The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  “Why? Are you going to get all anti-government?”

  “The bandit shackles the rich and rebels against the king.”

  “That’s fine, that’s fine. Just don’t go overboard. If you do get caught, I’ll beg them to release you. You know, when Hong Myong-hui was serializing Im Kkeokjeong for the Chosun Ilbo during the Japanese occupation, he missed his deadline so many times that on days when we had nothing to run, we’d tear up the newspaper in the bathroom and curse out the Japanese governor general. Historical fiction needs to be simple and savory, you know? That way everyone will enjoy it.” He then added something he would come to regret: “The important thing about a writer is that he has to do as much research as possible.”

  I blurted out, “Then give me as much money as possible to spend on research.” My escort, the department head, tapped my knee, but I ignored him. “If the readers don’t like what I write a year from now, I’ll give it all back to you.”

  Chang laughed until his face turned red. “Research money! I didn’t think of that … How much?”

  “I’m just a young, penniless writer, so getting one of those low-income, publicly funded houses shouldn’t be too hard. I’ll need a room full of books, after all, if I’m going to come up with a good story.”

  Chang started chortling again. “Fine, fine. The house is on you—use the money you make from writing—but a library’s worth of books, I can give you that.”

  He cut me a check then and there, and there was actually an extra zero at the end of it. Without exaggeration, it was enough to buy half a house. He wanted to see some pages immediately, but I pushed for six months from then, and we settled on three.

  Rumors that I’d received a large sum of money spread throughout Cheongjin-dong. To be honest, I was the one who couldn’t contain himself and blabbed about it at Lee Mun-ku’s office as if I’d just won big by gambling. For a week after, I had a new set of drinking buddies every day as we drank like fish. Choi Min drank so much for such a tiny man that he would stay to the end of the night. Later, I stayed out so late that a couple of my drinking friends would go to the market and buy us all fresh socks and underwear that we’d change into, roaring with laughter. There were late brunches of hangover stew, after which we’d go to an inn to sleep it off and wake up when the sun began to set, our eyes shining and our feet pointed toward another tavern to do it all over again. At the end of this bender, the research money was nearly all gone, but I gave what little was left to my wife out of what I laughingly would call my pride as the breadwinner. Then my anxiety over actually acquiring the research material came down on me like a mountain.

  “Oh well. What can I do? I’ll just have to buy those expensive editions somehow.”

  I dragged myself back to Chang Ki-young. It would take ages to go through the editor who was managing me, so I simply walked up to his office and asked his assistant to tell him I was there. He must have had some free time because he let me in. He asked how the writing was going, and I said I had spent the money on drink because my writer friends and I were so poor.

  “You mean you drank all that money?” Chang Ki-young sighed. He wrote me another check and scribbled something on the back of a business card. “This time, buy the materials you need. Here’s my card. I wrote the address of a bar on the back. I’m a regular there. Don’t go drinking anywhere else. And put it on my tab.”

  The department head who had introduced me to him flew into a rage when he found out what I’d done. The staff would talk about it for years over drinks. I bought all the rare books I needed for the project; there were so many books in our cramped little house that we barely had room left to sleep. The reporters told me later that Chang Ki-young had ordered them to get me whatever I needed to get the job done.

  When I went an entire week over deadline—the first such incident in the history of newspaper serialization—then-newbie reporter Kim Hoon was sent all around town to find me. Such were the days of that eventful project. But Chang Ki-young always told people to let Hwang do whatever he wanted, and that it was excusable for a writer to miss deadlines when he had writer’s block.

  There were no photocopiers back then, so reporters would have to go all the way to Kyujanggak to take black-and-white photos of old books and put them in scrapbooks for me, scrap-books that followed me wherever I moved in those days. I started Jang Gil-san when I was thirty-one (1974) and finished when I was forty-two (1984). Ten years! I had no idea it would take that long when I began. My friends opine that but for the Korea Times and Chang Ki-young, there would be no Jang Gil-san today. Chang Ki-young died before the serialization was complete, and it had to be paused several times, but his spirit seemed to continue supporting the work after his death. There were many days when the next installment would be replaced with this message: “Serialization has paused due to unforeseen circumstances.” And during the 1970s and 1980s, when I was running all over the country engaged in political activism, I’d often find myself writing the next installment on the spot and sending it off with strangers who had come looking for me on behalf of the paper.

  In 1975, the Park Chung-hee administration administered a yea-or-nay vote on the new constitution while releasing violators of martial law from prison. Kim Chi-ha, as soon as he was released, published “Penance, 1974” in the Dong-a Ilbo, who had recently made a strong declaration for freedom of the press. His new work described how he went into hiding, his arrest, and the fabrications surrounding that arrest on false charges. After the firing of the Dong-a Ilbo reporters, Kim Chi-ha was arrested again.

  Students began protesting again in April, emergency rule was reinstated, and the eight people imprisoned over the second People’s Revolutionary Party incident—when the Korean CIA created a fake seditious organization in order to falsely accuse and imprison prominent democracy activists—were executed. What I still see in my mind’s eye, as those framed, blameless people were put to death, was how yellow dust tinged the sky over Seoul. The blue above turned yellow, like during a monsoon or sunset, and the sunlight was blotted out by the descending cloud.

  A few days later, Seoul National University College of Agriculture student Kim Sang-jin read out a declaration of conscience and committed suicide by disembowelment. Kim Chi-ha’s declaration of conscience was smuggled out of prison, and law graduate Cho Young-rae and cultural organization worker Shin Dong-su added to it before disseminating it in the colleges. The art critic Kim Yoon-su, involved in this operation, would be arrested for it along with some other students and the future founder of Physicians for Humanitarian Action, Yang Gil-seung.

  I was living in an old-fashioned hanok house near the Ui-dong bus station at the end of the line, not far from the plot of land that would become Duksung Women’s University. The house had a shed and an outhouse either side of the main gate, with the kitchen and main rooms arranged around a courtyard, much like the hanok of the middle classes in the olden days.

  One night around nine, I heard someone pounding on the gate. I put on my shoes and went up to it, asking who it was. “My friend, it’s me.” Shin Dong-su was standing outside, with another person carrying a large bundle. I brought them into the house and was introduced to Shin’s acquaintance. This was Kim Geun-tae, his face as white as a sheet. He’d been on the run after Yushin was declared and had kept in contact with Shin, an old friend from high school. He had been working in the factories and organizing workers in the Incheon industrial zone. They were preparing a memorial protest for Kim Sang-jin, the student who had disemboweled himself and become another icon of the labor movement, like Jeon Tae-il.

  A month earlier, the US had given up on Vietnam and retreated, and the South Vietnamese government had imploded as Saigon was overrun. The Vietnam War was over, but soon we were hit with the “state of Vietnamese defeat” in Korea. The Yushin administration set up pep rallies and displays of our defense across the country, and passed security laws, civil defense codes, military spending statutes, and other legislation. They also de
clared Emergency Measure No. 9, outlawing any kind of dissent against the Yushin Constitution. Yet the students began protesting a mere ten days afterward. The literary and drama activist groups were preparing their own protest. That day, Shin Dong-su and Kim Geun-tae asked me to write a declaration for the protest, an elegy for Kim Sang-jin that would move the hearts of the people. They asked me to write it in one night, make copies, and pass them out on the scene.

  I worked on it while they slowly sipped their soju. I had composed countless such declarations throughout the 1970s and 1980s, words that didn’t pay a cent, words that could easily have sent me to prison for years. Later collections of activist martyrs’ writings and their bibliographies would include texts that had, in fact, been authored by me.

  They took the declaration I spent all night writing and disappeared at dawn. Kim Geun-tae’s reserved, calm manner left a lasting impression on me; I would later work alongside him in Seoul during the last days of the Yushin years. The main organizer for the protest was the literary critic Chae Gwang-seok. Working with him were the poet Kim Jeong-hwan and the critic Kim Do-yeon (who died in a car accident when I was in prison). Kim Do-yeon inherited the Community Culture newsletter I founded with Kim Jeong-hwan, and also ran a publishing house. When he learned that I had written the declaration he read aloud that night, he jokingly grumbled, “I don’t care who wrote it, but it took three and a half years to get through the damn thing. I demand you compensate me for that lost time.” After I was moved to the prison in Gongju, the older guards told me that all three had been incarcerated there at one point.

  This first protest by cultural activists during the Yushin era was very significant. It was a joint effort by artists from the spheres of literature, dance, and drama. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s they would become more organized, developing true forms of cultural activism. Above all, the seeds sown in Gwangju would soon yield further resistance.

  13

  Gwangju

  1976–85

  When I discussed with Hee-yun the prospect of moving south to Jeolla Province, she readily acquiesced, noting that being there would help me concentrate on writing Jang Gil-san, rather than staying in Seoul where I was constantly surrounded by friends. We decided I should go down first to find somewhere to live.

  My good friend, the painter Yeo Un, had a widowed mother who was the principal at a girls’ high school in Haenam, and Yeo Un’s good friend Kim Dong-seop was also living there after a stint in Seoul. I went to look at a place they’d both recommended: a stately old house with a well-maintained, 1,000-pyeong traditional garden. In the middle of the property was a separate two-room southern-style house, similar to servants’ quarters, sitting on 100 pyeong of land and surrounded by its own stone wall. It had good natural light, but best of all I liked the sound the wind made rustling the leaves of the great zelkova tree in the yard. The house had sat empty for years. I asked Kim Dong-seop to find someone to fix it up and decided to move in.

  A month later, in the fall of 1976, I sent my family ahead on an express bus while I drove the removal truck. Yeo Un, who had done so much to find the Haenam place, accompanied me. There was a highway between Seoul and Gwangju, but the road between Gwangju and Haenam wasn’t even paved. The dust rose like clouds and the holes in the road bounced us off our seats every now and then. But the mountains and rivers outside the window were breathtaking, and as we passed Naju, the view of Mount Wolchul dramatically rising up from the middle of the flat fields was a sight to behold. I knew this road had been famous for centuries, known as the “Thousand-li Road of the South.” When I decided on Haenam as my own place of exile, I was thinking of making this southwestern corner of the country my base for writing and a center of a new minjung cultural movement. No one had banished me here, but as my friends joked, I was about to embark on a life of self-imposed exile.

  Heading southwest again, Yeo Un and I drove past the lovely mountains, fields, and streams of Okcheon to the Useuljae hill road that led to Haenam. After breathless twists and turns through the mountains, the village of Haenam appeared below. Smoke from cooking fires rose above its roofs in the glow of the sunset as the villagers prepared their evening meals. This warm tableau made us fall silent. Anyone from this village who was returning from a long sojourn away would be in tears at this point of the journey. After moving to Haenam, my heart would fill with impatience to see my family whenever we reached the Useuljae road coming back from a trip to Gwangju or Seoul.

  I saw a big propaganda poster on the hill: “Look again to see if your neighbor’s visitor is a spy.” It seemed to mock us for having been so charmed by the beauty of the sunset a moment ago. Yeo Un and I broke our silence as we collapsed into laughter. Yeo Un jabbed me with his elbow and said, “I think they’re talking about you.” The truck rattled as it descended into the village.

  There were a few reasons I decided to move down to Haenam. First was the fact that, while writing Jang Gil-san, I realized how little I knew about country life, having grown up in cities. I couldn’t rely solely on other people’s material and my imagination. My boyhood had not been spent catching frogs or grasshoppers in a rice paddy or rustling through straw-thatch roofs looking for sparrows’ nests. My only rural memories were of visiting friends for a few days. The only reason I could tell a rake from a hoe was because I’d seen pictures of them. I needed to be where there were still traces of traditional life.

  My second reason was that there was a big controversy among students and young activists over the question of “the intellectual vanguard vs. the common people.” As sociopolitical oppression had worsened in the early 1970s, arguments had arisen between those who believed a small vanguard had to be set up to recover our democracy, even if by illegal means, and those who believed we had to live and organize alongside laborers, farmers, and the urban poor if we wanted the movement to have any meaning. I had realized my mission as a writer only after working at the Guro Industrial Complex, and I believed that any movement had to involve “the people.” Kim Chi-ha and I discussed establishing a cultural activist movement within the larger democracy activism scene, one that could incorporate the traditional culture clubs that were already beginning to pop up around the universities.

  The cultural movement of the 1970s began with college plays and talchum (narrative masked dance) performances, which fused into a form we now know as madanggeuk. Madanggeuk required a director, actors, a writer for scripts, and artists for painting the backgrounds, creating props, and making the masks. Madanggeuk had the added advantage of being able to be performed guerrilla-style in any open space, such as empty lots on campuses, with only the light of a torch. Madanggeuk were staged under conditions of censorship and monopolized cultural control to criticize the dictatorship and inspire resistance in students, citizens, workers, and farmers. Cultural education was crucial if the movement was to leave the campus and establish schools in the country, help out during planting season, or align with church groups that aid people in the countryside. Catholic and Protestant organizations were the first to work with cultural activists, enriching their own religious outreach programs directed at farmers and laborers.

  Those who participated in the madanggeuk process naturally joined in on activist work, and the different cultural genres combined into one. Support in the countryside swelled as those who came to the plays or helped on location became allies of the movement. The thing about book clubs or consciousness-raising meetings was that they required a lot of time and people, and the effects were minimal compared to the risks. One only ended up with small, limited groups. But the madanggeuk’s preparation process itself stood in for organizing and consciousness-raising, in a fast and effective manner.

  The cultural activist movement within the larger pro-democracy sphere was often looked down upon or derided as “cultural reformism.” Cultural activists called themselves ddanddara—jesters—not to mock themselves but as a badge of pride. What made the connection between the universities and the outside wor
ld possible was almost entirely the work of the cultural movement; by the late 1970s, cultural education became a crucial element in pro-democracy activism.

  As we entered the 1980s, the experiences of the cultural activists were enough to endow the larger democracy movement with confidence. We first created bases for cultural activism in the towns and then provided support to the cultural activists, mostly workers and farmers, who spontaneously organized themselves in factories and farms all over. The people in the towns were teachers, office workers, religious people, middle-class married homemakers, doctors, pharmacists, and nurses who formed urban intellectual book clubs to support night schools and education programs in the countryside. This madanggeuk, an art form that seemed amorphous at first glance, kept producing more and more kinds of collective action. For example, once a madanggeuk produced a singing group, that group would record an album on cassette tape. The art groups knew how to mass-print material at short notice and taught themselves to use an 8 mm film camera to create documentaries. With the development of media technology, the movement’s reach expanded overseas where the same methods were used to multiply ideas and actions.

  I chose the remote village of Haenam to live in so I could work on cultural activism in my spare time away from writing Jang Gil-san. But once there, I discovered that Haenam was already losing its old rural traditions, due to the destructive effects of the Saemaul “New Village” Movement that was sweeping the country. Far from being revived, villages were emptying out. Today some regard the Saemaul Movement as Park Chung-hee’s jewel in the crown, but everything that’s light has a dark side. On the ground, the policy seemed deliberately designed to devastate tenant or subsistence farmers, concentrating resources with richer landowners and attempting to increase production and specialization to raise revenue for Korea’s agricultural economy. The poorer farmers ended up abandoning the countryside to become factory workers in the city, and their former homes and lands were razed and tilled to make way for mass industrial farming. The poorer farmers became the urban poor, clinging to the outskirts of towns, or low-income, unskilled laborers.