The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  “I just do.”

  “The god of Bukhan Mountain?” My mischievous nature overcame my irritation at this point, and I was teasing her.

  “No, from farther away. Something to do with coming from Guwol Mountain in Hwanghae Province and having a look around here before going back.”

  “Well, never speak of such things to my wife again.”

  With that, I headed home and reassured my wife that the shaman had simply hallucinated during one of her prayers. The road up to the house from the last bus stop at Ui-dong went through a thick, pitch-black pine forest, with a steep slope on the left and a stream flowing over rocks on the right. I would weave up this path when drunk, singing to myself.

  One night, I heard the sound of a woman crying in the pine forest. I could clearly make out someone who was trying to swallow her tears but found her sobs overflowing, nonetheless. Everything else was dark. I’d been told that a man and a woman had swallowed some pills and died in the snow, and the man was said to have taken off his coat to wrap around the woman. It was, truly, an eerie winter.

  One morning, when the snow had come down in great mountainous drifts, Choi Min and three other friends came to visit me in Ui-dong. We got drunk on ten bottles of soju and dozed off around dawn.

  “Hello there, come on out! Come on out, hurry!”

  It was the shaman from next door. My wife and I got up to investigate. The shaman kept pointing at the ground around our house and crying, “Look! These are signs that the mountain god was here!”

  Indeed, there were footprints the size of my palm. My friends, woken by the ruckus, were also looking around in wonder. The footsteps really did go around the house and up the ridge behind us. We went back into the house in a daze.

  “It does kind of look like animal footprints …” Choi Min said.

  I tried to dismiss what he was saying. “So it’s a dog or wolf or what?”

  Choi Min shook his head. “Too big for dog-paw prints. And they’re in a straight line.”

  “A straight line?”

  “Big cats walk like that. One foot in front of the other.”

  Mountain gods are associated with tigers, and so, all of a sudden, the shaman’s talk seemed less far-fetched.

  After we left the valley in the spring for a two-room house in the village, the painter Kim Gi-dong used it as studio space. He told us about other strange things that happened afterward. He had nightmares every night, for a start. Across from the house flowed a stream from a different set of tributaries from our own stream, and it fed into a pool surrounded by boulders. I used to go there to collect pails of drinking water. There was a little waterfall between the rocks, behind which was a space wide enough for two people to sit. Offerings of rice or fruit or half-burned candles were often left there, probably by someone who had prayed all night. Kim said that vegetables or rice he had washed and set aside for later had a way of disappearing. We learned that the valley had been turned into shaman territory for gut ceremonies and devotions, and in the folklore there was a separate term—shilmul—for the disappearance of foods in devotional lands.

  ~

  For three years in the early 1970s, while I kept on writing short stories and novellas and trying to make it as a full-time writer, the Park Chung-hee administration was tightening its grip by getting rid of tenure limits on the presidency. The self-immolation of Jeon Tae-il, the publication of Kim Chi-ha’s incendiary poem “Five Bandits” and my “A strange land,” and the first post-division North–South contact at Panmunjom took place around that time, while in Seoul a garrison decree was issued, armed soldiers marched into university campuses, and subcontracted laborers protested before the Korean Airlines building demanding restitution for unpaid wages. While North and South Korea came up with an agreement, Park Chung-hee dismissed the National Assembly and declared martial law across the nation, inaugurating what would be known as the October Yushin era—referencing Park’s authoritarian Yushin Constitution. Soon afterward, North–South talks ground to a halt.

  I joined a group of pro-democracy writers to petition against the changes to our constitution. For four days, we collected signatures from sixty-one people, read out the declaration on the steps of Myeong-deong Cathedral, participated in the subsequent protest, and were all arrested by the KCIA. Each signatory author was interrogated, and five were arrested under trumped-up charges in a fabricated “literary spies” incident.

  Night after night, we poured ourselves rivers of soju at taverns in Cheongjin-dong, where we grilled fish and pork over coal briquettes. Around that time, any intellectuals possessed of a modicum of critical thought would gather to talk of democracy and death and resistance against the dictatorship. We would drink all night, and many of us would remain blood brothers for decades to come.

  The magazine Quarterly Changbi began after the April Revolution, directed by Park Yoon-bae. With his short hair and sharp eyes, he gave the impression of never having done anything as delicate as reading a novel. The first thing he wanted to do when we met was to tell me his thoughts on “A strange land” and “Mr. Han’s chronicle.” I don’t recall his exact words but the gist was as follows: “‘A strange land’ is impressive for being the first labor fiction since the Liberation, and this is an important achievement. But it is a little overeager in its zeal for the struggle.”

  To be honest, I’d had similar thoughts. There were many works written in the 1980s that dealt with the so-called labor problem, but this writing tended to be didactic. Looking back, I was still on my way to finding my own approach as a writer, and while I had put together my hamba experience of the 1960s with Jeon Tae-il’s death, I was not as mature as the characters in my own work.

  “Writers must throw themselves into the real world as fully as they throw themselves into their craft,” Park Yoon-bae told me. “Coupling activism to writing is crucial.”

  I believed him and believed in him. We spoke of many things as we kept on seeing each other. He was an avid reader and had learned Japanese in order to expand the scope of his reading. Later I visited his house and realized the full extent of his learning when I saw his shelves, full of books from various fields; yet he wore his reading lightly. He would go on to take care of Lee Bu-young, Kim Chi-ha, and many other young writers after me.

  Around the time that I was seeing him frequently, I came to a decision, which I discussed with my wife. I wanted her to earn her own income while I joined the labor movement. My wife decided to run a clothing store near Ewha University, and we moved to a two-room apartment in a poor neighborhood in Sinchon.

  The sprawling area from Daerim-dong to the five-way intersection at Guro-dong and Garibong-dong houses the Guro Industrial Complex and its laborers’ living quarters. I walked about Guro Market, Guro Theater, and the bus stop dressed in scruffy laborer’s clothing. There were small taverns and drinking stalls by the side of the big road from the complex, where several factories were clustered. I decided to go to the busiest stall to kill time. A middle-aged couple were running it; they sold noodles in fish broth and side dishes to accompany drinking, such as skewers of chicken gizzards and hearts, injeolmi and red bean rice cakes. It was busiest around 9 p.m., when the laborers leaving an overtime shift would decide it was too late to go home to make dinner and would instead order a bowl of noodles and some skewers and call it a night. There were factory girls who bought fish cakes and rice cakes before going in for the night shift. After four days of killing time in that stall, I offered a shot of soju to the owner, and without my having to ask, he proceeded to tell me his life story and treat me as a friend.

  His name was Kang. He’d been a tenant farmer, but it was too difficult to support his family and old parents on land that was barely ten majigi, or about one acre, wide. The military dictatorship boisterously promised to write off his loans, but the creditors showed no mercy. Abandoning the thatched cottage he couldn’t even give away, the family fled to Seoul in the night. They settled down in a single room in a neighborhoo
d in the mountains, and the young couple went to work in factories doing all sorts of manual labor. But his parents died one after the other, and his wife injured her back at a factory and died after a year of being bedridden. His eldest son was conscripted into the military and ended up staying to make a career of it, while his eldest daughter declared she would become a hairdresser and left home; she had not been heard from since.

  Kang became a junk collector, trading taffy or popped rice for old equipment destined for the scrap heap. He met his second wife while working in an alley in the market. His wife had a child of her own, he had a younger daughter from his previous marriage, and his youngest was already six years old. They followed the trail of manual labor gigs into the complex when it was first being built. After it was finished, a township of shacks sprang up along the stream on a nearby strip of land that began at the edge of a tilled field. I later described this town in “A Dream of Good Fortune.”

  When he heard I was looking for work and a place to live, Kang promptly offered his spare room to rent. He added that many foremen visited his stall, and he could grab any one of them to ask about a job for me.

  I decided to take a look at his place first, so I waited until they closed up the stall before curfew to accompany them to the shantytown. Kang roped the rear of his bicycle with empty basins, pails, and liquor bottles and pedaled slowly in front, while his wife followed carrying on her head a Styrofoam box containing the day’s leftovers packed in ice. I took up the rear, carrying containers sloshing with broth, bottles of sauce, and more leftovers.

  Faint lights began to shine in the dark as we walked along the walls of the complex and crossed a makeshift bridge of a few stacked sheets of metal. They lit up one by one beyond the dark stretch of empty land. I suddenly felt as if I were back in my childhood days right after the war. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could make out the movement of lit cigarettes and hear the sounds of babies and children. Most of all, the warm scene of a candle’s flame dancing in the rectangle of a window brought back dim memories. It looked like the recreation of a neighborhood during the evacuation period.

  Kang’s house was the first one facing the vacant lot, so it was better placed than others. It had good air circulation and space enough in front of the gate for his wife to plant lettuce and green onions. As there was no porch, the papered-over sliding lattice doors acted as gate and front door combined. Despite the cold, their son Geun-ho had left the door open as the kids waited for their parents. As soon as he heard footsteps, he hurried outside and helped his parents put away their things.

  Geun-ho was a nineteen-year-old middle school dropout. He’d lived in an orphanage before his mother married Kang. After quitting school, he apprenticed at a factory to become a lathe worker and now was a master in his own right. His mother was immensely proud of his having a regular job, and Kang also respected him to some extent as his own man.

  Geun-ho, like most workers around that time in the complex, worked twelve hours a day, with only Sundays off. The factory ran in two shifts from nine to nine, and the day and night shifts switched places every week.

  I asked Geun-ho that night, “What is the best way to get work?”

  “What skills do you have?”

  “None.”

  Geun-ho smiled and nodded. “Well, even if you had any, they’d be useless now. There’s so much specialization these days, and the machines are different at every single factory. On top of which they switch them out at the drop of a hat.”

  He was right. Large slogans saying “Work is battle” or “We can do it” were plastered on the buildings of the complex offices, with smaller ones below saying “Labor 80%, machines 20%.” In other words, the work at the complex was still largely labor-intensive. Most of the profit came from exploiting low-wage labor for subcontracted work commissioned by Japan.

  Japan at the time, much like South Korea today, employed the strategy of farming out labor-intensive manufacturing work to Korea and Southeast Asia, while keeping the high-value-added, technologically advanced jobs at home. Moderniz ation in South Korea was a vicious cycle: landless farmers were made to leave their homes in the country, keeping wages down across the nation, which meant that the price of crops also had to be kept low in order to feed the masses of factory workers in the city. In other words, parents who were farmers had to break their backs producing rice to be sold for a pittance so that their urban, factory-worker children could just about afford to buy the rice on their low wages.

  The military dictatorship at the time believed in “build first, distribute later.” Koreans still say that today, only now we call it “increase the pie before sharing it.” But despite becoming one of the top fifteen richest countries in the world, the fact that we still have one of the lowest levels of spending on social welfare tells you bluntly how much of this sloganeering has been just one big lie.

  Naturally, we on the activist left began to discuss whom exactly we were referring to with the label minjung, “the common people.” Eighty percent of the population were still farmers right after the war, but at some point people started talking about the “ten million laborers.” The number of tenant farmers and subsistence farmers fell, with only landed farmers remaining in the countryside, while the number of urban poor working in service jobs or small businesses increased. The majority ended up being laborers, farmers, urban poor, or the middle class. It seemed obvious that these groups needed to support each other and organize if they wanted to fight the dictatorship. Later on, anyone who managed to rent a room in the city and put a little rice on the table imagined themselves to be middle class, but this illusion would be dispelled around the mid-1980s.

  Following Geun-ho’s advice, I decided to aim for a factory job that required a bit more skill and paid better than others. Geun-ho thought that since I was post-military, and a bit older, I might tire more easily, and six months of hard apprenticeship was sure to lead to new skills and higher pay. He said such workplaces also had a friendly atmosphere, since most of the skilled workers were older and educated. Here, educated meant a high school diploma. Workplaces with low wages and large numbers of workers tended to be full of young people and also more hostile.

  I slept in Kang’s small room for a few days. That weekend, Kang, Geun-ho, and I ripped up all the flooring in the house and replaced the heating stones. Now I had a place to stay. In addition, having Geun-ho around was as fortifying as having a strong younger brother. He had Kang introduce me to someone for work.

  I was waiting at the stall when a man with a sun-darkened face and a gray factory uniform jacket came in. Kang’s expression immediately changed as he introduced us. The man was smiling and apparently unassuming, but his gaze was not simple, like a country bumpkin’s. He seemed to know something of the world.

  “Foreman Lee is the highest-ranking man in these parts. He started when this place was built, you see.”

  Lee inquired without hesitation: “You’re looking for work, right?”

  “Yes, I couldn’t find anything after I left the military.”

  He asked me where I had served, and when I said I was in Vietnam as a marine, he said he’d been there, too, and was discharged as a sergeant. It’s easy for men to keep talking once they start on their military experiences. Foreman Lee said his home was in Gangwon Province, where he’d worked as a farmer for two years before realizing he would never turn a profit; so he had come with empty pockets to the city for work. He had tried his hand at every form of hard labor in factories before getting a job at the complex. Now he was the foreman at the lens grinders’ division, the most popular of the production lines. He had married a factory girl who worked a sewing machine, and they had a child. His dream was to buy a house and for the company to succeed in its exports, so that he would make plant manager.

  He introduced me to a lens-grinding division at an optical factory that was doing well at the time. I got the job thanks to my high school diploma, proof of military service, and handwritten CV. If
I had graduated from my first, prestigious high school, the cat would have been immediately out of the bag. But because I had ended up graduating from night classes at an industrial high school, specializing in construction, no one suspected me of political infiltration.

  Later, when I’d quit the job, a police officer came visiting. He stared at my citizen’s registration card for a long time, stated, “Someone reported you,” and left. It wasn’t until much later that I learned the man who had reported me as a labor-activist infiltrator was the very man who got me the job: Foreman Lee.

  The grinding division was divided into three groups. The first ground glass circles into their initial shape, the second polished them to a flawless shine, and the third fitted the glass on a grinding mold. The round, wooden grinding molds were coated with coal tar; when the surface turned malleable with heat, the lenses were stuck on one by one and plunged into cold water to fix them in place, before slotting the molds into a machine. When this process was complete, a worker removed the lenses from the molds and stacked them to one side so they could be transported to another factory for more grinding.

  I started off as an apprentice, of course, and was put on the initial grinding unit. The master was a fat young man with bad skin. I don’t remember his name, but he would hum the songs of Na Hoon-a or Nam Jin as he worked: The man who took a look back at the end of the stone wall path, another look as he crossed the stepping stones, before departing for Seoul …

  Soon I moved on from assisting to fitting the machine myself, but it was not as easy as it looked. The machine did the work of grinding the glass that had been fixed to the wooden molds, but if the glass was tilted even slightly, the lens would shatter instantly. The cost of that was, of course, taken out of your wages. The moment one lens was done, the next had to be placed in the grinder immediately. The machine never stopped, and the slightest hesitation meant a shattered lens. The grinding mold also needed to be refilled with a fine abrasive powder and constantly dunked in water. By the afternoon, my fingers would be aching. We were expected to work at these monotonous tasks for twelve hours a day. I wanted to whoop with joy whenever we were told there was no overtime that day, but the other workers would curse in disappointment, because it meant that much less pay.