The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  Yoon Han Bong got us space in the building next to the Nokdu Bookstore. Our purpose was to coordinate the different religious groups and activists. Various groups were created around this time among youth and cultural activists, volunteer teachers, and wives of political prisoners. Regional activism in Gwangju grew steadily up to 1978, and many of the groups had overlapping memberships, with almost every volunteer giving their time and effort to two or three organizations. We all knew or knew of each other, just like villagers living in the same village.

  I was working as part of the Gwangju branch of Council of Writers for Freedom and Practice; they would contact me whenever there was a need for solidarity or petitions. The list of arrested figures was long: Kim Chi-ha, Moon Ik-hwan, the poet Yang Sung-woo, Song Gi-sook, and the critic Lee Young-hee were all in prison, and there were many protests demanding their release.

  Whenever I went up to Seoul, I’d meet with Kim Nam-ju. We stayed together once in Suyuri, the plan being to obtain some money from my publishers and give him some of it. We’d had lunch and were about to part ways, so it would have been early in the afternoon. I saw a poster for the Daeji Cinema and said, “Look, a double feature. I’ll be back by the time you’re done watching.”

  Nam-ju took a look and chuckled. “A melodrama, followed by a kung fu movie? Guess that’ll make me a true scholar-soldier.”

  I bought him a ticket and went downtown. By the time I was done meeting with everyone I had to see, it was late, far past dinnertime. I grabbed a taxi and rushed back to the Daeji, where a voice from a dark corner greeted me: “I thought I was going to starve to death. Let’s go.” He was sitting on the steps by the ticket office.

  My guilt made me irritable. “Why are you sitting out here? If I was late, you should’ve waited at the motel.”

  Annoyed himself, he said, “As if I had any idea where that was.” He prattled on as he followed me. “How does anyone know where anything is in Seoul?”

  “A revolutionary who can’t even find his way around Seoul,” I teased.

  “Eh, who cares if I don’t? I’ll burn it all down, anyway.”

  He was in some kind of anti-government organization around this time, doing underground propaganda work. He seemed to have been deeply moved by the leaders of this group, whom he believed to be of such faultless moral standing and selfless dedication that a wretched unknown poet like him was worthless in comparison. It brought him to tears every time he saw a white-haired elder among them running the mimeograph machine by hand as if it were nothing. He whispered, “I’m not always in agreement with their thinking. They’re more extreme than we are, but definitely against the dictatorship. I’m scared and shaking all the time. But I also feel alive for the first time.”

  Each cell moved as a team, one full member and one half member, with the full member leading. They would leave fliers in telephone booths; when it was observed to be safe, they put more fliers in other nearby booths. Sometimes they would leave them on benches in university parks or classrooms. The fliers had simple slogans: “Down with Park Chung-hee” or “End the lifetime dictatorship.” The teams would also wear long coats with holes in the pockets from which they’d surreptitiously scatter leaflets while walking around at night. The text of the leaflets varied depending on the situation. When the price of cabbage and turnip spiked during kimchi-making season, the leaflets read, “We can’t eat kimchi because of Park Chunghee,” and were dropped all over the markets. They sought to instill into the public mind that the most important thing was for Park Chung-hee to step down. They signed each of their handouts with their name: the South Korean National Liberation Front. Nam-ju urged me to join their “operation” (his military word for it) as well, saying if I showed my allegiance by obeying their rules and commands, I would eventually be given full membership. I had already read many books about revolutionary activism around the world and had a sense of what was going on. I couldn’t bring myself to agree with their approach, but I thought there might be situations where I could help them.

  In April of 1979, the world was turned upside down. Kim Nam-ju and others broke into the house of the Dong Ah Construction Company CEO, Choi Won-suk, to fund their movement, but were foiled by his guards and assistant. One was arrested at the scene, while the others ran. Kim Nam-ju, already wanted by the police, was suddenly a person of interest, and the heat was being turned up on him.

  I was especially anxious around that time. If I hadn’t been serializing Jang Gil-san and establishing the Modern Cultural Research Center, I would have gone the same route as Nam-ju. Minority party leaders Kim Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam were also stepping into radicalized political struggle, and college students protested in the streets, fearless of arrest or persecution. Intellectuals and religious people were being arrested left and right, and the workers’ struggles on the shop floor were getting more brutal by the day.

  In August, 877 unionized women at the YH Trading Company began their protest in a lecture hall at a Mapo district administrative building. The police mobilized 2,000 men to break up the protest and forcefully disperse them, killing a worker named Kim Gyeong-suk in the process. Kim was twenty-one, a sewing machine operator and union organizer. The letter she had written to her mother before the event shows us the gravity of the situation:

  Dear Mother,

  I miss you. YH Trading Company, where I live and work, is a very large corporation. The rich owner has run away to America, and the bosses have abandoned us laborers. They only care about themselves. They are shutting down the factory and have put out redundancy notices. But weak as we are, we have banded together to fight.

  There is something I especially need you to remember. It’s that the company owner is an evil man who will stop at nothing to get what he wants. Do not believe anything anyone else says in a letter, unless it is from me.

  It was revealed that company staff had visited the families of the protesters and told them they were being led astray by communists and were committing a heinous crime against the country. They had also made indirect threats about the family being held liable if their daughters did not desist immediately. The workers were being pressured by the company, government, police, and secret agents. The ruling party headquarters was so well guarded that activists instead visited the newly appointed head of the opposition party, Kim Young-sam, to plead for the women to be allowed to continue their protest. Kim Young-sam listened for just five minutes and understood immediately, promising: “We will protect and support the female workers.” In response, the government arrested the activist leaders and stripped Kim Young-sam of his National Assembly member status. This incident would become the first crack in the wall that would bring down the Yushin government. Religious leaders went into protest mode, demanding the Act on Special Measures for National Security Integrity be struck down. There was a protest at the Gwangju YMCA as well. I was asked to write up a petition and ended up making the declaration. It was a clear breach of the very act we were trying to strike down, but it was unavoidable. I had just returned from the event when the police arrived and ordered me to stay at home until further notice. I later learned from another writer that, of all the petitions, the one from Gwangju had been the most strident. No wonder I ended up under house arrest.

  I was so frustrated that I briefly wondered whether I should take part in an “operation,” as Kim Nam-ju had done. I asked to borrow a mimeograph machine from a pastor at a nearby church, saying it was to publish an anthology of young writers. Yun Gi-hyun came up from Haenam just as I had set up the mimeograph machine. I told him what I was really thinking and wrote it up. It was basically a call to fight the Park Chung-hee administration. The two of us printed fliers all night, put them in a closet, and went to sleep. Yoon Han Bong visited us in the morning. He saw our faces and whispered, “I saw Pastor Kang just now. He is very worried about you.” When I said nothing, Yoon pressed, “You borrowed a mimeograph machine from him, didn’t you? What are you going to do with it?”

 
I had no choice but to tell him how humiliated and vengeful I’d been feeling lately, and that I’d rather be an honest man in prison than a free traitor. He looked over my fliers and sighed. “Do you think you’re the only one who feels this way?” He reminded me that it was always darkest just before the dawn. He waved a ream of leaflets in the air. “This never happened. Let’s burn them all.”

  Our house in Gwangju’s Yanglim-dong was two stories high, with a cement staircase and a slab rooftop with a narrow courtyard below. Yun Gi-hyun, who’d been sitting quietly until then, grabbed the leaflets from Yoon’s hands and said, “I’ll do it.” He burned them all in the flower patch, next to a wall draped with grapevines, and buried the ashes in the soil.

  The Modern Cultural Research Center was shut down soon after. Plainclothes police were always loitering in town. We also began seeing strange men near the alley leading to our house.

  On October 9, the Ministry of Home Affairs announced the arrest of the members of the South Korean National Liberation Front (Namminjeon). The charges were more outlandish than we’d expected. It seems that, in naming the project, the investigators had changed the group’s name to “Liberation Line for South Joseon Nationals” and then added the phrase “Preparatory Committee” to the title during subsequent arrests, to make the group seem as seditious and sinister as possible. As the investigators explained the title change to arrestees: “That’s what you were going for anyway, right?”

  Once the press made their rounds, the entire democracy movement was calling it the “Namminjeon incident.” Spurning the accused group’s claim to be “a socialist and progressive nationalist group modeled after the National Liberation Front for Southern Vietnam,” the authorities dubbed them “North Korean spies trained to instigate riots in the nation.”

  The head of the Namminjeon was forty-five-year-old Lee Jae-moon. He had been a passionate advocate for independent reunification since the April Revolution and was imprisoned for his participation in the first People’s Revolutionary Party incident, in which the KCIA fabricated a fictitious seditious organization and accused socialist and progressive activists of belonging to it.

  After the People’s Revolutionary Party inmates served their time and were released, they would gather occasionally to talk about the state of the nation. In 1974, during student anti-dictatorship protests, the KCIA fabricated another People’s Revolutionary Party incident by claiming the later protesters were trying to revive the organization. The KCIA surprised the world with its bald-faced cruelty, sentencing the accused to death and executing all of them the next day in what is still called an act of “legal murder.” Lee Jae-moon, about forty at the time, had managed to flee. His hair had turned completely white. He made a promise to himself. He had only one life to live, and the only dignified choice he could make was to fight on, even if it meant death. Through the wives of his executed comrades, he had gathered the underwear the men had worn in prison to sew together a flag of the Namminjeon.

  The prosecution stated: “While it is unrealistic to think that Kim Il-sung had a direct hand in supporting the accused, they are still, clearly, an organization of North Korean operatives.” The official written arraignment, however, only says that: “The Namminjeon is not a South Korean revolutionary force under the command of Northern spies but an independent revolutionary group composed of South Koreans; but, had there been any contact with Northern operatives, the Namminjeon would have been a leader in North Korean espionage.” In other words, our own authorities admitted that there was no connection with North Korea. They were, however, highly motivated to show that the Namminjeon was intent on overthrowing the military dictatorship and establishing a socialist system.

  On October 16, about 5,000 students from Pusan National University marched, demanding the end of the Yushin government. Students from the local universities as well as citizens smashed police stations and other public buildings, leading the government to declare martial law in the city on October 18. Undaunted, the citizens continued their protest into the night. Masan’s college students also poured into downtown along with the laborers of the free-export zone, in what was later dubbed the Busan-Masan resistance. The government declared martial law in Masan and Changwon on the 20th as well, and by the 24th, Daegu’s students were also protesting in the streets.

  A while after the Namminjeon incident, Yoon Han Bong was dragged away and harshly tortured by the police. I began hearing rumors that the Modern Cultural Research Center was being tied to the Namminjeon and that our activist friends were going underground. There were rumors of an even bigger fabricated spy incident on the horizon. Lee Kang and other farmer activists were thrown in jail for being on the Namminjeon list. The South Jeolla Province region was hit by a wave of arrests.

  I discussed the state of affairs with Hee-yun, packed a bag, and laid low in a boarding house near Bulgap Temple. It was a classic hanok house with three buildings surrounding a courtyard. I sat on the porch every day and listened to the news on the radio. The Busan-Masan resistance was not being reported and so I had no idea it was happening, but at least I was writing my manuscript and sending it off regularly to Seoul.

  One morning, a loud, urgent voice pierced my waking dreams. Then some grand music played on air before the news came back on again. Unable to go back to sleep, I got out my toothbrush and stepped into the courtyard. The landlord’s son asked me in an agitated voice, “What if there’s another war?” Still barely awake, I asked him what on earth he was talking about. “President Park Chung-hee has been shot. He’s dead.”

  I thought I’d misheard him and turned my attention to the radio. The minister of culture and information was unmistakably announcing the death of the president, in a voice choked with sobs. I listened numbly until I felt a sudden chill all over my body. I immediately went to my room to pack my bag and leave for Gwangju.

  Park Chung-hee’s death had changed the entire world. The television showed nothing but reports on the incident and images of people expressing their condolences. Many who had been in hiding began gathering at our center’s offices, and we hoped that Yoon Han Bong and other martial law violators would be released soon.

  That day, when the sun broke through the clouds of the Yushin era, my writer friends and some youths drank through four crates of beer on the slopes of Mount Mudeung. The Modern Cultural Research Center was being managed by someone new, and Yoon Han Bong’s place was also being kept warm by another labor activist. We were going to strengthen all of our activities, from teaching and youth organization to cultural outreach. The cultural activist group was performing madanggeuk all over the country by then, with participating students later moving on to perform in the countryside or factories in the Gwangju region.

  Seoul’s activist community and minority party leaders were demanding that the next president be directly elected by the people, the Yushin Constitution struck down, prisoners freed, and the powers of the government transferred to the people. They decided to issue their demands through a declaration on November 24, registering the event as a wedding at the Myeong-dong YMCA, as protests were banned. Various activists, politicians, religious people, academics, fired journalists, writers, and youth gathered to make their declaration, and the police moved in to beat up and arrest the participants. They were taken to a military post in Yongsan to be tortured. Ham Sok-hon had his beard pulled out; Paek Ki-wan never did recover his health. Hyun Ki-young, known for his novel Sun-i Samch’ong—about the April 3 Massacre on Jeju Island, which had taken place under American rule after Liberation—was especially mistreated by the military investigators. He suffered from the aftereffects of his torture for a long time.

  Hearing what had happened in Gwangju, we had hastily written a declaration ourselves. It demanded the striking down of the Yushin Constitution, the end of martial law, the release of political prisoners, and direct elections to the presidency—in other words, for the military to give their power back to the people. These were all things that would have h
ad us thrown in prison only a few months earlier if we had so much as uttered them. We thought the military government wouldn’t dare to arrest us now. The declaration was to be read aloud at the Gwangju YMCA, among a crowd of religious leaders, intellectuals, and lawyers, with some reporters watching. I wrote the declaration, but Professor Myeong No-geun, one of the dismissed academics, was to read it.

  We were all arrested that evening. I wrapped up against the cold before getting hustled out. Everyone who had signed the declaration was at the police station. We spent a night in lockup and were taken to a military intelligence branch—Honam Gongsa—the next day. Their guidelines must have been different from Seoul’s, because while we were roundly insulted and humiliated, we weren’t tortured. Half of our group were pastors, including Kang Shin-seok and former resistance activists from the Japanese occupation. About ten main instigators were identified and imprisoned separately at a military prison in Gwangju’s Sangmu. We were charged with violating martial law.

  The military prison was a semicircular structure, with a watchtower in the middle and two military policemen surveilling the narrow, fan-shaped cells. I shared a cell with a pastor whose name I don’t recall. We were the only two civilians; the rest were soldiers. The most common crime was desertion, but there was a mix of soldiers in for causing traffic accidents, stealing, and assaulting a superior officer. They were all in their twenties, with a few thirty-something officers. The pastor in the cell with me had his congregation in Gangjin; he had once joined a walk to Seoul in protest when Park Chung-hee declared the new constitution.

  Each cell was the size of a schoolroom and housed thirty to forty men. Those from Gwangju were divided into groups of twos and threes and placed in different cells. We spent about a month there. I attracted the attention of young military police on duty there who happened to be fans of my work. The higher-ranking ones, especially those nearing the end of their conscription period, fought to get me to sign their autograph books. A scrawl would get me a bag of crackers. The prison served an early dinner, with lights out around nine. The pastor and I would wait patiently until then to break open the crackers, making as little noise as possible. But no matter how quiet we tried to be, we could hear our fellow prisoners nearby swallowing their saliva at the slightest rustle.