with much trouble, managed to get a small, three-bedroom working-class house in Daebang-dong. She left for work at dawn and returned in the evening; her only pleasure in life was to sit in front of the black-and-white television at night to watch the soap opera Assi (Lady).
I lived for a while in one of the rooms in the back, the curtains drawn in the middle of the day, which was much better than the attic room in Heukseok-dong Market. My brother was preparing for the college entrance exam; I could hear him muttering things with his friend as they studied by rote memorization. I suffered from insomnia. When it wasn’t the sound of my brother’s studying, it was the buzzing of the fluorescent lights that filled my skull.
I met up with many of my friends right after I returned. There were some who had just left the military, like me, and some who had stayed, married, and found jobs. They seemed to find it baffling that I’d come back from Vietnam without any money.
I was quieter than before and would sit for long stretches of time staring into space. I would fall asleep in the middle of a rainy scene in a movie theater and not wake until late at night, or linger in teahouses where old men sat killing time, skimming discarded newspapers for hours.
I was so tired of everything. I had begun to pick up books at used bookstores but didn’t feel able to start writing again. I was numb to everything, and at the same time I would find tears rolling down my cheeks while listening to popular songs or watching TV dramas.
If I couldn’t fall asleep, I simply stayed up. Then, after a couple of nights, I would fall asleep in exhaustion. But it was seldom a deep sleep; I could sense every footfall in the next room and outside beyond the wall. I dreamed a lot, usually nightmares. I would be walking down a foggy road alone. Suddenly, the road would be littered with body parts and decaying corpses. I would trip over the hand of a corpse or accidentally kick a severed head, and sometimes drown in dead bodies. I could clearly smell rotting flesh, which smelled like soy sauce being made, a smell so disgusting that it would jolt me awake even from the deepest sleep. In one dream, I was burying the bodies underground. But no matter how much earth I added, I still kept seeing a toe or a fingertip, or a tuft of black hair poking out of the soil. Another nightmare involved our escape during the Korean War. I was passing the rubble of downtown, separated from my family. Smoke rose from the devastation; no one else was around. Suddenly, I was surrounded by unfamiliar soldiers. They laughed loudly and started shooting at me. I stumbled over rubble as I fled. Bullets tore through my body, a bomb went off nearby, and my limbs flew off.
The sound of screaming woke me, and I shuddered at the strange sight of my room. My brother was there, wailing, his head covered in blood. A vase lay shattered on the floor, the water drenching everything. My brother had entered my room when he heard me flailing and, in my sleep, I had smashed the vase against his head. He ended up getting twenty stitches at the hospital. I finally came to terms with the fact that I was unwell.
One day, I woke up late and stared at my face in the mirror before shaving off my eyebrows. Without them, I looked as if I had no expression or soul. I continued to stay in the house, and at night I would sit by myself before sleeping almost twelve hours during the day. I felt completely alone. I had no one to talk to. My mother and brother tried hard not to disturb me; when I slept for hours with the curtains drawn, they would quietly come in to check that I was breathing before creeping back out.
I would wake up at night, wander around the house, eat rice mixed with kimchi, and read the books stacked by my bed. One evening, I came upon a contest-winning short story entry in a magazine. I had no idea who the author was, what she looked like, or how she spent her time, but I decided to write her a letter anyway. That first letter led to more, and I would find myself rising at dawn to go out into the dark, empty street, slide another letter into the mailbox, and go back home.
It was a truly isolated time for me. I was starved of self-expression. Oddly, what made me overcome those bleak days and begin writing again was the power of writing love letters to this woman, about whom I knew little more than her address.
~
That winter, my eyebrows finally grew back, and I escaped the dark room. My short story “Tower” and a play, Hwanyeongui dot (The Phantom Sail), written over several weeks, won contests: I was back into writing. The woman writer I had been corresponding with had helped me reconnect with the outside world. Over the next year, I began publishing older works that I had stored away as well as new stories.
Early winter, November 1970. The day was overcast. I was shocked to hear the news on the radio. A laborer at Pyeonghwa Market named Jeon Tae-il, after appealing to the authorities to uphold labor laws, had poured gasoline over himself and set himself on fire in order to tell the world about Korea’s inhumane treatment of workers. In his last testament, which began with the line “Friends, and all who know me, and all who do not,” he said: “I wish I had at least one friend with a college education. Then he could help me to understand our complicated labor laws,” a lament that pierced the hearts of many. In particular, his final words as the flames engulfed him—“Uphold the Labor Standards Act, we are not machines!”—sent shock waves throughout the universities and intellectual society. To this day, we hear of activists who claim their lives were changed by his terrible self-immolation; such was the effect of his sacrifice all throughout the 1970s and 1980s upon the labor and democratization movements.
Beginning in November, I spent three months working on my story “A strange land.” It was based on my experiences during the 1960s with the reclaimed land projects and hamba living, but life in South Korea hadn’t changed much since then. The so-called Five-Year Economic Development Plans, pushed by the military regime, began with restructuring labor-intensive piecework as factory work. As the countryside began to unravel, the next to follow was the Saemaul (New Village) Movement, which uprooted the sharecropping class and small-scale landed farmers and turned them into factory labor. Slums expanded around the cities, just as they did around factories in the West during the Industrial Revolution a century earlier. “A strange land” was greatly influenced by Jeon Tae-il’s death.
I didn’t know where to submit the story when it was finished. The poet Choi Min told me about the Quarterly Changbi, where he had just published a poem, so I sent it there. A month later, an editor there asked to meet me. I went to Cheongjindong to the journal’s offices.
Little of all this remains now, but Cheongjin-dong used to be full of taverns selling haejangguk, bindaeddeok, and makgeolli. There were many large and small publishers set up in the old Japanese-style buildings or in compact two-or three-story offices. At the time, the development of the land south of the Han River was still in the planning stages. Old residences were being knocked down to make way for nicer, single-family homes, with mass housing constructed on the outskirts. The people who lived in the “nice” homes were fond of shiny mahogany furniture and television sets with wooden paneling next to record players and shelves lined with sets of hardcover books that were never read. These book sets were printed by a handful of successful large publishers who sold them on lucrative installment plans. The books contained classics from both East and West and sported thick, gilded covers. Almost everything about them, from editorial planning to content, was modeled on Japanese book sets, and many of the translations were secondhand from the Japanese as well. No one cared about copyright or publishing rights; the publishers cranked out set after set in high-quality hardcovers and hired temporary contract workers to sell the monthly plans.
In contrast, the little publishing hous
es clustered in Cheongjindong were run by the so-called April Revolution generation, mostly up-and-coming intellectuals who had studied foreign literature and the social sciences. They focused on promoting new writers making their debut in the 1960s and 1970s, printing their work in quarterly magazines before publishing them in book form, a practice that breathed fresh life into the literary market. The literary establishment had no faith that these single-title books and poetry collections would ever break even, let alone one day become as profitable as the reprinted classics sold in sets on monthly installment plans. And no one could ever dream of being a “full-time writer.” No one dared question the minuscule manuscript fees doled out by editors, let alone expect royalties. More often than not, payment consisted of a round at the bar, which the writer had to simply accept, unable to demand money instead. A writer after the 1950s was little more than a member of the lumpenproletariat, wandering from teahouse to tavern, scribbling bits here or doing hourly work for publishers there, like a part-time employee. The best one could hope for was landing a full-time gig as a schoolteacher or news reporter.
The editor I befriended at Changbi was the critic Yeom Mu-ung. Though only two years older than me, he carried himself with mature aplomb (though he would later prove to be quite the comedian) and spoke little. He published me in the magazine but was anxious about it. The authorities tended to persecute the editor rather than the writer for problematic stories, and “A strange land” was the first to deal with labor rights issues directly.
In the fall of 1971, I was married off at last. Now that I was starting a family, I could not go on living in my mother’s house—not with a wife. I tried working at a publisher, for the sake of having a regular job, but felt suffocated by the meaninglessness of editing other people’s writings. After a few days, I left the office during lunch hour and phoned in to say that I quit.
To concentrate full-time on writing was the height of foolishness in those days. Few publications paid the author, and what they did pay was hardly enough to cover living expenses. Even if I published a short story every month, I would never make enough to put food on the table. And who could crank out a story a month? In neighboring Japan, it was possible around that time to maintain a middle-class lifestyle for about three months on the publication of a single short story. In other words, you could live a full year on just four short stories. Then you published a short-story collection every three years, kind of like settling accounts.
Later, when the fight for freedom of expression became more heated, the dictatorship moved to subsidize manuscript fees at magazines, cut taxes for arts workers, provide mortgages, and even bring in foreign investment as “carrots” to keep writers in line. But those benefits only went to the artists who complied with official policies.
I wanted to finish my new novella, “Mr. Han’s chronicle,” which I’d been working on until just before my wedding. I sensed a certain mood of decadence and a new wind of change in East Asia, and wanted to explore it in fiction. Henry Kissinger visited China, and the Park Chung-hee administration was proposing talks with North Korea through the Red Cross. A year later, in 1972, the July 4 North–South Korea Joint Statement was announced and the Yushin dictatorship began, heralding new relations with the US and China.
I’d been a middle school student when I first learned about the ideological discrimination suffered by my eldest maternal uncle, who had fled from the North alone, and my mother’s isolated efforts to support him in prison. I got the story again in exact detail from my mother, who was a born storyteller, and decided that the neglected lives of common people during the war was the right topic for my novella. Many of the first generation of divided families were still alive, giving my work a contemporary and universal appeal. In this battle of Korean against Korean, it was the blameless common people whose lives had been torn apart.
I laid out Mother’s testimony in chronological order and filled in the gaps with my imagination. I wrote the first draft in a room at a vineyard in Gwacheon, by the foot of Mount Gwanak. It was in a remodeled three-room shack that had been used to house farming tools and manure. The other two rooms were occupied by students studying for the national civil service exams; I’m sure my weird work of “writing fiction,” which had driven me to retreat to a quiet, peaceful place, struck them as freakish and useless at once.
I had left my mother’s home with my wife, Hee-yun, but it hadn’t taken long to realize that having no job and hoping to write fiction for a living was a foolish dream. First of all, there was nowhere to go. We didn’t have enough to cover living expenses, let alone a deposit for a place of our own. All I had was the advance for my novella and some money from short stories, which was just enough to support us for two months if we kept to a strict budget. A few authors were declaring themselves full-time writers around then, but they generally had working wives, or they wrote movie scripts.
After asking around, we rented a bungalow on the slopes of Bukhan Mountain that we’d eyed during a hike, and moved in during the winter. Hee-yun was pregnant with our first child. We bought some household goods at Suyuri Market as well as a small, low table. That table was where I did my writing, after we’d sat around it on the floor for our dinner.
The bungalow was one of ten built in the Ui-dong valley near the Bukhansan hiking trail. A rich man’s mistress was said to have inherited these houses and rented them out to hikers and vacationers. I remember paying 5,000 won—the equivalent of $4 today—in monthly rent for the entire house. The structure was simple, with the front door leading to a narrow hall with doors to the kitchen and bathroom, and a sliding paper-screen door to the bedroom. There was no electricity or running water; the floor was heated by a wood-burning agungi built into the outside of the house. As my pregnant wife curled up to sleep, I lit an oil lamp by the window and worked on “Mr. Han’s chronicle” through the night, until the break of day.
~
That winter, the Ui-dong valley would get snowed in once every few days, with especially harsh winds from the north. Even behind the windowpane, the flame of my oil lamp would whip about as if it was about to go out. There were only maybe four hours in a day where sun shone on the valley, and the wind was relentless; fuel became our biggest problem. There were no coal deliveries this far up the slope, and the agungi could only handle small amounts of wood. The landlord had stocked the woodshed full of pine cones, old leaves, and sticks, and so our house on the hill was always giving off white smoke. The landlord brought in some wood once or twice, but it was so expensive that there wasn’t much of it and we went through it quickly.
I finally went to a junk shop and bought an axe. If I sweated for about half a day, I could chop down enough firewood to last four days, but I was unused to the labor and injured myself frequently; once I slipped from a tree and was bedridden for a few days. Not only that, the mountain stream we drank from would freeze over, and breaking the ice every morning was a difficult chore. I once slipped and fell while carrying a pail of water in each hand. My trousers were soaked, and I had to fetch the water all over again, shivering like a doused rat.
As Hee-yun’s stomach grew bigger, I began hearing from publishers that my novella, with its political themes, would be impossible to publish. We were beginning to see soldiers standing guard in the streets, looking down in contempt at people from their tank turrets. That winter was cold and tedious. I’d write into the night, and go outside for a smoke, shivering in the cold air, and see the Sunwoongak gisaeng house shining across the dark valley. The city seemed as if it were buried somewhere deep below.
Writing line after line about the torn fate of our times while blowing on my fingertips to warm them, I would eventually hear the sound of a band playing in Sunwoongak valley around dawn. I would turn the lamp off when the sun began to rise. As I sat in the dimness, a bird would wake underneath the eaves and cry mournfully. What depths of the forest did it fly from? What wanderer built its nest under that eave? I wondered if this was the bird of legend th
at lived in the snowy mountains, the one said to shiver all night, crying that it will build a nest when the day breaks, but forgetting once the morning comes. The one that asks, why build another home when here I am unharmed? yet regrets it each day when night falls.
The valley that winter was full of strange experiences. A shaman moved into one of the nearby bungalows. One day, my wife said, “That woman keeps saying strange things. Like that the mountain god comes down here and circles our house.”
There were days when I went downtown and returned late at night, and I worried about my wife sitting in our house alone. The thought of this shaman woman filling her with fear upset me. I marched down to see her. There were handmade paper lotus blossoms and other complicated shamanistic designs plastered on the walls. This being a shrine, she had set up a pair of candles near one wall and put some incense and a white porcelain bowl filled with clear water before them.
I stood in front of her door and said loudly, “Stop filling my wife’s head with nonsense! She’s pregnant!”
“Now just hold on,” she said. “I’m speaking the truth. Hear me out.”
The candles flickered in the draft of the open door. I went inside and crouched next to the sliding door inside. The shaman woman lowered her voice and said, “It’s true. When I sit here and look at your house, I sometimes see two lights like lanterns wandering around the hill and disappearing.”
“But that’s … How do you know that’s a mountain god?”
The Prisoner Page 51
