The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  Around December 15, a conscript who treated me well beckoned me to the bars at the beginning of his shift. He informed me that on the twelfth, Army General Chun Doo-hwan had mobilized a military force and, after a gun battle, managed to arrest Army Chief of Staff Jeong Seung-hwa and take power. This was the December 12 coup d’état. Change was on the horizon. I was soon released on suspension of indictment.

  The new military administration decided to install Choi Kyu-hah, the man they had appointed acting president, as actual president through the still-extant National Conference for Unification. His appointment triggered the release of all martial law violators, and many youth activists, including Yoon Han Bong, were free again.

  We thought, considering the precedent of Park Chung-hee, that this transitional phase of the military government would continue for another year, now that the new administration had appointed Choi Kyu-hah as president. We planned to establish a theater that would support the work of the Modern Cultural Research Center. We got some underground space near the Nokdu Bookstore and Center and began remodeling in April of 1980. I had to figure out the deposit, remodeling fees, and lights and sound equipment. I saw no alternative but to ask my publishers for another advance.

  Chun Doo-hwan had Choi Kyu-hah appoint him head of KCIA and commander-in-chief. Now that Chun held all the de facto power, it became clear that he would soon push Choi aside. Other politicians, including Kim Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam, had reignited their political careers, invigorated by their pardons, but no one knew how long this reprieve would last. That April, in the universities, it was as if decades of suppressed yearning for freedom were exploding all at once. Nineteen universities were closed because of protests, sit-ins were underway at twenty-four schools, and twenty schools were demanding the dismissal of government-appointed professors.

  I met Yoon Han Bong, Choi Kwon-heng, and Lee Hae-chan in Seoul while I was there to wrangle another book advance to fund the center. Lee Hae-chan, a Seoul National University representative at the time, was trying to fulfill his pro-democracy movement duties while managing the expectations of radical underclassmen who were itching for a fight. We felt in our bones that a pivotal clash between the administration and the democracy movement was looming. Yoon Han Bong said that the military leadership, having tasted power and now wielding arms, would never cede to civilian rule. We had just had lunch and were near the red-light district of Miari when Choi Kwonheng suggested we get our fortunes told. I was about to share my thoughts on an ominous future anyway, so we picked one of the fortune-teller shops around that neighborhood.

  Yoon Han Bong asked for his fortune first. The shaman channeled the spirit of an innocent who had died young; she shook some bells, opened her eyes wide, and her voice changed to that of a little girl. She said that Yoon’s father had died of sorrow because of his son and that Yoon needed to buy him a set of clothes and burn them before his grave. Everyone knew that Yoon’s father had passed away while Yoon was imprisoned during the National Democratic Youth and Student Alliance incident. She said she saw blood in his future. She mumbled that blood would flow like a river. He needed to be careful, very careful, if he wanted to avoid death.

  The fortune was so disturbing that Choi Kwon-heng and I didn’t even ask for ours. Yoon, as we walked the street, said there was nothing strange about it. Hadn’t we already had the feeling that something like that was about to happen? The Miari shaman’s prediction that “blood would flow like a river” left a deep impression on us.

  ~

  When I was running a farmers’ school in Haenam with Kim Nam-ju and Jung Gwang-hoon, the National Council of Churches invited me to give a talk in Busan at a conference for church workers in industrial zones, slums, and the countryside. I became acquainted with many activists in that sphere, including Lee Cheol-yong. Lee had only graduated from elementary school and limped from the aftereffects of arthritis from tuberculosis. He was still a feisty character, with a criminal record that grew longer and longer, and lived in the slums of Miari.

  Lee Cheol-yong was a born organizer of the slums. He felt that students or pastors who preached to the poor were full of it, that the poor did not trust flashy words from gentlemen and ladies. Lee took a different approach. In his neighborhood, there was a problem with raw sewage being discharged on the street, which stank in the summer and dangerously froze over in the winter. So Lee’s strategy was to wait until the meanest lady of the neighborhood came out onto her doorstep, and then pour sewage right in front of her house.

  The woman shouted, “Who is this asshole dumping his sewage in front of my house!”

  Lee matched her stream of curses with his own. “Stupid bitch! There’s no sewer around here, where else am I supposed to dump it?”

  “You bastard, how is that my problem? And how is it my fault we don’t have a sewer?”

  The people of the neighborhood gathered. At some point Lee said: “Then stop blaming me and let’s take it to the district office.”

  “After you, asshole, let’s go!”

  “Hey, everyone! This is no way to live! Don’t we pay taxes like everybody else? Just because we live in a slum, doesn’t mean we aren’t citizens! Let’s all go to the district office!”

  And just like that, he had the whole enraged crowd on his side.

  I remember an incident during President Carter’s visit on June 29, 1979. Activists started a petition against his visit to Hwashin Department Store in Jongno and were arrested after a brief protest. Only religious gatherings were permitted at the time, so a “protest prayer” was held at the National Council of Churches offices on Jongno 5-ga. Heo Byeong-seop and Lee Cheol-yong decided to burn down the decorative arches welcoming Carter. There was one on the second Han River Bridge on the way into Seoul from Gimpo Airport, and another in front of the Dong-a Ilbo offices in Gwanghwamun. Burning down an arch didn’t hurt anyone physically and yet would have significant symbolic impact.

  Pastor Heo’s team took the arch on the bridge, and Lee took two students for the one in Gwanghwamun. Heo’s team had a gasoline can but it happened to be raining at the time. The arch was made of particleboard on a steel structure, both of which refused to catch fire. Lee’s game plan was different. He got two small cans of lighter fluid and hid them in the inside pockets of his jacket before setting off. It was early in the evening and rush hour, so there were plenty of people on the streets. Lee, with his bum leg, was to go up inside the arch and spray the lighter fluid while a lookout stood underneath to keep passersby away, with the third person setting the flame. Everything went to plan until the decisive moment: the arch immediately exploded, sending the third man to the ground. As the fire attracted a crowd, the lookout ran straight through the intersection, while the one holding the lighter foolishly stuck to the sidewalk only to be caught by some virtuous pedestrian. He said later that he’d sprained his ankle in the fall and couldn’t keep running. Lee watched it all unfold from nearby and returned to the slum. His house was at the top of Miari, where the houses were so close together that it would be easy to jump from roof to roof if he had to flee. It was also not a middle-class neighborhood, and no one cared if strangers went in and out. I heard all of this from him at Heo’s church.

  The arch had been repaired by the next day and not a single journalist reported on the incident. There were no repercussions despite the arrest; it turned out that the American Embassy had dropped the matter, as they did not want to attract attention to it. From the Americans’ perspective, having just dealt with the Koreagate bribery scandal, Carter’s Korea visit was perceived as an attempt to pressure Korea on issues of democracy and human rights.

  Several students and activists took down Lee Cheol-yong’s life story, and I used the notes and recordings to weave them into a narrative that became my story of Korean poverty, Eodumui jasikdeul (The Children of Darkness). This was around the time that The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Children of Sánchez, and Eoneu dolmengiui oechim (Shouts from a Stone), on the lives of Kore
an laborers, were published. My story was published in a magazine and the edition sold out. I gave all the rights and royalties to Lee, of course.

  Beginning in early May of 1980, the members of the cultural activist troupe Gwangdae began borrowing a conference room at the YMCA for rehearsals, in preparation for our theater opening. It was a version of my own work, “Mr. Han’s chronicle,” which I’d adapted myself.

  On May 16, a Friday, I went up to Seoul to get further funding for the theater construction. The publishers said the banks were about to close and wouldn’t open until Monday, which meant I had to spend the weekend in Seoul. On Saturday 17, I was sitting in a bar near Sinchon Station when a young man I knew ran inside and told me that a meeting of the student government representatives of Ewha Womans University had been broken up by the police and the members arrested. I called up Ko Un, Rhee Young-hee, and Moon Ik-hwan. They had all been arrested around the same time at their homes. I called the Nokdu Bookstore in Gwangju, and Kim Sang-yoon’s wife said that he and various local activists had also been taken into custody.

  On May 18, we began hearing news of protests in Gwangju, with the first death reported at Gwangju Express Bus Terminal. The activists who had managed to escape arrest were either fleeing to Seoul or going into hiding. On Monday, May 19, the situation worsened, and I consulted with those around me as to whether I should go back to Gwangju or stay put. The novelist Park Taesun declared that this was exactly like the Donghak Peasant Revolution in 1894 and that it was my historical imperative to join the revolution, while Choi Kwon-heng, Pastor Heo, and others urged me to stay in Seoul to organize support, as it was obvious I would be immediately arrested upon my return.

  For the next few days we attempted to start protests in Yeongdeungpo, Jongno, and other districts of Seoul, and a few people were arrested. Then, a young activist named Kim Uigi stood on the sixth floor of the National Council of Churches building on Jongno 5-ga, scattered a ream of fliers out the window, and threw himself to his death.

  We decided to produce an underground newspaper that would tell the citizens of Seoul the truth of the popular uprising and state repression in Gwangju. Because of martial rule, not a single line about the incident had made it into the Seoul papers, despite more innocent citizens being killed every day. Heo Byeong-seop and I went to the “House of dawn,” Pastor Moon Dong-hwan’s church. They had a semiautomatic printer that Pastor Heo said they weren’t using.

  Heo must have contacted Moon’s wife, because she came home while we were at work in Moon’s study. She was an American whom he had met while studying in the US. She spoke Korean well and had grown very familiar with Korean society and emotions. She told us that, while away on business in Australia, Moon had heard that his colleagues were in preventive custody; he had gone to their New Jersey home instead of returning, and she was going to join him there. She worked in the library of the United States Army stationed in Korea and was up to date on what was happening in the country. According to her, the American authorities were going to keep silent about the new administration’s violent suppression of the rebellion in Gwangju. She packed a bag, saying she would stay with an American friend before departing the country, and left the house.

  Pastor Heo and I were devastated by the news of American complicity in the violent suppression of Gwangju’s citizens. There were all sorts of fliers on the table that had come from Gwangju. One was an eyewitness account in the name of Chosun University’s student council. Their words were like a message in a bottle, pleading for rescue from a lonely island in the distant seas, carried to us over the waves from that far-off place. I kept myself together as I tried to write something that would move people’s hearts. I drafted slogans and statements while Heo checked them over and set the printer. We printed hundreds of copies and crawled onto the sofa to sleep only when the sun began to rise.

  Over the next three days, Lee Cheol-yong and Shin Dong-su organized five underground newsletter teams made up of twelve volunteers. Seven were women workers that Lee Cheol-yong had been introduced to; they were members of a credit union in Mugyo-dong that had been formed by the fired female laborers of Dong Il Company Textile, in the brief period of freedom after Park Chung-hee had died and Choi Kyu-hah was acting president. The other five were students and activists who’d responded to a call put out by Shin Dong-su. We all paired up, one person tasked with distributing fliers and the other with keeping a lookout and ensuring they had a quick exit ready. Each team took a different area; Lee Cheol-yong offered to take the Samsung headquarters, JoongAng Ilbo, and Seosomun, where there were many offices. We targeted the highly trafficked neighborhoods of Gwanghwamun, the Jongno intersection, Myeong-dong, and Sinchon first.

  Pastor Heo and I bagged up the day’s portion of fliers and headed for a restaurant next to the Daeji Cinema. It was usually pretty deserted after lunch and had private rooms and tall booths that were perfect for secret meetings. We chose a room, and every half hour or so a team would come in and take a packet of fliers. Shin Dong-su showed up sharply dressed in a dark suit and tie. When it was over, Shin went to a third location where he made sure everyone was accounted for.

  At one point, a fired female worker and a male Seoul National University student, who’d partnered up to flier an underground passage in Myeong-dong, got into an argument over who would do the actual distributing. Having reluctantly taken the lookout job, the woman was flabbergasted to see the student stop halfway down the stairs and drop the entire ream down on the people in the passageway. He was so nervous that he simply dumped the whole stack and ran off without looking back. The woman courageously hurried down the steps, grabbed the fliers and pressed them into people’s hands to make sure they wouldn’t be ignored or overlooked, and hurried out of the passage. She had caught a taxi and was headed toward Euljiro when she saw the SNU student sprinting by with his hair blowing in the wind. “Get in, get in!” she shouted, but it took him a moment to hear her, and he practically collapsed into the taxi, his body drenched in sweat. He stopped coming to meetings, and the woman said she needed a new partner, as the college boy was not suited for this work.

  On the same day, I followed Lee Cheol-yong out to Seosomun because I wanted to see him in action. He glanced around and said, “You better just sit tight and watch.” He sat me down at a bakery with a good view and slowly walked up the steps to a nearby overpass. He threw the fliers off the steps to the pedestrians below and quickly came back down. Then, among the gathered crowd picking up the fliers, he cocked his head and picked one up, looking at it intently. Note that this was after a state of emergency had been declared nationwide and there were tanks stationed next to every newspaper company, broadcaster, and administrative building, and soldiers standing around everywhere with bayoneted rifles. In the midst of this repressive climate, I couldn’t help but be amazed at his brashness.

  According to The Kwangju Uprising, in which I recorded my memories of the incident, the special forces had moved into Gwangju on the night of May 17 and taken over the various administrative and college buildings, especially in Chonnam National University and Chosun University, where they arrested students in libraries and student council rooms. There was a clash between the special forces and students at the gates of Chonnam National University on May 18, which triggered a student protest that spilled over into the city and pulled in ordinary citizens. Martial forces spread throughout Gwangju and started to beat and kill citizens with batons and bayonets, while students fought back with stones and Molotov cocktails. Faced with the military’s violent crackdown, it became a fight for the very survival of the citizens of Gwangju. There had already been preemptive arrests of activists in Gwangju and Seoul on the 17th, but the cultural activists and volunteer teachers still at large used their emergency network to take on the role of organizers. Kim Tae-jong, Jeon Yong-ho, Kim Seon-chul, and others printed fliers with eyewitness accounts of what had happened and scattered them in residential areas. This was the beginning of the “Combatant newsletter.
” Yoon Sang-won and Kim Sangjip made Molotov cocktails at the Nokdu Bookstore. After the 18th, tanks and armored vehicles appeared on Geumnamro Street, Gwangju’s main road, and the whole of Gwangju turned into a resistance zone. Countless students and citizens were killed. The youth took up wooden planks, steel pipes, and Molotov cocktails, and from the afternoon of the 19th, the citizens began to fight back. They fought because of the massacre they had witnessed the day before. The mass killings in front of the Catholic Center, in particular, had made them realize that they needed to arm themselves. There were citizen barricades everywhere, and everyone was prepared to fight to the death. Even high school students, girls and boys alike, jumped into the maelstrom of protests.

  The gymnasium at Chosun University and auditorium at Chonnam National were full of injured citizens and students who had been grabbed off the street by soldiers. Helicopters spouted propaganda and surveilled the movement of the protests. Later, there were reports of armed helicopters firing into the crowds. It appeared that the first shots on the ground were fired around 4:50 p.m. on the 19th, from an armored vehicle surrounded by protesters. There were eyewitness accounts everywhere of the army’s violence; taxi drivers who had been beaten with clubs for trying to stop soldiers from pulling out their young customers and arresting them were planning a car protest. At night, the protesters set fire to arches and cars and police stations.